Web and Graphic Design HQ

Here’s my first post in this category.

Make money with products from best-selling author and Internet entreprenuer, Joel Comm. Link to Joel’’s products and earn fantastic commissions on all sales generated:

Joel Comm’s Internet Products Affiliate Program

I’ve started a new category on this site for highlighting plans/ways to make money online that I think you’ll be interested in.

Yes, I do include these resources with affiliate links. I’m upfront about that. You have a choice to click or not. Don’t be embarrassed or uncomfortable about it. At the same time, don’t be angry the links exist. Clicking on my link costs you no more. Finding a way to circumvent that is of course possible. But it rewards no-one… it’s a lose/lose situation. I miss a commission for highlighting a program of interest. You miss out on active affiliates sharing lucrative opportunities (here and elsewhere)… and probably a bunch of valuable REWARDS that I will start offering soon.

As for bad karma or things like that, your perception and attitude is your own. This is not my livelihood, it’s a fun “hobby” — I won’t starve. But nor will you for clicking on my links, and helping meet the cost of hosting, time sharing resources, time for community projects like Rotary membership.

Does clicking on the affiliate mean you pay more for the information? Well, no. The “commission” is part of your normal investment for the resource. Does it mean that a determined net user won’t bypass, circumvent or want to sneak past my affiliate link in any way? No, of course not.

Actually, depending on the resources I share, I will REWARD you for clicking on my link with bonus offers and products or services… from free copies of paid-for reports through to physical products like free business printing or even free membership in some of my business services. I haven’t set that up yet, but it’s not far away.

That’s why you have the choice — you don’t have to click the link. You can Google and research the service yourself.

So that’s my introduction — hopefully you’ll find these links and programs of value.

I came across Slide this week, which lets you create, save and share a slideshow of your own images.

And it’s free.

Once I’d uploaded my images (you can even retrieve them from online services like Flickr), I picked the “Yearbook” style for image transitions, and hey presto! Nice flash-based slideshow to host anywhere.

The uploading interface was very simple and showed progress along the way. Once uploaded, you can re-arrange the order, add captions (or delete the default ones), and do lots of other customisation.

I then clicked save, skipped on signup (which means I can’t edit this slideshow later) for now (I’ll signup later) and then grabbed the code (I selected eBay as my option, so I could grab the manual html code to paste straight into my Wordpress blog, which I host myself).

Great for blogs, eBay auctions, MySpace and more.

Here’s my 3-pic mini-slideshow, with 3 cute pictures of very tiny baby Echidnas! (One of the Sydney 2000 Olympic mascots, Millie, was an echidna).

Here’s a simple tip for improving the look of your desktop publishing: use “invisible grids” in your alignment for a good visual presentation.

Here’s a small image of a typical graphic layout that hasn’t really had much care put into it:

As you can see, the elements just sit on the page, nearly randomly. Nothing is really in alignment. Here’s a quick fix:

The blue lines are only here to show you an invisible “grid” on the page, to make for better alignment. Here there are 4 alignment situations helping improve the presentation:

1. The headline and the Date/Month text on the right share the same “baseline” — the bottom edge of the lower-case letters that don’t descend, like “m”, “a” or “x”
2. The headline, body copy and author’s sign-off all share the same left alignment margin on the page
3. The margins on the left and right are now equal: there is the same amount of room between the left edge of the page and the word headline, and the right edge of the page and the end of the date/month text
4. Finally, the date/month text’s right-hand edge is in alignment with the right-hand edge of the body copy.

While this is just a very basic example, I see ways all the time to use a simple alignment grid to help improve presentations. This applies to graphic and text elements on the page. In some ways, this is still a fairly “boring” layout — but with the visual alignment taken care of, it certainly looks more professional.

In a future post, I’ll present some more interesting uses of an invisible alignment grid, but I wanted here to get across the basics.

Here’s another simple example, using a grid, to help make a good presentation: