Define the Project

In view of the upcoming Ycademy Seminar, I will anticipate in a series of posts how participants can prepare the event and what they will get out of the Ycademy online seminar which will take place next week-end.

Before building my Flash Website, I define my project and prepare my infrastructure.

The Purpose of my Flash Website

The new flash site will focus on design and my activity in that field. I will replace my depreciated site at ZibogRoy.com which served as a showcase in the past and illustrated some of the work done in the past, namely in connection with YORGOO Press and YORGOO Tabloid a great seller. Zibog Roy gets some 250 clicks per day and is visited mainly by commercial prospects.

By the way: Zibog Roy is the inverse reading of Yorgo Biz and it’s therefore no wonder he is my preferred designer:-).

The new Flash site will focus on Design. Design will be subdivided into Graphic design, Web design and Media design to start with. The content will feature my work and services in the 3 mentioned fields and illustrate work done as well as serve as a show case, linked to a sales pipeline.

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Impossible Design

The Flash Website Framework

Semiomantics Evolution as provided to all seminar participants.

The site will be loaded to ZibogRoy.com root. It is compatible with the present WordPress powered Semiomantics Showcase script. The Blogs homepage will be replaced by the new Evolution site. Evolution will then profit from the Semiomantics script running in the background and allow for hooking the flash site to a Semiomantics SEO Power Engine at a later stage.

The Evolution site can be loaded anywhere and is easily transferable; the reason being: it does not need any MySQL database and the content is not domain specific as in WordPress. Therefore the site can be downloaded via FTP and uploaded anywhere else in minutes.

For the purpose of the construction I will build the site in a sub-folder of my main domain and then move it to Zibog Roy when it’s ready for public release.

The Main Categories

There will be the following main categories in the menu to start with:

• Home Page with an intro movie and a slider displaying images representing services.
• Graphic design Showcase with a presentation of specific products and descriptions.
• Web design Showcase with gallery
• Media design Showcase with galleries
• A Contact Page with the imprint
• External links to blog and shop

More as soon as the above is implemented.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Better YouTube HD Output

Happy? Yessssss! Finally got some YouTube output I don’t have to be ashamed of. For some time I was wondering about all those guys who could produce quality YouTube HD clips while mine drowned in blurs and other negative effects due to YouTube compression.

Quality is a matter of money

As so often online: your look is a matter of money! Sure, as a surfer you can access all those goodies and enjoy great info and media files for free. When however you wish to put up your own stuff for grab, things change. Your pictures need to be in Photoshop quality and your videos need to be HD encoded to match the quality your competitors produce.

Another 250 bucks down the road I finally can feel like an Internet astronaut as well and dispose of my hi-tech, high-end cockpit for editing comfortably HD stuff. Sure, I could continue to produce the “normal” stuff and remain a victim of YouTube’s compression. The problem however, is simple: most Internet surfers dispose of high resolution screens and are able to see the difference.  And my problem is obvious: I am selling great web design and media services which need to be brought to potential customers in an eye catching way.

An image is worth a 1000 words but a lousy image’s value is 4 letters according to Nikos Advertizopoulos … how right he is again!

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Slice Show Cockpit

Of course a new space rocket is a great thing, but you need to learn how to fly it. My first tests and exercises are getting there slowly and I am in for more. My first worry is the output quality on YouTube and other free junk sites which usually compress away the quality of hours of work.

My YouTube rocks now

Have a look at my recent YouTubes: the latest Astir Beach picture show and Global The Brand; you can watch them in 720 p HD and go for full screen and it still is a pleasure. And I can still step up the quality by one tick to 1080 p.

See Astir beach on YouTube in HD full screen HERE

Look at the smashing HD output of Global The Brand HERE

Here is a screen-shot of a full screen Astir Slide on YouTube:

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Astir Beach on YouTube

The screen-shot is an 80% quality jpg output from Photoshop of the YouTube full-screen view on my monitor.

How to achieve better Media on YouTube?

The most cost effective way to achieve the above and also to improve your editing knowledge: join Ycademy. Ycademy is a non-profit online learning program where participants contribute to a pool with a monthly fee of $30 to access and to make available the most advanced technology and services online.

Oh, by the way, there is also loads of knowledge being made available at live calls, trainings and seminars. Useless to tell you that I have learned it all at Ycademy :-).

The upcoming March Seminar of Ycademy builds a smashing flash site with participants. The Program in April will be focused on basic media design and includes all the know-how and tools needed to produce high quality YouTubes amongst others. An Ycademy Seminar is worth more than 1000 words and more importantly … more than 1000 Bucks!

For insiders only as there is no promo for Ycademy but you can contact Bianca at bianca(at)ycademy.com.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Global The Brand Fonts

An important element of branding are Fonts. In the case of Global The Brand the selected fonts will not only appear online or on printed and visual media, but they will also be stitched or glued to all the products, from Kicks to Caps.

Having followed multiple avenues, here is the outcome of a first branding project in as much as fonts are concerned.

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Global The Brand

We have tested the fonts on YouTube as well. Have a look at the short YouTube clip HERE *

* Please note: I am getting better outputs on YouTube :-).

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Gene Line Motors on YouTube

In an attempt to improve my YouTube output I have just loaded a few test slides containing pictures of Gene Line Motors. The main problem is to preserve as much image quality as possible, considering that YouTube’s compression kills the effects and the beauty of the work … unless you are editing professional HD stuff such as the movie producers.

Today’s test looks better than the previous Astir Beach slides which frankly were sub-standard and need to be replaced.

Improved YouTube output quality

Let’s compare the live image and the YouTube output:

1. The first image is a 100% JPEG Photoshop output, 1109 pixels wide. It may take some time to load in the overlay due to its 664 kb:

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Gene's Line 100% JPEG Photoshop

2. Here is the corresponding YouTube output; if you go for full view it will expand to 1600 px wide whereas the image will then be 1109 px as above.

