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Creating A Website

9 Rules to Create a Website For Your Restaurant That Is As Good As Your Food

by Bitsy April 22, 2014

written by Bitsy

Restaurant websites are like the street-side menus propped on easels of yesteryear: They provide patrons with a tantalizing first impression of the ambiance, the food, and the service your restaurant offers them. When someone is looking for the right place to grab a bite or go on a first date, chances are they’ll skim through dozens of restaurants’ websites before settling on the one they’ll call for a reservation. As a result, a restaurant’s website needs to be able to grab a visitor’s attention (and whet their appetite) in a matter of seconds – before they bounce to the next culinary spot on their list.

Without further ado, here is our 9-step recipe for creating a stunning website for your restaurant:

#1) Know Your Audience, Know Your Restaurant

The first step in designing your restaurant’s website is to know what makes your restaurant unique, and what kind of clientele you want to attract. Try picking one architectural element and one menu item or key ingredient, and use these two features as the aesthetic backbone for your website. Picking out a couple “key” design elements will help your website stay consistent while establishing a branding language your customers will be able to grab onto instantly.

#2) Hire a Professional Food/Architecture Photographer

With free website builders, there is no need to fork out thousands of dollars on hiring a web designer to build your restaurant’s website for you. Take the money you’ve saved on your website development and invest it in a great food and architecture photographer. Make no mistake: Beautiful photographs of the food you serve and the ambiance your restaurant creates is crucial to leaving good first impressions.

#3) …And Put Down the Stock Photography

Imagine your customers’ disappointment when they arrive at your restaurant after consulting your website only to find that the images of your food and your space don’t even remotely resemble what you’ve advertised online. Restaurant-goers want to know that they are paying for something special – something that will become your restaurant’s signature. In most cases, using stock photography to illustrate your restaurant makes your website appear impersonal – and lazy.

#4) Keep Colour and Texture in Mind

Just like your menu, your website should communicate the colours, the textures, and the flavours that make your food special. More than simply showing potential customers the dishes you hope to serve them, think about the basic elements and ingredients that break down your culinary style.

#5) Your Menu Does Not Belong in .pdf Form

It never ceases to amaze us how many restaurant websites, even ones for some of the best establishments in the world, choose to make their menu available only through a downloadable .PDF file. Not only is this a cumbersome way for a potential customer to see what you have on offer, it’s also slow: On average, PDFs take longer to load than text on a web page. Instead, place your menu directly on your site using a text window.

#6) Stay Simple

Many restaurant websites make the mistake of over-complicating things, which leads to a top-heavy user experience that is tricky to navigate, and slow to load. Keep things simple by sticking to the basics, and avoid adding too many pages on your navigation bar.

#7) Try a One-Pager

People tend to skim through several restaurant options in rapid succession before deciding on an ambiance and cuisine that suits their mood and their wallets. Using a one-page design puts all your most important information in an accessible, scroll-able format. Visitors can skim through your information quickly, without having to skip from page to page. One-pagers work particularly well for visitors looking at your website from mobile devices, as they’re more prone to scroll as opposed to click on new pages.

#8) Make You Location, Hours, and Contact Info a Priority

Restaurant customers need to be able to see when your restaurant is open, where it is, and how to contact you for a reservation, but all too often, restaurant websites hide this information on different pages or strange locations. Be sure to place basic contact details like your restaurant’s address, phone number, and email in a highly visible location on your landing page, such as the top right corner or the bottom of your page. Use a Google Maps geo-location widget to give visitors a quick view of your location in relation to where they are.

#9) Connect to Real-Time Customer Reviews

More and more, restaurant-goers rely on social media apps like Twitter, Instagram, FourSquare and Yelp to search through user-generated reviews, and to find a place to eat that is conveniently located and priced to suit their needs. Adding social media widgets to your website helps create trust with customers by showing them that you are listening to what they say about your food, your service, and your ambiance.

IM Creator’s social widgets make adding real-time tweets from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram a breeze, but you might also want to look further afield. FourSquare and Yelp both offer widgets that can be easily embedded onto your website, so that real-time reviews and live check-ins are made visible on your site.

FourSquare: FoursSquare has its own API to create an app for your restaurant. A little bit of HTML know-how might be useful here, but FourSquare offer all the tools necessary to get started, available here.

Yelp: Yelp also lets restaurant owners add some “bling” to their website with their handy widget, available here.

