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IM Creator

? CREATOR OF THE WEEK ? – Jasmina Boban

by Chris V April 22, 2021April 22, 2021

written by Chris V

One of the most important aspects of a portfolio website is the look of your work. Among the thousands of portfolios and endless amounts of content available on the internet, yours has to be unique and attractive. Hence, good photos of your products can help you attract as many customers as possible.

Today, we want to share the story of our creator of the week, Jasmina Boban. She is a product photographer from Serbia! Let’s have a look at her beautiful portfolio, and maybe one of our creators will be encouraged to collaborate with Jasmina.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Jasmina Boban based in Serbia and I’m product photographer/stop motion content creator mostly for beauty products.

How did you get started?

I was always a photography and art lover. My journey to what I love was a bit strange but things you love and attract come to you for sure. I studied law just to fulfill my parents wish, never finished (never regretted) as I was always ‘distracted’ by art. And here I am working full time as a product photographer.

What sets you apart?

My constant willingness to learn and improve, to listen and think outside the box, to be patient and persistent. I love to experiment, to try and find different views and points of view.

What obstacles did you have to overcome?

Being a freelance photographer in Serbia in a very small town is a bit strange so I had to find my clients outside of the borders. The start was not easy, but with the first satisfied clients, I got my wings and self-confidence to grow and be better.

Do you have any tips for other creators?

Well, just be what you are and be uncompromising! Listen to yourself, believe in yourself, believe in your intuition, and be persistent. Do what makes you happy and fulfills you! And find only one person to support you on your way, things will go much easier.

We want to remind you that we have a free license for artists and students, so click here and start building your site for free!

April 22, 2021April 22, 2021 0 comment

Creating A Website How to build a website How to create a website IM Creator Small Business Tips & Tools

Do I really need to have a website in 2020?

by Chris V August 3, 2020August 3, 2020

written by Chris V

Many people think it’s enough to manage a company Facebook page, or maintain a similar social media presence, but our marketing expert explains why you may need more.

Yes, it is absolutely a necessity for a small business to have its own website.

You can, of course, use social media to promote that website, but you definitely don’t want to be entirely dependent on your social media profiles.

Why?

Because social media platforms can change their rules at any time, and hold your hard-earned audience hostage.

There are countless examples of how this can go wrong, but essentially you want to avoid this type of scenario:

Create a Facebook page for your business
Create content for that page
Build an audience for your content
Engage with your fans
Continue to grow your audience
Pay Facebook to reach the audience that you built organically

In this scenario, if you haven’t already used your Facebook page to promote your website and start getting your fans to go there, you’ll have no choice but to pay Facebook (or whichever platform) to reach the audience that you worked so hard to build.

The real question here is, why wouldn’t you have a website for your business?

I suspect that the answer is that you (and many other small business owners out there) are still under the impression that building a website is a daunting task that requires technical knowledge or a large budget to outsource the work.The truth is, it’s easier than it’s ever been to build a business website yourself, even with zero coding experience. You can start today by building a free site with IM Creator, so there’s really no excuse for not having a website for your small business.

August 3, 2020August 3, 2020 0 comment

Creating A Website IM Creator Web Design

The Evolution of Website Builders

by Bitsy August 22, 2014

written by Bitsy

It only seems appropriate that on the 25th anniversary year of the World Wide Web, we should take a moment to celebrate the evolution of website builders – the unsung heroes of the internet and pioneers in user-generated content. For those of us over the age of 20, the Internet might still be fondly remembered as a mysterious, nebulous network of disparate information, a gateway to walls of text and bouncing GIFs punctuated by a theme song of high pitched, screeching, dial tones. Pages took several minutes – not a few seconds – to load, and content tended to carry the distinct air of a high school science class presentation. Still, the early days of the world wide web were exciting ones, especially as so many of us realized that we, too, could have our very own page online. Like human evolution, website builders have moved from primordial, gooey systems with limited functionality to strong, complex machines capable of incredible things.

