Everyone should have at least one web based free e-mail account, just in case your regular e-mail is acting wonky. Choices include yahoo, hotmail, juno and a slew of others- but, my favorite for so many reasons is Gmail, from Google. And starting today, you don’t need an invite from someone else.

About Gmail
It’s a Gmail party and everyone is invited!
You can still invite your friends to enjoy Gmail’s spam protection, 2.8 GB free storage and other great features, but now you can also just tell them to visit www.gmail.com and sign up without an invitation.

A Gmail account gets you access to all kinds of other cool Google analysis tools, programs, statistics etc. So get on over to Google mail and sign up.

Lorelle has an amazing post about plugins for handling pictures, well worth the time to investigate. I’ve found that many themes don’t handle pictures well, and trying to attach a caption isn’t really something that a stock WordPress install can do. Until we have time to check out some plugins with WordPress 2.1, we’ll just send you to Lorelle’s page:

WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics « Lorelle on WordPress
WordPress offers fairly simple image uploading and the automatic creation of thumbnails, but there are a lot more you can do with your images with WordPress Plugins.

There are a lot of WordPress Plugins to help you upload, sort, arrange, enhance, edit, frame, popup, popin, lightbox, photo album, work with online image storage support and services, and manage your images.

Unfortunately, not all media-based WordPress Plugins, no matter how impressive and fun, are well supported or well documented. Creating an image-oriented WordPress Plugin is challenge, hard work, and takes a lot of maintenance as technology changes and WordPress upgrades. Many create these for fun and then let them go. I’ve done my best to only highlight the WordPress Plugins which feature strong documentation, easy instructions, and show recent activity and support.

One thing I can’t stress enough- remember to give your pictures great alt tags (title and description). Google will give a properly labeled photo great page rank if you have the search term in the alt text. A post I did with a photo of the band Supernova ended up number 4 in google for a bit- this was when the TV show was on and millions were watching.

If you don’t understand what to put in alt text, here is my rule- what would describe the picture to a blind person? Write a good description for a blind person- and you’ve got Google’s attention.

You can come to Chicago in June for a two day conference and spend $800, or you can visit Dayton and get a day for $79 (Everything is cheaper in Dayton OH). We’re proud to have our chief Websitetologist, David Esrati be one of the featured speakers at this conference:

Web Content 2007 – Chicago Business Conference on Internet Website Content June 18 & 19
Know the State-of-the-Art in Website Content Management

Web Content 2007 is for business professionals involved with creating, organizing and maintaining web content. The two-day conference provides three tracks: content design and access,content development and management and emerging tools and technologies. Each track offers attendees a selection of workshops, case studies, and presentations lead by recognized Internet authorities. Attend all sessions in one track or mix-and-match sessions in any track to create a customized program. Held in an intimate setting in Downtown Chicago participation is limited. Registration is now open. Save $100 if you register before May 4, 2007.

If you don’t believe that this Websitetology thing works: think again. We’ve never met any of the people who are speaking, or contacted them- they found us, from our online presence. Same goes for clients in Minneapolis, Austin, Raleigh and Jacksonville. Using the proper Content Management System, utilizing webstats and understanding search and web 2.0 will grow your business.