Take heed of rule #6, though: A website crowded with social credibility can take away from the basic information you want to portray, so if you install extra widgets on your site, use them sparingly by choosing just one – usually the app that your customers use most.

Image Credits

Gradois Reception by Sebastiaan ter Burg

Handmade Brioche and Breads by geishaboy500

April 22, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website

What to Do With Your Wedding Website Once You’ve Said “I Do”

by Erez Zundy April 17, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

Nothing can compare a couple for the whirlwind amount of work a wedding asks of them: What is over in a day takes months of planning, much of which is spent trying to communicate with invitees. For many couples, a website dedicated to “all-things wedding” eases this burden, from providing links to gift registries to updating guests with locations, dates, and dress codes.

But what do you do with your wedding website after you’ve said “I do”? Is it destined for the vast sea of forgotten websites, or can it take on a new form, one that works as an ongoing memory of an important day? In this blog post, we’ll look at the various ways a wedding website can be re-purposed, giving it an enduring new life to share with friends and family.

A Photo Album to End All Photo Albums

There’s no two ways about it: We take a lot of photos these days, especially when we’re looking our best. Your wedding’s website can act as a portal for friends and family to peruse and download photos from your wedding. Here are some free tools and a bit of common sense advice when it comes to uploading wedding photos to your website:

Create a hub for guest photos: Rather than have guests send you .zip files with their own photo documentation of your day, consider adding a line to your website or social media event page that will indicate an online hub where all their photos can be shared. Dropbox works very well in cases where several people need to upload photos to one place. Once your guests have sent in their photos, you can curate your favourites on your website.

Keep copyright in mind: Most professional wedding photographers will have guidelines as to how you can share their photos, and it’s important to respect them. If your professional photos don’t come with a watermark, be sure to credit your photographer on your page.

License your own photos: Without proper licensing, photos of your wedding day can be used for commercial purposes without your knowledge. Make sure to license all your photos, so that it’s clear to others whether or not they’re free to re-use. PicMarkr lets you add watermarks to all your photos if you feel the need, but Flickr reigns when it comes to licensing large batches of photos at once. This WikiHow page shows provides a step-by-step on how to go about licensing your photos on Flickr.

Make Connections

With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites, it’s easier than ever to stay in touch with (and spy on) the new friends and connections your guests made following your Big Day. IM Creator makes it easy to keep track of all the “likes” and “shares” your wedding has enjoyed with social widgets, but other free services exist to help your wedding’s website go the extra social mile:

Tint: Tint aggregates social media profiles, events and most importantly, #hashtags into one beautiful media stream that can be embedded into your website. The service gets pricy at the pro level (premium plans start at $40 per month), but their free service still lets you connect to two social media accounts of your choice.

Twubs: If your wedding guest list is full of Twitter addicts, adding a live streaming widget to your website will help guests to keep track of what’s going on second by second, which will also act as a valuable time capsule of your wedding’s miscellanea.

Image Credits:

Louise & Will-260 by John Hope (Flickr Creative Commons)

April 17, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website

How to Choose Images For Your Website: Tips, Tricks, and Dispelled Myths

by Erez Zundy April 16, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

We humans are visual creatures: We like to see the impact of an idea rather than just hearing about it, which might help to explain our present fascination with YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Images, as it turns out, define an idea far better than rhetoric alone.

When it comes to building a website to show the world your own idea, images tend to be the most important – and the most difficult – aspect of site construction. While it’s always best to use your own images on your own site, stock photos are a great way to help to fill in the gaps. Finding, choosing, and using online photos can be tricky, though, and questions abound: What’s the deal with image copyrights, anyway? Where can I find free stock photos online (that don’t look terrible)? And how do I know my images will pop out at visitors? Not to worry, we’ve got answers to your questions below:

Question #1: Where can I find free stock photos online (that don’t look terrible) to use on my website?

Last year, PopPhoto published some jaw-dropping numbers: Every minute of every day, 27,800 photos are uploaded to Instagram, 208,300 photos are uploaded to Facebook, and more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. What’s more, Yahoo! recently reported that, if we continue photo-binging like we did in 2013, we will put over 880 billion photos online in 2014 alone.

Out of the billions and billions of photos available to internet users, there’s surely one you can use to illustrate an idea or decorate your page, right? Not exactly.

Finding free, relevant images can be a hell of a task, but there are a couple of guiding lights:

IM Free: Along with our free website-building platform, IM Creator has gone the extra mile to curate a catalogue of beautiful, professional, and useful images – that are all free for commercial use. There are plenty of categories and subcategories of hand-picked photos to choose from, from “fashion & beauty” (41 photos), to “people” (928 photos) to “business” (74 photos). When you find an image that fits your criteria, IM Creator Free will take you to a Flickr page where you can choose the size you want to download.

IM Creator Free can be thought of as a “boutique” image database; there aren’t 50,000,000 images to choose from, but for each category you’re sure to find what you’re really looking for.

Google Image Search Criteria: Google Image Search is probably the most comprehensive image database on the web, but until recently it was a pain to try to filter through all possible options. With Google’s “Search Tools”, though, you can specify the colour, size, type, and even the usage rights associated with an image.

Wikipedia Commons: For every Wiki page, there exists illustrative photos, and more often than not, these photos are part of Wikipedia Commons, an expansive database of over 20,000,000 images for public use.

Question #2…So wait, I can’t just take any image I find on the web and use it on my own website?

Nope. Image copyrights are a big deal on the Internet, and the consequences are real for those who flaunt them. The reason is simple: Millions of people put images of their work online, and if you’re not paying for an image, chances are they are missing out on being properly compensated. That’s why the good folks at Creative Commons decided make things plain and simple. Creative Commons allows users to license, search, and read up on all things copyright. Tools like IM Creator Free and Google Search Tools make finding images that are free for all kinds of uses easy. If, however, you’re unsure of the copyright status on an image, it’s best to err on the side of caution, or consult Creative Commons.

Question #3: How do I choose images that will catch my visitors’ attention?

Ah, visual attention: the age-old pursuit of trying to get stuff noticed by other people. Designers and marketers have spent years trying to understand what will get our attention, and often the best they can come up with is a hot babe in a bikini, or a puppy in a bucket. As it turns out, the way to a person’s eyes has more to do with contrasts and shapes than babes and buckets. This is because we first process simple shapes and changes in light and shadow more quickly than we recognize the meaning of those shapes.

When you’re choosing images for your website that will catch your visitors’ eyes, look for ones with plenty of contrast, in which the element you most want people to pay attention has plenty of space around it.

Image Credits:

13/52 my first bokeh: http://imcreator.com/images/1352-my-first-bokeh by Scarleth White (Creative Commons)

April 16, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website Design Tips

Stop Overwhelming Users: How to Embrace Minimal Web Design

by Erez Zundy April 15, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

We get it, you’re excited about your new project, but there just never seems to be enough space on a website to tell visitors all about it. Soon, what started out as simple, elegant, streamlined web design has become a content monster, with words and pictures and calls-to-action flung at visitors from all sides as soon as they arrive. Adding content can be like an addiction (or maybe an overly opinionated guest at a dinner party): there always seems to be room for one more thing.

Think of this blog as an intervention. Instead of piling more and more information onto your visitor’s shoulders, consider breaking content down into bite-sized pieces, and only showing what your visitors tell you is important. Websites are made with multiple pages, navigation bars, and other organising formats so that a visitor can find a piece of information only when it’s relevant for them.

How to Go Minimal

First things first, get organised. Whether you’re improving a pre-existing website or starting from scratch, planning every dimension of your site beforehand will pay off. If you’re collaborating with other people, come to an agreement early on about what should be immediately visible to users. Make a diagram of three key points of your design, and stick to them.

Kayla Knight over at WebDesignerDepot goes further in her ideas about how to go minimal. She suggests picking a single focal point and orienting everything on your site from here. This makes sense in terms of content and aesthetics, as too much variety in too little space can be confusing to readers.

If you can’t figure out what your main points of reference could be, experiment. Collect data using site analysis tools and find out where users are clicking or spending the most time. If, for example, users are searching high and low for your phone number but are never clicking on the “our story” button on your home page, it might be time to re-prioritise.

Quick Tips:

Get Organized: Instead of piling on content as you go, make a clear design and content guidleline before you get started designing – and stick to it.
Pick a Focal Point: Choose one aspect of the page you want to let shine.
Be Consistent: One of the worst ways to clutter a site is with design inconsistency. Choose a single format, colour scheme, and font scheme, then follow it religiously.
Use Data: Use data from Google Analytics and other site analysis tools to find out what your users are interacting with most, and make this visible. If, for example, users are focusing on an area that you don’t think is too important while ignoring a crucial piece of content, consider switching them up, or getting rid of the unimportant piece of information altogether.

