Category: Blog Posts

I’ve used Unsplash for years and found it to be pretty good, but I sometimes struggle to find an appropriate photo.

So, when Mark Coster (a graphic designer I’ve known for a long time and learned all sorts of things from!) of Pixooma as part of his 10th year in business celebrations opened up an Ask Me Anything I posed the question: What are some good resources to find free images for commercial use?

Here are 3 that really stood out for me:

Pexels – https://www.pexels.com/

Pixabay – https://pixabay.com/

Flickr – https://www.flickr.com/ (you’ll need to adjust the search filters there).

Thanks Mark for the tips!

The first and biggest thing on your homepage should be utilised.

This is the line of text that is the main heading, usually the first thing after the ‘header section’ with the site navigation menu.
If you go to my home page you will see my heading is “Websites for Artists and Artisans” https://www.tombstevens.co.uk/

Saving it as a H1 tag in your page editor tells search engines that “this bit is the important heading”.

You should only have 1 H1 per page by the way.

Instead of “ABC Solutions Ltd established 1987” as your H1 heading use something that includes keywords for your services, e.g. “Graphic Designer in Coventry, Brand and Logo Specialist”.

I used to have an IT support business. Then, and still to this day in fact, I get asked about email providers.

My answer is pretty much always the same: use Google unless you have a really good reason not to!They’ve had plenty of rebrands over the years, Google Apps, GSuite, Google Workspace. Throughout I have always recommended their service for small business email. Microsoft is a close second. They both are the industry leaders for good reason.

So, do I use Google for my business email? I don’t, haha. But I have an excuse. When I looked to switch to them I had already established many +alias addresses (e.g. tom+support@tombstevens.co.uk) which would automatically create subfolders in my imap email system, which I found really handy at one time. I’ve been gradually phasing these out and will one day switch over to Google, unless something big happens to change my mind. If that happens I’ll do a post about it. 🙂

I just saw a very convincing scam email, a phishing attempt.

So, my email today is a reminder to be super careful. Even the tech savvy can be duped, so don’t think it could Never Happen To You. If anything seems even a bit odd then don’t divulge your username and password!

Of course, having strong unique passwords for different things is also good practice.

This year I’ve been hearing more people talking about the energy that websites use. Which is a welcome development. What’s not to like about lowing carbon emissions.

How might you lower your sites energy use without making it worse for the visitors coming to your site?

I think the easiest thing would be to reduce the filesize of images – so run them through some compression if you can. Shout out to tinypng for making that super easy.

Here is a website carbon calculator that I was introduced to recently by Roger Knight (AttractMore):

https://www.websitecarbon.com

The info it gives is an estimate. I’ve tested a few sites on it, and I think it’s a useful tool. See what you think. 🙂