If your online business involves using a lot of photos, you might occasionally have the need to convert an image from one format to another. When I need to do this myself, I often use my Paint Shop Pro program. However, since I only have that on my laptop, and I work more on my desktop PC, I don’t always want to do the two-computer-tango just to convert an image. So I’ve found some online image converter resources that I have found to be handy, and equally as effective. So thought I’d share them with you, in case you might have similar conversion needs.

Go2Convert

CoolUtils Image Converter

Convert Hub

If you know of any other great converter resources, drop a comment and let me know.

Did you realize that your website looks different depending upon which browser you use to view it in? It does…and believe it or not, many online business owners/website owners do not realize this.  And what also you may not realize is that your website could be displaying improperly or with errors in other browsers that you don’t use. So when you’re working on your website, or just designing it for the first time, you should make it a habit to compare how your website looks in the most common browsers.

According to the Internet Browser Review for 2010, the top 5 browsers are as follows:

1. Firefox
2. Google Chrome
3. Internet Explorer
4. Opera
5. Safari

So, theoretically speaking, you should check and see how your browser looks in at least the top three browsers, just to make sure it’s rendering correctly in the most popular in the list. But how do you do that? I’m gonna tell ya! There’s a great website called Browser Shots, and it does just that: lets you see what your website looks like in any browsers you wish, just by entering your URL and checking which browsers you’d like to compare.

Since you want your customers and website visitors to have the best experience possible, be sure to do a regular check as to how your website is displaying in other browsers. If your website isn’t displaying correctly, you can lose traffic that you have worked all too hard to get, and that’s definitely not good for business!

If you blog for business (or otherwise), there is a great way to connect with your blog’s readers by adding the Google Friend Connect gadget to your blog. It’s a tool that enables your followers to keep up with your blog, and to connect with the blogs and websites of all your other followers. You can also customize it to match your blog, and it is very easy to use.

We use the Google Friend Connect gadget here at OBJ. You can see it on the right side of the blog. If you click on any photo icon you see in our Followers list, a window will open that shows you a brief profile of the follower, along with the other blogs they follow, and their own website information (if applicable).  You can click on any of those links to visit those blogs and/or websites. You can add followers as friends, and you can also send them a message, if you like.

Google Friend Connect is a wonderful marketing and social networking tool. I highly recommend it! If you’d like more info, just follow the link below.

Google Friend Connect

I just found another really great file storage, online backup, and sharing site. It’s called:

Dropbox

Install this program and any time you add files to it, they are instantly backed up online. Install it on multiple computers and sync them, and then whatever files you add to your Dropbox on one computer will automatically appear on the other computer as well. This, my friends, will save ME a lot of work. Normally, when I want to transfer files from my laptop to my desktop PC or vice versa, I have one of three options:

1. Copy the files to a flash drive and use that to transfer.
2. Upload the files to a storage site online on one computer, then go to the other computer and snag them from online.
3. Email them to myself between computers.

Those methods all work, but they are much more time-consuming. Dropbox will speed up this process and move it right along! You can also create public folders to share documents between friends, family, or colleagues.

Their basic 2GB account is free. You can upgrade to various levels of paid versions, the cheapest being 50GB for $9.95 per month. I’m starting with the free version, because I think that will do me nicely for awhile. This is really one of the coolest file storage/backup sites I’ve seen for awhile, so I had to share it with you. And hey, you can get free extra storage space, simply by referring someone, OR by following someone’s referral link! Now that’s what I call a perk!

I’ve just posted two new pages to Online Business Junction. One page has resources for a variety of Etsy Tools.  The other is a page about Favicons, providing resources for online favicon generators, along with instructions on how to add a favicon to your website, and to your Blogger blog. Check them out when you have a chance.

1. It prevents people from right-clicking to open other parts of your website in a new tab or window.
2. It prevents people from right-clicking to open links to other websites that you have on your site.
3. It prevents people from right-clicking to bookmark your website.
4. It prevents people with web-based email accounts (like Hotmail and Yahoo, etc) from right-clicking to copy your email address in order to send you an email.
5. It doesn’t stop people who know they can view your site’s source code to get the URL of an image and steal it that way.
6. It doesn’t stop people who know they can do a Print Screen to copy the page the image is on; and then they can use any graphics program to crop the photo they want and save it.
7. If your script generates a message like, “Don’t Steal My Images,” you can offend your customers who were trying to do no such thing, and send them on their merry way…to someone else’s website.

If you really want to protect your images, there’s one easy solution: watermark them! You can do this yourself with a graphics program; there are even websites that allow you to do it online. Or you can pay someone to do it for you. Either way, that is the best way to protect your website’s images.

For further reading…

Watermarking Photos

Graphics Tools

]]> http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/12/right-click-much/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/12/twitter-tool/ http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/12/twitter-tool/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:42:37 +0000 admin http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/?p=558 I just came across a great website that allows you to customize your Twitter background. It’s a free service, and very easy to use.  It allows you to add themes, photos, and text, so you can coordinate with your website design in minutes. Whether you Twitter and Tweet for business or casually, you may find this service very helpful.

Free Twitter Designer

Backup Outlook Express

PDF Online