Oil Paintings of Stratford-Upon-Avon – My New Book

Here is a collection of oil paintings of Stratford-upon-Avon that have been compiled in my new book.

I have to take my dog for a walk everyday and I take my camera with me. As a result, I have taken numerous pictures of places on my walk and have built up a selection of images throughout the year.

It is interesting to view the changing colours and scenes throughout the year. Also, the difference that can be made by using different colour filters.

I put the pictures into Photoshop and apply an oil painting effect including colour saturation to enhance the colours.

I feel that these would be quite commercial if I tried to sell these to the many tourists that visit Stratford-upon-Avon but so far I haven’t explored this possibility. By putting the images into a book, I can get some feedback from the tourist retailers about this.

I recommend that you view the book in full screen on a fast slide-show…

Here is the link to my book

Website Review – Swan Architects

I today carried out a website review for Swan Architects of Stratford-upon-Avon.

I met the owner of the business whilst I was out walking our dog yesterday (both of our dogs are called ‘Poppy’.) We often see each other but I have never stopped to chat with him before.

I asked him what he did for a living and he told me that he was an architect. I then told him what I did and he immediately said that he needed to sort out his website. His current website was created by him from a site-builder system.

Many businesses do this to save money but it is a false economy because it will directly impact sales revenue if you don’t get your online marketing right.

(I learnt this lesson in a previous business, when we hired a professional photographer for a few hundred pounds to take pictures of our product, and subsequently sold over £1m of product from a brochure with those pictures in it. I know how difficult it is to risk money upfront on marketing with no guarantee of a return!)

I volunteered to carry out a free review and here is the result below – sit back and enjoy the insights.

I am posting this because I think many other small businesses are making similar mistakes with their online marketing and it should be instructional for those businesses too.

Here is a summary of the points covered in video:

– Font size

– Lack of text

– No headlines

– No calls to action

– Lack of branding

– No explanation of who you are or what you do

– Who is your target market and where are they located?

– What is the step-by-step process to take a project from start to finish?

– What is your involvement in that process?

– Where is the proof that you can do it?

– Why should I choose you rather than a competitor?

– Your projects page does not give enough explanation of what you did and what we are looking at.

– No links to Social Media sites

– No site map

– The site is not mobile friendly – you will be penalised for this by Google (- the good thing is that most of your competitors have got this wrong too!)

– There are non-working areas of the site and some technical issues

– You are not getting traffic from the search engines

– Your content is not targeting keywords that people will use in the search engine to find your service

– Your business is not registered with Google Plus

– The professionalism and design of your website will subliminally reflect on the perceived quality of your work

If you would like me to carry out a free website review for your business, then please feel free to contact me.

Salmon Web Design – Web Design Stratford-upon-Avon

Web Design Stratford-upon-Avon.

I have just created Salmon Web Design specifically to sell my web design services in Stratford-upon-Avon. However, my services are not limited by geographical area as I can design websites for any English speaking customer.

I have created a website that showcases some of my web design talent at http://marksalmon.biz.

The reality is that I can take any WordPress design template and configure it for a client. That’s not really the difficult part, although some themes can be complex and fiddly to configure like the one I am using on http://marksalmon.biz.

In my experience, it is creating the graphics and content that is the most time-consuming aspect of creating a website design.

I am able to source and edit photographs and images – whether creating 3D marketing collateral like ecovers and product images, or indeed stylising photographs. Some of my stylised images are showcased at http://mark-salmon.com/images.

One of the innovative things I have done on my web design site is to create almost 1,200 blog posts from one post using a plugin that swaps out keywords so that each article is unique in respect of those keywords. I am using this technique to target each town through out the UK with my web design service. I used this technique for another client and it worked surprisingly well in attracting search engine traffic.

Take a look at Salmon Web Design and tell me what you think. Do you think my web design is good enough to get clients in Stratford-upon-Avon?

Scenes of Stratford-upon-Avon

When I take our dog for a walk, I slip a small camera into my pocket and simply snap the scenes of Stratford-upon-Avon that I see. When I return home, I quickly upload the pictures to my computer and process them through Photoshop. I use a combination of Photoshop Actions and ‘play’ with the images until I find something that appeals to my eye.

Here are a collection of some of my pictures – click on them to take a better look:

All this is within 5 to 10 minutes of my door-step. It seems foolish to measure wealth in terms of money. When you take the time to look around you – i mean really look, you begin to see just how wonderful life is.

My grandfather used to paint and photograph the local scenes (-a number of which adorn my office wall -) and he would be interested to see what I am doing with my photographs – I like to think he would approve

I hope you enjoyed these scenes from Stratford-upon-Avon and maybe they will inspire you to look more closely at what is on your door-step!

A Source of Free Graphics You May Have Overlooked

In this video I outline a source of free graphics that you may have overlooked.

In fact it is a completely authentic and engaging source of graphics that will be great for your personal branding. It is easy to build up a nice library of graphics that you can use in future projects and they will be free of copyright or royalty restrictions – indeed, you own the copyright!

Are you ready for me to reveal this source? Then watch this video: