delicious photos {hey cupcake}

Big photos of cupcakes - yum! These are the creations of Hey Cupcake Bakery and what a beautiful job of capturing the essence of their business by these styled shots. The power of the visual is something that I always try to convey to my clients. It's worth it to pay that professional (even semi-pro) photographer in the beginning to get the right images to represent your business or services. Beautiful (or in this case deliciously cute) imagery is priceless over wordy words, especially on the web where we are all victims of short attention spans. Don't these photos make you want to go to this *particular* bakery and get a dozen just for yourself? So for you business starters, it's not a bad idea to budget this as an expense - it will be worth it, for sure.
With more photos of yum cupcakes, have a wonderful weekend~

seven virtues pdx

Just in time for the Grand Opening celebration for Seven Virtues Coffeehouse, our friends out in Portland (PDX), Studio TOTA has created a blogsite for them that includes information about their coffeehouse, their events, the local artists featured on their walls, and more. Having a strong sense of community and wanting to share a warm and healthy space to neighbors, we felt as though allowing their customers add to their website through comments and feedback would be quite appropriate. So utilizing Wordpress blog software with a custom CSS upgrade, we were able to create a low-budget website that communicates essential information for their business to their existing and new customers. Something to consider for new businesses out there that may not have the budget to build out a full out customized website, but wants something that is not your typical generic template website (<-- not so pretty).
For those of you in the Portland area, Seven Virtues Coffeehouse's Grand Opening is on June 7th so go join them with a full day of free samples, live music, coffee demonstrations and more!

pictobrowser

Looking for a good way to show your Flickr photos on your website or blog? Try Pictobrowser - a free web application - super easy to setup and works quite smoothly too. Check out some of my pics from Japan...{click on the center to see next photo or hover over the bottom and thumbnails will appear...cool}

stamp it

A custom stamp is a great way to literally put your mark on something that is unmarked. A blank piece of paper. A solid colored envelope. A piece of memo paper. For smaller businesses, instead of getting EVERYTHING custom printed, this is a good solution to put your identity on something that you don't necessarily want to or can't mass produce. I got my self-inking stamp here - all you need to do is upload an image and voila~