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Utilizing stones found in a river bank near his home, Hirotoshi Itoh creates sculptures that juxtapose the original shape and hardness with surprising humor...

You love photography? And you love reading? So do I, and this article is for us! I started recently compiling my summer reading list with interesting, educational, cool and good priced books!

I'm using TU Me, a free, all-in-one global communicator that puts your texts, calls, shared photos and more on a brilliantly simple timeline...

If we don’t own our minds, we’re like pawns in a game where we’re not the player. We’re being played. Corporations, governments, advertisers and even religions (oops, I said it) have gone to great lengths to control your mind. Sometimes their tactics are obvious, but most of the time they are downright sneaky.

If we want to ensure that we’re living for ourselves and not serving some corporation’s agenda, we have to put on our mental armor. We have to arm our minds so we can first know when their is an assault on our sovereignty.

Here are 10 tools you can use to avoid brainwashing and retain the ownership of your mind:

1. Decrypt media spin.
The media uses many different tools and angles to sensationalize things that aren’t inherently sensational. “Experts generally agree” can mean a community college professor and “recent surveys find” can mean the polling of 10 people...

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In a previous article I have suggested some ideas to consider for improving your package design in general.

Managing a website relaunch or launch is not straight forward; there are so many issues to consider from marketing strategy, customer experience to content strategy to the technical challenges of selecting and integrating different technology platforms and web services.

Here are 20 key points: http://bit.ly/JIymfF

1. Define Vision, strategy, goals

2. Consider audience and users’ needs

3. Schedule planning, phasing, piloting and testing

By figuring out what’s most important to launch first, you can have more focused results and then you are setting yourself up for the ongoing quality of your site.

 Think also about the maintenance and sustainability of the site in all relevant ways – financial resources, staffing, design, technical upgrades, etc.

4. Plan your content strategy

Planning content is key

Too often too much time and attention is spent on the application rather than the content and user experience. The best CMS cannot compensate for poor visual design or lacklustre content

5. Review changes in landscape and technology

Anything from business model, regulations and laws, your knowledge base, to new opportunities and innovation

6. Get the budget and resourcing estimates right

7. Put in place measurement, analytics, KPIs

Working out how you will measure performance and success on an ongoing basis is essential

8. Define a Leadership / project governance structure

Appoint a single person to implement the online strategy and give them the authority to make decisions.

9. Get stakeholder engagement and “buy in”

 Define the engagement process

10. Establish which platforms you’re serving

 Consider the platforms on which the site will be used: does it need to work adaptively for mobile devices now and in the future. Will it need regular upgrades after launch to allow for new features and functionality? If so, how will these upgrades be made (and paid for)? How will it deal with the inexorable march of browser specs?”

11. How does the website fit into the wider online and offline world?

12. Enable sharing

Make sure it’s really easy to share, like, tweet etc. every page of your website

13. Branding and visual design

Clearly this is a major consideration – and often the most apparent change externally

Don’t under or overvalue visual design, just because it’s what everybody talks about.”

14. Plan for SEO from the beginning

SEO considerations need to be an integral part of the site design process.”

15. Get the requirements right for the content management systems

16. Plan launch marketing and messaging

“If you build it they will come. No they won’t.”

Social marketing/strategy is important but don’t overlook the need for:

a) Good old fashioned marketing. b) Your ‘attitude’. c) Your approach – take a look at your message. If it takes you half a page to describe what you want your reader to know – then you need to go back and redo it.

17. Make sure your site performance is sufficient

Google will penalise you for slow-loading pages (we have the data to prove it) – but this opens up a whole can of worms – because to accomplish speed you sometimes need to compromise on the dynamic and the beautiful.

18. Get the technology delivery capacity right

Spending too much is a waste of money. Spending too little will literally cost you money.

19. Don’t start with the homepage

Design the homepage at the end of the process – or as near as you can, because designing a homepage before you have confirmed the information architecture, defined the key needs of the users, etc, will mean numerous changes

20. Stay fit and well

a) Sleep b) Eat c) Exercise d) Meditate e) Practice - Being humble!

It’s going to be great

Original Post: http://bit.ly/JIymfF