Grateful clients

What a great month I've had. One client, Sherri Williams, our Austin realtor, told me to give myself a nice bonus when I ran the monthly charge for maintaining her website. Nearly ten years of self-employment and that was definitely a first. How sweet - and unexpected and appreciated.

Another client, Lisa Kleypas, came out with her umpteenth book, Mine Till Midnight, which she had dedicated to me! To top it off, the book hit #3 on the New York Time List in it first week.

It's always gratifying when a client takes the time to say they appreciate what I do. None of us say thank you enough when we receive good service - and I hope that even though I'm not perfect and have my bad days and senior moments, my clients know that my intentions are always the best for them. After all, if they do well, I do well.

So, thanks to all my clients for trusting me to help you do well with your online business. I truly appreciate it and try not to take you for granted.

About image size for your website

It's kind of confusing, but there are several things that affect how big a file is, i.e. how much space it takes up on the hard drive, in kb or mb (kilobytes or megabytes).

1. Resolution which is measured in dpi or dots per inch. A picture that is 300 dpi will be bigger than one that is 72 or 96. 300dpi is the minimum for something to print nicely. All that a monitor will display is 96 dpi so no picture ever needs to have a higher dpi than 96.
72-96 is low resolution.
300 and up are high resolution.

2. Size of the image on the screen (dimensions measured in pixels). An image that practically fills your monitor/screen space (say 1000x700 pixels) will be bigger (in kb) than if you make that same picture 500x350 or whatever.

3. An image with a lot of colors will be bigger in kb than an image with fewer colors. So, if you have a very colorful product, the best background would be something solid and in a neutral tone. Changing the text in the image below from red to white added 10 kb to the image size.


Don't forget that there are still people out there who have smaller monitors. And a lot of us don't maximize the windows on our computers. Right now I can see Firefox (which I prefer to Internet Explorer) and Dreamweaver (my web design program) and Eudora (my mail program) and my favorite image editing program: Fireworks Creative Suite 3. Rapidly prototype and design for the web. Order Now!


I like to see what all I have open cause it's kind of my reminder of things to do. So even though I have a 21" monitor, I don't like websites that have giant pictures where I have to maximize the window to see the whole website.

Of course, most of my clients are trying to sell products online. So I'm always thinking of how best to do that. And the hardest thing for clients (including my daughter) to remember is that a website should be designed for the buyer. It's all about making it easy for them to find what they want quickly. Naturally, the website must be visually appealing, but the main person to please is your customer, not you.
More on that later.