The creators of South park created a new website where you can watch every episode of South Park ever created even the latest episodes from this week. The site also features an avatar creator, clip viewer and many other cool features.
Check it out at http://www.southparkstudios.com/
This is a very popluar topic these days. The iPhone is a great gadget but has one downfall, it is only available for AT&T cell service. That is, until you unlock your iPhone to enable it to work on other networks. There are a bunch of different ways to unlock your iPhone and most will cost you around $20 bucks. There is a site that is dedicated to finding all the resources for unlocking your iPhone for free. They have a ton of information on how to do this and best of all, the program they recommend is top notch. It works great, has a great developer behind it and works with the latest iPhone firmware, even the new upcoming iPhone 2.0 software.
I found a good tutorial on how to make Mirror Reflections using Photoshop. Here is a small blurb about the tutorial and a link to take you to the rest of it. This is a fun process to learn.
Many people these days are enamoured with the latest craze of photographing products on a glass surface with the product reflecting a very smooth, liquid reflection. Apple made it popular with their iPhone imagery.
In the old days, we had to go to some fairly lengthy set building in order to accomplish the look, but today you can do it in mere moments.
The object itself has a lot to do with the relative success of this technique. Best case scenario is a good, straight-on product shot. This eliminates the need for oblique reversals which take a lot of time, and need to have a perspective slant in order to look convincing.
Creating the reflections
Let’s use this shot of a Pentax camera.
Note I’ve carefully cut it out of the background so no slivers of white are showing. Mistakes in removing the background will be glaring once we build the illusion.
See the rest of the tutorial here
When building a website, a lot of times you are doing graphic design work and you want a catchy font other than the basic fonts computers come with. I found a website that has a great collection of free fonts that are from everyday companies, candies, movies etc that you can download and use for free.
Here are some examples of the free fonts you can get:
There are hundreds more free fonts so check them out here
The 12th part on how to start a website is going to be about monetizing your site with Google AdSense. Once you site is up and running and has visitors, it is always good to try and make a little money with it, at least to pay the bills of the hosting and the domain name.
There are 100’s of ways to make money with your site similar to Google AdSense but AdSense is about the easiest, especially for the beginner.
The first thing you need to do is sign-up for your free Google AdSense account which you can do by clicking the button to the right that says “Generate Revenue with your site using Google Adsense”.
Once you sign-up, you will create campagins defining different sized ads, different colors etc to match your website. There are a bunch of philosophies on whether to blend them or make them stand out which you should play with and see what gets better click through rate (number of clicks vs impressions which is the number of times the ad is shown). Once you are signed up, setup a Google AdSense campaign by following the steps below.
1. Click AdSense Setup - in the top tabs. This will bring you to a screen that looks like
2. Click AdSense for content - We are going to setup ads on our website. The next page we will decide what type of ad we want. I would start off with Ad Unit isntead of Link Unit but you may also ad a text unit once we are done. With the Ad Unit, I would recommended leaving the default setting at Text and image ads to get the best results. Click continue after selecting the right info. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to take a break from the “How to start a website” for a bit and answer some questions that have been coming in.
One of the most frequent questions that I have received as well as probably the most frequent question all over the internet is how to make money online. The answer is this, there are 1000’s of ways to make money online, some are easy and some are not. Some you can make a ton of money at and some just a little.
I have asked this question many a times myself and I currently do a few things to make a little extra income from the internet. One of my favorites that is easy to do and doesn’t take much time is getting paid for my opinion by taking surveys. Yeah, I can’t believe that someone would acutally pay me for my opinion either, but businesses do. The easiest way I have found is to sign up for Survey Panel Group.
It is free to sign up and each survey only takes about 7 minutes and you get the rewards!
Have you ever dreamed about playing in the world series of poker and winning millions of dollars?
I’ve always wondered this and so have many of you. Here is the answer, best of all, it’s FREE!
Click here to sign up for free and win your seat in the WSOP!
Search Engine Submission is an important step after you have completed the previous steps I have described in Parts 1 - 10. You want to make sure you have completed these other parts before you attempt to submit your site to search engines as they can be very picky on how your site is. You don’t want a half finished site being listed, you want to make sure it is ready for people to see.
As you know, search engines are how most people find websites that have information they are looking for. You probably use google or yahoo to search for key terms correct? Exactly. The task now is to get your website listed in these search engines so that when people are looking for information on your websites topic, it will be listed and people will go to your site.
There are a ton of ways to get your site listed but I wouldn’t recommend paying to have this done, it is a natural process that if you followed steps 1 -10 of this tutorial, then your site should take the natural course of website listing. You can help it a long for free, but don’t pay for it, at least not for your project.
The three major search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Two of the three offer a great webmaster resource that I think helps in search engine listings.
Google: Uses Webmaster Tools which is a great way to keep track of all your websites, see keywords that people are using to find your site, see incoming links, and add sitemaps to your website. You should definitely use this tool to help in your website development.
Yahoo: Uses Site Explorer which provides about the same service as Google’s Webmaster Tools but for yahoo.
These tools will help your sites get listed in those two search engines and give you data on how they are doing and ways to improve. MSN doesn’t have anything like this as of yet but they do offer a free submission service which we will list below.
Sitemaps are something that all websites should have. Google pioneered this and the three major search engines have come on board with it. A sitemap is a listing of all the pages within your website which tells the search engine bots (software that crawls and lists your site) where your pages are. It makes them easier to find thus indexing your sites quicker. I will create a tutorial on how to create sitemaps in a coming how-to.
Here is a list of major search engines that you should submit your site to.
Google: Click here to submit
Yahoo, AllTheWeb & AltaVista: Click here to submit
MSN (Live Search): Click here to submit
DMOZ: Click here for info on how to submit
Other than that, there are a ton of free search engine submission sites, do a google search for that term. It does take time to get listed so don’t worry if your site isn’t listed right away. By working on SEO and content, your site should automatically get picked up by most search engines.
The tenth part of my “How to start a website” How-to is going to be about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The main purpose of SEO is basically to get better search engine placement in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. I’m not going to list all the parts anymore as the list is getting quite long. Make sure you read all the parts to this writeup if you haven’t done so already.
Have you ever searched for something using one of the major search engines? You usually click one of the first few listed results correct? This is why search engine optimzation is critical in the success of yor website. The key is to get in those top listings for your preferred keywords, at least on the first page.
Search engine optimization is actually fairly easy. You want to create your website so that the search engines like it. I will explain this more later and offer great resources on how to learn more about this process. There are many aspects to SEO and I will list them below.
Search engines like pages that have great content and are keyword rich for a particular keyword that relates to the content. Keyword rich means havening the particular keyword within the content quite a few times but not too much. You want the content to make sense. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the ninth part of my “How to start a website” how-to. Please take a look at the other parts of this how-to if you haven’t done so.
This phase of starting a website may not be for you depending on what software application you are choosing if any at all. This post will talk about setting up phpBB3, a great forum solution for use on your own server. In the next few days I will discuss the setup of other types of platforms as well.
Today we are going to talk about phpBB3, which I believe is the best free forum software available, maybe even the best overall. I use this forum on many sites and find it easy to work with as well as having many powerful features. The community behind this software is amazing and the modification development is quite high. To install and configure phpBB3 is fairly straight forward.
The steps to install phpBB3 are (with detailed descriptions below)
