If your looking for a web developer in Murwillumbah then look no further then us, Gold Coast Multimedia is a local digital agency providing web design, video production, graphic art and digital education.
We have been working hard over the years to come up with some real solutions and options for smaller businesses and companies in rural areas of Australia. Murwillumbah is a beautiful place to live. However we have identified that although some of the smaller web developers in the town mean well, they are limited in human resources. We have not only worked with local developers in the area but we provide the necessary bridge to fill the gap and help smaller businesses in other areas of digital media that may not be available to them. Check out some of our new website member packages for smaller businesses.
Here’s the simplest way to achieve that sleek depth/distance look in Adobe Flash CS3 and upwards (using Actionscript 3). This is a nice interactive effect sometimes seen in flash banners and site navigations. Ooh, classy!
Start up a new Actionscript 3 document in Flash. Draw a circle anywhere on the stage with the Oval Tool (If you want a perfect circle, hold Shift and drag).
(Optional: For maximum visual goodness, click on the circle to select it then go to Properties and set Stroke to 7. Then draw a rectangle with a gradient in the background like the one I have – make a new layer for it in the timeline.)
Make sure the circle is selected then click Modify>Convert To Symbol in the top menu bar. Give it the name ‘circle’. Then in the Properties, give it an instance name of ‘circle_mc’ (seen below).
Step 2:
Now that it’s a symbol we can find the effects options in the Properties. Click on the bottom left icon in Effects and select Blur.
Step 3:
With the circle selected, Ctrl+C to copy it. Now Ctrl+V to paste 8 more circles on the stage, anywhere you like.
Size each of the circles up or down with the Transform Tool (Again, you can hold Shift to keep them perfectly round). You should now have 9 blurry circles of random sizes on the stage.
It’s time to mess with the Blur Filter again. Change the Blur X and Blur Y values in the Filters for each circle, so that the smaller the circle is, the higher the Blur X and Blur Y numbers will be. In other words, small circles are blurrier, big circles are clearer! We also want the bigger circles to be on top (to bring a circle to the front, click on it and Ctrl+Shift+Up). Like below:
Now give an instance name to each of the circles in their Properties. Call them circle1_mc, circle2_mc, circle3_mc….. all the way up to circle9_mc. This is a very important step, so make sure your spelling is right and there are no two circles with the same name.
Step 4:
Now make a new layer in the timeline (by clicking the ‘New’ icon in the bottom left of the Timeline panel). Double click on its name and call it ‘actions’.
Here’s where the code comes in. Make sure the first frame of the actions layer is selected, then go to the Actions panel (Window>Actions). Copy and paste this code directly into the Actions panel:
stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, moveCirclesInDirection); // listens for when the mouse moves around the stage.
var previousX = 0;
var currentX = 0;
function moveCirclesInDirection(event:MouseEvent):void //this function happens when the mouse moves.
{
previousX = currentX;
currentX = mouseX;
if (previousX > currentX) { //this determines if the mouse is moving right.
circle1_mc.x += circle1_mc.width / 20;
circle2_mc.x += circle2_mc.width / 20;
circle3_mc.x += circle3_mc.width / 20;
circle4_mc.x += circle4_mc.width / 20;
circle5_mc.x += circle5_mc.width / 20;
circle6_mc.x += circle6_mc.width / 20;
circle7_mc.x += circle7_mc.width / 20;
circle8_mc.x += circle8_mc.width / 20;
circle9_mc.x += circle9_mc.width / 20; //when the mouse moves right, all the circle_mcs will move right at a rate determined by how big they are. The bigger circles move slower, the smaller circles faster.
} else if (previousX < currentX) { //this determines if the mouse is moving left.
circle1_mc.x -= circle1_mc.width / 20;
circle2_mc.x -= circle2_mc.width / 20;
circle3_mc.x -= circle3_mc.width / 20;
circle4_mc.x -= circle4_mc.width / 20;
circle5_mc.x -= circle5_mc.width / 20;
circle6_mc.x -= circle6_mc.width / 20;
circle7_mc.x -= circle7_mc.width / 20;
circle8_mc.x -= circle8_mc.width / 20;
circle9_mc.x -= circle9_mc.width / 20; //when the mouse moves left, all the circle_mcs will move left at a rate determined by how big they are. The bigger circles move slower, the smaller circles faster.