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Gene's Line YouTube screenshot 100% JPEG

The loss of quality is obvious, however, the result is much better than the achievements of earlier attempts. Check it out using the magnifying glass when your mouse moves over the images.

Some of the loss demonstrated here may be due to the fact that the slides loaded to YouTube were edited with a width of 800 pixels; the blur effect gets therefore really bad if you look at it in full screen mode on YouTube.

Checkout the YouTube output movie by clicking HERE.

I guess I will have to produce HD to get a quality where details survive.

More after the next shot :-).

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

WP Best Old Fashion Theme

We have just added another great looking WordPress Theme to our showcase: the WP Best Old Fashion Theme! The style is inspired by old fashion ads and magazines as well as by the work of some great designers of the past and present.

Most importantly: underneath the beautiful face hides a roaring engine signed by Semiomantics. This guarantees the usual incomparable high visibility and performance of Semiomantics powered sites on Search Engines.

WP Best Old Fashion Theme Colors

The WP Best Old Fashion Script has been built in 3 basic colors of which only one per color will be commercialized and customized: Dark Blue, Dark Red and Dark Green.

Availability: directly from Semiomantics or through a Semiomantics Website Developer exclusively.

WP Best Old Fashion Theme Screen-shot

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WP Best Old Fashion Theme

The below details show the carefully designed skin:

The Test Site is HERE

PS: An add on shop is under development.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Minimalist Elegant Web Design

Subsequent to yesterday’s post about elegant web design, here are two sample sites I like particularly, namely because of the minimalistic approach. Of course, the blank space can be populated by customizing the design.

Elegant dark Web Design

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Elegant Web Design Home Page with a presentation slider

Preview the site HERE

Elegant white Web Design

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Elegant Web Design 2 - Home Page with a video clip

Preview the site HERE.

The two above referenced sites are designed for media presentation. Their multiple gallery modules can hold most any current media format. Media embedded into flash offers a better protection against content theft while allowing for good quality images.

These two designs, optimized by Semiomantics will shortly be available from our store. Web Designers and Web Site developers can modify any files as we pass on all source files (fla).

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Elegant Web Design

Elegance and Luxury are the guidelines of a new web site I am setting up to be added to our Elegant  Web Design portfolio. The product addresses people or brands who are looking for a customized high-end media driven web site.

Building such sites is time consuming and demanding, namely when it comes to the media production and their formatting for high quality online use.

At present we have two sites under construction: a dark gray and a white design. The new product line will be called Protos Magas, a Greek term for the ultimate top notch quality.

Dark Elegance

Elegant Web Design often makes heavy concessions when it comes to SEO performance. In collaboration with the Semiomantics Site Smith we have developed technology to reach high visibility with flash driven web sites which compensates for the lack of readability of flash embedded content by Search Engines .

Here some first screen-shots of the new media driven Elegant Web Design.

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Elegant Web Design Home Page with a presentation slider

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Elegant Web Design Media Slides with text

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Elegant Web Design News Section

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Elegant Web Design Audio Library

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Elegant Web Design expanded gallery

More later.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Build your Flash Intro

After the 3D logo session last Friday, we have another unique session in store: Build your Flash Intro tonight at Ycademy.

Join from yorGOtalk at 7 pm London time (GMT).

Flash Intro

A flash Intro can be used in multiple ways, one of them being product marketing. Also, the format of the media is swf and can therefore easily be embedded into the flash website we are building at the March Online Seminar.

Have a look at a DEMO FLASH HERE.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Learning Basics of HTML

When you first start to do things on the internet you are quite happy to follow existing programs getting the feel of how it all operates and learning how to find your way around. Then comes the time when you want to start branching out a little on your own, doing things for yourself. This is the time when you need to learn some basics, like learning the ABC of the internet, learning some Basics of  HTML.

Some people are put of by this notion of learning something new thinking its really difficult, however HTML really isn’t that hard. Remember when you first  stared to do sums at school? well once you understood how it all worked it was all easy. HTML is pretty simple.

Basics of HTML

HTML stand for Hyper Text Markup Language. The language is easy, its plain english.The words we use everyday. To get these words to be visible in a browser we need to give the browser instructions to read them. The instructions are the HTML,  this is what the browser looks for to display correctly what you have written.

HTML Tags

Instructions come in the form of a series of  tags <tag>. Each tag gives an instruction. Each tag is a keyword surrounded by brackets <tag>. Its very much like the training soldiers receive to stand to attention and then to be at ease. You give the command, then you close or finish the command. So we have an opening <tag> and a closing </tag>. The / tells us its the closing tag instruction.
 
Just learning a few basic tag functions will help you with some very basics tasks online like inserting the html code for a banner for example. I remember myself the frustration I had when trying to do this when I first ventured out online without first learning some Basic HTML. Had I first learnt some of the basics I wouldn’t have wasted an hour or two in frustration.

Ycademy Basic HTML

Having a handy reference that you can refer to at anytime, like the ‘Ycademy Basic HTML’ is so useful, and you can return to it time and time again till you are more proficient in what you do. Printing out a copy and keeping it handy I personally found was easier. I was educated in the era when printed matter was all there was so old habits die hard.

Author: Zo Nicholas, Media, Marketing, Publishing. Co-Founder of YORGOO, Ycademy,YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader or Subscribe by Email.

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Build your Flash Website with Gene

I forget to mention Gene’s Gallery Draft in my last post ….

Gene Line’s Car Gallery

Ferrari-612-Scaglietti-One-

Gene Line Auto Parts

Check out the Slide-show from HERE

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.