Business Card Design

I desperately need a business card, so I've been trying to get some inspiration on the web today. I hit the jackpot when I visited theDaily Poetics Blog. The possiblities are endless!

Is SEO a waste?

According to today's SiteProNews newsletter, American Express kind of denounced using SEO specialists to get higher ranking on Google, Yahoo, etc. Published in an AMEX recent small business guide:


"Search engines, like Yahoo! and Google, are usually the first
place people will look for you. Make it easier for them to find
you. Yahoo! and Google offer tools to let them know the site map
structure of your Web site."

"Also, using clean U.R.L.'s like yourdomain.com/store/widgets
instead of yourdomain.com/store.php?id=42&categoryID= widgets will
increase your chances of getting indexed in a search engine."

"Finally, don't waste money on so-called Search Engine
Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick
to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques,
and once your site has been put on Google's blacklist, it will
take forever to get off."

I tend to agree with them. There are sneaky ways to fool search engines to get you higher ranked in a shorter amount of time, but the tried and true ways seem to work best in the end. There is some justice in this crazy world we call cyberspace!

Penmanship

Spawned from a recent conversation with a friend about Number 2 Pencils, I got to thinking about those old penmanship books that were used in elementary school. It's sad, and quite pathetic, to think that my handwriting was much better in first grade than it is now. I mean, it really sucks now. So much, in fact, that when attending a friends wedding, an acquaintance actually made a comment as to how suprised she was to see what my handwriting looked like in the guest book. She wasn't expecting to see such chicken scratch from someone she thought of as creative.

Is it true that kids don't practice handwriting in school anymore, or is this just a nasty rumor?

Underwater Camera Review

On a recent trip to Ambergris Cay, Belize, I finally had the chance to experiment with the underwater settings on my Olympus Stylus 770 SW. This picture of a sea turtle came out pretty good- in focus and clear. I think this was taken on the wide underwater setting. I had a hard time with the macro setting for some reason- I think it's because I couldn't keep my position long enough in the current to get the focus I wanted. I found that the Hyper Crystal LCD screen view finder comes in handy when wearing a snorkel mask, even though I'm cursing it most of the time in sunny weather. Overall, I'm giving this camera a great underwater review, although it may not be the best all-around digital.