This is the add-an-image screen from WordPress. Yours may be different but the basic elements will be the same.

If you are asking why these are important:

• It’s the law baby. Well not really but if you want your site to be compliant with the powers that be, you will include ALT tags.
• It’s beneficial to your audience members who use special internet readers.
• Your images will be included in the search engine ‘image searches’.
• Your search engine ranking will go up.

So go ahead add those tags, everyone will be the better for it.

We’re working on getting the album up on his site soon I’ll keep you posted as soon as we get that done.

It was a fun project. We’ve been Hank fans for a long time. It was fun to design an album for him. The album is a mix of songs, emotions and styles. So far the songs Everybody Like This! and Vacuum are my favorites. Other musicians who play with Hank on the album are:
Jimmy Goings, Mike Miller, Jeremy Hegg, Jon Hegg, Peter Neussmann, Ricky Jacobsen, Kenny Putnam, Matt Berry, Matt Wallace, Tommy Hartig, Jimmy Sanchez, Andrew Reinartz, Genevieve Goings, Tony Baker

The complete track list is:
1. Amanda Lee
2. Everybody Like This
3. Women Choose
4. Typing and Entering
5. Vacuum
6. The Way to Heaven
7. I See Your Face
8. Love Doesn’t Stick
9. Nothing 2 Wear
10. Voodoo Avenue
11. Hope Dies Hard
12. What Am I Gonna Do?
13. Hypnotized
14. After All

This year we went out a little farther into the marketing world and made fun posters and used Facebook and Twitter to try to help promote the event. So far he’s already had a reported 3 visitors to the Gallery BEFORE the event’s even started. I’m taking that as a sign that our extra effort has payed off.

Below are a couple sample graphics of what I created to help spread the word, enjoy:

• Habit 1: Be Proactive
• Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
• Habit 3: Put First Things First
• Habit 4: Think Win/Win
• Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
• Habit 6: Synergize
• Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

That works   The first 3 habits are pretty clear. The proactive part simply means taking a good look inside, in our website scenario this step would include an analysis of what your business site already has going for it, then adding a careful mix of research and dreaming to see what it ultimately should be.

Beginning with the end in mind?  In other circles that would mean setting clear goals. Give yourself and your people a destination. Think of the early American pioneers in their covered wagons. They knew their ultimate destination was San Francisco or LA or Portland. Because they know this fact they could route their course and measure their day to day accomplishments. So it goes with website planning. If you know where you want your website to take your business it makes for much easier pathway planning. It also give you the ability to set up milestones along the way.

Put first things first – As simple as this seems, it is really quite the opposite. As C.S. Lewis once said, “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.” It has to do with prioritizing and giving tasks ordered values.

My favorite habits are 5, 6 and 7 because not only do they apply swimmingly to website planning and implementation they also are practically the poster children of good social media practices.

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood – We don’t call them customers anymore. We call them the community members. Customers were the old school advertisement recipients, the broadcastees. They received the messages from our ads and then for the most part, they kept their mouths shut. Community members talk often, they talk loudly and they are wired to large numbers of other community members. By getting to know them, chatting, sharing and learning from them – products improve, brands gain loyal followers and complaints are dealt with quickly.

Synergize – This is Habit 5 with a kick. Its teamwork, group-created new solutions and big ideas. It happens when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And it is great fun.

Sharpen the Saw – In the summary this habit is explained, “Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.” On an enterprise level Google defined it as ‘Innovation Time Off’, their practice of encouraging all engineers to spend at least 20% of their time on projects of their own choosing. This has benefited Google greatly resulting in such products as Gmail, Google News, AdSense and Orkut.

I would also put ‘learning adapting and constant implementation’ into habit 7’s saw sharpening requirements. In order for a website to be highly effective it must change and grow with the trends of technology and communications. A site that was effective three years ago has already lost quite a bit of its luster. The way messages are delivered and received on the web changes – sometimes quicker than others. The changes we are witnessing now are flying lightening fast. As Catherine the Great said (and I’m sure would say again if she were surveying the social scene) “A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.”

Granted, the voting audience is decidedly techno-geeky. They are the folks who fix your computer when it is acting up or programmers who make all this internet magic work or perhaps they are security analysts, mobile data technicians or master clandestine hackers. Whatever their calling, chances are they know a lot more about the computing world than the average Joe. As of 12:12 pm today here is a rundown of their preferred browser.

Firefox (60%)
Safari (12%)
Chrome (11%)
Internet Explorer (11%)
Opera (5%)
Other (1%)

Please take note of where Internet Explorer is on the list. If you are still running Internet Explorer (especially IE 6) you might want to ponder the recommendations of the experts.

Back a while I was still a CS2’er I discovered the exciting new world of downloadable presets for Photoshop. Brushes, Custom Shapes, Gradients, Actions etc. When I made the switch to CS4 I thought I had lost all of my previos downloads and was heart broken. Alas, today my day was brightened when I discovered they still worked. This sent me on a quest to find more – I found this site www.ladyoak.com you have to register but once you do you have access to a bazillion custom shapes. I’m not going to tell you how much time I spent downloading them this morning.

www.qbrushes.com has proven itself awesome for brushes and there is always www.deviantart.com which is chalk full of useful downloads for all sorts of purposes.

The point to this post I guess is that even though Adobe is awesome there is much more out there that can be added to make it even more awesome.

If you know of any secret sites out there I’d love to hear about them.