The Champions of Minimal Design

There are plenty of examples of beautiful minimal design to choose from when it comes to re-thinking your own site, here are some of our favourites:

Deryne made big, artfully-taken photographs of their family-run restaurant, their menu, and their suppliers the focus of their site. Information about their restaurant, their bakery, and the history of their Budapest bistro elegantly tucked in the bottom right. The site is well-organized, offering short yet descriptive information about all aspects of the business, as well as videos and menu information when necessary. Even their “find us” page comes off as minimal despite having social media, Google Maps, press, and job information on one page.

Tarian is a Parisian eye-glass brand with a knack for exquisite detail and perfect finishing. For their website, Tarian also chose a simple and visual design, with a large cover photo over a white background. As you move deeper into the site, though, you really get a sense for the site’s simplicity. Images of Tarian’s spectacles are given the space to shine, with little to no other information needed. Because Tarian does not sell online, information about thier showroom is clearly present on the landing page.

BUBGreat used a minimal black and white (with a hint of red) design scheme for their yourth wellness programme website, with a bold headline, navigation bar front and centre, and promotional video as the key focal points of their site. Big, custom images (no stock photography here), serve to communicate to visitors that BUBGreat is a community effort, and their navigation menu neatly organises all the information about the initiative needed, including social media links and program information. What’s more, BUBGreat use a long-form landing page, so that navigation from page to page on the website is kept to a minimum.

April 15, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website Design Tips

Will A One-Page Website Work Best? When Multiple-Page Websites Don’t Make Sense

by Erez Zundy April 9, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

The decision whether to break up the content on your website into many smaller pages or keep all of it on one, long page is a debate that’s gained considerable steam over the last few years in web design. After SEO Moz’s famous “long landing page” study that gave them a 52% improvement in sales and $1 million more in revenue, “going long” has never seemed so tantalizing.

Blogs abound on what works best for business and for users. For some, it’s purely a question of SEO mathematics; not being able to rank the performance of every element on your website is awkward for sites that have a lot of different themes of information to cover. For others, it’s looks; while scrolling down a long page has become second nature for many web users, many still enjoy the sense of organisation that comes from several content-purposed pages.

In this blog post, we’ll deconstruct the top considerations about one-pagers to keep in mind for your next project.

Scrolling Through A One-Stop-Shop

Most tend to agree that one-pagers work best for sites that have a singular or limited goal – a site selling a single idea or a profile showcasing one person’s work, for example – not an entire e-shop selling dozens of different kinds of products.

Common wisdom in the past said that users rarely venture below the “fold” – thereby necessitating multiple navigation pages – but this idea has been challenged recently; clicking through page after page of information is becoming cumbersome to users in the age of scrolling. The scroll-ability of one-pagers also offers heightened benefits particularly for mobile users, who intuitively scroll rather than click.

Myth Dispelled: No, users aren’t afraid of scrolling down a long one-pager. A ClickTale case study analyzing over 100,000 page views showed that people used the scrollbar on 76% of pages, with 22% of users scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page.

Fact or Fiction: Will a One-Page Site Hurt my SEO?

The SEO community has never been a quiet one, and when it comes to one-page sites, there are an awful lot of opinions as to whether or not a one-pager helps or hurts your ranking. Essentially, it’s important to remember that your single-page site will be the sole-bearer of your PageRank, meaning that keeping your key words streamlined and your general focus narrow will help keep you noticed.

In this way, one-pagers are often useful when it comes to AdWords sites, as the entire page would be optimized for your one goal. Tim Ware over at Hyperarts agrees, and points out more helpful SEO tips along the way.

For example, Tim reminds us that with one-pagers, you only have one “title tag” and one “meta description tag” on search engines. A “title tag” refers to the headline in blue or purple that Google or any other search engine will present you with when you’re searching for information. A “meta description tag” is the little blurb of information you see under the “title tag”.

And Now, Some One-Pager Inspiration

As one of web design’s biggest trends, there are plenty of one-page site designs to choose from and inspire you these days. IM Creator offers a few different templates for trying out your first (or next) single page design:

The Max.V has many of IM Creator’s signature design traits, such as big, bold images and clear typography. With lots of space between content to let visitors breath between written content and photos and large text, this site makes desktop and mobile-browsing easy.

The Dime uses colour blocks to separate written and image content, so that information is easily readable as users scroll down. Like the Max.V, images are given centre-stage so that creative or visually-minded projects really stand out.

