I’ll keep this brief . . . I’ve been a huge fan of crowdsourcing — even before I knew what the term meant. I got our BiggerPockets logo designed this way using the Sitepoint Marketplace — now known as 99 designs and I encourage anyone looking to get some creative work done for themselves or their businesses, to crowd source.

The reason for this post is that I just learned about Crowdspring, another crowdsourcing resource, in case you’re shopping around for other places to get your creative or corporate identity projects designed.

Check these sites out – they may prove to be incredibly helpful to you.

The following post, from David at twago, details how businesses can utilize the Slideshare social media platform to drive their marketing efforts.

Utilizing the benefits of Social Media is difficult for any company. Whilst the prospect of expanding the online presence of your company into new markets to reach potential customers is intriguing, getting the right balance between informal, personal and professional social media output is tricky. Luckily there are social media platforms that exist purely for business purposes which companies and entrepreneurs can utilize solely to expand their professional, quality driven social media output.

Slideshare is the business orientated Social Media platform that revolutionized the business world after it went live in October 2006; it now regularly attracts around 12 million visitors every month. The platform works in a similar way to YouTube in that it enables users to upload slides from presentations on a range of business related topics such as freelancing, start-ups and forming business partnerships.

However, Slideshare is of a more serious nature than YouTube and slides that are uploaded should only contain serious business orientated content rather than videos of cats playing pianos!

The Benefits of Uploading a Presentation to Slideshare

• Good PR — spread your company’s brand through this serious business platform which is used by millions of other professionals.
• Possibility to attract new customers and business contacts by uploading professional, quality driven presentations. The best presentations are also spotlighted by the Slideshare site which would prove to be an invaluable promotion tool for your company.
• Track back function allows the user to monitor how many people have viewed their presentation once it has been uploaded.
• Instant transcription of your presentation allows for certain Keywords, to appear in the text version of your presentation; which gives you a SEO boost.
• Embed your presentation in other social media outlets such as your company’s Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, to maximize the output of your presentation.
• Name the Slideshare account after your company and add relevant tags to get Google’s attention.
• Slideshare offers the user an opportunity to extend the lifetime of their moment in the sun (so to speak). If you have delivered a presentation that you are proud of then why not share it with others?
• Whilst the service is free, a premium membership (SlidesharePro account) can be purchased, offering you the chance to create a custom channel, upload HD videos, remove ads and much more.

In short, Slideshare has gained a solid reputation for facilitating business success through a more dependable, professional social media platform. So what are you waiting for?

Good luck with your new Slideshare endeavors!

Since reading about its introductionfrom Google on November 3, I’ve been asking people about mod_pagespeed, a module for the Apache HTTP Server.

According to Google, it:

perform(s) many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

Here’s their mod_pagespeed video comparison showing the effectiveness of the new module. As you can see, it definitely makes a significant difference in page speed and load time:

That said, I’ve talked to developers and server folks that I know, but no one has rushed to install it yet. I wonder if this is because they don’t know enough about it, or if it is because these refinements may already be accounted for through other caching and optimization methods. Any thoughts?

For More Information Check Out:

• Installing and Using mod_pagespeed
• Here’s a site that gives examples of load before and after implementing it: mod_pagespeed Examples Directory
• ReadWriteWeb Hack breaks down the module in some detail.

Have you installed mod_pagespeed yet? What do you think about it?

I just wanted to share a great tool that I recently found, called Balsamiq, used for creating software mockups. This is great for developers, designers, or web-entrepreneurs like myself.

Check out the demo to get a quick walk through.

Everyone these days has a webcam, and I’m pretty sure most people don’t really use it too much (outside those of you voyeurs & teenagers out there). I actually use mine almost daily making video phone calls through Skype. It’s great! I keep up with my family, friends, and business associates by making these video calls.

There are, however, other great uses of these cameras. I did some exploring yesterday and found a bunch of cool resources for doing online broadcasting via your webcam. These tools can be used to start your own live online TV show, to create a video blog, or to just make interesting web-videos. All are worth checking out!
Live Web Broadcasting Tools

• Operator11
• Stickam
• USStream.tv
• YouCams

Scheduled and On-Demand Web Broadcasting Tools

• Kyte
• SplashCast * My Favorite *

Thanks to Masternewmedia.com for putting out a great web broadcasting guide and list of web broadcasting tools!

While I’ve already begun to set up my e-commerce website (not even close to being complete, BTW) using OSCommerce, I’m still not 100% convinced that I’ve made the right decision. One of my ecommerce mentors Dave Pitlyuk (he doesn’t even know it yet) has suggested that I use ZenCart instead, but that has made the indecision even worse here. With that in mind, I continue looking for quality ecommerce shopping cart solutions while SLOWLY building the framework of my shopping site.

Introducing E-Junkie “Fat-Free” Shopping Cart

I don’t actually know much about E-Junkie other than what I’ve seen on their site and a few other resources, but their technology looks very promising. Essentially, you can add their shopping cart to any site, including blogs, myspace, etc. Their service provides a pop-up-like cart that is not really a pop-up, which integrates with Paypal and Google checkout. It looks like it is really easy to use and it could make setting up an ecommerce site quite simple. In fact, it seems like it only takes minutes to get things up and running, and to be honest, I am quite tempted to really try it out.

The problem for me is, however, that I haven’t heard very much about the company. In addition, I cannot find any real contact information on the website. Seems like a company offering this kind of service would go out of their way to publicize a phone number or real address. I guess I’d like to see a few more websites using their shopping cart solution.

If anyone out there knows anything about E-Junkie, please let me know. I’ll add any resources regarding the company to this page in an effort to inform other out there who are curious. Here are a few that I’ve been able to scrounge up:

E-Junkie Articles and Reviews

• Weekly Site Review – E-junkie
• E-junkie is addictive
• Review: E-junkie is an Addicting Storefront Solution
• E-JUNKIE Shopping Cart… sharp product, sharp price
• Another Plug for e-junkie (More on E-Junkie from a regular user)

E-Junkie in Action: Some sites Using the Cart

• MUVAudio.com
• TheoWorlds
• Bingo Card Creator

Again, please let me know if you have anything to say about this company, good or bad. Thanks!

Obviously, color is an extremely important aspect of web design and style. Figuring out the right colors to use is not easy for a lot of people. I put together a bunch of helpful resources to make it a bit easier to find colors and different color schemes. In addition, I explain to those who are unfamiliar how exactly to use the colors you find to change the look of your website.

Color Resources

The 4096 Color Wheel is where I go when all I need is the Hex code for certain colors. The site is very simple to navigate; just click a color on the wheel that is close to one you want to use, then use the palette next to it to find the perfect shade. Once you click on the shad you like, you’ll see it show up on the leftmost color chart.

Looking for a site that makes color matching easy? Check out The Color Wizard This site makes picking out color themes for a website a piece of cake! Use the color sliders to pick a color that works for you, and the site will find color variations of similar Hue, Saturation, Tint, & Shade. Once you’ve found the color you’re happy with, go to the bottom right corner of the site and you’ll see SUGGESTED COLOR SCHEMES. These are generated from the color you’ve chosen, and you can look at different choices of schemes including: Monocromatic, Analugus, Triadic, Tetradic, Complimentary, and Split Complimentary. Personally, I think the Monocromatic palettes are the best. This is my favorite of the bunch!