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Creative Bookmarks: Best of August 2010

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:45:50 +0000

August was another awesome month with great tutorials and articles oozing from everywhere. Here’s Creative Bookmarks August!

Quick Nav: Photoshop Tutorials Illustrator Tutorials Web/Blogging Tutorials Freebies, Inspiration, & Resources

Photoshop Tutorials

How To Create The Expendables Winged Skull Poster Art

In this tutorial, by Chris Spooner, you’ll learn how to re-create the sinister and gun-crazy poster for the new movie The Expendables.

Create a Cosmic-Inspired Dreamy Scene in Photoshop

In this great tutorial, from PsdTuts+, you’ll learn how to use a combination of photos, 3d elements, and other tricks and techniques to make a cosmic scene.

This month’s Real Estate website launches from USM

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:14:21 +0000

Over the last month, Union Street Media has had the opportunity to launch new and redesigned websites for several clients. We are happy to include them in our expanding portfolio. In the following snapshots, we discuss the different ways in which we have either given an older site a refreshed look, or have used our Premium platform to build affordable, innovative real estate websites.

Ed Cashwell

As a successful and innovative real estate agent in Boston’s North Shore, Ed Cashwell needed a website that would not only stand out from the crowd’s; it would also engage potential leads to work with him. When the Premium platform came out, along with its pricing, Ed signed up, excited to broaden his referrals, as well as bring in new leads. Ed currently features his happy clients on the homepage and continues to work with USM’s Internet Marketing team to build his site’s search engine visibility.

Attaca Realty

Taking advantage of all of our newest real estate web tools, local Burlington office, Attaca Realty, worked with USM to focus specifically on their marketing of recreational properties with Cabela’s as well as their Residential, Relocation and Rental services. Whereas Union Street Media focuses on the 3 R’s of Report, Recommend, Revise, Attaca has a 4 R focus, and we drew those elements out with custom homepage images including Attaca’s signature door to bring clients in to specific parts of their website. Post-launch, Attaca is working with USM in monthly RRR to continue tuning up the site’s reach.

Save The Date! Real Estate Bar Camp NH is October 20, 2010

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:50:32 +0000

What are you doing on Wednesday October 20, 2010?

We highly recommend you come to Real Estate Bar Camp New Hampshire at the Mount Washington Hotel. As with the dozens of Real Estate Bar Camps that have been organized by real estate and technology industry leaders across the country over the past three years, it’s FREE to attend! The event is conveniently held the day after the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS fall convention.

What is REBarCamp?

REBarCamp is a nation wide network of mini-conferences that find their strength from participants expertize. Anyone can present at this “unconference” which creates an awesome atmosphere of crowd-sourced mind-sharing amongst all participants. When you arrive at BarCamp, you’ll see a giant white board, with rooms across the top and times down the side. If you want to talk about something or want to see if anyone else knows about something you are interested in, you write it on the board and start the conversation.

Mitch Joel is coming to Burlington VT!

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:25:19 +0000

Mitch Joel – Twisting the Image

Boy are we excited about this one. If you haven’t heard of Mitch Joel yet and you are a social media enthusiast, be sure to get down to the Burlington Hilton on Thursday 12th at lunchtime to catch him. As a regular subscriber to his blog Six Pixels of Separation, he keeps us ahead of the curve and has some very sage advice on what social media was, is and will be.

See some of you there!

Read the Burlington Free Press article on Mitch Joel

USM Receives Best Web Developer Award

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:47:54 +0000

This week, Union Street Media was proud to receive top honors in the Best Web Developer category for the second year in a row from Vermont’s popular weekly newspaper Seven Days. Each year the independent paper calls on Vermonters to vote for their local favorites in dozens of “Seven Daysies” categories.

The team at USM is honored and excited to be recognized by our VT neighbors once again. We plan to live up to our Best Web Developer title and keep improving our web design and Internet marketing services for you!

Thank you, Vermont!

WordPress Ecommerce: 30+ Resources

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:50:38 +0000

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for blogs, portfolios, and other types of sites, but with the right plugins and/or themes it can also be used for e-commerce. While WordPress is not specifically intended to be used for e-commerce sites, the quality of available plugins and themes has increased in recent years. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 resources and tutorials to help you get started with e-commerce for WordPress.