April 9, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website Website Promotion

Trust Seals: What They Are, Which To Use, and Where To Use Them

by Erez Zundy April 8, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

When you think about it, doing business on the internet is a strange game: Millions upon millions of people are forging anonymous relationships in order to buy products that may or may not be legitimate every second of every day. Much of the time, the only guarantee as to the legitimacy of a seller or their product are a few visual signs, know as trust seals. These underrated little symbols can make a big difference when it comes to putting your visitors at ease, and reducing cart abandonment.

In this post, we’ll look at in’s and out’s of adding trust seals to your website.

What are Trust Seals (And Which Ones Work Best?)

“Trust seals” usually come in the form of symbols or “badges” that show users you are a legitimate business. A third-party security entity, such as an anti-virus or encryption service, provides individual websites with trust seals once it has been determined that the website lives up to their standards.

Trust seals can be broken down into roughly two categories: “SSL badges/seals” that show an encrypted connection between your website and the user’s web browser, and “trust badges” that don’t offer any real security other than a proven relationship between a website and its users.

Interestingly, most users don’t know the difference between the different kinds of badges, and most don’t really care. The dozens of badges that exist to place on your website act more as a safety placebo than a real guarantee of security.

With this in mind, it’s helpful to look at some data as to what trust signs users have the most confidence in. Last year, the independent web usability research group Baymard Institute released a study showing that, from a survey of over 2500 people, “Norton Secured” was the most trusted seal, garnering 36% of votes. Second place went to “McAfee Secure”, with 23% of votes, and 13.2% of votes were shared equally by “Trust E” and “BBB Accredited”. Interestingly, the second, third, and fourth place winners of the survey aren’t SSL badges.

Baymard Institute recommends adding several seals to your site to cover all your bases by investing in a Norton SSL seal to show that you have an encrypted connection, a McAfee seal to show that your site is “hacker safe”, and a BBB Accredited or TRUSTe seal to show that you have good customer relations. As we’ll show in the next section, though, this might not always be possible for young entrepreneurs.

Helpful Tip: Users don’t really know the difference between different trust signs on your website, so if in doubt, go for the most popular.

How Do I Get a Trust Seal? What About a Free One?

For many online businesses, investing in a SSL seal or trust seal with Norton or other big companies is a price worth paying, both for the service they provide and the calm they instill in users. For those of us just starting out, though, a big-name trust seal along with encrypted services will set you back about $2700 per year. While free trials are available, free alternatives to the big guys do exist. Be careful, though: You get what you pay for (or don’t) in most cases, so investing a bit of money when you feel you need the right security might outweigh the long-term costs.

Free Trust Seal Alternatives

StartSSL offer a free SSL encryption certificates almost instantly for websites that need to prevent eavesdropping and increased privacy. The service is low-assurance, meaning that it’s not top of the line, but at least it’s a start.

Comodo also offer a free 90-day SSL certificate, with most of the bells and whistles, including a dynamic “TrustLogo” for your website and free daily website scanning.

CAcert is a free community-driven security certificate authority that issues trust seals for free. In order to benefit from CAcert’s collective perks, you need to join as a member of the community. Once you’re in, they’ll issue you with free certificates.

ScanVerify isn’t a SSL encryption service, but it does provide free third-party assurance to online customers that a website has been validated and can be trusted.

Where to Put Your Trust Seal

Once you’ve validated your site with a third party, it’s time to figure out where exactly you should put your badge of honour. In all cases, it’s important to remember that trust seals are there mostly to put your user, not you, at ease, and so it’s best to place them at crucial moments in your relationship with your customers.

Above the “fold”: When web usability and marketing types speak of the “fold”, they are talking about the crucial area of a website that can be seen as soon as you arrive on the page, before you choose to scroll. Putting a trust seal front and centre for a user to see as soon as they arrive on the site can be helpful in establishing an immediate sense of trust, but for some businesses this may also be too flashy or intrusive.
Next to the checkout or payment field: This is by far the most important area to place your trust seals, as it remind users just as they’re pulling their credit card from their pocket that you’ve been recognized for your customer relations and your security. One Get Elastic case study showed that adding a “Mcafee” trust seal next to their payment process boosted sales by 4-6%.

Image credit:

Credit Cards: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Credit-cards.jpg (wikipedia commons)

April 8, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website Domains

Domains 101 – Everything a New Website Owner Should Know

by Erez Zundy April 3, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

Domain names are a part of the system we use to distribute and locate information on the web. Every website has a domain name and most of us browse through them everyday, yet we seem to know very little about them.

What is the difference between a domain and a URL, how do I get a domain name for my website and how do I control it? Read about it in our short introduction to the world of domain registration.