Geocities: The First Sign of Life

Geocities was originally founded as Beverly Hills Internet in 1994, the year the World Wide Web Consortium was founded to enact standards for web design and four years after HTML was first developed. Geocities was, for all intents and purposes, the first website builder. Conceived as the “Wild West” of the world wide web, Geocities was populated by “homesteaders” who were part of “29 Neighbourhoods” in different “cities”, each covering themes from conspiracy theories to celebrity fan pages. Their interface was clunky (and needless to say, achingly slow), but for many, it was also their first taste at joining the internet. Websites were mostly text based but with some advances, like color changing text and early graphics. They also predominantly took on the “table” format, developed in 1992 as the most intuitive form of site architecture thus far (previously, website had looked more like lists). Yahoo! bought Geocities in 1999, and sunk into oblivion ten years later. Currently, Geocities is only available in Japan.

AngelFire and Tripod – Marine Life

Both founded in the early 1990’s, AngelFire and Tripod evolved as slightly more complex website builders, albeit with slightly confusing mandates: AngelFire was originally offered as both a builder and a medical transcription service, while Tripod was conceived as “hip web site and pay service for and by college students”, offering tips for teens away from home, resume building tips, and of course, a homepage builder. Even if AngelFire and Tripod were essentially awkward teenagers, Tripod was still the first website builders to offer a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) builder which, as far as the evolution of website builders go, is about akin to the first marine creatures transitioning to land. Meanwhile, the dawn of Flash and Javascript in 1995-96 brought the first glimpses of interactivity to website builders, introducing animation and effects to web design. Both services were bought by Lycos in 1999, but unlike Geocities, both are still operational.

WYSIWYG and HTML Builders – The Reptiles

As the Y2K scare came and went, and along with it the first major tech bubble burst, a slew of new website builders like Amaya, SiteSkins, and HighPowerSites began to emerge as the easiest way to build a website, with all new WYSIWYG and HTML capabilities. Although CSS had been around since 1996, it’s next version, CSS3, brought completely new capabilities to web design, as well as a more fluid HTML language. As the precursors to drag & drop editors, early WYSIWYG website builders resembled Microsoft Word, making them by far the most approachable for young businesses aching to get “on the net”. Sites from early WYSIWYG and HTML builders differentiated themselves from AngelFire and Tripod sites with a distinctly more modern appearance, including more elaborate textures and layout.

Flash and Drag & Drop Website Builders – The Mammals

Though Flash had been around since 1996, by the time the earliest Flash and Drag & Drop website builders emerged in the early 2000’s, users were starting to get the hang of creating more dynamic sites. Slow to load and even slower to be picked up by search engines (Google couldn’t read Flash), websites created with early Flash and Drag & Drop editors were clunky if fairly representative of what we know websites to have looked like up until recently. By 2003 – when 38 million websites already populated the internet – web2.0 made its debut, and along with it came social media, and blogging platforms such as WordPress. Suddenly, the clunkiness of a personal website could be replaced by the relative simplicity of a blog, ushering in a whole new wave of user-generated content.

HTML5 and Drag & Drop Website Builders – The Homosapiens

As the fifth generation of HTML, HTML5 is the current WWW standard, and comes with a range of features we’ve come to perceive as normal, such as <video> and <audio> syntactic features and scaleable vector graphic (SVG) integrations. With HTML5 (as well as its counterparts, CS3 and Javascript) came another generation of website builders like IM Creator, that are capable of creating beautiful, highly functional, and – most importantly for today’s devices – responsive websites. More importantly for users, HTML5 website builders offer a far more intuitive Drag & Drop interface, making it possible for just about anyone to create a professional website without any coding or design knowledge.

The Future

Keeping our Jetson’s fantasies at bay, the future of the website builder (and indeed, the future of web design) is still very much up for discussion. For some, the future lies in page-less, “native” websites, ones that stray from the archaic “print” format that websites grew from and move to experiences that can only exist on the web. Advances in HTML5 (or 6, or 7, or…), CS3, and Javascript will also allow users to make websites that are far more maleable even by today’s standards, making updates as fluid as, say, tweeting.

For us, here at IM Creator, the future is something we think about all the time and we are working hard to bring the future towards the present. We see the future of website builders as being even more simple and approachable for novices, and yet, being the ultimate tool for web designers, allowing them to provide a full solution to their clients with no need for any coding at all. The future is closer than you might think, so follow us on twitter or facebook to stay tuned for coming updates.

