The Change Creative
Remember the good old days of red and blue glasses before all this high-tech 3d imagery came in. One lens red, the other blue? Well in this totally free tutorial I am going to teach you how to create your very own 3d imagery! The things you will need are a) patience and any version of Photoshop as the same rules apply for cs to cs6.
Sometimes deciding what to write about on your blog can be difficult, you just get a creative block and it’s like you are sat in a white room, on a white stool with white windows & with nothing to white, oh sorry I mean write! Finding out what is trending on social media is one great way to inducious your creative sparks. In this post you will find four useful links to find out what is currently trending.
Each day there is new content created on the web and search engine giant Google is a great place to find out what is trending. It is the most widely used Search Engine in the Western Hemisphere so if you write about something related to the main trend you have a good chance you may generate some traffic from it.
Ever heard of reddit? Well you have now! Reddit is a place that people share stories that they find interesting and they post them in specific categories. The benefit of this for looking for ideas for your own works is that you can see how many up’s they have which gives an indication at how interesting and successful the story might be if you were to create something yourself around that particular article.
BuzzFeed is the leading media company for the social age, intensely focused on delivering high-quality original reporting, insight, and viral content across a rapidly expanding array of subject areas. Their technology powers the social distribution of content, detects what is trending on the web, and connects people in realtime with the hottest content of the moment. A great way to really spark your imagination with many subjects and ideas to discuss on your blog, what could be better?
Lastly, if you are starting to enter the world of video blogging you may like to take a look at this site. It gives you insight into what is currently trending on youtube. Even if you aren’t video blogging it still might spark some ideas for your latest blog post or podcast.
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Remember, although all these websites are informing you of what is trending at that particular moment you may want to try and be a little bit psychic too and write about things that are yet to happen but are foresable and highly likely to happen as this will give google time to index your content and you won’t become old news. Alternatively, if you can write an article within a couple of hours and you have large social media followings on various platforms and you are a part of various communities then don’t worry so much about natural search results just make sure you use the hashtag as effecitvely as possible when describing your blog post so that your article can be found amongst all the other trending information. Best of luck and if you have any other ideas of to find out what is trending then please feel free to comment in the box below.
Photoshop comes with some fabulous brushes but did you can you make your own? In this blog post I help you in learning how to create a Photoshop brush so you can create your own.
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Create anew document and then a new layer. Draw a black object. We produced this one by creating Bezier curves using the Pen tool and then filled in the path. Ctrl/Cmd-click the layer to select the object and choose Edit > Copy. Select File > New and change the background contents to Transparent.
After the new document has been created, select edit > paste and the shape you copied will appear on the transparent background layer. Choose Select>All and then edit > Define Brush Preset. A brush name window will appear for you to name your brush. Enter the text in the name box and click OK.
Create a new document. Choose the brush tool and select a colour by clicking on the foreground colour swatch in the tool bar. Select Window > brush preset. Scroll to the bottom of the brush presets palette to find your new brush. Click it to select it. Now make alterations to the size, opacity and flow of the brush using the top toolbar options. See what kind of patterns you can create!
Finally make sure you save the photoshop brush. To do this simply select the brush > then press the dropdown next to the small image of the brush > then the arrow pointing right in a circle and a drop down will appear. Next click save brush…a file save as will appear, give your brush a good name, jobs a gudden!
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When making new Photoshop imagery it is useful to know where to find some free images to use for your creations. In this blog post I will share ten of the best texture websites out there.
Most CMS platforms for websites have a login page where it requires a login and password. If you own or run a website having secure logins has never been more important! In this post I suggest ways of increasing your password security. [divider style=”1″]
You spend a long long time making your website. Its content, its media & making it work as efficiently as possible. Others have different ideas…hackers, although many are good, some provide a real threat to your hard work. A hacker can try a brute force attack to infiltrate your digital kingdom.
A brute-force attack is where a computer tries every possible key or password until it succeeds at infiltrating your website. Nothing like a bit of determination! A simple brute-force attack usually has a dictionary of all words or commonly used passwords and cycles through passwords until it gains access. It can take time to complete BUT just read the next paragraph to see how many passwords can be tested per second…
This piece of information is really going to shock you…
Individual desktop computers can test over a hundred million passwords per second using password cracking tools that run on a general purpose CPU and billions of passwords per second using GPU-based password cracking tools.
Scary thought really isn’t it, best change that password from password123 now don’t you think?
Eventually, after a while the hacker will gain access to your website this way if they are persistent. It can take a few minutes, a few days, a few months, a few years, or decades ( i think most would give up at this point! ).
