I remember growing up I always wanted to be a photographer. I would take my family’s little camera with its rolls of carefully inserted film, and snap shots of everything and anything. My happiest moments were during special events and family parties when my relatives would smile with fond tolerance as I interrupted their conversations to get a picture.

My skill was always barely passable, as can be expected for a small child with no training. As I grew, my interest in photography waned, especially given the huge amount of effort and expensive equipment that was required to take it into even hobby territory.

Nowadays things have changed a lot. Anyone with a smartphone and Instagram filters can make something pretty presentable. Which is good news for people who want unique, professional level photographs for their website without the skill or money involved in going full pro.

It is all about understanding how creative images for websites are made, or where they can be found.

Be Prepared To Pay

Sites like Dollar Photo Club, Fotalia and Death To The Stock Photo are just a few of many examples of awesome photo sites that are popping up all over the web. They maintain a higher standard, often presenting magazine grade images for cheap.

There are also a few cool free alternatives like Smart Photostock.

Overlay Images with Text

Text overlays are popular for two reasons: they are easy, and they work. There is no simpler method of instructing users on how to use your mobile app, or gently nudging them towards converting to a premium service or buying a product.

Best of all, it does it in a way that they now expect; users prefer text overlays to cumbersome demos and annoying voice overs or How To sections.

You can use Canva to easily overlay any image you buy with an eye-catching text. To save time, always keep a quality image source handy. I prefer this one to quickly find an image to use in the background.

These images make great printables too! Here is a Vista Print promo code for you to repurpose your original images into posters or conference swag.

Get a Filter App

Instagram has made filters a pretty standard element of taking images. But if you aren’t on the social network, you can get other apps on your mobile device that give you filters and let you edit images before posting or sending them, all in high resolution.

EyeEm is one popular option, available for Android and iPhone. But you have hundreds at this point to choose from. Your best bet is to try a couple and play around with them to see which work best for you. Make sure they don’t include a watermark.

Learn The Features On Your Camera

(Image source)

Your camera will have certain features that improve your photographs more or less automatically. For example, you can turn on a grid system that will separate your photos into fours, or sets of threes. This gives you framing assistance so you can find the perfect angle for a more engaging shot.

The HDR function improves elements light auto lighting and quality. Flash can be turned on or off to improve visibility. Touching the screen on the primary subject will bring it into focus more than the background. Outdoor and moving shots can be selected to adjust the camera accordingly.

Know what your camera is capable of.

You can create awesome photography with your phone too! Many professional photographers use an iPhone camera! Some Android phones will work for that too!

Get Someone Else To Handle Images

Of course, you don’t have to do the photos yourself. Plenty of photographers out there will work for a rate within your budget if they are able to use you as a reference, and the images as a portfolio piece. They may also require mention on the site that they were the original photographers.

Investing some money in a professional (or talented hobbyist) can pay for itself in dividend. So consider it.

Any more ideas on creating cool images for your site? Please share them in the comments!

Whether you think you can or not, you’re right.

These inspirational words from Henry Ford ring as true now as they did when the first Model T cars were being manufactured. An abundance of confidence will not make up for an overall lack of talent though.

If you’re wondering if you have what it takes to be a successful blogger, you may or may not be ready. You’ll never know if you don’t give it a try though, right? The only way to monitor if you have the gumption to get it done is to start up your blog and see what happens.

Can You Write Professionally?

Anyone can scribble some words on paper but it takes real panache to write something people will like to read. You must not use any netspeak like “ur” (you’re) on your blog if you want people to take you seriously. If you can’t come up with the quality copy you need, it might not be worth the bother of starting a blog.

Blog-goers can tell when a blog’s owner isn’t the person actually writing for it, so don’t think you can be sneaky and get someone else to do your writing for you.

Blogs like that are called Flogs because they are essentially fake. You shouldn’t be aspiring to a half-hearted effort anyhow, so don’t even try starting a blog if you can’t do the writing for it.

Do You Have Anything Meaningful to Say?