To finish off this post, here’s a little timeline taking you through the history of website builders: Image Credits

Evolution-des-wissens.jpg at Wiki Commons

Amaya inuse at Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

August 22, 2014 0 comment

Client spotlight Design Inspiration IM Creator

7 Superstar IM Creator Websites

by Bitsy July 18, 2014

written by Bitsy

It’s difficult to suppress the awe that we feel every time a great new website designed with IM Creator goes live. From artists, architects, chefs, and designers to lawyers, models, and psychiatrists, there’s nothing quite like seeing talented people breath their own particular energy into one of our website templates.

Without further ado, here are picks for 7 of the best IM Creator websites from across the world:

#1 Marina di Nisida, Milan, Italy

Try to suppress the urge not to book the next flight to Milan when you catch a glimpse of Marina di Nisida’s mouth-wateringly crisp photography – a central player throughout their website.

Everything about Marina di Nisida’s website is built with graceful usability in mind: Copy is kept to a minimum, letting images speak louder than any words possibly could. Their menu page doesn’t require any cumbersome downloads, and is set out in an easy to read, elegant typeface. Their contact page, too, couldn’t get any simpler (or more effective): An interactive map is placed at the top of the page, next to contact information and links to Facebook and Tripadvisor. Even a subtly added image of Marina di Nisida’s awning graces their contact page, providing visitors with a subtle clue as to what to look for in Milan’s winding streets.

#2 Barbara Rondini, Perugia, Italy

Barbara Rondini’s boutique law firm in Perugia, Italy, offers an utterly original take on the legal website; no stuffy neo-classical typefaces or boring colour schemes here. Barbara chose a one-pager design to allow for easy (and mobile-optimized) scrolling, beginning with an unembellished description of what her firm does, helping visitors to immediately gain an understanding of the site’s content while keeping SEO keywords in mind. Although there is sea of text to scroll through, readability is ensured by plenty of whitespace and big, easy-to-read font. Sections are organized using backdrops in shades of grey – a playful riff on classical law firm website sobriety.

#3 Chikin and Fish, Byron Bay, Australia

What do you get when you put a “tattooed, pierced metal head” with a “track suit wearing pop princess”? A perfectly designed wedding website, that’s what. Chikin and Fish (otherwise known as Kim and Leigh) took an IMC wedding template and made it utterly their own, all while providing the perfect breadth of essential information for their wedding guests. Organized into six unfussy pages, Chikin and Fish spared their wedding guests lengthy copy, relying only on the basics…and some perfectly chosen typography. Even their RSVP page, often the site of untold confusion on wedding websites, is broken down into just three easy steps – another example of how this happy couple’s easygoing and fun personality translated to an intuitive, beautifully-designed website.

#4: Heidi Acuña, Honolulu, Hawaii

At just 18 years old, Heidi Acuña’s website puts one too many seasoned graphic designers to shame. Her personal diary of fashion, food, travel, and shoes has been lovingly designed with big, energetic images and novelly designed blog entries. What really makes Heidi’s website stand out, though, is the way she integrated social media widgets. Rather than crowding them amongst her content, Heidi’s live Facebook and Twitter feeds are nestled at the bottom of her homepage along with her contact information. Instead of appearing clunky, they blend perfectly in with her stellar design while still remaining easily accessible.

#5: Vibe Johansson, Copenhagen, Denmark

Vibe Johansson is a Danish fashion label making waves across Europe and Japan with dark, ethereal, and thoroughly Scandinavian designs for women. Their website is a true testament to minimalism: it could teach a course in whitespace. Copy is smartly spaced, and uses the usually blah Arial font particularly well to drive home their sensibility for uncomplicated reinterpretations of classic design. To help cater to their adoring Japanese clientele, Vibe Johansson also offers a Japanese-language version of their site, winning them plenty of usability points.

#6: Wiggley Bottom Farm, Healesville, Australia

Wiggley Bottom Farm, a perfect slice of country life in Healesville, Australia, has been a favourite website of IM Creator since the day it launched. Perfectly capturing the friendly and vibrant bucolic atmosphere of this guest cottage, Wiggley Bottom Farm’s website is cleanly organized, making it a breeze to navigate through, and providing visitors with the immediate sense of its pristine freshness. While the use of colour in web design is never an easy concept to grasp, Wiggley Bottom Farm’s website cleverly picks up on the hues of the farm’s surrounding nature, using blocks of color to set text against bright, professional photographs.