Want to know exactly how long it takes to hack your password then simply enter it into this website, you might be quite amazed at how secure your password is https://howsecureismypassword.net/ if it doesnt take long it’s time to make a change! [divider style=”1″]
Most brute force hacking uses commonly used “words” and natural choices we make like numbers after each other. A good technique is to use a phrase rather than a couple of words. For Example think of the song “If I could turn back the hands of time”
“If I could turn, turn back the hands of time, then darling you, you would be mine”
No, I am not declaring my love to you but I am loving this technique for building a password! What I want you to do is take the first letter of each word in that single sentence from the song and make a password!
“If I could turn, turn back the hands of time, then darling you, you would be mine”
IICTTBTHOTTDYYWBM
This password would take 8 million years to hack whilst still being easy to remember by remembering the tune…quite a while i think.
If you add just three memorable numbers 124 on the end it would take 3 trillion years to hack
add a ? and it would take only 27 quintillion years to hack…so not at all long!
Warning before performing this action make sure you have a basic understanding of what you are doing
What if someone does manage to access your website through brute force, what then? Don’t worry if you do the following steps they can’t access the dashboard of your site even if they guess the password correctly! Bonus.
If you are the only person who needs to login to your Admin area and you know your own IP address, you can deny wp-admin access to everyone but yourself via an .htaccess file.
Create a file in a plain text editior called .htaccess and add:
# Block access to wp-admin. order deny,allow allow from x.x.x.x deny from all replacing x.x.x.x with your IP address. Your Internet Provider can help you to establish your IP address. Or you can use an online service such as What Is My IP.
Creating a strong password is only your first step to ensuring your website is less at threat to those with malcontent towards you and your business. There is a lot more to be done and I will be blogging about these things in future blog posts so please, sign up to my rss feed for my blog and receive it in your email so you never miss new information.
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There are several ways to build your Twitter following on Twitter but there are two common ways. Follow people in the industries you are interested in and they will follow you back or alternatively you can pay someone to give followers.
The first path of following people and receive follow backs to those in my particular professional industry is the option i chose. Admittedly it takes time to build a large Twitter following this way but like 300 Spartans going to war, having 300 relevant Twitter followers compared to 30,000 you have paid for that have no real interest in you or your business is a waste of money and a weak following regardless of numbers.
I know some people pay for a following so they can look like they have integrity and are a powerful online social force with something important to say but strength doesn’t come in numbers it comes in the quality of the few and I can quite proudly say every follower I have on Twitter is someone in my area of expertise that may retweet what I tweet and get some benefit from my tweets.
Usually spotting a Twitter User that has paid for followers is easy. One key factor is having very few tweets for the amount of followers they have gained. A sure sign something fishy is going on.
Not only are you being decieved by the seller of the fake followers but they will also abandon you before you know it. I do know somebody who has bought Twitter Followers and they have started loosing quite a few of those followers a couple of months later.
The worst part of buying Twitter Followers is that you are deceiving your potential clients into thinking you have integrity and influence if they follow you on Twitter when really your reach and influence in Twitter is small.
My final note is this, fight your fight the proper way, take your time ( believe me it takes time! ) and build your following by following others in your industry, retweeting, favouring and sharing other peoples content, build strong relationships with followers and you will gain respect as a true Twitter Power then you too can call yourself a Spartan Tweeter.
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You may already know this but there is a great online program called justunfollow.com. You can see who has followed you, unfollowed you, even copy followers of people you follow which is ideal for building a relevant Twitter Following. I use it every day on the free version but for just a small fee you can follow and unfollow as much as you like and build your following much quicker.
Last year I started rebranding an IT company that had two sectors, a data centre consultancy & a state of the art Colocation Data Centre. Both had been branded with separate identities due to the fact the consultancy was very well established and a recognized brand and the investor didn’t want to damage the brand recognition. Considering this the rebranding of the company had to be carefully thought out and the Digital Artwork to be displayed on the walls of the data centre was no different. In this post I discuss 5 things that I feel are important to consider whenever you design some digital artwork for a corporation. Continue “5 things to think about when designing good digital artwork”
When I started building up my website with plugins, themes, pictures, JavaScript and various other features I started noticing a slow down in my website speed. I was less than happy that this was happening but I suspected that because my site is driven by databases then the server has to work a little bit harder than usual. Having a CDN has many benefits and speed is one of them, read on…
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The first thing I recommend you do before even considering buying a CDN is test your website using tools.pingdom.com/fpt/.
This website tests the speed of your website from various locations around the world and gives you a breakdown of what is the main issues effecting your website speed, you may find it isn’t your media files after all it may be something else…
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When you put your url into the test box if you notice the first option that appears ( which happens to be your connection to your host ) is one of your slowest features ( anything about 1 second is pretty poor, anything about 3 seconds and you really do need a new provider ) then this will be a hosting server issue.
