Graphics Helpers that You Will Love
Graphics isn't a topic you'd associate with SEO. Graphics are, however, very important to Internet marketing and how you present your business online. From blogs to squeeze pages to making videos, graphics play a huge part in what we do. If you want to look professional, it's important to study pages that are appealing eye candy and pages that are plain Jane and to emulate what works best for each page you put up online.
For squeeze pages and sales pages, plain convert like crazy. White backgrounds, read headlines, and black print. Boring, maybe, but effective… undeniably.
Blogs, Twitter pages, and videos are another story. You often need to spice things up, and if you don't have $600 or there abouts to buy Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, what's a person to do? Well… I have an incredible free solution…
Gimp.
That's right. Gimp.
It's an open source software that rocks! In fact, my daughter, who's an artist and former art student at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, says that Gimp is better than Photoshop. She loves it because it doesn't crash her laptop all the time like Photoshop did. With a Wacom tablet and Gimp, she's producing some amazing artwork. You can, too, whether you're an accomplished artist or just someone who likes to fool with images or add graphics to their blog, like me.
Gimp has the power of Photoshop and the fact that it's free is just amazing. Get it here: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/.
The other program I want to tell you about is teeny tiny. What it does is tell you the codes for any color you rest your mouse on. Yeah, yeah Firefox has a color picker add on, but this little gem is far superior, and you can use it whether you're in your browser or not. The software is called Pixie and you can get that for free at http://Nattyware.com. I use that one a LOT. It gives you the HTML, Hex, and RGB values that you can use to duplicate any color you want exactly.
But sometimes you need to get dimensions for some graphic you want to make or have made. You need a pixel ruler! You can get that free tool at http://www.mioplant.com. I use that a lot, too.
So, there you have it: Three VERY cool and VERY helpful graphics tools and you don't have to pay a dime for them. What's better than that?