Making your own Photoshop Brushes boils down to two incredibly easy steps.
Making A Photoshop Brush:
Select the part of the image you want to convert to a brush.
Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give it a name.
You’re done! You should see your brush pop up in the brushes panel, ready to be used.
Exporting A Photoshop Brush Pack:
So you’ve got a brush or a couple of brushes you’ve made, and you want to share them with the world.
Meet your new best friend, the Preset Manager! Go to Edit > Preset Manager.
Here you can select the brushes you want to export, then click Save.
Name it and save it wherever you want. It’s a Brush Pack, and it’s YOURS!
Groovy.
Tips When Making Photoshop Brushes
Basically, it’s a good idea to work in Grayscale Mode when creating brushes. Why?
Because when your image becomes a brush, it will be converted into grayscale anyway.
When your image becomes a brush, the blacks in your image become opaque and whites become transparent. And between white and black, the grays will also be varying amounts of transparency.
So Grayscale mode is nice to work in, if only because it helps you optimize the appearance of your brush.
Optimizing your brush is a matter of using Levels, Curves and Brightness & Contrast to adjust the crispness of the image. These are found in Image > Adjustments. It’s crucial to fiddle with these in order to produce brushes with good detail.
And, if you want to make high-res brushes, anything above 2000 x 2000 pixels is the standard stomping ground. Just be sure that you are working in CS3 or CS4, because earlier versions of Photoshop will crack under the pressure of anything more than 1000px.
Blind people have a different web experience based on their use of screen reader software, which means layout and design take a backseat to overall hierarchy and simplicity. Blind users prefer sites that are simple, concise and uncluttered, which makes audio-based navigation easier.
Here’s a couple of tips to remember when modifying or creating a website to suit accessibility standards.
Remember to use descriptive titles for every page, and a descriptive element for every non-text element (a graphic for example).
Alt tags are your friend. Screen readers read alt tags, as well as content on your site, so make sure you write alt tags that explain the image. Minimize background images and spaces as they may create unnecessary noise for the screen reader to read.
Mimimize the amount of links on your page. A screen reader reads the amount of links on a page before it moves to the content. More than 15 links is very hard to for the user to remember.
Write cleanly and clearly. Too much fluff in your information and the screen reader user may begin to get impatient or fatigued.
Try not to use characters like * ( < ~ The screen reader will say ‘star’ or ‘left parin’ etc and too many of these are very annoying to listen too when trying to understand the content.
Get rid of the popups. These may confuse someone using a screen reader, with the popups giving them the impression that they have entered the wrong site.
Image maps can sometimes fail with screenreaders. Go with with text links.
The accessibility industry continues to evolve. Keep an eye out for new technologies – braille display, screen magnification for the visually impaired. But remember that only websites written in correct html with clean ordered layouts will be accessible, even with these technologies.
General Accessibility Standards
There have been many groups setting guidelines for accessibility for the web.Possibly the most well known is The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which explains how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities.
According to Wikipedia a completely accessible website should comply to these guidelines:
(X)HTML Validation from the W3C for the pages content
CSS Validation from the W3C for the pages layout
At least WAI-AA (preferably AAA) compliance with the WAI’s WCAG
Compliance with all guidelines from Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act
A high contrast version of the site for individuals with low vision
Alternative media for any multimedia used on the site (video, flash, audio, etc)
Access keys are also helpful – they are shortcut keys you can set in your site to skip to certain areas. These are good for people with mobility issues and most government websites use them. There’s a great article on access keys at Sitepoint.
CMS Systems. They’re everywhere on the internet. All the big businesses have already made the move from HTML web pages to CMS. CMS or Content Management Systems are frameworks to build your site on, allowing far easier site management, and they come with many other little goodies. Ever seen a website that actually looks good and is easy to use? Chances are it’s a CMS. Any business serious about their internet presence should base their site on a CMS.