WordPress E-Commerce Plugins:

WP e-Commerce Pluign (free with premium upgrades available)

Shopp ($55)

Writing Good Content for Your Landing Pages

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:40:13 +0000

In a previous post this month we talked about your overall web strategy including social media and a blog to drive your target audience to your website, which is often the foundation upon which all your marketing is built. Spencer correctly pointed out that without satisfying your audience’s needs on your website, all these efforts can fall flat as visitors bounce from the site in quick time. To prevent this, you need to think about patching the leaks on your website, both on your home page and deeper in.

Close the Deal | Image via Wikipedia

Do Your Landing Pages Close?

Remember, any page on your site is a potential landing page from a search engine query. The bulk of your visitors will arrive on your home page, so you have to get your marketing message, design and functionality right; but that doesn’t mean you should treat interior pages like the red-headed stepchild. If you’re a Realtor or a salesperson, you have to work hard all the way to closing and it’s no different for a web site. If a visitor gets past the home page, gets lost, has to hit the good ole back button, can’t find a contact or simply gets bored and frustrated, then all that hard work on design bought you an average home page bounce rate and no conversions.

The kinds of pages that you should pay most attention to are:

New real estate website launches from Union Street Media

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:34:43 +0000

In the last few months, we’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new real estate websites. Many of these have been built on our new Enhanced and Premium platform, and we are excited to show these new and refreshed websites.

Peabody and Smith is a large and successful agency based in Northern NH and VT. After years of maintaining their functional website, it was time to make sure the site was not only found in search engines, but it also represented the professionalism of the business through a refined design. In this facelift, USM focused on clean design and images that complement the beautiful landscapes where Peabody and Smith sell real estate. We also included a sold property search, and a new map-based property search. We were happy with the results, but we were even more excited to get the client’s response: “We could not be happier! This is so wonderful! I was thrilled and showed the agents this morning, and guess what – not one negative comment, they LOVED it! You have done a great job, let’s keep proceeding forward. I am absolutely thrilled!”

Another longtime USM client, Debbi Burton, took advantage of our newest property detail view pages as we redesigned and widened her website to better portray her successful Burlington, VT based real estate business.

Blue Ridge Real Estate in Rutland, Vermont came to Union Street Media for a new website that would provide their customers with the most user-friendly tools while allowing them to drive the website process and update all of their content. They chose our Enhanced package.

15 Proven Ways to Gain Exposure for Your Design Portfolio

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:46:32 +0000

With so many web and graphic designers out there, getting the attention of potential clients and landing work can be a major challenge. The portfolio site is one of the most important assets for a designer, and an effective portfolio site will be an invaluable resource for keeping the business moving forward.

For many designers creating an attractive portfolio site is not the problem, getting people to see it is often much more of an issue. In order for the portfolio site to truly do it’s job it must be well-designed and it must attract the right types of visitors. In this post we’ll look at 15 things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your portfolio site by getting more exposure for it.

1. Have a High-Quality Design for Your Portfolio Site

Not only is the quality of design of the items in your portfolio important, but the design of your portfolio site itself will also have a big impact on potential clients. Clients will expect a designer to have an attractive and usable site, otherwise they will question the work that the designer will be able to do for them.

When designing and coding your portfolio site be sure that it is getting all of the attention that it deserves. After all, it will be one of the most important aspects of your business, so it should not be rushed.

New Interactive website launches from Union Street Media

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:07:40 +0000

When a business or nonprofit comes to us looking for a new or redesigned website, it’s always exciting to imagine what we’ll come up with , how the design will progress and how the site will function. It’s even more exciting when the site launches. That has definitely been true for the following new websites that we have launched in the last few months. They represent a wide variety of client type and website needs, so please take a minute to check out these site profiles: Recently started to help address conflicts around the world, the nonprofit Bridging the Divide came to Union Street to make sure that the organization’s website could act as a springboard for its innovative campaigns. Not only were they looking for an attractive and easily navigable website, they also had a strict timeline we had to stick with. By working with Michelle to outline every step of the process and create reachable but quick deadlines, we were able to get the website up and running faster than any site before without compromising on quality. We are so pleased to welcome this remarkable organization to our client community. After years of thoughtful planning, the developers of Hinesburg, Vermont’s sustainable Green Street neighborhood were ready to get started and build their community. With Union Street Media’s expertise, they were able to develop a website that conveyed the appeal and overall principles behind the neighborhood development with a clean layout and design and an easily update-able interface. Longtime Union Street Media client, Vermont Apartment Owners Association had a wealth of information on its former site, but the design needed a refresher and the site was due for reorganization. In the newly launched version, we improved all calls to action, highlighted the benefits of membership in the association and streamlined the navigation to better represent the services provided by VAOA