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Business Owners' Stories

Megapixel Exposed

by Norma

What is a megapixel any­way?

We have a great cam­era; a Nikon D-​90 just chock full of megapix­els. For each of those invis­i­ble megapix­els, we have a mil­lion invis­i­ble pix­els. I would rather not see a pixel. See­ing pix­els in Pho­to­shop gen­er­ally means I’m attempt­ing to use too low a res­o­lu­tion graphic at too large a size. Images are made up of tiny (pixel) dots. Vis­able pix­els are yucky! They make my graph­ics ugly.

Lately megapix­els are a hot topic in our house­hold because my hus­band, the hiker, wants a com­pact cam­era to take on the trails. But he also wants sharp, clear pho­tos with rich, true col­ors. To get those high res­o­lu­tion pho­tos to print at almost any size, for any pur­pose, you need scads of megapixels.

Luck­ily my husband’s can fit 14 mil­lion pix­els into his shirt pocket. Now his new dig­i­tal camera’s 14 megapixel sen­sor awaits his click to launch them into brief life as an elec­tronic signal.

Did he really need so many megapix­els? Prob­a­bly not. Every­thing we read says a cam­era with around 5 megapix­els will be suf­fi­cient for a home cam­era. He bought this cam­era for its excel­lent lens, and the excess megapix­els came along for the hike!

megapixels

Pic­tures of the fall col­ors in our yard were taken with our 12 and 14 megapixel (right side) cameras.

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Too Good to Pass Up

by Larry

Did I miss the SEO Boat?

Just got off the phone with a fast talk­ing sales rep from a com­pany that swore they were a Google part­ner and could “guar­an­tee” first page rank­ing in Google for my web­site. I must be crazy because after argu­ing with this guy for a half-​hour I turned down his fan­tas­tic promises, unsub­stan­ti­ated guar­an­tees, and super dis­counts. He warned me mul­ti­ple times that I would miss the boat for­ever if I didn’t sign up immediately.

After hang­ing up, I went directly to Google to see their advice for select­ing a ‘Search Engine Opti­miza­tion’ com­pany. Here’s a bit of what I found:

  • Be wary of SEO firms and web con­sul­tants or agen­cies that send you email out of the blue.Amaz­ingly, we get these spam emails too:

    “Dear google​.com,
    I vis­ited your web­site and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

    Reserve the same skep­ti­cism for unso­licited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help trans­fer funds from deposed dictators.

  • No one can guar­an­tee a #1 rank­ing on Google.Beware of SEOs that claim to guar­an­tee rank­ings, allege a “spe­cial rela­tion­ship” with Google, or adver­tise a “pri­or­ity sub­mit” to Google.

They should have men­tioned peo­ple who still insist on tele­phon­ing me with wild offers. As I expected, right off the bat, Google says NO ONE can guar­an­tee any placement.

You may want to read their sug­ges­tions your­self here:
Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) — Webmaster Tools Help

It could save you hun­dreds of $$…

Hint:

Good web­sites designed with a lit­tle fore­thought to SEO place­ment can, and do, rank well with­out resort­ing to funny busi­ness. Before hir­ing a graphic designer ask what he knows about SEO, espe­cially about Google, Yahoo and Bing!

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