So everyone’s making the leap into the world of content management. Why? Glad you asked.
1. Ease of use
Tired of wrangling with code or formatting when you just want to stick some freakin’ words in? CMS to your aid. The whole concept of a CMS System revolves around providing a secure backdoor administration area to your site where you can add content in a single click. No more asking your nerdy cousin to add another picture on your html site – with CMS, you log in, add the content yourself, and see it come up on your site instantly. And there’s no risk of you accidentally ruining the layout of your site in the process.
2. Multiple users
You’ve got employees. They all have varying degrees of computer skills. With CMS, you have the power to give them each a backdoor account on your website with different access levels. Eg, give Timmy an account that lets him post new articles on the blog, but he can’t edit anyone else’s articles or pages. Handy.
3. Saves money
In your face web developers! No more paying developers for site content updates. Now you can update your website yourself or get an employee to do it. And it really does take a second or two.
4. SEO Gold
The search engine optimzation benefits of most CMS systems are great. A lot of the systems automate SEO so you don’t even have to think about it. CMS auto-SEO won’t get you to the front page of Google – you’ll have to work on that – but it certainly keeps your website in the game.
5. Security
CMS Systems store your website content in a database, making it only accessible via a password and username. Much more security against standard website attacks than HTML, and there are plugins that you can add into your site to improve the security further – which is a good thing to do.
Well geez, you say. That all sounds very nice, but can’t I just cruise with my HTML site? The answer – of course you can! Nothing wrong with the old HTML way. HTML is great for personal websites and one-page small business websites. But if you plan on growing your business, the truth is you will eventually need a CMS, or you may suffer a lot of pitfalls when you need to update your site more often.
Note to businesses – CMS Systems are the new wave. Get surfing.
Podcasting is an audio/video media - you’ve seen them on Youtube channels, other video sites and even internet radio. Podcasting is basically an audio/video way of shouting what you are about in an interesting and engaging way. There are many podcast-dedicated sites out there, allowing people to subscribe to your videos/audio channels and get instant updates on new videos you release.
Are your local competitors utilizing Podcasting as a marketing tool? Often the answer is no. This marketing strategy is often overlooked and when it’s done right, any business can tap into a market that previously didn’t exist.
So how does it work? You submit a video to a large number of podcasting sites. This video needs to be well targeted to your market eg. cat care techniques if you are a vet, and it needs to be presented in an engaging and relevant way – the kind of informative video you might be inclined to subscribe to yourself. People watch the video and if they think it’s pretty awesome/useful, they will subscribe to your feed. Generally you don’t control this feed like you do a mailing list, but it’s managed by the podcast site and the podcast reading software that your viewer uses. So, if you’ve contracted a local business to make targeted videos for you, Podcasting is basically no effort or time spent on your part. People are able to watch, listen, download your content to their iPods, embed them, refer them, it’s out there and it’s everywhere.
iTunes. This music software by Apple is one of the largest players in the podcasting world – it’s free and manages all your podcast feeds as well as your music and video collection, and allows you to buy music via its online store. This is one of the first stops to make when submitting a podcast to all the many, many podcast sites out there – you can submit a video or audio as you see fit. Or you can submit your video to Blip.tv, which automatically submits it to iTunes. There are loads of options out there. They’re all different, with little nicks and tricks that can make submitting a podcast a little less straightforward than you expected.
The content. Don’t go hardsell. Who wants to watch an ad? What you need to do is provide quality information that is interesting and relevant to your niche market. Straight-up advertisements often won’t make it through the approval process it takes to list your video on most podcast sites. Sometimes an interview format works well in both video and audio – like a ‘problem solver’ Q&A session. Once you have a few subscribers it’s sometimes a good idea to release a video/audio detailing your services and how you’ve helped clients in the past – but again, not hardsell style, just a short vid people can watch if they’re interested enough in your business. Whatever the strategy, it needs to be interesting to watch or listen to. Target your customers’ needs and problems.
