#tech&design

[liquidblox]

The Utopia of DIY internet

In the new world of DIY internet, anyone can become a media outlet. Graphic designers are the new web developers. Teachers make online teaching materials on a daily basis.

Is DIY internet becoming reality?

From 2005 to 2008, MySpace was the largest social networking site. From the DIY standpoint, it was heaven. Page content could be personalized. All kinds of themes could be used from glittery neon colors to intentionally butt ugly. With a little bit of knowledge of how to work with stylesheets, a person could really create a profile that expressed themself.

Classic MySpace was acquired by Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake in 2011. Since then, business has downscaled and focus is now on the music industry.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for MySpace lovers out there. Brie Hiramine from Mashable writes that the Tumblr blogging tool is showing signs of becoming the new MySpace. But do we really need a new MySpace?

Couldn’t DIY internet be practical and exciting?

Many modern website builders have taken coding out of the loop and made it possible for regular people to create functional web content. One of these is LiquidBlox who’s main focus is in online magazines and catalogues.

LiquidBlox CEO, Jani Hiltunen says the self-service-product has a life of its own. It pushes the boundaries of DIY internet. LiquidBlox staff wonder why many users in Colombia signed in at the same time and all of them published similar publications about Greek history. Later they learned that a school class had started to use their FREE version for school work.

LiquidBlox has been used to create everything from kids’ birthday party invitations to photographers’ portfolios. Four fashion boutique keepers started publishing a fashion magazine that looks so professional that even professional designers think it is.

One of the most explosive expressions of creativity is Smart Happy Magazine. Lisa Lillywhite, a writer and an artist says the magazine is a project to bring together her love of nature and geometry and to share it with others.

This is what Lisa has to say about LiquidBlox: “I’m pretty much self taught when it comes to onscreen graphics. I learn a few tools and then quickly get them to do what I want. So I fell in love with LiquidBlox’s layout tools.  It took just a bit of practise to work it out and then I was away; dividing the blocks up and adding text or images in. Once you understand the concept of the layers of blocks you can make it look however you want.”

[liquidblox]

Are digital publications only for big media?

As circulations diminish, printing and distribution costs of magazines, and any publications for that matter, constantly keep rising. Many large publishers are forcing consumers to take on print subscriptions on top of an online subscription to keep the printing machines rolling. Editorial deadlines get shorter, yet at the same time, it takes longer for the printed edition to arrive at your doorstep. And all the time, the pressure for raising the prices grows. All of this has a great effect on the content of magazines and publications. Digital formats are pushing the traditional media and publishing formats constantly.

Why is the transition to digital still lagging behind? Big media houses have had the resources and plenty of time to develop smart solutions for digital publications, where the content from print is brought into a completely new reading format. At the same time, many smaller publishers and organizations are still struggling with unfriendly PDF e-papers.

As an example, Wired has managed to grow it’s tablet footprint to more than 240 000 paying readers and the audience is growing all the time. Keep in mind that we are not talking about a simple e-paper here, but about a tablet optimized digital publication.

The transition toward digital publications is getting faster as we speak and it is not only the privilege of large media houses anymore. There are several ways for smaller publishers, ranging from local newspapers to the community college down the road, to transform their content into something digital that is easy to read and share. Digital is becoming the primary way of publishing, not just a side product of print content.

Publishers already have several good tools for creating digital content without forgetting the all important magazine-like reading experience. With LiquidBlox, you can use readymade publication and magazine templates that can be customized to fit the purpose or just simply start your publication from a blank page. The easy user interface makes it possible for virtually anyone to create a publication that looks professional and is well made.

For example, the magazine of the Finnish family businesses union recently decided to put more focus into their digital magazine. So far, the experiences have been nothing but positive, says their communications manager, Kirsi Hölttä.

[liquidblox]

The Magic of lists

Long before the rise of today’s information technology, humans have had a tendency to use all kinds of gadgets to help us remember stuff. And perhaps the most essential of these is the good old list. You encounter lists everywhere online and offline, even more than you might notice.

For example, the shopping list is an essential tool making the trip to the supermarket possible. You most certainly will not remember to buy something you planned without your carefully made list that you just forgot on the kitchen table.

Another clear indication of the importance of lists to mankind is the amount of different apps and software that are basically just list-making tools. Evernote, Basecamp and Trello are just some examples.

And because lists are such a natural and essential thing to us, no wonder they are everywhere in web publications. If you think about websites, they are full of lists:

product lists in catalogues

image galleries

news column lists

contact info lists

list of links in navigation

list of videos

lists of team members

Naturally LiquidBlox software also has different kinds of pre-made list templates available. Image above shows a product list and an online magazine navigational list.  You can edit the number of items and reorder them to your liking. Then just replace the placeholder text and images with your content.

In addition to using our ready-to-use list templates that can be chosen from the menu on the top in the block template view, you can also create one from scratch. When you have a block highlighted, choose the add content option and click add list element. Then select the type of list you want from the templates and define the number of columns to use.

Hopefully this post was able to demonstrate how to make lists in LiquidBlox. Hit us with an email, If we are missing some vital list type as a template.

Happy list-making!

[liquidblox]

Is your online magazine content SEO friendly?

There’s a saying on the web: “The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results.” Apparently 95% of people don’t look beyond the first page when searching for something. Making your content search engine optimized is more important than ever. Can you afford to keep vital information in content that cannot be accessed by Google or other search engines? Probably not. Missing sales is not an option.

And still, many struggle to get their publications search engine optimized. For example, in PDF files the text is often vectorized and thus search engines cannot read and index it. This is often done in order to preserve the fonts used without embedding them in the file. Another common mistake is that PDF files are converted into pictures, and while Google’s abilities might seem godlike, it cannot “read” pictures. At least not yet. Or the pages of the publication are not rendered in a way that search engine algorithms can crawl through it grabbing the text and other metadata.