Domain – A domain is the name of the website, like imcreator.com facebook.com etc. In order for your site to be available on the internet it needs to have an address where it can be reached.

subdomains are a part of the main domain name. If you own a domain name ‘mysite.com’ you can create a subdomain like ‘mobile.mysite.com’ and connect it to another part of your site.

When your site on IM Creator is ready to go live, you can choose to connect it to an existing domain, if you have one, or buy a new one through us.

URL – A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) contains the domain name but is more specific. It can contain a page of the website (domain.com/page.html), an image or other parameters . It tells the browser where to find the exact information, like a map of the website with instructions.

Nameservers – As the name indicates, nameservers are the computer servers holding all the information regarding the domain and has DNS software installed. The name servers handle all queries regarding domain from local computers. Every domain has at least two nameservers which indicate where that domain is managed. You can change the default nameservers if you want to control your domain’s DNS from another control panel. In IM Creator, there is no need to change the nameservers and you can simply change two DNS records instead, the empty A record and the www CNAME. You can see more on how to change the records and connect your site at imcreator.com/existing_domain.

DNS – Domain Name System. These are the technical records behind the domain name and URL. They are used to connect the domain name to the actual website you’ve created. They translate the names as they are typed in the address bar to numbers and codes that the browser can read and work with. The DNS contains different types of DNS records, each controlling another part of the domain uses.

The A records controls the naked domain’s location (when someone types in your domain without www) while the CNAME controls all of the domain’s subdomains location, including www. Other records can control email services and other advanced options.

So where is your site located and how do you assign a name to it?

Hosting – A service storing your actual website’s information. When you are uploading images, text, files and design information to your site, it all needs to be saved somewhere. Website hosting provides space to all your site’s information.

Hosting can be provided separately or in addition to other web services, like registrars or website builders. All sites built on IM are hosted on Amazon’s global cloud services. However, if you have a hosting service you’d like to use, you can download your site and host it there. See more about this option here.

Registrar – The official entity responsible for the management and reservation of internet domain names. This is where all the information regarding the domain names is kept and where you control your domain settings.

Most registrars provide access to a control panel where you can control the location you want the domain to point to. This is done through changing the DNS records. This can sometimes be tricky so don’t hesitate to contact your host or registrar for assistance.

To find out who your registrar is you can go to whois.net. If you already know who it is, but can’t locate the control panel you might find this post helpful.

For a more detailed explanation of the difference between a Registrar and Hosting company, click here.

April 3, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website Design Tips Photos & Images SMB Tips & Tools

What You Need to Know About Image Copyrights

by Erez Zundy April 1, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

Trillions upon trillions of images are floating around the world wide web, with several million more being added every minute of the day. With platforms like Flickr, Instagram, and Pinterest making photo sharing a breeze, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s happening to the images you put online – and who has the right to use them. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the steps of protecting your images and making sure that you’re using someone else’s images correctly.

How to License Your Work Online

If you want to make sure that the content you put online is protected by copyright, Creative Commons has you covered. Whether it’s images, music, videos, or text, Creative Commons has a straightforward licensing system that helps you make sure that your content is only being used with your consent. A 4-step process is all that’s needed: Simply decide whether it’s okay for others to use your work commercially or to make changes to it, select your license, enter some information about what you’re licensing, and bingo, you’re licensed.

How to Protect Your Work Online

Even when you’ve gone the lengths to protect your work through Creative Commons, it’s prudent to take some extra measures and check in on where your online content has wandered off to every once in a while.

Reverse Image Search: If you’re curious to see where your images are popping up, Google has a nifty system. Instead of typing in a search term, you can upload or drag & drop a photo into the search bar to see how many times your images have been reproduced. Even if your image doesn’t show up, Google will show similar images in terms of composition and colour, which helps to suss out images that have been heavily cropped or re-formatted.

Watermarks: Improperly or unlabeled images on the web tend to be particularly vulnerable to prying hands, and watermarks can go a long way to avoid any confusion as to whether others are allowed to use your work for their own purposes. Wikihow has a good step-by-step explanation of how to add watermarks to your photos using Photoshop and Picasa, but there are also other tools available.

PicMarkr lets you add a text or image-based watermark to any image with their free service. At the pro level, PicMarkr is useful for adjusting the size and angle of whole batches of photos. It’s also connected to Flickr, so that you can update all your Flickr photos with watermarked versions in one go.

