Planned Video Tutorial -- Check Back!

Do you have a quick website or graphics question that needs answering? In less than 2 or 3 minutes? Mindspring Design will be producing bite-sized, video tutorials for the busy, small-business professional.

Some examples of topics planned are:

• How to Use Layers and Masking in Photoshop
• Web Usability Testing — Why Every Small Business Needs to Do It
• Testing for Accessibility — Don’t Leave Out Any of Your Customers
• Award Winning Web Designs — What’s So Great About Them?
• HTML and CSS Stylesheets — Stop Pulling Out Your Hair
• Setup and Connect to a MySQL Database
• PDF creation, manipulation, editing, optimizing, preflighting, and more…

Let me know what questions you’d like to see addressed on this blog!

Lynda.com is a great online resource for small-business owners who need to brush up their web and graphics skills. Whether you need some help using Photoshop or need help integrating an online shopping cart, Lynda.com can offer assistance via video tutorials. Some of the topics include:

• digital photography
• HTML
• blogging
• e-commerce
• search engines
• and much more

Lynda.com offers excerpts from a selection of courses for free. But to gain unlimited access, you must purchase one of their subscriptions. The monthly subscription is only $25/mo, well worth it considering the range of information available at any time of day, from any computer with internet access.

These courses offer a good place to start learning basics of print and web design. This would be helpful to small-business owners who like to do things on their own. It also gives them a solid knowledge base to draw from when discussing designs with their web developers, or graphic designers.

I definitely recommend Lynda.com to small-businesses to offer training of their employees. And with businesses looking for ways to cut costs, it’s a good resource to learn to accomplish some tasks in-house when hiring a professional designer isn’t possible.