If your website is on what is called a “shared server” (which most websites are if they are not a large corporation with their own IT equipment) then getting a fast connection can be difficult. A shared server means just that, you share your server with other websites and sometimes there can be hundreds sharing the bandwidth to your server and why a connection can be slow. Some hosting providers do give the option of dedicated hosting but it does tend to cost a lot more…if you are a fairly young online business I would stick with shared hosting until finances permit you to make the transfer to dedicated hosting.
Some hosting providers are better than others for different reasons and Bluehost.com is one particular host that is recommended for WordPress sites, but don’t take my word for it. I recommend that you consider doing some research about hosts, read customer feedback and possibly look into changing your hosting provider.
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CDN is an abbreviation for content delivery network. what a CDN does is distribute your large data files (such as your images,videos, audio and JavaScript, etc) and deploy them on a system of servers in multiple data centers across the world
Why is having a CDN going to help your website? Speed is one reason a CDN can boost your websites performance but there are more reasons, if you are interested in what they are then please…read on!
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Users are very impatient and getting more impatient.
They expect fast & efficient websites so they can reach the information they want at lightning fast speeds. A user just sees a browser window but behind that computer screen of that web request activated from a left mouse click of your right hand is traveling down the internet highway to process a large amount of data of varying types and putting it together like a jigsaw of varying file types to return it back to the screen of the user wherever they may be.
One datacentre in a big wide world
If you are lucky your website data will be stored on servers that are located in a high tech top of the range data centre like the one at MigSolv.com. Although this is great the problem with this is that if you are in a far off land such as California accessing a website stored in the UK it will take longer than one closer to where the web request is being made.
Geo-location on the CDN
This is where a CDN steps in. A CDN relieves this issue by delivering that data from the closest server, via geo-location ( Geolocation is simply the identification of where the electronic device request is being made from).
Improves your User Experience
Once you have set up your CDN then the website increases in speed & the user will be happier in at least one area of using your site. Since using my CDN I have seen my bounce rate decreases by 20% and the amount of time people staying on the site increasing.
A CDN will likely improve your conversions
As Goran Candrlic mentions in his post about website conversions and speed. For every 1 second of improvement they experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions. There is some great information on that post about speed and conversion so when you get time check it out!
Search Engines have a need for speed too!
If your site is fast the major search engines will fall in love with your content! You will find you start ranking higher for your pages and higher search engine ranks means more traffic and more traffic means more chance for conversions!
You can’t take me down so easily
The fear of hackers, spammers and others with malicious intent is a constant worry for website owners. Having a CDN gives you some extra redundancy should a hacker manage to take your website down because your files are stored in a type of cloud in varying data centres around the world so you content may still be accessible. One little piece of mind if it ever happens to you and you need to reinstall your content to your website.
A CDN can help you when you get popular
All website owners dream of gaining thousands of visits a day. Becoming web famous would be a dream and would be the best way to increase conversion rates. As you create more great content your traffic increases thus more requests for the data will be needed putting extra strain on your server. A CDN reduces the pressure on the server and will make your website faster even when you have unpredictable spikes in traffic.
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Why I am discussing WordPress? WordPress may be the most popular CMS widely used by website owners worldwide today. Its simplicity of use and lack of a need to understand in-depth coding ( although it is good to have at least some basic html knowledge at least ) to make a website work well for your business.
A very good cache plugin that ALL WordPress sites should have installed is W3 Total Cache.
W3 Total Cache has a feature to add MAXCDN. When a plugin as good as W3 Total Cache recommends a CDN you automatically know this is probably the best option for your site.
I did try Cloud flare first before I started using MaxCDN as my chosen CDN but I didn’t feel I was getting the level of service I was expecting.
It came with features to block well-known threats from certain IP addresses across the world that are recorded but the problem with Cloudflare is that sometimes it blocked some people who are genuine visitors which seriously frustrated them.
You may say this is a small price to pay for a CDN making sure to keep your website as secure as possible but I think as long as you back up your databases and content as regularly as possible using any backup program, then you have nothing to fear from hackers and spammers as a restore of the system should be pretty straightforward as long as you give your hosting account a very strong password.
I use MAXCDN for my website content and I couldn’t be happier! I am writing this from the point of view of a very happy customer. I could write and promote several CDNs with the chance of getting affiliate percentages from all products like several blogs do but that isn’t why I write about certain products, I write about products I believe in and that I have had a great experience with. I believe in only promoting products that I truly believe in and that I think others can also reap the benefits of.