All podcasters have humble origins. Be patient and create/submit regularly. Many of the big players even have paid advertising now – they get paid by sponsors to put ads within their podcast!
If you need help, we can help. Gold Coast Multimedia has top of the range recording equipment and marketing techniques – we can set up an entire campaign for you and blitz the podcast scene. Anyone can make a podcast and submit it, but it’s incredibly important that it is properly targeted and marketed in a way that will benefit your business. That’s where we come in. Head to our homepage: www.goldcoastmultimedia.com
CMS Systems are Content Management Systems – website frameworks designed to take the bother out of editing and managing the content of the website. Another side of CMS Systems is the fact that they are miracles in terms of search engine optimization. Why? Because they have the ability to publish fresh content, and Google loves fresh content. The top three CMS Systems available, ( and really the only ones worth mentioning) are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
WordPress
Winner of the 2009 Open Source CMS Award, WordPress is currently the most popular CMS option today. It is the easiest and most user-friendly,
and as we are about to find out, has some great SEO perks too!
WordPress has a really clean coding framework, meaning faster loading time, meaning better user experience.
Additionally, one of the best SEO features of WordPress is the flexible Permalinks option, allowing you to optimize the page urls – you can add keywords to target certain posts etc in the url. This is great because modern search engines tend to look in the url for keywords as well as other areas of the site.
WordPress also allows you to add tags to your posts – increasing keyword traffic and helping along those search engine spiders that map out your site. The Comment functionality is easy to implement and drives more traffic to your site – a surprising amount of site traffic comes through search engines finding the user comments left on posts.
Many of these features can be found in other CMS Systems, but WordPress makes it easy, automatic and flexible to create a dynamic, SEO-friendly website. There is a strong community of people on the Web that hold the opinion that WordPress is the best CMS option in terms of SEO today.
Joomla
This is another leading CMS system in the industry. As well as being a dynamic system with fresh content like WordPress, Joomla offers additional plugins like Joomseo, Search Engine Friendly Patch, sh404SEF and Xmap/Joomap to help the search engines pull your site up. These plugins are free. They automate SEO features such as meta tags and page title tags, generating site maps, and other components. Some themes are specially created for SEO purposes and tend to yield a greater result on Google.
Joomla also sports a Permalinks option, but it automatically uses the post title and is not quite as flexible as the WordPress permalinks option.
Many people have found Joomla to be a very high-ranking option in conjunction with the proper addons and keyword usage .
Drupal
Drupal, WordPress and Joomla are without doubt the CMS kings of today. Drupal, much like Joomla and WordPress, offers good SEO benefits by default. Drupal is far more customizable for your purposes than WordPress, but its SEO is possibly not in the same league without some serious tweaking. Drupal offers some good SEO addons like SEO Friend, it has more extensible user profiles and options, the backend allows for easy custom theming in the login panel (whereas WordPress does not).
There are a lot of great features to Drupal that allows for further customization of the framework… but does it hold up its own against WordPress and Joomla in the SEO battlefield?
Verdict
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are all on a level playing field. If used right, any one of them can lord it over the other. But in today’s fresh-content driven SEO market, WordPress stands tall because of its ease of use, very quick user-generated content publishing options and its incredible popularity (meaning more support forums). It is predominantly a blogging platform, but because of its flexible core and huge range of available addons, WordPress is the industry’s current favourite for business webpage development. Joomla has a few handy extra features which are nice, although the learning curve is a little steeper than WordPress. Drupal is the coders’ friend – its API is very useable but its plugins and community for the new version (6.0) are still in baby stages. Remember, whichever one you choose, look for some SEO plugins and addons to help your site on its way – this will give you the advantage. SEO is also a matter of targeted keywords and sentence content – make sure you have a target market and blast your information their way. Tally-ho!
Hey hey! We’re kicking off the all-new official Gold Coast Multimedia Blog: jam-packed with all sorts of really interesting stuff and useful articles about everything Multimedia ranging from video production, website design and development, right through to coding tricks and great free stuff. It’s gonna be big – I can feel it! Check back from time to time to catch some useful updates, and be sure to comment. Cheerio – Tane