In LiquidBlox all of the problems listed above have been taken care of. Don’t believe it? Find out yourself by typing “LiquidBlox Publication is a set pages next to each other” into Google. The first result is a direct link leading to page 2 of our how-to guide.

Let’s think about this for a moment. For example, when making a catalogue, all the product information and other text descriptions can be found and indexed by Google. And the magic making all of this possible is HTML5. Each page is also it’s own entity in the sense that you can link to a specific page.

Read more about how we have done SEO at LiquidBlox at LiquidBlox.com

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How to create a stunning portfolio in 5 steps

Life is not easy for artists and designers. For example, creating and updating your personal portfolio can be a tedious task and can take time from more important work. For freelancers it is especially important to create an impressive portfolio that displays your pieces of work in a nice and easy way.

The point of this blog post is to introduce a 5-step model, a kind of a workflow for portfolio creation and updating.

Step 1:

Plan your portfolio. Make a broad outline of the structure of your portfolio with Word, Evernote or even plain paper. The important thing is that you have planned the format and the contents.

Step 2:

If your works of art are not in a digital format, take or have somebody else take excellent and clear photographs of your work for your online portfolio. Nobody will look twice at a portfolio with sloppy and bad quality photography.

Step 3

Write clear and short descriptions for each picture, that sums up the body of work displayed. Don’t hesitate to emphasize your strengths and techniques you have mastered.

Step 4

When your online portfolio is finished, go through it one more time and make sure there are no mistakes! An intricate portfolio gives an image of an established designer.

Step 5

Share it with the world! For extra convenience create a short URL with a service like bit.ly or goog.gl, so it’ll be easier to share on social media. Maybe you can even make business cards with your contact information and the link to your portfolio.

All of the aforementioned steps are possible with LiquidBlox, in an effective and easily manageable manner. When your portfolio is made with LiquidBlox, everybody has always an up-to-date version of your portfolio as the portfolio is updated real-time online. Click here to sign up!

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How to use templates in our online magazine software

Block templates make creating publications a breeze. We have designs for every use, from headline templates to picture collages. Some of them are small and simple, some of them form more complex layout structures. They are created with the aim to cater all kinds of creative needs, from creating online magazines to displaying your art in a handy portfolio.

And by no means is the usage of templates being forced on you, the user. They’re there to help you out when needed, but you can always start creating your online catalogue or magazine layouts from scratch with LiquidBlox. As the picture below demonstrates, the templates are accessed from the “create from template” button when adding content to a page.

The whole idea of templates is to make creating all kinds of publications as easy as possible. Choose from different pre-designed block layouts, to construct the desired pages for an online magazine, catalogue, portfolio, or any other publication. The block templates come in many different shapes and sizes, so you can have many different blocks on the same page. For example, one template could be for the headline, one for the picture collage and one for the text, all on the same page.

Another option is the utilize templates only partially. If creating nice-looking text blocks isn’t really your thing, then use a template for that and create the rest yourself. Elements created with block templates can be edited as any other element. Outcome of your design might be quite different from the the template you started with.

Replacing text

So how about altering and customising those blocks? When you want to add text, you have the obvious two choices: type it in or copy and paste it from another document. Just remember to be careful with text formatting when pasting text. Sometimes formatting is not web competitive and does not work online.  Then it might be wise to use the ”paste only text” –option to just paste the plain text.

TIP: when talking about the text elements of your publication is that the styles of the paragraphs and headings of your text are not carried over from one LiquidBlox publication to another, so the block templates will look like the examples when making a fresh new publication before adding block templates.

Replacing images

With blocks with pictures in them, you have two options. You can either upload a new picture from your files or choose from the ones you have uploaded before. There are a two basic options that are important when fitting your picture content into your publication. The ”crop” mode cuts the image to fill out the desired block. The ”fit” mode adjusts the image size so that is fits completely into the given space.

Editing layout

And the block layouts themselves can be edited. Changing their height and width is incredibly easy, just activate the block and drag the handle to make the block the desired size. All the lines that separate blocks can also be edited in the same way.

We’re adjusting our editor all the time, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment, positive or negative, about the usability, design, or anything at all. Do it through our chat in the page editor or send us email at: https://liquidblox.com/contact

Happy designing!

[liquidblox]

Make your catalogue both for print and web with our online catalogue software

The integration of digital and physical worlds is still in progress. As they say, old habits die hard. Many people still design their publications first for print, which are later converted to digital form. From the viewpoint of the online visitor or shopper, the result of this kind of solution is often less than optimal.

No responsiveness. If your publication doesn’t look good on every device, you won’t be taken seriously. Even search engines disregard poorly mobile competitive content.  No interaction. Would you like to click a link that goes straight to your own online store? Oops, not possible. A common phenomena is also to claim for the publication to be “mobile-friendly” when in reality you have to zoom in to be able the read the text. Not very handy and convincing, eh?

Online catalogue software  for multichannel publishing

Our mission here at LiquidBlox is to solve these problems and make creating catalogues and other publications online extremely easy. Publications that are made online should be remarkably easy to convert to print. Our software is easy to master and it creates catalogues, portfolios et cetera which are native to the web environment. What’s not to like?

Our HTML5-based in-browser editor/publishing tool enables anyone to save the digital version of a catalogue as a PDF file for print. As the picture below demonstrates, when you’re done with your creation our software offers you two choices: Publish the version online on our platform, or download it as A PDF to print out or to email to your customers.

Wondering about the size of your publication? A4 is one of most widely used sizes in publishing. Our software offers a handy marker to help you create exactly A4-sized publication. Just pay attention to the little marker on the edge of the page and your creation will be just the right size!

Happy publishing!

Sign up here and try it out!