I think what stood out for me with MaxCDN was their live chat feature. When I wasn’t sure whether I had set up the CDN correctly I spoke to one of their employees via the Live chat and I was very very impressed! I created another user with admin privileges so they could access the plugin and the employee then set up the CDN perfectly.
Of course giving access to my website to someone I didn’t know did give me a little apprehension but as I back up my site regularly I felt it would be okay to create a new account and delete it once it was completed.
I was blown away by this level of customer service , they could have pointed me into an online tutorial but they exceeded their requirements and helped all they could!
Making my connection for users to my website faster was really important to me, probably the most important and MaxCDN really delivered. I am much happier with my website speed since using MaxCDN and I highly recommend the product.
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You may have guessed already but I think EVERYBODYS website should have a CDN. Fact.
If you are serious about generating traffic and providing a brilliant experience to your potential clients or readers then you have to own a CDN for optimum website speed experience.
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MaxCDN is the best option for you and I wouldn’t recommend using any other CDN. You have nothing to lose as you have a 1 month trial too, click the banner below to find out more : –
Broken links can really effect the integrity of your website so it is vitally important you find them before your visitors and search engine bots do! Although it may seem like a minor point you would be mistaken because if you just leave them it makes your business look totally unreliable if you can’t even get the basics right. In this post I will tell you how to avoid the embarrassing broken links from effecting your users experience.
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When a website user cannot find a page they are looking for they arrive at what is called an error 404 page. These pages are not often designed well but can make the experience of reaching a broken link that slightly more forgiving if it is at least pretty. Here is one I designed for MigSolv Data Centre Specialists.
Think about the company’s brand, what would represent their identity in an imaginative way?
As your website grows you may notice more and more link errors appearing, its natural so don’t worry, if you have over 1000 pages and blog posts there are naturally going to be broken links (i.e. if a visitor bookmarks a particular page they liked) but it still doesn’t look great for visitors.
A way to defuse arriving at an error page is to redirect the lost soul back to the homepage so they can navigate to the desired page they were looking for. To do this you will need to follow these instructions.
1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and on the left hand side options select Appearance > editor.
2. Navigate to the 404.php file of your live theme.
3. Replace the content with that below
You can download the file and replace it for your 404 file if you have access to your back end, or alternatively open it copy and paste the code into your 404.php section on the appearance editor dashboard.
Download 404 file here
Integrity is a broken links checker for Mac OS and it is the one that I particularly use. It is straight forward and gives you heaps of broken link information.
Download it here : –
http://integrity.en.softonic.com/mac
Link checker 6 is a broken links checker for PC, i’ve not actually used this one yet but the reviews on it look good.
Download it here : –
http://wummel.github.io/linkchecker/
If you don’t want to download a program that is okay this Online broken link checker will help you find and correct all the links that aren’t working correctly.
Follow this link below :
http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
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If you find any other broken link tools or you have your own tips please feel free to comment in the box below.
Google Analytics is a fantastic little tool for analysing how to improve your website through visitor behaviour, locality , referal traffic etc but if your IP address is included in the analysis it may make the results quite inaccurate. In this post I discuss how to exclude IP addresses from the analytics.
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If you are using Google Analytics to give you useful information and you aren’t excluding your IP address you may as well shut down your account with google now. If you are at a loss to what an IP address is or how to find it don’t worry, that is why I wrote this post..I’ll help you as much as I can.
Think of an I.P ( internet protocol) address is a unique string of numbers that EVERY single digital device you use or own has if they can connect to the internet. It is like a home address for your computer devices so that it can be identified online. This is why you need to exclude your ip addresses you own to access your website as even when you are working on new content google analytics will see you as a visitor and NOT an owner or designer.
To find out your I.P address all you need to do is go to www.google.co.uk and type into the search bar”ip address” and it will come up with your unique IP address. It is that simple 🙂
1 . Firstly you need to login to your account.
2. Click “Admin” in the orange bar on the right hand side.
3. You should receive a screen similar to the above one, just check you have the right website open before you go any further from the drop down boxes.
4. In the third column, the “profile” the fourth item in the list is called “filters” click it!
5. Now click on the filters tab and click the “+ New Filter” button.
You will be given a screen like the one below simply give the filter a name that will help you identifiy it is your computer like “home desktop”.
6.The Filter Type raido button to select is “Predefined filter”.
7. The final step is to choose “Exclude” from the first drop down list then “traffic from the ISP domain” and “that are equal to” then enter your IP address you looked up in Google. Check whether it’s IPv6 or not (if you don’t know leave it unchecked).
8. Click “Save”
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Complete-oooooooooo!! Your account will no longer include you in the analytic results. Hooray!!
…if you don’t have a Google Analytics account yet, don’t worry it is really straight forward and in a future post I will be blogging how to set up Google Analytics for your cms website.