Watermarks should always include the “©” symbol along with your name, the year of release, and a URL, if possible. While some suggest that a watermark should be so big that it ruins a work’s artistic integrity, most don’t go this far. A simple text at the bottom of the image usually suffices to clarify any copyright questions someone might have.

How to Know if An Image You Find Is OK to Use

These days, there are very few excuses for ambiguous copyrights on online content. The Golden Rule: If you’re not sure whether or not an image is okay to use for your own purposes, check until it can be verified – or use another image. Nobody looks very kindly on copyright infringement these days, especially when it comes at the cost of a paycheque for a hard-working creative.

When you’re searching for an image to use on your website or blog, it’s best to start at places where all the images on file are free to use. Wikipedia Commons and Flickr Creative Commons are the popular free image databases, but smaller, more curated image databases like IM Free are a great place to look when you don’t feel like sorting through thousands and thousands of images.

Image Credits:

Get Your Camera Out by Thomas Leuthard (Creative Commons)

April 1, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website Domains

Web Hosting vs. Domain Registration Explained

by Bitsy March 24, 2014

written by Bitsy

Many internet users rarely give a second thought to the inner working of the web until it comes time for them to dive into the deep end themselves. All of a sudden, bewildering questions arise: Should I register my domain name first, or will my web hosting service do that for me? Do I need to go through a domain registrar if I have a web hosting service? Do I need a web hosting service, or can I go it alone? Relax, we have all your web hosting vs. domain registration questions covered:

What is Domain Registration?

Computers communicate between themselves on the internet using IP addresses, numerical sequences that broadcast their location. A domain name puts a face to all these numbers: Instead of typing in 12.34.56.789 to access a website, domain names allow us to simply search for mysite.com.

A domain registrar is like City Hall or property registry, keeping tabs on internet real estate and property transactions. When you register a domain name, you are essentially laying claim to a specific internet address and making sure that no one else can use it. You become the “registrant” of the domain, and the organization you register your domain name with becomes the “registrar”.

Why this matters to you: At the free level, most free web hosting sites will provide you with a free URL under a sub-domain (for example, mysite.i-m.co). Registering your own domain name, though, is a relatively simple and inexpensive process, and allows you total freedom to choose your website’s name at a nominal price. Most domain registrars charge between $5-10 USD per year for a generic TLD like .com, and often less for a local TLD and lesser generic TLDs like .net or .org. While many domain registrars offer web hosting as part of their package, they tend to leave you on your own when it comes to building the site itself. In this sense, it’s often best to combine your domain registration with a free or inexpensive website builder if you don’t know your way around coding (you can try IM Creator here).

Here are our 3 top domain registrars:

GoDaddy offers both domain registration and web hosting at bargain prices, starting at around $10 per year that comes with a domain name and basic hosting services.

1&1 is among the cheapest of domain registrars, with prices starting at just 0.99 cents per year for domain name registration. Like GoDaddy, 1&1 registrations come with a free 5-page web hosting package and free private domain registration to keep your private information safe. (see here how to attach a 1&1 domain to a site built with IM Creator)

Name are a more aggressive domain search and registration platform, with plenty of tricks up their sleeve. Most notably, Name offers suggestions for domain names that are currently up for auction, and allow you to keep tabs on unavailable domain names with their “Domain Grabber”. With this service, you can pay Name to keep an eye out on a domain name, so that when and if it becomes available, you can grab it first.

What is Web Hosting?

If domain registrars are like City Hall, web hosting services are perhaps best thought of as landlords. They rent you web space and storage on a server, help with its basic maintenance, and keep the power on.

In their most basic form, web hosting services simply allow users to upload files to a single web page using FTP (file transfer protocol). As websites become larger and more complicated, though, so do the services web hosts provide.

When you’re reviewing various web hosting plans, it’s fairly typical to run into exotic-sounding acronyms like PHP and MySQL, but what exactly do they mean?

Development Platforms

The internet uses several different coding languages to help developers build websites, from HTML5, to PHP, Python, and RubyonRails. In order for a website to be built using one of these platforms, the web host must support it.

Why this matters to you: If you are using a site builder like IM Creator to create your website, the question of development platforms shouldn’t be much of an issue for you – your friendly website builder is already structured using one of these languages (in IM Creator’s case, it’s HTML5). If, however, you are working with a developer or graphic designer to build your website from scratch, the coding languages your web host supports may be a factor to keep in mind.

