Word on the Wholesale Matters blog (the Rosen Group’s blog for artists who wholesale their work) is that The Rosen Group has temporarily shelved the publication of the new studioArts magazine. According to their public relations manager, Daniel Waldman, The Rosen Group has decided to shelve the magazine so they can concentrate on better building their web presence and that they hope to return to the magazine soon. If you’ll remember, The Rosen Group had bought out Crafts Business magazine and had planned to relaunch the publication under the name, studioArts this summer. You can check out the official word here.

Well, I hope that they don’t shelve the project too long…artists and craftsmen can always use a good industry magazine.

Most people are familiar with Google and using Google as a search engine. What a lot of people don’t know is that Google does way more than just search and they have a whole range of cool services like Google Maps, Google Reader for reading RSS feeds, a free email service called Gmail, and a ton of other services.

One service that I’ve been using for a while is Google Alerts. Say you want to keep track of every web site or blog that mentions your name. To set up an alert, you fill specify what you want Google Alerts to search for, where to search for it (Google can search the whole web, blogs, and news sites), and how often you want the results (daily, once a week, or as soon as it finds a match) and the results are emailed to you.

I’ve been using this tool to keep an eye on who’s been linking to my blog and who’s been mentioning my blog posts. And I’ve often been surprised at where I’ve been finding links to my web sites and blogs.

Yesterday, I ran across an even better way to use Google Alerts. A couple days ago I mentioned Chuck Green’s web site and blog Ideabook.com. Yesterday, I received this email:

Nicolette:

Was alerted by Google that you had mentioned ideabook.com–many thanks for the kind words.

His email went on to tell me about some errors that he encountered trying subscribe to my RSS feed and checking out the past newsletter links. He even sent screenshots of the error messages and described what links he clicked on when he got the messages. Well, Chuck just made my day, I’ve been trying to find the source of those errors for awhile and his email pointed straight to the root of the problem. So thanks to Chuck and Google Alerts, the problem is all fixed…thanks Chuck!

After I fixed this problem, it occurred to me, why just use Google Alerts to monitor mentions of your site? Why not also use them as a why to start up a conversation with the people that are kind enough to mention you? Check out the site. Drop them an email to say thanks for mentioning you…make useful suggestions or comments that can help them out. If you run into a problem with their site, do what Chuck did and tell them about it. Invite them to join your newsletter or RSS feed. If you find their site interesting and useful as well, keep it as a resource…blog about it. Remember that marketing yourself on the web is really no different than marketing yourself off the web…it’s all about making connections and forging relationships!

Holy crap! StumbleUpon sure is addictive. I’ve heard about this web site for quite a while, but I’ve finally got around to getting an account a couple days ago and I’ve been so unproductive ever since If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon it’s a web site/browser tool that lets you push a button to find web sites that might interest you. So if you would like to find web sites on fly fishing, woodworking, and photography, push the little Stumble button on your web browser and it takes you to sites that deal with those topics.

Fly fishing is not my thing tho’, so I’ve been “stumbling upon” sites that have to do with jewelry, art, web design, and graphic design, and I’ve hit on a bunch of really useful web and graphic design sites, a few of which I’ll mention here:

The first site, BittBox is actually a blog that has very cool tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, so if you have some basic experience with either of these two programs and you want to stretch your skill a bit, you may want to try some of these tutorials. But not only does Bittbox have tutorials, but there are a number of free goodies like graphics and fonts that are available for you to download to use. Amazingly this blog is only about 3 months old, but there’s some good stuff there.

If you haven’t a clue about how the whole process of designing and launching a web site works, you should visit the Beginner’s section of the site Web Design from Scratch and get a quick overview. The site is maintained by web designer Ben Hunt who is in the midst of writing a book “50 Redesigns from Scratch”. Even if you aren’t a rank beginner when it comes to building your place on the web, there are some useful articles on HTML, the design process, copywriting, and other topics.

This next site is more of an online magazine of sorts. Smashing Magazine is focuses on rounding up some of the latest web trends and techniques. While this site is targeted towards web designers and developers, it’s great for finding resources and inspiration. I’m especially fond of their design showcases like the 50 Most Beautiful Web Designs in 2006, 49 Simple Web Designs, and 50 Remarkable Favicons (you know…those little graphics you see on the address bar of your browser). If you are a newbie at Dreamweaver, you should check out yesterday’s roundup, Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials

If you’re just learning how to use Photoshop to design your web site, there are hundreds…even thousands of web sites and resources that will help you learn. But for today, I’m just going to focus on three of them!
The web site Photoshop Lab, has a number of tutorials for special effects, tips on useful Photoshop shortcuts, news, reviews, and links to other Photoshop resources. If you’re a beginner, you can go to the Beginner’s section and get up to speed on using the basic tools in Photoshop and basic shortcuts. And you can keep up to date on all the news and tutorials by subscribing to the Photoshop Lab blog.

Phong is actually I web site that I used when I was first learning how to use Photoshop and to my surprise I found that it’s still around. Phong focuses on using Photoshop to create specific special effects and the tutorials are categorized as basic, intermediate, and advanced. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to stitch photos together to create a panoramic image, how to use drop shadows, how to design metallic wires, or how to make your text look like metal or glass…Phong is your web site. While some of the effects are probably too far out for your web site (the web site itself is pretty far out), just going through the tutorials is a great way to practice and sharpen up your Photoshop skills.

This last web site is not specifically a Photoshop web site, but it’s very useful one if you don’t have much experience in graphic design. Chuck Green’s Ideabook focuses on graphic design and how to use it for effective marketing. Ideabook focuses on print design, but it also has some useful advice for web design as well. As many of the design principles in print also apply in web design, there’s some very useful advice for you if you need to design your web site. So you can learn how to pick a commercial printer for printing your business card as well as how to integrate you web site design with your brochure. And if you need a logo for your web site, check out the tutorial Step by step logo to see what the process is behind designing a logo…fascinating stuff.

Do you have a favorite design or Photoshop resource? Leave a comment and share!

If you are just learning HTML or if your HTML skills are somewhat rusty, check out the online HTML tool, htmlPlayground. htmlPlayground is a combination reference and tool that contains a library of HTML and CSS tags. Click on a tag and you will get an explanation of what that tag does as well as some examples of the tag in use within HTML code. You can make changes to the code example to see what what happens when you make changes and you can even copy the example for use on your web page. Keep this web site bookmarked if you need a handy HTML reference. Check out htmlPlayground here.