brand, build & sell - small business, blogging and entrepreneurship Part 53

Free High Quality Photos from PicApp

Oct. 13, 2009 • Build Your Website, Freebies, Recent Blog Posts • 478

While visiting one of my favorite sites Lost Ball in High Weeds, I learned about a new site that has high quality photos to spruce up your website, called PicApp. I’m always interested in giving my readers access to valuable freebies for website building, so I immediately took a look and was pleasantly surprised. They have some of the best quality photos online, by far and they are all for FREE!

No more “borrowing” images from your favorite blogs. Now you have access to the same great photos they do without the risk of copyright infringement.

From the PicApp website:

Add the best news and stock photos to your blog.

Picapp is all about more opportunities and choices:

Where You– the publisher get access to millions of premium, legal images, updated by the minute and can use them in your posts- for free!

Where You– content owner enjoys this innovative yet monitored distribution channel to reach new users and increase revenue

Where You– advertiser reaches targeted, well segmented audience and access to premium ad inventory

A true Win-Win.

We have over 20 million premium images, editorial and creative, covering any imaginable category—from news, sports, to celebrity, travel fashion and more.

Our content partners include Getty Images, Corbis, Splash News, Pacific Coast News, Newscom, Image Source and more. We support the largest blog platforms: WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and more.

What’s also great about PicApp is that they already have a super cool WordPress plugin, which allows website owners to easily add photos to their websites or blogs directly from the PicApp database.

Here are a few video videos to get you started with using their service.

How to Use the PicApp WordPress Plugin

How to Search for Images on the PicApp Website

In addition to the WordPress Plugin, they also have a PicApp Toolbar which enables you to search for free images from your Firefox browser.

Try them out and let me know what you think! This is a definite add to my recommendations page.
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New Changes. New Theme. New Goals.

Oct. 10, 2009 • Just My Opinion, Recent Blog Posts, Web Design • 444

With under just a few months of starting my blog, I decided to update the theme a bit. I liked the design I created and the person I contracted to code it for WordPress did an awesome job. However in hindsight I realized that I needed just a little bit more flexibility.

The old design used the blog as the main focus, which was a good idea at first, but after reviewing the stats and using my own intuition, I decided to make a few changes. The meat of the content on this site is listed in the right column, so I wanted that to continue to be the main focus. Since it’s the most popular area on the site anyway.

The newsletter signup looked cool but wasted too much valuable homepage real estate (plus, I’m not even sure if I want to have a newsletter anyway.)

I wanted to place more emphasis on the upcoming tutorials section, so with my new Studiopress Metro Theme, I was able to add a video section directly to the homepage. The point of this site has always been to give my visitors useful info on how to create a website, so in that sense, the blog needed to be alot less important. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I know some of my content is still missing … (and I’m trying to train myself to hit spellcheck before I post lol)

So what are my new goals? Well other than using spellcheck, I plan on finishing up this first round of web tutorials, review a few other website builders to keep up with all the great new technology and hopefully finish up the Step 4: Avoid Some Common Mistakes section.

Screenshot of Old Theme

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Coming Soon

Oct. 9, 2009 • Tutorials • 416

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