, ,

Are your photos slowing your website down?

, ,
Are your photos slowing your website down?

No website is complete without stunning imagery. After all, an image says a thousand words and images, whether it be photos, icons, illustrations or backgrounds are a central part of our website design. (By the way if you're looking for the best sources for free images you should check out The Design Vault)

But could your images be slowing your website down? If you have an image heavy website (like a regularly updated blog) and do not save your images optimised for web then chances are the answer is yes. This is not good because slow loading is a major reason for people leaving a website.

However, now that you're here, you will no longer have one of those websites. In this post I'm going to show you exactly how to optimise your images and increase the speed of your website.

There's Been Some Exciting Changes Around Here!

There's Been Some Exciting Changes Around Here!

Welcome to my new and improved website! I can’t tell you how excited I am to share it with you. I’ve been working away on it behind the scenes for weeks. It started off as a simple website redesign, because over the last year my website design skills have improved rapidly and I was at the point where my clients websites were better than mine! Not a good look for a graphic and website designer!.

So I desperately needed to upgrade which on Squarespace is pretty easy and would usually only have taken me a few days. But once I got started it just kept evolving until I found myself designing new graphics and banner images, re-writing pretty much all the copy on my website, changing email marketing systems and much more. All this took much more time than anticipated, but I have to say that it was worth it.

So what's new?

,

5 Must See Videos For Bloggers & Creative Entrepreneurs

,
5 Must See Videos For Bloggers & Creative Entrepreneurs

We live in a world that is overflowing with information. There are millions of blog posts, videos, podcasts, books, and articles on any single topic you can think of. As fellow bloggers, creatives and entrepreneurs, I'm sure you have experienced information overwhelm too. So, to make things easier for you, I thought that I'd put together a short list of my top 5 videos for anyone who is or aspires to be a blogger, creative, entrepreneur or any combination of these. 

All 5 of these videos really impacted me and my thinking and it is for this reason that I cannot rank them. They are all equally amazing for different reasons and are in no particular order. Most of these videos go for about 15 to 20 minutes except for one which goes for just over 40 minutes but it's so good that it seriously felt like it was 5 minutes. So this is a great post to PIN NOW for a rainy day when you can curl up with a cup of tea and have a little inspiration binge. 

5 Secrets To Writing A Blog Post People Want To Read

5 Secrets To Writing A Blog Post People Want To Read

In today's world, where content marketing is such a central part of building a business, creating valuable, interesting blog posts on the reg is so important. Being in the blogosphere I know what it's like to feel like you have to keep up with everyone else in order to get seen.

But when there are millions of amazing posts being posted daily, how the hell can little ol' you possibly hope to keep up? In this post I'm going to share my top secrets on how to write great blog posts that people will actually want to read.

The good news is that writing a blog post doesn't need to be grueling task. Even if you hate writing or feel like it's not something that comes naturally to you. You don't need to be a literary genius to write a great blog post.

It is possible for you to write amazing blog posts with ease. So let's dive in

,

Are You Holding Your Blog Back? And How Not To

,
Are You Holding Your Blog Back? And How Not To

If you often find yourself worrying about how many people have liked, viewed or commented on your blog post, how to gain more subscribers, how to generate revenue from your blog or how to stand out against all the other amazing blogs out there, then chances are the answer is yes, you are holding your blog back.

Before I get into this post I want to tell you a little story of something that happened to me only this morning that inspired me to write this post. I was actually working on another post for this week and decided to save it for another time and post this one this week.