Here is where many young blogs foul up and go bad. You could put whatever you want on your blog, all day every day. If none of the content is any good, nobody is going to be recommending your blog to another person. Your copy needs to pull at people’s strings, get them feeling or thinking or maybe best of all, laughing.

There is one way to get around meaningful content and that’s if your blog will make people giggle. There’s a surprising amount of slack given to blogs that send their visitors away with a big, dumb smile.

This could be perfect if you’re already a sort of comedian. With a venue you control, nobody can make you stop until you’re ready to call it quits.

Can You Keep The Content Coming?

Writing a blog takes a lot of time and work. You will be looking all the time for something new to write about and that in itself is like another, small job.

If you aren’t giving your readers something new at least once a week, you can bet they’ll go somewhere they can get new stuff to read. A good way to deal with this is to have some posts ready before you start your blog.

This isn’t cheating or anything, you just do the writing beforehand and then you have a bank from which you can pull good, original content when you need it. It seems like common sense but then we all know how uncommon that really is.

It is a good idea to start tracking your rankings earlier to be able to tell which of your keywords perform better and identify your priorities earlier on. SE Ranking SERP tracker is a great app to do that easily and affordably:

Do yourself a favor and come up with a store of posts before you launch your blog. That is, if you’re still interested in blogging at all.

I consider myself a pretty good typist. On a good day I manage to churn out around 2,000 words in an hour and that’s without ever looking down at the keyboard or the screen. I write for a living and so I’ve gotten to the point where it feels almost as natural as talking.

But that’s not to say that typing is perfect or without limitations. For starters it’s not for everybody – those with disabilities often struggle to type efficiently while others simply take a long time to learn to type.

Furthermore, typing requires you to have both hands available and probably a surface you can learn on – which means sitting down at a desk to write and not being able to do anything else (multitasking with typing is pretty much impossible).

And finally, typing still isn’t really all that efficient. Even at 2,000 words an hour that’s much slower than you would be able to speak the same amount, and when you try to translate the process onto a small touchscreen you find that that slows down further.

So what other options are there? If you want to write while at the same time doing the washing, if you don’t have full use of your hands or can’t get to a desk and keyboard setup, or if you just want to try and go faster than your current typing speed, what can you do?

Dictation Software

One option is to try using dictation software. This of course is software that attempts to translate the spoken word into text on the screen so that you don’t have to input the information yourself. In theory this should allow you to stand at the sink and wash up while simply speaking the text you want noted down.

Alternatively you could dictate while going for a walk and at the same time you would expect it to be much quicker. It would be a blessing for those with disabilities and indeed that’s why many people already use it.

Currently though dictation software isn’t perfect, or we would have far less need for keyboards. Perhaps the best known example is ‘Dragon Naturally Speaking’ from a company called Nuance, and this works by using the normal analysis algorithms while at the same time keeping an index of your currently used vocabulary and learning the way you speak.

Still though, there will be times when it makes mistakes, and it can be a fiddly process trying to go back and edit (‘go back – no don’t write go back…! Delete go back!’). For now it’s enough to provide a viable alternative for the disabled, but it’s not yet going to replace a keyboard.

Still, writing and posting by voice is doable: Here’s a guide on how to do that in WordPress. There are also free plugins for WordPress that can make it more doable.

Pen Input

Another option is to use pen input rather than a keyboard, which is another that’s becoming more and more viable as technology improves. The best devices that support stylus input include the Sony Duo 11, the Surface Pro 2, the Dell Venue 8 and the Galaxy Note 3 among others. Each of these allows you to draw directly onto the screen with a pressure sensitive matrix detecting the input on top, and will then convert what you write into text.

This is actually a very fast method for capturing input and is great for jotting down ideas on the tube. However there are also some downsides to the method that again prevent it from being as efficient as it might be.

For one, most handwriting recognition requires you to write a few words or a short sentence at a time and then wait for it to be translated into typing. Even if you could write an essay the same way you might have done in an exam at school, it still wouldn’t offer you the option to scroll down the screen easily or to start new pages, and it would probably be slower than typing anyway.

