Author: Nancy McCord

We hear this all the time from website owners. I found the perfect picture, just take it and put it on my website.

It is important for clients and web professionals to know that taking an image or content from another site is a copyright infringement. You can not just right click and make something yours! Everything on the Web belongs to someone. Even if there isn’t a copyright notification at the bottom of the web page, the item can only be used with permission.

When we do images for websites we pay for the photos that we use. We typically use iStockPhotos and for $1 own a license to use a photo one time on a website. For each time we use the photo, we download and pay for it. We also use Microsoft’s free photos from the clip art gallery. The license on these images states that you can use them for all uses except for the creation of logos.

So don’t cheat, don’t steal get your images from a legitimate source. Remember even images on Google images are copyrighted! The biggest suggestion we can offer is that when you are using images and content for your commercial website use, the rules are different and the bar is higher, you can simply not afford to snatch something that belongs to someone else.

It used to be that what you read on a blog was an honest personal viewpoint, and in some cases, that is still how it is. Today however, you’d better start to be more careful about what you trust when you read a message on a blog.

Blogging has gone mainstream and when anything goes mainstream it is suddenly used for spin, advertising, and invisible veiled agendas. We are seeing an increasing use of paid advertising posts in the blogosphere without you, the reader, knowing that the writer is being paid to give a good review or supposed personal testimony on a product. Not only has that sabotaged the blogosphere and compromised some bloggers who were not forthright about their sponsorship, but it has made all blogs now suspect of spin and a lack of sincerity. Is there a hidden message behind many blogs? You bet there is, and I am bemoaning the loss of innocence of a great medium.

We have never participated in blogging schemes to create spin or bogus testimonies for our clients and never will. We are simply not driven by money in what we do. The majority of our clients use our ghost blogging services to create great search engine friendly content for their websites as an effort to get the “leg up” on others when it comes to organic placement. This is what we do and what we love.

As I work with the blog players and blog owners behind the scenes, I have seen it all! So my word to you is, be careful about what you read on a blog, can you trust it? Weigh the message before you embrace it against what you read on other blogs, and don’t make a decision or base a judgement on a blog post that you have read. You may be simply be reading a spinmaster’s blog message being used to shape a viewpoint or to create viral marketing on the Web.

We’ve just finished one of our “up in five day” websites that we call Quick Launch for The Identity Theft Institute. Click our post title to visit this nice five page site done with one of our own expandable templates.

Quick Launch is a special program for us. We are a custom web design house and yet have found that some clients have special needs or budgets that simply won’t fit with our custom web design services. Quick Launch sites start at $600 and allow you to have an inexpensive web presence done quickly.

For this site, our logo designer also custom created a logo for web and print to brand this new business. Take a look and see what you think at http://www.identitytheftinstitute.com/

My team has just started blogging on this blog, http://www.beathillaryclinton.com/. I have to say that this may be some of our best work and we are really having a ball with this blog. Click the post title to get a chuckle out of the posts you’ll find there. (You may not agree with the political point of view, but that is what ghost blogging is all about being able to wear the hat of the client and write to their specifications.)

Here’s a teaser that got me chuckling even as I posted it to the blog for the post “Oprah and Hillary Slap Fest: The Babes are Takin’ Off the Gloves“.

“In her best Linda Evan’s style, just the other day, Hillary, cool as a cucumber, claimed Oprah’s stumping for Barack was not a big deal, telling the press that she was a “great admirer of Oprah”. Then… like a cobra… she struck! Hillary whipped out her secret weapon, a political endorsement from none other than the Golden-Throated Diva of the Divine, Barbra Streisand!!!

“Hiss and MEOW!! Take that Oprah!!

“Although Oprah can claim a TV show and a widely circulated glossy mag, Babs has sold 146 million records and is the darling of the most-voting demographic in the country: upper middle class white people over 50. Will be interesting to see how this plays out come Demo-convention time.”

The posts we have planned for next week will really get you laughing, so keep an eye on this one even if you are voting for Hillary Clinton.