#7: Cory Tallman, New York City, U.S.A.

Cory Tallman is a copywriter from New York City, the brain behind Saks Fifth Avenue’s elegant yet ever-so-slightly offbeat promotional copy. His website acts as an elaborated business card really should: Easy on the eyes, and offering just the right amount of information (to keep you asking for more). As a professional copywriter, you might expect Cory to offer some intriguing word-sprouts throughout his website – and wouldn’t be disappointed. Cory’s copy is a breath of fresh air: Easy to read, easy to understand, and full of personality. In his words: “Words are common, the ideas they express aren’t.”

July 18, 2014 0 comment

Client spotlight IM Creator IM Creator websites

Meet James Burke, May’s Designer of the Month

by ruthie May 27, 2014

written by ruthie

Our May Designer is James Burke. James is the owner of Umag Inc, a marketing and promotions company offering services such as website design, mobile app designs, ad campaigns, and business consulting. James has built so many websites with IM Creator, we thought it would be cool to ask him a few questions about his experience.

What’s the first thing you ask a client when asked to create a website for them?

The first thing I ask clients is what is the look and feel that they are going for. Are they looking to build a product based site or an informational site.

Where do you find your design inspiration?

I find my design inspiration from looking online at some of the top sites in different genres.

What’s the most common mistake you see clients make when planning a website?

Many clients put too much information on their site and do not plan it to be search engine friendly. This is so important as you don’t want just to have a website, you want people to find it. Another major mistake I see people do is that they don’t plan their website to be user friendly. It’s great that someone is visiting your site but you also want them to stay.

What’s the easiest thing to do in order to make a website look up-to-date all the time?

I think you should keep the content fresh and try to use good quality pictures and content.

One great resource for free photos for commercial use is IM Free

What made you choose IM Creator as a tool for building websites?

It’s very user friendly and the tools make it a better builder than some of the most advance builders I have used from other companies.

What’s the best web design tip you can share with IM users?

The best advice I can give IM users is to be creative and push the boundaries of the builder and themselves and always think outside the box.

want to be June’s Designer of the Month? Send us an email to design[@]imcreator.com!

May 27, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website IM Creator

5 Tips to Choose The Best Template for Your Site

by ruthie February 20, 2014

written by ruthie

IM Creator has many beautiful and unique templates. No more cookie-cutter templates and dull and outdated websites. The creative revolution is here.

Who am I? Why am I here?

Well, these are not exactly the first questions you need to ask when choosing a website template. What you do need to first ask yourself is what kind of a website you need. Are you creating a website for you or for your business? Do you need a site that will host many pictures and videos or are you in need of a more text oriented site like the one below?

Now ask who am I…

Many templates have a specific theme – artists, designers, service providers, hotels, restaurants, event planners and more and more. A themed layout will guide you through the specific needs of the website you need. At IM Creator, all of our templates look like real websites (no lorem ipsum mumbo jumbo), so it’s easier to choose the best template and to add your content in the best spot on the site.

Bound 2

After figuring out who we are (it’s hard, I know :-P), it’s really important you connect to the visual aspect of your site and what it represents. Although all IM Creator templates are custumizable, we’re pretty sure that when you see a template you like, you’ll know it. An instant connection to the color palette, fonts and images is something that’s bound to happen. But remember, a good website is a website that people visit and browse through… Try to understand what kind of visual language will speak more clearly and be most effective to your target audience. Will your audience connect to a more vintage look or a more modern look? Are you building a Liverpool FC fan site and the color palette is blue? Fail 😉

Consider the content you need on your site

Now that you’ve pinpointed the goal of your website, its look, and know your target audience, what is the information and content you need on the site? No need to add everything immediately – you can start small and grow. But, there are some basic things you need before the site goes live. If you provide services or want people to contact you for your work, you must have some kind of contact details – whether it’s a link to your email or a contact form – you want people to be able to contact you.

If you also want to tell a little about yourself, so that visitors to your site will understand exactly where they are, add an “about” or “bio” page.

