I was recently featured on MO.com! This website is a great new site that is currently being developed to highlight entrepreneurs. The owner of the website, Brian Null, is a fellow entrepreneur and big-hitting domainer. As you can tell from his domain name – MO.com (every 1,2,3 and 4 letter domain in the .com is currently purchased) he knows what he is doing. He also used to own golfcourses.com as well as several other solid URL’s.

So check out his website and check my website soon for an updated look and better content!

This past Sunday night marked the first time since World War II that the St Simons Island Lighthouse has been turned off! In case you don’t know, the Lighthouse is an icon for St Simons Island – it stands at the southern tip of the island, overlooking the village, the pier and the view across to Jekyll Island. The historical society had a nice little function at the SSI pool to commemorate the occasion and got the entire community involved.  A band was there, free food was provided by Barbara Jean’s, and tons of people came to the event!

We took some pictures as the sun was going down and we also climbed to the top of the lighthouse! This happened to be my first time up in the lighthouse. There was a great view from the top and I got a few nice pictures while up there. Check them out:

While at my buddy’s wedding in Wisconsin, my wife took some great pics and I’ve started to mess around with the creative touches in Photoshop.  I ran across a super easy way to give your pictures a little pop by making them black and white except for select areas that you want to keep color! Check out the picture below:

So here is the basic tutorial for all you newbie Photoshop users:
1. Duplicate the layer:

2. On the duplicated layer go to Image>Mode>Grayscale. (Do your color correcting before you turn the pic to black and white for best results)

3. Now here’s the easy part: Select the Eraser tool and simply erase the Grayscale layer wherever you want to see color! The background layer will show through as color. Use the [ and ] keys to control the size of the eraser to make sure you get fine detail and don’t erase anything that you didn’t want to.

Bonus: Now let’s say that you want to make the background a littled blurred and out of focus so as to draw more attention to your subject:

5. Duplicate your top layer and go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Adjust the radius to about 1.4 pixels. If you really want the artsy look, raise the pixels to something like 7px.

6. Now get out your eraser tool again and you can simply erase the main subject that you want to keep in focus. All you’re really doing is revealing the layer underneath again!

That was a super simple technique, yet it can really make your images look great. Keep on the lookout for more tips coming from a new design and web development firm – AO Studios.

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On my recent trip to Chicago and Wisconsin, I stayed at a very cool hotel under the Starwood brand. The hotel was an “Aloft” hotel. Weird name, but they have a very modern vibe about them. One of the little perks of staying at this nuevo hotel was the 3 magazines that they provide for you in the bathroom area (they were all NEW magazines, so don’t worry, they weren’t tainted by some other bathroom reader before me). So one of these magazines was a “Wired” magazine. It was the first time I actually read one and I was super impressed! Not at the actual writing or anything, but the fact that they pointed out how UNCOOL it is to wear your bluetooth headset while not doing anything. Check it out:

Right on the cover they explain that even BRAD PITT can’t pull off the bluetooth headset. So I just wanted to give this magazine mad props for finally letting the world know that the bluetooth headset is queer!

Tasteful Temptations, a great catering company based out of St Simons Island, GA needed their website re-designed so that they could update the website whenever they want.  Well, I made that happen.  I transfered their existing site from XHTML to a Content Management System.  I added some Javascript on the site to make it a little cleaner too.  There’s only one more addition that I need to make on the site, and that is a flash file for the Cakes page. (Wait till you see their awesome wedding cakes!)  So if you need a web designer, then contact me and I will build you  a website that is easy to update yourself!

I just finished another website for a custom drums company based out of Greensboro, NC.  This custom drum builder needed a web presence other than his Myspace page and he came to Avenue 3 Media to design and develop his website.  He wanted a website to showcase the custom drums that he has built and to convey his military themed business.  The word OPFOR is an acronym for something in the military (I still don’t know what it means!) and he wanted it to subtly be displayed throughout his website.  So I gave him some neutral colors and a text that really pops.  We also added a nice little slideshow with a bunch of his work to showcase.

