Archive for July, 2013

Making your Holiday Images worthy of your website

July 8th, 2013 by Vincent Lai

Holidays are great.  They’re a fantastic way to relax, explore new places, spend time with the people you love and we all want to immortalise those great moments in our holiday snaps.  However, as great as those photos are to us as individuals, how often have you looked at another person’s holiday photos and found them genuinely interesting?  More often than not it’s taken with a quick fire digital camera (or worse, your smart phone) with a cheesy generic pose in front of a cliché tourist attraction.  The colour in the photo is never great, and a surprising amount of times, you will find a non-descript passer-by doing something unseemly in the background to ruin what should have been a great memory.

An easy way to spruce up photos and give them a bit more life is to simply switch up the way you see photos.  Instead of a mundane slide show of photos that your facebook friends are most likely NOT going to scroll through one by one, take a couple of varying shots of the same moment, and put them into a collage, each moment being defined by a few different photos of the people you are with, the place you have come to visit and maybe even some candid shots of the scenery or the locals.  Play with the layout, maybe make it into a simple grid, or layer the photos on top of each other to give yourself that artsy appeal.  You don’t need fancy programs and photography skills to turn a couple of boring photos, into an art board that truly tells a story.  One of the best online tools to edit your photos is pixlr (www.pixlr.com).  It’s free to use, easy to master and can help you get the most out of your photos.  Another good tool is the all too famous Instagram.  With its myriad of image filters and effects, it’s not hard to give a boring flat image, a bit of life that it sorely needs.

So the next time you go on holiday, change the way you think about taking those happy snaps and instead of a mundane collection of photos, you can come away with something spectacular.

Here’s a couple of examples of banners created using our client’s holiday pics:

And here’s an example inside the website: www.travelinsure.net.au

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Have you noticed how easy Google makes it to search?

July 7th, 2013 by Heather Maloney

If you have you ever tried searches in Google like this:

  • ‘definition of altruism’
  • ‘convert 7 feet to metres’
  • or typed in an address you’re looking for

you’ll know that Google has been doing a lot of work to make search so much faster and easier for everyone. This is particularly important for people who are using smart phones to carry out their searches.

One of the more recently added features in the smart phone Google Search app is a set of “search cards” – or standard searches – that Google executes when you open the app. You can choose which ones you want, and they range from “time it will take me to get home” through to flight information (shown for a flight you have searched on before).

The only thing that I worry about with all this ease, and answers to readily at your fingertips, is that we’ll start (or maybe that started a long time before) using Google as the full and only source of truth. Your thoughts?

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