Three Ducks Tutorials - My Motivation

It is possible some visitors to Three Ducks may be asking themselves, "Why is she doing this?" So, I thought I would share with you some of the reasons why.  To begin with, it makes good business sense. There is a great deal of competition on the internet and it is growing by leaps and bounds every year. If you research internet marketing, one thing stressed is that if you have a skill or knowledge that may be of interest to others then share it especially if that skill or knowledge relates to the product(s) you are selling.

As well, by preparing these tutorials I am gaining or improving my skills. I mentioned in 'Creating Web Images Part 2' that I am no expert when it comes to using Paing Shop Pro. I have had the program for three years but have really only used it for making web images from pics and scans for my shopping cart and now this blog. Yet, there is so much more you can do with the program and by learning its functions I am increasing my knowledge and that is never a waste; infact, it can be marketable, too. Just with what I already know, I was contracted last year to research resources, write text and preprare images, photos and banner pics for the Pender Harbour & Egmont Chamber of Commerce. As a small business owner myself, that research was invaluable so I profitted in two ways: extra pin money and discovering business resources.

However, there is one more reason and I think this is a very important one especially for those who own internet quilt shops and who blog about their quilting. I need to give you some background before I explain further.

I lived in a little village on British Columbia's west coast for almost fourteen years. If you do a search on 'Egmont, BC' you will discover it is also on the Sechelt Peninsula about an hour's drive north of Sechelt where I live now and is next to the Skookumchuck Rapids (the largest salt water rapids in North America). However, it is world's apart in many respects and one of those is internet access! In Egmont, you had two choices: dial-up or the much more expensive satellite. The phone system is too antiquated for ADSL and Telus said it would never upgrade the system. The TV cable line stops at Garden Bay which is a half hour away in Pender Harbour. By the way, cell phones do not work in Egmont because the village is surrounded by mountains. And, those expensive satellite feeds cut out during storms and when it snows. So, I was on dial-up.

When I decided to expand my little quilt business onto the internet I began visiting other internet quilt shops and approached them as I would do if I were a shopper. I wanted to look at their layouts, see how they set up shopping carts, see what shopping carts they were using, see how their fabrics were displayed, etc., etc. Well...let me tell you that as a dial-up user this proved enlightening. Would you believe that there were some quilt biz shopping carts that I could head off to the washroom, then go to the kitchen and make a cup tea or coffee, come back and the first page would still be downloading! Why? Because of the the images and  photos.

Living in the city with access to high speed internet, we don't think about those who still might be on dial-up. I checked my stats yesterday and over the last month I had just over 100 visitors who are on dial-up. Those are 100 potential quilt shop customers or 100 quilters who might love to visit a blog but can't because images files are so huge that it takes forever to download.  So, what do these quilters do? They leave.

So, this is another reason why I wanted to learn Paint Shop Pro - so that those living in the northern reaches of British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario or Alaska, or in small farming/coastal communities throughout Canada and the U.S. wouldn't give up in exasperation when visiting my quilting website. Yes, it has been and continues to be some work getting those image and pic files down in size, but I think it is worth the effort. Just for fun, here is my Picasa photo album where all my blog photos are stored. If you look in the right hand column, you will see that I have 105 images; now, look at the file size - 3 MB! This is 0.35% of my alotted 1024 MB. I have been to some blogs where one image alone close to 1 MB. If you would like to check the file size of a particular picture, click on it and, when it is individually displayed, do a right click and click 'Properties.' Okay, so learning to use PSP, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements or The GIMP has this advantage - enabling you to reduce your image and picture file sizes.

I would like to demonstrate another reason for learning how to use a photo editing program by showing you before and after images of the quilt my Mom gave me for Christmas.

By using the crop, resize, brightness & contrast, and sharpen tools; as well as the .jpeg optimizer I have improved the quaility of my images substantially. For many bloggers, just learning these few basic steps would show off their hard-worked, beautiful quilts in all their glorious splendour!

This isn't a rant and I am not intending to tell anyone how to run their business or produce their blogs. I'll keep exploring my PSP and if I discover something that others may find interesting or helpful and if I am able to make the time I will write a tutorial and put it on Three Ducks blog. If you find it interesting or helpful, that's great (and, I would love to hear if you do!).

(By the way, I am doing this blog posting using my dial-up connection. My laptop is sick and in the shop and it has the high speed connection. I decided to keep my dial-up service for my desk top PC as back-up and I am so glad I did! But, being a news junky is tough now that news sites are increasingly going to videos...sigh. Guess, I'll turn on the radio!)