• Photo Editing for Photographers
• Websites for Community Groups

Register for a course with a friend, and one of you gets 10% off!

Photo Editing for Photographers

Back by popular demand after being offered last fall, this course is geared to beginners!

Learn how to edit your photos to improve composition, contrast and colour, to fix defects such as dust, scratches, redeye or incorrect exposure. Learn about key concepts including: dynamic range, resolution, file types, and workflow; and special techniques such as painting with light, restoration, photo montage, and more.

Together we’ll edit a variety of sample photos to create beautiful, powerful images. This is a great way to take your photography to the next level!

The lab will have PC’s and software available. We’ll use Adobe Photoshop CS2 in class, but the principles and techniques will apply to Elements, Lightroom, Aperture, GIMP, and other photo image editing applications.

Prerequisite: intermediate computer experience, including the ability to open, save and organize files.

Tuesday nights, for 6 sessions, from 23 March to 27 April, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.

Web Sites for Community Groups

Turn over a new leaf!

Learn how to use a modern web system to build, maintain or renovate your community group website.
We’ll cover domain names, menus, static and dynamic pages, graphics, links, connecting to mailing lists, photo sites and promotional sites such as Facebook or MySpace.

The goal is to create or remodel your community group’s site by the end of the course.

Prerequisite: membership in a Salt Spring community group with permission to create or remodel the group’s site. Intermediate computer skills.

This is a great way to get a functional, easy to update and maintain website for your group, and to connect to local community groups on the web to share skills and resources.

Thursday nights for 6 sessions, March 25, April 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, from 7:00-9:00 pm

Details for both courses

About the Instructor: Charles Buchwald has 20 years experience as a creative professional, including graphic design, web development and photography projects for clients including BMW, Disney and Pillsbury. He enjoys sharing the experience of learning and has taught image editing and other classes in the U.S. and Canada.

Location: GISS Room S111 (the computer lab)

Note: the fees are primarily to cover use of the H.S. computer lab during the courses.

SPECIAL: REGISTER FOR THE SAME COURSE WITH A FRIEND, AND ONE OF YOU GETS 10% OFF

Please contact me if you have any questions about the course. Please contact Saltspring Community Education to register.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

I was just interviewed by Chamber Manager, Donna Powell, on her Chamber of Commerce sponsored radio show on local community station CFSI-FM. It was good to be able to talk for a bit about the business case for web sites and web marketing, and to provide some insights into SEO, social media, social media marketing, and all these new ways to connect with customers, potential customers, and other business people. Thanks, Donna!

This Thursday morning, 18 February, I’ll be speaking on some of the same subjects to the Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Club, at 8:00 am at Calvin’s Bistro. I have a lot I’d like to cover, and I’m looking forward to taking questions, too. If you are on the Island and would like to come, you can attend whether or not you are a Chamber member.

And last, but not least, I’m currently offering a 10 percent discount to Chamber members on web development and marketing services through Charles Buchwald & Friends. And, I will contribute the savings to the Chamber and their continuing IT needs, so it’s really a win-win-win deal! Please contact me for more details.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

From Randy via WebInkNow

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

I believe in abundance consciousness. I believe there is enough work, food, love and compassion to go around… if we open to it.

(This is not to say that our environmental problems will go away, and we’ll suddenly have unlimited natural resources if we so believe. But I do believe that we have the capacity to tackle even these big issues with creativity and kindness, and that putting our intention in the direction of a safe, clean, kind world is a lot more likely to get us there.)

Another local design and development group is tacitly advocating competition, by censuring all such fellow groups from their “community” efforts. This does not support a growing professional network, or a sustainable business community, or a vibrant and developing social community. Pulling together as a community, whether local professionals in a network, or other  participants in the local business landscape, is a way to enhance professional strengths, work towards a sustainable business community, and contribute to a more vibrant and developing social community.

After some thought, I am listing below, all the businesses and individuals I know in the area that are working in web design, graphic design, software development, and marketing. I have personally worked with many of them, and continue to seek opportunities to collaborate. It is my personal policy to direct potential new clients to anyone I think will better serve them, or to bring such collaborators into projects, and I will continue to do so.

Do you know of other Gulf Island’s businesses in this field? Please let me know via email or comments, and I’ll list them here.

Are you involved in this field? If so, please consider your professional, business and social communities, and advocate collaboration and network building over destructive, zero-sum competitive practices. I hope to work with you soon!

- Charles Buchwald

Bibby Communications
Imagine That Graphics
Raven Isle Graphics
Kmax Multimedia
Karmadillo Graphics
Barnyard Grafix
Salt Spring Graphic Design
Sky Valley Web Design
John Cameron
Mobius Communications
Gravy Design Co. (graphic design only)
Ceawave Communications
Salt Spring Media Ltd.
C3
Magic Cottage Creations
Ampersand Graphic Design
Bytesmiths
MonicaWorks (Mayne Island)
Contour Media (may not be active)
Living Water Media
NextGem (maybe Portland based—haven’t met these guys yet!)
Stephanie Moore/C&C Imagination Media

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

2009 was great year for community service here at Charles Buchwald & Friends, with contributions to the SSI Farm and Barter Network, the Jazz and Blues Society, Griefwalker films, photography for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s Predator Survey, and most notably, a major new site for the Centre for Child Honouring. (Congratulations on the new digs, Raffi and friends!)

