amy cham :: pixels + people

Web 101: Copyright, model release, and the Internet

Important: I am not a lawyer. This article is meant only to point out key issues pertaining to internet copyrights, not as a legal guide.  Please take this overview as only a starting point in seeking out legal information from an authoritative source. Ideally, you should consult with an attorney before using any material owned by another party.

Updated: I've added the picture of the ad, taken by Brenton Cleeland.

When you go looking for clipart or photos, do you know which ones you are allowed to use?

For many, this is a difficult question to answer; for many more, it's a question that never gets asked.  I frequently find myself explaining to people--friends, clients, other developers--that copyrights do, in fact, remain in effect online.  And copyright is not the only issue; there is also the matter of model release.

This point came to mind today as I watched this clip on CNN, discussing Virgin Mobile's use of a girl's picture in its Australia ad campaign.  In this case, Virgin pulled her picture off of Flickr and made it the primary image in ads placed on billboards and bus stops throughout Australia.  It appears that Virgin believes that it has the right to use the picture; the girl in the picture disputes that.  What is involved here? (There is an extensive discussion thread on Flickr where someone snapped a picture of the ad itself.)

Web 101: The Three-Column CSS Layout

Wendy Piersall of eMomsAtHome.com has launched her second “How To” Group Research Project, where she invites her readers to contribute “How To” articles across a wide range of blogging, web development, entrepreneurship and internet marketing topics and awards prizes for the top articles.

I was in the midst of wrapping up school during the first one, but this time around I’m jumping in on beginning CSS! I’m sharing the topic with Lucy Nixon of WebLucent.com; she’ll guide you through the "What is CSS?" phase and font formatting techniques, and I’m giving you the rundown on how to build a table-free three-column page layout with CSS! (Lucy's article focuses on WordPress users. Aside from the mechanics of using the WP interface, the CSS info is the same for everyone regardless of platform.)

In a rush? Download the final CSS and sample HTML.

Why Use CSS?

For several years, web designers relied on tables to create their columns and hold things like images in their proper places.  Today, many still do.  In some ways, tables are very intuitive to use—they stretch when they need to, and they keep items aligned in neat rows, columns, and grids. 

So why use CSS instead?  The tables method has some drawbacks:

• Mistakes are tricky to catch.  Forget a closing <td> or <tr> and you can get very strange results. Additionally, when your entire page relies on a table to hold it together, unrelated parts of the page can have a major impact on each other.  For me, the most frustrating of these was the tendency for a sliced-image heading to fall apart because something further down the page was a couple of pixels too wide.
• The code is ungainly and tedious to work with. Tables-based layouts can get very, very messy.  In the old days, it was very easy to end up with 6 or 7 levels of tables nested within each other. (In other words, a cell of the outside table would contain a smaller table, which had another smaller table within one of its cells, and so on.)  This made it very tedious to find the part of the page you needed to edit, make your edit, and then ensure that your change did not affect the numerous other tables that came into contact with that part of the page. Furthermore, if you didn’t have a CMS or includes, layout changes had to be made on every single page.  With CSS layouts, the CSS file controls the positioning on all the pages, making it fast and easy to reposition something.
• File sizes are bigger.  The same page layout can result in a file 3 to 7 times, or more, if it is done with tables instead of CSS.  Additionally, once the CSS file is loaded and cached, the formatting for the layout does not need to be loaded again.  An extra 15 or 20 kilobytes doesn’t sound like much in today’s broadband, multimedia-heavy environment, but if you run a high-traffic site, it can chip away at your bandwidth resources; if you have mobile users, every kilobyte counts when you’re sending it over the often-sluggish mobile networks.
• It’s not very accessible. Alternative devices, like screen readers, expect a table to hold tabular data, not align your navigation next to your text.  They use this assumption to decide how to read a page.  If your content is all in tables, the sequencing can become garbled and difficult to follow for someone using such a device.

So that’s the why and wherefore of CSS vs. tables.  Hopefully, that’s enough motivation for you to learn a new trick or two.  If you’re ready to bring your layouts into the 21st century, read on…

Three C's of SEO: Part I

This is a topic that gets a lot of coverage around the internet, but it's also one that I get asked about very regularly: How does search engine optimization (SEO)/search marketing work? 

The question usually comes from someone just getting their bearings on the internet, often frustrated with their own poor search rankings.  With all the engine quirks, tips, tricks, and of course false promises out there, the typical small business user doesn't know where to start.

So here's my contribution.  The following is focused on organic search marketing, and I will use the term 'SEO' to refer to it. ("Organic" search refers to the search results on the main part of the results page; the term is used to differentiate these results from the ones that are paid for.)

Taking a small sip from the MBA koolaid, I've put the key SEO elements into a simple 3 C's framework...

Web 101: What is interactive marketing? (II)

A few weeks ago, I wrote "Web 101: What is interactive marketing?"  The article focused on the tactical elements of internet marketing--the online tools that today's technology adds to our marketing mix.  This time, I'd like get more conceptual, and focus on what it is that interactive marketing hopes to achieve.

To start with, I should not have gone straight into interchanging "interactive" with "internet" without acknowledging that I was doing so. 

Interactive marketing seeks to build a conversation with the market, rather than simply sending out messages--it's a conversation instead of a monologue.  Today, the internet is one of the primary means of doing this, and many regard the terms as synonymous.  It is a habit I have gotten into, and should have noted at the outset.  In the context of my blog, I will often interchange the two. However, they are not exactly the same.

So what are the goals of internet marketing?

In some regards, they are very similar to traditional marketing channels, and in others they are unique to the internet. 

Web 101: What is interactive marketing?

I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of this blogging thing, so I'm trying out a new idea.  I am introducing a "Web 101" series to help small bizzers understand what they are hearing about the internet space, and hopefully provide a jumping-off point for getting started with interactive marketing.  I'll do my best to give a basic understanding of miscellaneous interactive marketing topics so that you can go out there and start learning what things are about.

Which leads neatly into my first segment: what is "interactive marketing?"  (Or "web marketing," or "internet marketing.")