Information Technology for Development

Fit4Life

rjredden — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:49:43 +0000

One of our favorite clients. We did some social media work. and learned a thing or two about fitness along the way. If you have any fitness needs, go see Shain.

Creative Problem Solving 101

rjredden — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:35:28 +0000

Google+ Hangouts and How They Can Help your Business!

andrew — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:32:43 +0000

Google+ the social network from Google has an awesome feature called a hangout. A hangout allows you and your customers to meet face to face with video chat!

(Click here to see a 30 second preview of a hangout)

The following article explains some of the main ways that hangouts can be useful in your business.

What Google Hangouts Can Do to Your Business

If you have any questions about Google+ or Hangouts feel free to ask in the comments section below

10 tips to boost search rankings – Internet – News

rjredden — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:19:35 +0000

This is a well written article. Tip #1 is particularly critical. Creating compelling content for your site is as important, if not more important, than driving visitors to your site. Focusing only on search engine optimization is the equivalent of making sure that all the road signs that lead to your amusement park are attractive and functional, yet forgetting to upgrade the rides.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/10-tips-to-boost-search-rankings-62301468.htm

Gimp (photo editing software)

rjredden — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:28:21 +0000

Gimp is an open source photo editing program that is free to the public, and it is the reason why I have not needed to purchase Photoshop in many years.

If you are already familiar with Photoshop, then the layout and tools will be familiar as well. If this is your first time doing photo editing, then I would recommend reading the help files that come with the product. It does take a little getting used to.

Basics: One of the main uses for entrepreneurs is to help with the sizing of images to put on websites. For example, if you’ve taken a digital photo of some of your incredible work and want to display it on your website, then you may want to consider the storage size of your photo. Why? First, because websites have storage limits. Second, because slowly loading websites annoy visitors. It makes sense when you think of it this way – the larger the image size, the longer it will take to load. Third, and you may find this surprising, is that the vast majority of images on websites nowadays are low resolution images. Your visitors are not going to be turned off by a low to medium resolution image, because every one else is using them. Certain people do use high image resolution, but they are usually photographers.

Gimp also has all of the basic features that everyone is used to from a photo editing program. You can adjust brightness, contrast, and apply special effects.

Advanced Features: Learning to think of a photograph in terms of layers, instead of a flat image, is a concept that will help a lot in advanced photo editing. For example, if you want to add text to a photo, then it will generally go into a “layer”, which can be modified without modifying any other feature in the photograph. Next, you can add more text, either on the same layer or on an additional layer, depending on your needs.

I’ve used this program many times, and have always come away with good results. If you need a good photo editing tool, download Gimp and get started.

Download

Tutorials

One additional note. Though the software comes at no charge, many people support the open source software community by means of donation. If you get a lot of use out of the product, consider the developers. THey are people like you and me, and they don’t mind getting a donation for their good work.