Of course continuing support for the Bandemonium Music Society, the Crofton Airshed Citizens Group, the Luna Rose Prison Project, and the Salt Spring Vipassana Community was a pleasure to provide.

2009 was a great growth year for CB&F, including some fresh new projects. Retail Marketing Group and G. A. Industries helped start the year with some outstanding work in Adobe Flash. (Thanks, Doug, and Joern and Petra for being such great clients!) Later, 2009 welcomed new clients including Peter Allan’s Noble Sculpture Studio, North End Fitness, Hands On Healing Bodywork, and Westwind Translations.

Another major effort debuted in August, with the WOLF Kids website. What fun to celebrate the next stage of their programs with Harry Manx, Valdy, and friends on New Year’s Eve! Word is that another past client, Royal Roads University, may join forces with this innovative island school in the coming year.

Although it was a small project on a short timeline, it was an honour and a pleasure to renovate ronaldwright.com for one of the island’s, and the nation’s, more famous and insightful authors, Ronald Wright.

And wrapping up the year, new clients Greening Sports, ChemainusRental.com, and Hampton Stone Coaching worked with CB&F to create strong, focused new online marketing programs.

For more about CB&F’s history, activities, portfolio and so on, see the Archives.

Thanks so much to all the new clients for the year… especially those of you who are already working on new initiatives with CB&F for 2010!

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

I can’t take much credit for design, since the theme came from the outstanding http://elegantthemes.com. But please don’t think that getting up and running with WordPress is just a matter of finding good hosting and the right theme… it’s really worth spending some time on expert SEO, so your visitors can find you, and organizing your site so that it’s accessible and understandable.

Please do leave feedback here or at http://hamptonstonecoach.com as it’s much appreciated.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

• Google Streetview really spices up the maps section, while offering real value to visitors and potential renters.
• An email contact form helps keep junk mail to a minimum by foiling pesky spambots.
• Judicious use of a native WP sidebar module highlights the feature text.
• SEO working behind the scenes helps ensure the site will be showing up in searches.
• A quick, simple and useful FaceBook page helps with social media relevance.

What  a pleasure to work quickly and well, and produce results like these!

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

This chart summarizes the five most important factors which they identified:

What does this mean for you and your website?

Build the trust and authority of your site by sticking to your main message. Laser like focus on your basic message— whether it’s your brand’s USP, your charities mission, or your personal dharma—is the key to building your readership.
Links to your site from well ranked, trusted sites, embedded in content directly related to your site, are especially valuable. In other words, it’s a network, and meaningful connections with partners, peers, and others in your field create value… and the more the better.

Keywords count: the language you use needs to be consistent and focused. Repeating a few words over and over again won’t work. What works is good, useful content that makes intelligent use of keywords that have been identified as representing your focus. And here’s a very concrete tip: using keywords in the page title is very important.

The survey ranks negative factors as well. They can be summarized concisely: don’t try to trick anyone, and keep your site up. Cloaking, buying links, or linking to web spam sites just hurts your ranking in the long run. Server downtime and pages that aren’t available will hurt your page ranking as well.

When Developing a Site…

What if you are in the development stages, and don’t yet have a site? Or are renovating a site?

Here are my top tips:

1. Content is still king. Articles, stories, products and other memes that interest people, and focused on your message will attract visitors. Keep it fresh, well organized, and continually growing and your visitors, and the search engines, will reward you.
2. Research keywords as part of the development process, not as an afterthought. Keywords are so important in SEO it will cost more to integrate them later.
3. Keep the Flash and rich media (like audio, video and animation) to a minimum. HTML is the lingua franca of the search engines, so text content is king, and even the most beautiful and richly produced videos won’t get the attention that good, focused text does. At least provide summaries and transcripts when you do use rich media.
4. Plan the site structure with keywords in mind. Again, it’s much easier than retrofitting or reworking.
5. Don’t use text instead of images; when you have to use images make sure they are labelled properly.
6. Use internal links (within your content). Besides making your site more accessible and easier to navigate, it adds to the richness of your content. Every link, internal or external, is a chance to add SEO value.
7. Don’t duplicate content… link to it, instead. Visitors and search engines see duplicated content as sloppy at best, and dishonest at worst.
8. They used to call it the “million dollar click”: what is the goal of your site? Is it to sell a product, idea or philosophy? Encouraging your visitor to take the next step and make that purchase, download a file, or take positive action is important, so consider the big picture, or you’ll just have traffic.

This list was inspired by this blog entry, found via LinkedIn.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

By converting and updating a static, iWeb based site into a modern, user-editable and user-maintainable CMS based site, CB&F kept cost and time under control. The new site allows for easy updates, an RSS feed, tagged articles, and more fluid categorization, too.

Ronald is “a novelist, historian and essayist, he has won awards in all three genres and is published worldwide in sixteen languages. He is the author of nine books, including the 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, which won the Libris Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year and is now in production as a documentary film.”

A very low bandwidth, customized theme makes for the fastest loading WordPress site we’ve ever designed and hosted. CSS sprites, amalgamated CSS and JS files, and intelligent layout make this one a speed demon.

Special search engine optimization (SEO) helps to ensure that this new site will make Ronald even easier to find on the web. A set of special plugins and routines focuses on the clearest and most meaningful content, and presenting that clearly and cleanly in the titles, meta data, page links, and other parts of the system.

We are honoured to be working with him!

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.