If you are an artist, designer, model, actor, a portfolio is always something important to have. No need for a full one of course, just one that showcases a selected part of your work – you can always add more later.

Have fun!

There are so many templates to choose from – finding the one you love and building your website should be a fun experience – so enjoy it!

Remember, with IM Creator, you can switch templates if you want to refresh the look of your site or rebrand it. So it’s not a life or death decision – pick the template you like now, that answers your current website building needs.

February 20, 2014 0 comment

IM Creator IM Creator features IM Creator news

New! IM Free – the Anti Stock Photo

by Erez Zundy January 6, 2014

written by Erez Zundy

We’re tired of dull stock photography: cliché pictures that cost too much. We want it real and unique – from real photographers, with real people. Free for commercial use.

So we’ve built IM Free, a new service that will allow you to browse through 1000’s of high-quality creative commons free photos and find an image that is exactly what you are looking for.

The Current Stock Photos Problem

Everyone who has ever searched in the popular stock photos websites knows that getting the right image is a nearly impossible task. There are hundreds of thousands of images in each website and many of them are of very bad quality. The high quality photos on the other hand, are too popular, causing the same image to appear in many websites. The faces of the stock photos models are found in many websites, and even if you haven’t looked up an image before, you will probably recognize some of these faces:

Google images – “stockphoto doctor”

Google images – “stockphoto business”

And who can forget the famous healthcare.gov stockphoto?…

The IM Free Solution

With IM Free, you can find a unique photo, of real people, taken by amazing photographers who posted their work on Flickr. These photos are under the creative commons attribution license, meaning that you can use all the photos for free(!) as long as you give credit to the photographer (we encourage you to do that as it’s the only way this model will stay strong).

At IM Free, we have curated photos of many talented photographers and categorized them in order to make it easier for you to find the right photo. This collection will also be updated all the time with new photos and categories.

Some of the categories you can find are:

Art & Music
Business
Ambient – including many beautiful images that can be used as a background image for your site.
Nature
People

There’s also a search box at the top of each page that will help you locate an image by keywords, quickly.

We plan to update the collection and add new photos but if you would like to contribute beautiful creative commons photos you found on Flickr, or if you are a photographer and would like to share your work with others in return for a credit, please contact us at free (at) imcreator.com.

It’s 100% Free For Everyone

IM Free is free to use and not just for IM Creator users. Later on, we plan to integrate IM Free into our editor and make it easier for IM websites owners to add beautiful images to their site.

Here at IM Creator, we keep working hard to achieve our goal of making websites creation easy, so be on the lookout through our Facebook page and Twitter for future expansion of IM Free to other free website creation resources.

January 6, 2014 0 comment

IM Creator IM Creator news

Announcing the new IM Creator Affiliate Program

by Erez Zundy December 18, 2013

written by Erez Zundy

Since we first launched in 2011, we’ve had affiliates promoting IM Creator on their websites. Our affiliate program acts as a partnership between IM Creator and affiliates with the goal of spreading the word about IM and today we’re excited to introduce our new IM Affiliate Program, powered by HasOffers’ popular platform.

Now everyone can apply and in no time, start promoting IM Creator using a unique link and track visits. Application approval is usually done on the same day you apply.

In HasOffers, register (or login if you already have an account), click “offers” on the left sidebar and go to “My offers”. You will usually see 2 offers:

Premium affiliates – will allow you to send traffic to our homepage, our new landing page, or any other page on imcreator.com using the “Add website” in the offer details age.
Promote templates – will allow you to get HTML codes that include a thumbnail image of one of our templates, and a unique link that will direct the traffic to that template’s specific URL.

Affiliate Program Features

Send traffic to any page under IMcreator.com using the “add website” feature.
Set a source parameter in order to group and filter statistics in the reports.
Add as many SubIDs parameters to the URL in order to track things better on your side. For example, if you would like to distinct between traffic you generated via paid ads and traffic you sent over via your new blog post you can set SubID1=post or SubID1=cpc
Add your own pixel to the thank you page in order to track advertising campaigns like AdWords.
Many banners in different styles and sizes for you to use.

A bit more about promoting templates:

In order to promote IM Creator using templates, please download the HTML creative of the template you want. If you would rather use your own code, open the file and:

1) Copy the image and edit it as you wish.

