Merry Christmas!  I hope you have a wonderful holiday full of the 3 F's...family, fun, and food.  As my Christmas gift to you, I searched the Creative Commons stock on Flikr for some of my favorite winter photos you can use on your website for free.  To grab them, just click on the photo to be taken to the page where you can download the image.

You can use these as you like on your website for free, just remember to give credit to the artist (usually by placing a small link at the bottom of your webpage to the artist's photo.  You'll find the artist name next to the photo and can use that as the text for your link.  Ex. instead of www.domain.com//blah blah blah, put jenny downing as your text and link it to the photo)  

You can see the links to these artists at the bottom right side of this page.  A bit of effort, but it's much better than paying a fee for every photo you use, thank you generous Creative Commons artists!  Creative Commons photos are great for blog posts because you might want some visual impact, but you don't want to own (or have the budget to own) every image on your blog. 

To experience more of the wonder of the Creative Commons world, go to http://search.creativecommons.org

Enjoy, stay warm, and I'll see you on the other side!
Erin

Snow? You might ask.  Well, it's white and takes up a whole lot of space which makes me think of white space which is what your website needs to be professional and inviting to your guests.  Find out how to use white space to your advantage...

So this week I completed a project I've been putting off.  It only took about 20 minutes and it's already saved me more than that, you gotta love organization!

In the world of technology, if you're anything like me, you have usernames and passwords to account after account.  Email, websites, autoresponders, Facebook, Twitter, you name it.  Up to this point, I'd been keeping my usernames and passwords in a notebook - list style, which worked out really well for a while...until the list became 5 pages long, boo. 

Every time I needed a password, I'd scan through the multipage list looking for the right one and each time it bugged me.  Then a lightbulb moment (ta-da!).  I decided to write my usernames and passwords with the program/website they belong to in a small extra address book I had laying around. 

Now they are all grouped alphabetically, so when I'm staring at my Netflix screen wanting to watch a movie (and I could have sworn I'd asked it to remember my log-in information for me), I can grab my little black book of passwords, flip to 'N' and there it is - in less time than it would take to request an email reminder and way less time than it did to scan 5 pages of passwords, yahoo! 

Do you have a time saving organization system for your technological life?  

Please share by commenting below, we'll love you for it!

Creativity and Joy,
Erin