Have you ever been locked out of your car?

It can be one of the very most aggravating, frustrating experiences a person can have. You have to get somewhere, as fast as possible, and you left the keys in the car. Now what, try to fiddle with the lock? Why not call Lynn's Lockshop!

A locksmith can safely and legally see to it that you get your keys back, and are able to get home safely. No more hassle, no more worries, no more fears!

In the past, I rarely used vectors; I just rasterized everything, because I honestly didn't know the difference. Then, lo and behold, I was enlightened by the coming of the Illustrator.

Admittedly in the past, I'd always wondered how graphics artists did those cool images that were somewhat cartoony, but at the same time had perfect edges, and just seemed all-around great. When I learned how to use vectoring and Illustrator, it all became clear to me.

Lately there have been quite a few reworks going on - and by quite a few, I mean absolute stacks of them.

It is interesting to see how far accounts have come so fast. In the last five months, the bar has been placed just a little bit higher for everything, and I feel that these improvements are for the better. However, it does mean that older accounts must be edited in order to accommodate the new standards; everyone should get the same service they paid for, right? Honestly, more companies need to value both current clients and past clients - whether you are a cable company or a software company, I feel that it would be more fair to service both past customers with up-to-date standards, while maintaining those standards for new clients as well. Just keeps everything equal.

So, today there were quite a few reworks - approximately 3 sizable stacks that I could see.

I grabbed up quite a few, a few of which were home based business sites, and a few of which were other things, such as, well, home based business sites! Yay! You can now create wealth just like you've always wanted!

In any case, it's Friday! Happy fun day! The day for happy fun time!

And everyone likes happy fun time.

For a long time, I was a die-hard Photoshop user. It was the only imaging program that I would use, and frankly, it severely limited my design skills. I knew a little bit about Fireworks, but I hadn't even touched Illustrator or even tried to do vector graphics.

Being the art person that I am, I did, in fact, overcome my Photoshop-ness and try out Illustrator. The recent real estate agent site that I did was completely planned and created in Illustrator (other than coding, of course; that was done by hand). I had never realized the untapped potential that this program has.

One of the most frustrating yet rewarding things to do, in my most humble opinion, is troubleshooting.

Today I found a typo in a banner for an exotic horse ranch site. Well, I uploaded a new banner after fixing the error (thank goodness the text was written as a vector for easy editing, plus I still had the uncompressed document), but suddenly, an MLM's content appeared, and all the text turned grey.

I have no idea what happened, but it did give me a few minutes to start troubleshooting - probably one of my favorite parts of designing things, other than being able to use pretty colors and draw stuff. It's like chasing after something, and once you get it, it's this great feeling as your fingers quickly type out the needed CSS, or delete that unneeded line.

Maybe I'm a freak, but somehow that thrill gives me an instant feeling of happy that just makes my day.

We recently implemented a new system for our optimization pages; it's not too terrible. There are a few things I don't particularly like about it, but I did find that it makes upgrading accounts much easier, such as the upgrade I did for a home based business site. Usually I have issues with content not appear right because a ton of extra span tags are added in; this doesn't seem to happen as badly with the new system. It makes me a verrry happy camper (and by happy camper, I mean double my current happy camper-ness).

It'll take some getting used to, but I certainly feel that the new CMS will certainly help streamline things more; just a few kinks to work out (let's just say it makes inserting images much more difficult than the old one did - I think it doubled the time it takes for me to add some images to a site's content), but all in all it has quite a bit potential.

SEO can only do so much in terms of sales conversion; in the end, SEO is half of it - getting the client to the site. The other half is creating a clean, working, and professional-looking page that keeps the client there - as opposed to one that looks cheap and screams 'home made'.

Just a thought I was thinking about while making a Windmere Chalen realtor website today. Their main site has a Flash banner on it; I don't like Flash banners that much. Other than that, the site, while not top of the line, appears to be professional and is easy to use; there aren't any tacky colors, the navigation is defined, and it just does its end of the job.

And it seems to give you a really strange feeling.

And by strange, I don't mean bad strange. I just mean... well, strange.

It stirs up memories from years ago. So you put effort into it.

The only problem with that is when you have to make the SEO page mirror the client's site, which is horribly designed and you know in your head that you could do far better.

So, a new policy says that we need to add images. In light of this, I began to add images to a home based business opportunity in order to spruce it up.

The site, though not quite done yet, is looking much better now. The images bring the user in, and certainly break things up from the boring text. The only issue with having lots of images is the fact that it can limit accessibility for users who have slower connection speeds, but it allows for alt text, which allows for a greater amount of descriptive keywords in order to make the page more important to the search engine spider's algorithm. So, really, they have their pros and cons, but I'd say that it's finding a good balance between lots of pretty pictures and a few pretty pictures.