While this post is not strictly about the web and web design…remember that a lot of your customers will find your web site through offline means…which includes your business card! So if you’re thinking about designing or redesigning your business card, you can get some design inspiration by checking out this Business Card Flickr set by Daily Poetics. You’ll find the most beautiful collection of business cards there for your viewing pleasure. Check out the rest of the business card designs here. (Notice that almost every business card in this set has their web address prominently displayed)

While I’m on the subject of business cards, the Art Biz blog has a couple of posts on business cards that would be worth your while to check out:

• Some Handsome Artist Business Cards
• Get Your Business Cards Printed

Technorati Tags: business cards, design

For the past couple weeks I’ve been playing around with a new service and I’m beginning to get addicted to it. I’ve got so many projects up in the air staying organized is a constant struggle. New ideas, new things for the to-do list, and new appointments are always popping up in my head and I don’t always have a pen and a piece of paper to write everything down. Before I’ve just had to try to remember whatever it was until I could locate something to write down my thoughts. Sometimes I remembered…sometimes I didn’t. That is until I ran across Jott.

Jott is a free service that allows you to use your cell phone to send reminders, to do’s, and messages to your email address. To use Jott, you sign up for a free account using your cell phone number and your email address. Once your account has been activated, anytime you want to send yourself a reminder you dial Jott’s toll-free number, speak your message and hang up! About 5 to 15 minutes later, your message will appear, in text, in your email inbox. If you want to listen to your message, click on the link in your email and you can listen to the actual message you sent.

When I told my husband about Jott, he asked, “Well how is that different from sending yourself a voice mail?” Here’s how it’s different. In your Jott account you can create a contact list of people you are in frequent contact with. Say for example you want to Jott a message to a specific person. If you had added that person as a contact in Jott, you call the toll-free number, speak that person’s name and the Jott message will be sent to that person’s email. You can also combine individual contacts into groups and send a Jott message to entire groups of people with a single phone call! Did I also mention that you can send Jott messages to cell phones as well as email addresses? My husband, an avid league tennis player is always on the phone coordinating groups of tennis players and he often has tell them all the same thing. This group ability is a great way for him to broadcast messages to every member of his team without the hassle of dialing a dozen numbers. If you have a blog and your blog allows you to add blog posts through email, you can also use Jott to send brief email posts. Just add the email address you use to post on your blog into your Jott contact list. Then call Jott and direct the message to your blog.

Of course Jott isn’t perfect. Because they use actual people to transcribe your Jott messages, you need to make sure that you speak clearly when sending your message so that they transcribe it accurately. And there can be mistakes in the actual transcription, especially if you speak too fast, don’t speak clearly, or if your cell reception is fuzzy. But the majority of the Jott messages I’ve been sending for the past few weeks or so have been pretty accurate…and when mistakes do appear, they are relatively minor.

Right now getting a Jott account is free…how long it will stay that way remains to be seen…I’m pretty sure that they’ll add some advertising or even make parts of the service for pay only sometime in the future. But if you want to check it out while it’s completely free…visit the Jott web site at www.jott.com and start Jotting!

In past posts, I’ve explained a bit about what RSS is and how you can use it…but we artists are visual folk and it’s almost always easier to show rather than to tell. So I was happy to find this cool video from the Common Craft web site, called RSS in Plain English. It’s basically a quick three minute video that explains (with visuals) what RSS is and how to use it. Enjoy!

Click To Play

*If you can’t view the video from here, try to watch it directly here

Whew! I can’t believe it’s already May! I’ve neglected this blog disgracefully while getting the new season of my podcast Crafting Voices up to speed. But I promise to get back to blogging here regularly and I’ll start with another resource I’ve found for picking colors for your web sites. The Daily Slurp compiles a daily list of well designed web sites for design ideas. Now The Daily Slurp has created a new tool that will allow you search through their database of over 10,000 sites by color. Looking for ideas for sites that are predominately orange? Choose your main color, and if you like, you can also choose a secondary color and you get a whole list of examples that use these color combinations. Check out their new Color Search tool here.