2) Right-click the mouse on the image and ‘copy link address’ to get the relevant link to the image.

Reporting – Things You Should Know

In order to get an input on what’s working and what’s not, there’s an easy to use reporting system you can find on the left sidebar of the control panel.

Since we are tracking both “Free users” and “Premium users”, you will need to add the “Goal” dimension to your reports. Just click “report options” on the top menu of the Reports page and check the “Goal” box.

You can add any type of information that we track to your reports, including Creatives, Countries, Browsers and more.

You can even break down your reports by week/day/hour of the day/etc. and save a report for later use.

Commission Payment

At the moment we only support PayPal for affiliates payment but we have plans to offer more payment options in the future. The initial commission rate is $35 per sale, but we really like to increase it for affiliates who drive a lot of sales or stick with us for a long time.

We love our affiliates and welcome you to join this unique group and start promoting a website builder you actually like. Sign up today.

December 18, 2013 0 comment

Creating A Website IM Creator IM Creator features

Found my image! Now what?…

by ruthie December 11, 2013

written by ruthie

You found a great image to place as an icon, background or just add it to your site for great design. Now what?

Here are a few simple steps on how to add them to your new site:

Adding a background

Step 1: We need to save the image to your computer. In this case, I chose a pattern from our blog post.

Click on the source of the background. In this case, “Grass Pattern”

Step 2: Save the file of the pattern to your computer. As you want to add it as a background, it’s better to save the highest-resolution file if you have an option to download several sizes.

Save As

Step 3: When you are logged in the editor, click on Settings > Background, choose “Picture” as background type, upload the picture you saved and voilà!

grass pattern

See here to learn more on how to set your background.

Adding a Favicon

Choose a picture you like or your brand’s logo and upload it as your site’s favicon. Let’s take for example one of the logos from our post http://imcreator.com/blog/40-creative-negative-space-logo-designs Logo

Right-click on the picture to save it (make sure you can use it in your site if it’s not your logo :-))

When you are logged in to the editor, in your site, click on Settings > Favicon, choose the file and that’s it.

See more in our 30-sec video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxnlz5n_xZE

December 11, 2013 0 comment

Client spotlight IM Creator

Client Spotlight – Katherine Minski, Graphic Designer

by ruthie November 12, 2013

written by ruthie

Katherine Minski is a freelance designer from Madison, Wisconsin.

Katherine customized one of our templates to create her website katherineminski.com, using her personal touch and perspective, designing a unique site that reflects who she is.

Graphic designers can not just build their portfolio with IM Creator, but also to use the platform to build sites for clients. As IM Creator is a drag n’ drop platform, no coding is required.

Katherine’s website is a great example that for a website to be successful and draw visitors, it doesn’t need to be lengthy and cluttered.

Katherine has 4 pages in her site – Home, Info, Gallery and Contact. With IM, she can always add more pages and material to her site but to have a beautiful and succinct site, no need for more than a couple of pages that represent who you are, your work and most importantly – how to contact you!

Katherine tells us:

I’ve been working as a freelance designer for the past couple years, while I went to school part time for my Associates Degree in Graphic Design and Illustration. I have a BA in Mass Communications and used to work in TV news, making graphics, which kind of sparked my career in design.

Freelance design is the perfect fit for me, because it allows me to pick and choose what projects I do. It gives you a lot of freedom! My day job now is working for a music publishing company, as a royalties specialist. It’s a great balance for me! Plus, when I’m not fully dependent on my graphics work as a means to support myself, I can do a lot of pro bono projects for local charities and non-profits (my favorite clients!), such as the Lakeshore Pembroke Welsh Corgi Rescue.

My website went through a lot of transformations before it went live…I have this self portrait that I really wanted to incorporate somehow, but in the end, it just didn’t fit with the branding I created for myself. So, I took a hard look at my personal letterhead, resume and business card and took my inspiration from there. My branding is very simple, so I wanted to keep my website simple and easy to use as well.

I used one of the templates offered by IM Creator and altered it to fit my needs. One of my design instructors at school recommended IM Creator for designers who want to design their own website, but don’t want to build it and do all the coding.

November 12, 2013 0 comment

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