Hey all, I thought I'd offer the new bloggers (and old bloggers may find something useful here too) some helpful things that I've used in making my blog. Images and image editing I like to use GIMPshop to edit most of the photos I use on my blog http://www.biz-tone.blogspot.com. It's great for resizing images quick and has many more features (almost the same as Photoshop... but FREE to download!). You might check it out if you are in need some editing software. Also check out recommendations in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=763603 Dictionary Alright, so most people edit in Word and then transfer it to their blog. There's a lot of spell check software out there right now. But I like http://www.dictionary.com, it offers quick switches to Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, The Web, and has an all referrence feature as well. It's highly useful, and you may find it helpful. Stock Images I get 99% of all the images I use from http://www.sxc.hu/. SO USEFUL! Often the images don't even require you to credit the source. It saves a lot of time. Has millions of images. There are some other great Stock Image sites out there as well. This thread is pretty useful for finding more: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=794002&highlight=Stock+Images SEO My best SEO tends to come from H-tags! Once I started using these correctly my traffic increased dramatically. There are so many useful SEO tips here on DP... but I found this one to be the most useful, you'll have to follow the links... but it is pretty helpful: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/search.php?searchid=11817228. Any basic Google search will help as well. Finally, if you like anything that I am doing... and have any questions I'd love to help you guys out. If you need any publicity, getting sites out there, I'd offer a link or two. So long as we can write an article that is useful and relates to business or money (or ways you plan to make money). I hope this has helped out in some way, shape, or form! Good luck to all of you.
I don't understand the need for an image editor for the standard blogger. That link for the stock images was pretty useful, though.
My thought process behind that is... well, most basic photo software that comes standard on PCs is often not user friendly and distorts images as you size them (either up or down)... the image editor it also makes it very easy to add text to images or blend images. I understand where you are coming from though.
I have mostly used DP to help me through out my blog developement... I figured it was time to give back.