News

New York City Clients Featured on International Art Channel

Charles Schick and Regina Bartkoff were honored yesterday, 7 June 2023, to have their work featured in an episode of Inspiring Art by Independent Artists on the YouTube channel Blind Dweller. Its creator describes his endeavor as “An experimental channel for a few of my favourite things: art, music, media and films. I make docu-style videos based on the weird and wonderful. From the light-hearted subjects, to the darkest.”

The UK-based Blind Dweller is a favorite among art lovers, with many thousands of subscribers. Congrats, Charles and Regina!

Watch the videoVisit their website

My Post-Pandemic Offering

Hello everyone, so much has happened since the last time I made a blog post and I hope this finds you all doing well. I’ve decided to offer a discount for the holiday season. From November 1st, 2022 through January 31st, 2023, I’m offering a 15% discount on new websites. During the same time period, I’m also offering a 10% discount on updates for existing websites that I’ve built.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

Give it a Whirl…

A list of some website-related tools:

Links

Use Neil Patel’s backlink checker to see who is linking to your website.

Broken links on your website are really annoying, especially since they’re good at hiding. Use the Broken link checker to find all of them!

Color

Want to check whether the contrast between text and background on your website is big enough to be legible? Kontrast is a nice tool with free Firefox and Chrome addons.

Illustrations

When you need to create images for use in online promotion material, hotpot might be a nicer way to work than Photoshop. You start by picking a template from one of their categories and then you can edit them right then and there. You pay $1 when you want to download your finished image. Take a look at what they offer. You might like it. The picture of the blue orange was made at myhotpot.io

For free illustrations of humans, take a look at Humaaans.

In need of SVG illustrations? Look at unDraw.

Whether you have a lot of experience with Photoshop or Affinity, removing the background from a photograph is never fun. This web application isn’t infallible and you might have to tweak it a little but removebg can simplify the process. And with 50 free ones a month, it’s worth trying.

Responsiveness

You can test the responsiveness of your website in your browser, especially Firefox and Chrome are good for that but the Responsinator is a sweet online tool you can try as well.

From 0 to 255

A handy little tool for working with colors is 0to255.com
This one is not so much for finding contrasting or complementary colors, but nuances of the same color.

On writing manuals for WordPress websites

“There is a real rhythm to the work of walking through each step myself and then breaking it up into smaller steps, and even smaller steps, and trying to get it small enough that it can be written down in a single line of text. There is a satisfaction in seeing how simple something really is when writing it down like that; in knowing that the person you are making it for will be able to really do what they want to do.”

Read more

Compression: making pictures easier to load

For visitors of your Web site it’s important if the pictures they see there are as light as possible, so they’ll load as quickly as possible. If a picture is big that’s one thing (w x h in px), but it shouldn’t be too heavy (weight in kb), especially not for those who are using their cell phones. Thankfully, there are quite a few tools to improve the compression of a picture and one of them is this online one with a friendly panda:

If you don’t want to make your picture smaller but you do want to make it lighter,
you can use tinyjpg.com for  JPEG/JPG
and tinypng.com for PNG

With some pictures the improvement will be bigger than with other but I nearly always use this service.

More Color Tools

It just never ends, the use of color continues to give trouble, both in the area of
Color schemes: Copaso
and in the area of  accessibility: Contrast-A

Updating Your Own Site

If you already have a Web site and you’re happy with it but you would just like to make a few small changes to the text now and again – and you can’t… there are some options that might be interesting for you.

It depends a little on how your site was build originally and on your Web host (their server settings, the service you take from them) but there are some, relatively, easy and, relatively, cheap ways to set you up with a very simple text editor for your site.

For example:

  • Snippetmaster: not the prettiest one in this list but works well and is easy to use
  • Unify: prettier and more versatile, makes it slightly less easy to use
  • CushyCMS: pretty and to the point, the quickest to set up

If you want more of full fledged CMS, Concrete5 could also be a good option, especially if you already have a site design ready in HTML but your entire site hasn’t yet gone live.

Of course, if you’re starting from scratch, I’m still a big WordPress fan!

Meanwhile in the office…

So far this year, three projects have been completed already, one is still a bit of a secret but also the most fun and the biggest of the three. It is basically a Blindschelders & Raadsman project where I was responsible for building everything online. We’ve converted an educational CD-ROM from roughly 5 to 7 years ago into webapp for a project that will hopefully start soon! (After that I’ll be able to go into more detail.)

For Rob Perrée I created the online art magazine africanah.org, a pay site. It is a monthly magazine with articles about African, Caribbean and African American art. Often writers are asked to write in depth articles for free and Rob’s magazine tries to circumvent that while still creating a quality magazine.

And since the start of this week Jessie van Vlodrop’s site has also gone online: verhalenvangers.com. Not as common as it once once this site has not been built on a CMS, although we did make it so that she can easily update some parts herself.

Multilingual and 404

It took me a long time to find a plugin for making WordPress Web sites multilingual that didn’t frustrate me, and after endless battles with Qtranslate en WPML, I’ve finally found one that so far has been reliable and relatively easy to use.

Polylang

It’s free, not overly complicated, extensive and the author keeps the plugin up to date.

Additionally, a blog post at WerdsWords let me make a little change to this site that will send an email whenever a visitor visits a page that doesn’t exist (anymore). The visitor lands on a 404 page and that will trigger the sending of an email and I’ll be notified of the problem.

For more information: WerdsWords 404.

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