Google on YouTube. 

Keeping abreast of the latest with Google and SEO should be ongoing and crucial to success, so here is the link to their YouTubes  for those of you that prefer to watch and listen versus reading.  Google on YouTube. I recommend viewing all these videos, thinking of it as as your SEO 101 course. It will provide a strong understanding and foundation jumpstarting your success with your search engine results.

The presenter on the videos  mostly appears to be  Matt Cutts who if you don’t know already is one of our most important resources to follow.   Matt Cutts is head of webspam for Google.

Here Matt Cutts Blog

and….

Follow Matt Cutts on Twitter

While reading my favorite blogs over a cup a coffee this morning I came across the most adorable free twitter icon set. Wanted to share it with you and give a shout out to the artist, these are so cute and memorable!

Download the full set of twitter icons from Icon Eden

These are really good articles on what one may consider when putting a price on their work, art, illustration, photo, project etc…
After reading browsing these articles I realized I was on the right track.

freelance switch

escape efrom illustration island

Hi – Welcome to the launch of my new blog and website!

It has been long overdue for a website overhaul so we got a serious face lift.  It took me some time, it is really hard to design your own site!

I wanted to stick with the original color scheme of brown, pink, and pistachio green. I love putting colors together and these three colors just look yummy to me. Yummy as in ice cream colors… Friendly’s flavors, chocolate marshmallow, black raspberry and pistachio were three of my favorites growing up.  I wanted to switch the main background to a damask from the pink green stripe with white center curl. The custom stripe with swirl was stolen over a year ago and my copyright was infringed when it was resold countless times.  So I decided to change the back out to something more interesting and retire my old to my for sale premade section.

I enlarged and further detailed the header to include more of the boutique illustrations that are my unique signature style and have become so trendy. Large illustrative art has caught on to become trendy in web design this year. I re-did the animation, updating the girly character rotating in the wrought iron sign, and added the animated doggy and sparkles. Most of the art used in the new header are vectors I have created for clients so it truly does reflect my unique style in web design.

One thing I tried to accomplish with the new web design was to make everything flow smoother, less wordy, and easier to navigate. I got rid of the vertical navigation and now use horizontal navigation. I also accomplished my goal of simplifying updates for myself by changing content management systems. Hopefully I will be excited to update again because for a long time I have dreaded updates due to the overwhelming time it took.

The blog was redesigned – my last system had a built in rss feed that I could apply to my frontpage without having to use blogger or wordpress. The blog design is seamless with the web design and has lots of white space. It has a little author icon and blurb which is another trend this year in design. I will be using the new wordpress blog to post tips, tools, and helpful information to my clients and others who it applies.

I hope you like the new site and find it easier to use. Still lots to tweak and refine.