Why You Should Care About Google Penguin 2.0
Lions may rule the jungle, but one special penguin sets the new rules for getting your website out of the weeds. On May 22, Google un-caged its Penguin 2.0 update, tweaking the rule set for the mega search engine’s algorithms. What does that mean? Google revamped its search engine optimization (SEO) rules for how it evaluates Web content so it can better identify web spam from great content. So, if you want your website to climb Google’s search engine result rankings, you’ll do your best to march in line with Penguin 2.0’s criteria. SEO is highly useful for every single website, be it a...
read moreSimple Adobe Photoshop Effects: Black & White Photos – Part II
After reading through Part I of our black and white series, you should know the basics of how to use the Channels panel to create a black and white image in Photoshop. If you enjoyed reading Part I, we would like to offer you a second helping of black and white tutorials. This time, we’re going the extra mile, giving you even more control over the black and white levels of your image. Prep Your Image First, duplicate your black and white image as a new document. To do this, right-click on the respective channel that remains visible in the Channels panel and select the Duplicate Channel...
read moreMicrosoft Project: A Great Way to Stay on Task
At the Fort Collins Digital Workshop, we are extremely excited to be moving into a new Old Town location to better serve the community as a resource for digital arts classes and business computer training. However, with a big office move such as this, there are also a lot of headaches to organize and many phases of the project to consider. For a project of any size, including our moving plan, Microsoft Project is a powerful project management application that can help a team stay on track. Tracking time and cost resources effectively, Project has emerged as an industry leader for project...
read moreSimple Adobe Photoshop Effects: Black & White Photos
We all love a crisp, high-resolution photo, but nothing beats the classic quality of a good black and white. Using Adobe Photoshop, you can turn just about anything black and white, and to be honest it doesn’t take all that much effort…if you know the few simple steps, that is. That’s where we come in. Photoshop offers several methods to turn an image black and white. For instance, you can go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Black & White and that will automatically generate the desired effect. But, if you want a little more control and mastery of Photoshop, you will want to...
read moreGeek Out on Google Analytics
How do you know your website gets the job done? Do you get emails or comments from viewers? Did your mom say it looks great? No disrespect to mom, but without a reporting tool like Google Analytics, measuring the success of a website is dodgy at best. Google Analytics offers free reporting and metric tools for just about any website. Reviewing metrics on a weekly or monthly basis informs you as to how much traffic you’re getting and where traffic comes from. Properly analyzing website metrics can help you focus on content that viewers enjoy. It also helps you understand what’s not working,...
read moreUsing Microsoft Excel to Integrate Data Systems
Integrating multiple systems is a problem for any business. In the past few months, it’s been a good problem to have for the Digital Workshop. As our volume of students has increased dramatically, we’ve been trying to figure out how to better handle our multiple systems internally. One of the most common issues that come with having multiple systems is they don’t talk nicely to each other. By “talk,” I mean data does not transfer easily between them. For example, a system for human resources data may export a text file of employee info that a payment tracking system doesn’t understand....
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