RDBMS

A Relational Database Management System – or “RDBMS” – is the system that stores and manages your website’s data. Any time a visitor clicks a link to access information, a database management system must retrieve it from your archive. RDBMS’ language, Standard Query Language – or “SQL” – is used to access, manage, and update stored information on the RDBMS.

Why this matters to you: Web hosts tend to offer one or two different SQL options for their users, usually MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQlite. Unless you are writing code for your website yourself, the kind of database system your web host provides probably isn’t very important. Most web hosting services offer MySQL or PostgreSQL, which work well for website that are created on blogging platforms (like WordPress) and CMS software.

Image Credits

Macro Pixels URL Cliche by Chris Dlugosz (Flickr Creative Commons)

March 24, 2014 0 comment

Branding Creating A Website Domains SEO

The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Domain Name

by Erez Zundy March 11, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

You’ve assembled your team, picked a killer name, and designed a fabulous logo. Everything is in place until…thud, you find out someone else has cruelly registered the domain on your name before you had the chance to!

Fear not. The internet is awash with solutions to the problem of finding the right domain name, and this is a particularly informative place to start. In this blog post, we’ll outline top tips and tools you’ll need to get your website up and running in no time.

Great Tools To Find The Perfect Domain

The first step in finding the right domain name is to figure out what’s available. There are hundreds of websites that make this possible, but we’ve chosen a few in particular for their unusual strengths:

When you need a creative push: Panabee lets you search for available domain names, but if your name is taken it will give you suggestions as to alternatives.

When you want a remix: Bust A Name created a linguistic algorithm to combine your various domain search queries with a mix-and-match of other possible names. Bust A Name lets you kill two birds with one stone, too: they also help you to manage your domain.

The most secure: With SSL encryption, Domize has made its name as the among the most secure domain search tools out there, so that you can find your domain name privately.

The fastest: There are many, many domain search websites that offer “while you type” domain availability, but Instant Domain Search is one of the most popular.

The junkyard: Old Domains is a bit like going to a flea market. It lists expired domains so that you can claim what should’ve been yours all along.

Hot Professional Tips To Register a Great Domain

Make Your Name Memorable

Ask a thousand online businesses, and they’ll tell you a thousand different ways to make your name stick out. At the end of the day, the best way to find out if your name is easy to remember is with the 3 T’s:

TELL: Speak your name out-loud and use it in conversation. Is it difficult to roll off the tongue? Do you mix it up with other names?
TYPE: Using colloquial language like “u” as opposed to “you” may seem like a great idea at the time, but unfamiliar users or word-of-mouth traffic might have a hard time recalling your novel spelling if they’re typing your domain name straight into their browser.
TRY: Ask colleagues and friends to try out your domain name both by speaking and typing it, then be sure to jot down their helpful criticism. Getting some distance from your own business is essential to finding a name that sticks.

Stay Visual

Make sure to keep your domain name straightforward and utilitarian by using keywords to instantly explain what you offer. Product designer Jack Makin wanted to draw attention to his made-to-measure service (from product design to photography) when he was building his website with IM Creator, and chose www.makinbespoke.com as his domain instead of the more obvious www.jackmakin.com. The “bespoke” element of his domain and the strong visuals he uses on his landing page help potential users quickly associate his work with client versatility.

Keep it Short

Simple, short, and to the point domain names help users remember who you are and how to find you. In keeping with our words of advice, we’ll leave it at that.

Have Fun with Your TLD

A top-level domain (or TLD) refers to the last part of your domain name, after the last dot. As the internet grows, so does the scarcity of a good old .com TLD’s. Alternatives like .biz, .info, or .net abound, but are often racked with unsettling cultural associations (.biz, for example, is frequently misconstrued by users as spam). While SEO Moz’s Rand Fiskin suggests that any serious business should stick to .com and .com only, there are some back-roads to be travelled.

If your website’s name + .com has been taken, try making the last two letters of your name into your TLD. Tech-savvy, playful websites like visual.ly are using this technique to outsmart the .com hegemony. This strategy can be especially useful if you want to make a person’s name into a domain.
Meanwhile, if your business is primarily local or you want to associate it with the country you operate in, country-specific TLD’s are often more available and are readily trusted by users.

Found the right domain name. Now what?

You found the perfect domain for your new website? Super! Now go ahead and attach it to your new IM Creator website. Don’t have a website yet? Not a problem! Go to our website builder and create yourself a website in just 5 minutes.

Image Credit: Saleeha Bamjee, Flickr Creative Commons.

March 11, 2014 0 comment

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