So thanks to Big Jerm for the referral and I hope Opfor Drums continues to keep growing!

We all know that St Simons Island, GA is a great place to live, and if you didn’t know that, then now you do.  It’s a terrific little island just north of Jacksonville, Florida that seems to lag behind the times when it comes to the ever evolving modernity of urban life.  Now, in no way am I saying that St Simons has ever been urban – far from it actually – but it does represent a population of transplants and drifters from all over the US, especially urban areas.  Sometimes it seems like people here would love to have the urban lifestyle, yet mostly everyone settles for the small town, quaint island life that is truly indicated by the 7 degrees of seperation that everyone has in common.  Actually, it’s more like 3 degrees of seperation around here – everyone seems to know everyone in one way, shape, or form. Either a friend of a friend or a co-worker of your friend will seem to know someone else on the island! But my point that I am trying to make through all this is – St Simons businesses, for the most part, have TERRIBLE websites. Like websites that were built by 9th graders in 1997.  Yea, that bad.  And the reason that I hate it for them – is that these businesses are fantastic! There are some excellent little stores and some pretty good size businesses on this island that just have bad looking, poorly developed websites.  It’s my belief that a website should represent a company’s brand image and offer useful information to the customer.  Well, it’s a shame at what some of the local businesses websites offer around here.

Now, you might be asking, “is he knocking other local web designers?”  Maybe.  I don’t personally know any other web designers on the island, but if they haven’t updated the look of their clients’ websites by now, then they are just stealing money from them.  It’s ok to lag behind the times when it comes to urban sprawl and pace of life around here – but the web isn’t waiting for anyone.  It will always keep moving and if you aren’t moving with it – you’re standing still on a busy highway.

Anyway, that’s my take and I’m gonna continue to learn as much as I can and make better and better websites.

I’ve been working hard lately on a few projects for myself and a few projects for clients.  This is a sample of a site that is getting ready to launch.

I’ve been building a lot of WordPress based websites and finding out more and more that I LOVE WordPress. Here are some great reasons to have your website built on the WordPress framework:

• The best thing about WordPress is that you can easily control the look of the site purely through CSS.  Yes, you can add tables, but using Divs is so easy that I can whip up a simple site in a couple hours.
• Another great thing about building sites from WordPress is the ability to ad Google’s Adsense into your pages.  What’s better than earning a little ad revenue from your site?
• You can also edit the CSS directly from the internet through the WordPress “Editor” function under the appearance tab.
• The sidebar can be a powerful tool to advertise and keep your followers updated with your Flickr photos, twitter messages ( Tweets ), recent comments, links to other hot sites, new pages, and social networking sites.
• Another fantastic advantage of WordPress is the ability to integrate a shopping cart into your site via Plugins that make it SUPER EASY to add items for sale such as eBooks, MP3’s, Pictures, PDF’s, and other digital media. Check out the shopping cart I just did for the Coastal Players Tour.
• While we are talking about plugins – I might suggest some other great plugins that can allow users to post Video Comments on your blog, integrate Javascript (cool effects like those built by MooTools), and easily submit your site to search engines with built in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools.

WordPress as a content management system (CMS) makes it super easy for the client to edit and update his own website.  This takes away the need for a webmaster to constantly keep updating a website whenever the client needs something adjusted (that’s a great reason for me to like it!)  This gives the user without much web experience to keep their site up to date, becuase we all hate a website that hasn’t been updated in years.

I have recently finished a website for Communities in Schools, a local organization aimed to help kids keep from dropping out of school.  This great program is known throughout the US and has local “chapters” in many cities.  The local CIS here in Glynn County needed a website that could be easily updated and a place where locals could donate money or other resources.  I built this site using the WordPress framework along with some Javascript. Check out the website here.

Now the school administrator can login, update their live calendar, add new pages and links, and keep parents and donors up to date on all the latest happenings.  The custom WordPress theme that I built was based on a Mootools Javascript file and a very simple layout with a fixed background.

If you would like me to design a custom website for you that you can manage yourself – please contact me!