8 Things to Know Before Hiring a Web Developer

Last week I was brought into a project for my wife’s boss, a local dentist, who wanted to freshen up his existing site. I was glad to offer my services for free, as I have had more than one dentist visit that was “on the house.” So I sat down, eager to study his existing site and come up with a plan.

Things went from bad to worse as I learned more about his site and the company he had chosen to develop it. Frankly, I was surprised the company he used, Internet Dental Alliance, was still in business.

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Building Websites with Master Pages (Visual Studio)

Last week I was tasked with building a site from scratch with a very short deadline. Normally, I’d accomplish this with a WordPress install and a few theme tweaks, but my bosses didn’t want to go that route. I thought I was going to have to do things the old fashioned way (Dreamweaver, lots of typing, lots of coffee) until a friend of mine told me to take a look at Master Pages in Visual Studios.

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Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Part 2 – Flag, Rate, and Filter

In the previous article of this series we took an in-depth look at importing your photos into Lightroom. Now that your photos are imported, let’s take a few moments to go through them and tag them with a flag, rating or color so we can easily filter through them during the editing process.

It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the importance of a good tag and filtering process. If done right this can be a huge time saver. It’s also handy for archiving; when you return to these photos after weeks, months or years have passed you are immediately able to see the original tags you applied.

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Digital Photography Tips – White Balance with a Gray Card

One thing that often gets overlooked by amateur photographers is getting accurate color in your photos. The first step to getting good color is making sure you have paid attention to your white balance. White balance, sometimes known as color balance, is basically making sure that white appears as white in a given lighting scenario.

Many people deal with white balance by simply setting their digital camera to Auto White Balance (AWB). While cameras do fairly well at achieving good white balance automatically, there are a few steps you can take to insure more accurate depiction of colors. Read more

Edit Multiple Pictures with Photoshop

One of the best things about digital photography is how easily you can take dozens of pictures and quickly share them with your friends and family. No longer do we have to keep up with envelopes of negatives or worry about getting your film developed. However, with each improved model of digital camera, the number of pixels used to create our photos increases, often by the millions.

This isn’t a problem when it comes to printing your photos. In fact, the more pixels you have the better your printed photos will look. The problem arises when we just want to share these pictures on the web or email a few of them to a friend or relative. You see, the more pixels an image uses, the larger its file size will be. Large file sizes mean longer downloads for your friends and family, and can also be the reason why your emails won’t go through (many email servers won’t accept messages larger than 10mb). Read more