You may also want to pick a minimalist theme for your blog, one that doesn’t require a lot of editing before publishing.

The Solution

The real problem is that we are taking our existing input methods and trying to adapt them to more modern scenarios.

We are trying to write and type into our computers and talk to our phones, when really our language and the devices themselves aren’t suitable for either. To speed up we are going to have to change one of those things – at which point we may well see a huge paradigm shift.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

The last three times I have gone to contact someone through a website, there has been no contact page. I am not joking or exaggerating, there was no contact page at all. One of the three had a little, tiny blurb mixed into too much text providing an email address, which was a very strange choice in design. But otherwise I would have had to go through their social media accounts to speak to them.

I was very disappointed with this turn of events, because at least one of the blogs I contacted barely used their Twitter and I never got a response, and another still hasn’t read their Facebook message. Why wouldn’t they be more concerned with connecting to their readers? And why wouldn’t they take the five minutes it requires to install a plugin (these were all WordPress sites), and create a Contact Page?

After all, implementing ways to hear back from your site users is one of the most important elements of any landing page.

Create an Awesome Contact Page Fast

I don’t want anyone else to make this very pointless mistake. Not when it can be rectified so easily.

First of all, the Internet is full of free tempates and tutorials for you to handle almost everything at home. If you are looking for beautiful forms, here’s a great selection of free HTML5 and CSS3 contact form templates for you to choose from. There’s also a great tutorial on how to edit those here.

If your site is not on WordPress, here’s a good selection of other available content management systems and useful resources to learn using them.

Here are six WordPress plugins for making a contact page that is fast, easy and effective.

1. WP Forms (or WP Forms Lite)

When someone who has no website building experience first gets the more advanced version of WordPress, they can feel a bit intimidated. Getting the plugins down can be hard, and there is a learning curve associated with any new software. WP Forms was made to cater to those beginners, and is probably the easiest form builder around.

You can use one of their many contact page templates with drag and drop functionality, and fully customize it to fit your needs. It is compatible with responsive websites, and they offer instant notifications of contact so you never miss a message. There is a free version also available, if you don’t mind skipping some of the advanced features.

2. Formidable Pro

If in addition to your contact form you want to be able to display data, you may prefer Formidable. It is a great tool for extendable forms and information that will be posted across your website.

I have seen it used to great effect on joint Contact and About pages that sim to show the person why they should contact them. Something that I personally like very much. They are a bit more costly, but effective.

3. Ninja Forms

Looking for something totally free that just creates great looking forms for you to use? Then Ninja Forms is your best bet. It provides easily adjustable settings that customize the form, and leads you through every step of the way.

They provide widgets and shortcodes to integrate into WP seamlessly. Plus, they are translation ready.

4. Contact Forms 7

This is an oldie but a goodie, and one that is still being supported by the developer in spite of its age. It is very basic, just a fill out form from the plugin’s dashboard.

There are no bells or whistles at all, which can be considered a good thing. The results are a very clean, functional contact form.

5. Pirate Forms

Want to make your contact form more feedback based? You may like Pirate Forms, then. It gives you full control over customization, and has the option of sending emails via SMTP.

It has a recaptcha generator, so you can try and limit spam.

Manage Your Leads Like a Pro

Putting up a form is just the first step. Don’t forget that as your site is going to become more popular, you’ll be receiving hundreds of email requests and pitches. You need to manage and organize those properly.

One good way to keep an eye on your mail is Cyfe. It connects to Gmail, your CRM or anything else under the sun. Put simply, Cyfe lets you keep a lot of pieces of your marketing under one roof.

Different Forms for Different Purposes

I am a firm believer in cold contacts for guest blogging. I have sent out my fair share of unsolicited offers and while they don’t all work, about a third of the time they do. The ones that almost always succeed? Those that come from sites with a Write For Us page.

To attract guest bloggers, some of them quite well established, put up a Write For Us page yourself with a set policy on posts. You should get some interesting pitches and offers from people of varying talent and influence.