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My revised website  is updated and now I will let it rest awhile before adding any more.  I need to be sure the links are working and the pages still make me happy after a week or two.

The site includes links to articles, books I have illustrated, a bio and contact along with portfolio pages in color and line.  Using the upgrade to Dreamweaver CS5 has been a bit of a challenge for me personally but I am finding it easier to use day by day.

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I am thrilled to announce the dawn of a new era at First Book:  the official debut of our brand-new website!

Our old site had reached “vintage” status, so we hope you will find our new site faster, easier to navigate and much more useful. (We think it’s pretty nice to look at, too!)

I especially love our new video, The Story of First Book, with starring roles by some of our favorite authors, including Mo Willems, friend to pigeons everywhere.

Read more about our impact , our outstanding partners, and how we continue to innovate.  First Book is helping guide the publishing industry and giving heroic educators greater choice and voice in the books and learning resources available to them like never before.

If you are a teacher or you know of a group that serves kids in need – from birth to age 18 – it is easy to tap into First Book’s resources . With a growing inventory of top-quality books at prices 50% – 90% below retail, our revolutionary online bookstore, the First Book Marketplace, makes books affordable to schools and programs serving kids in need.

I invite you to make a donation to support First Book’s mission – every $2 pays for a brand-new book for a child in need.

Our web site is just one sign of many exciting things to come.  We’re testing e-books now with plans to provide reading resources in new formats and technologies.  We are working to make sure that children from low-income families are not left on the other side of the digital divide.

Please let your friends and social networks know about First Book.

If you’re on Twitter, tweet about us to five friends and ask them to do the same.  Here’s a sample message: Check out @FirstBook ‘s new website! http://www.firstbook.org

If you’re on Facebook, “like” us  and post this update to your status: Check out First Book’s new website! http://www.firstbook.org

And let me know what you think of our new site.  I’d love to hear from you!

Thank you,

Kyle Zimmer
President and CEO, First Book

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Hi everyone,
If you have been over at my new website, you may notice that did a little retweeking. I rearranged the layout of the "Home" page and changed the way the portfolio images are viewed. At first the portfolio images  opened up in a new window but I changed them to open in the same window for ease of navigation. I took the great advice form my friends in the zero2illo forum, and also moved up my image rotator on this page so that most of it is visible once you land on the page and then you don't have to scroll down to get the full image. I also decreased the height of my header as well, to help create more space for the image rotator. At the top are my favorite 2 of the 9 variations I came up with for a new header design. I know 9, yeah...totally type A of me- hahaha.
 I opted to go with the top header image. If you have a preference I'd love to hear it!:)
Now that the website is live I am looking forward to getting back to messing around with my plasticine and get creating. I have a project I hope to finish in a few weeks so stay tuned for updates.
Bye for now!

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Hello,
I just launched my new portfolio website suzannedelrizzo.com. It will probably take a few days(?) to show up as I just submitted it to Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., so hopefully it will be crawled soon so it is visible to the world!
I was hoping to get it up yesterday but we've had a nasty bout of stomach flu on a rampage thru the house and all the kids have come down with it ON SEPARATE DAYS!!! So this website launch has had to wait.
I hope you will all take a second to read through the content, and check out all of my images and if you notice any typo.s or have any suggestions, please don't hesitate to share! 
Thanks hubby for being patient when I was frustrated and tired, you are the best! But I think it was worth all the work!;)
If anyone is thinking of creating their own website I highly recommend the Headway WP theme. It really made it easy once I got the hang of it.
Crawl googlebots crawl.....I wanna share my website with everyone!

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So this is the reason I have been so absent from my dear little blog lately.....I'm finally putting a proper website together.  Here is a sneak peek of my new portfolio website, well a screen shot of the top half of the "Home" page at least. I am so excited to share it with you all, but it isn't quite finished yet. I hope to launch it next week if all goes as planned!
We've had a case of the stomach flu hit the family so fingers crossed it doesn't make the rounds to all of us and slow down my momentum!
I am using the Headway theme from Wordpress and it has been tons of fun playing around with it.

I wanted to have the same look and feel on both my website and this blog. But since it looks a little more complicated  to make the switch from Blogger to WP, I've decided  to stay put and just match it up as best I can for the time being.
So I switched templates, customized it a bit by changing the background to my cool plasticine image, re-sized my cute header, and changed some fonts and colours and voila!
What do ya think?
I hope everyone will please check out my website once it goes live at suzannedelrizzo.com, and give lots of constructive crit.s and comments too.

It looks like Febuary is going to be a busy month with artwork that has been put on the back burner while I've been getting the website put together so I promise to have lots of artwork illustrations to show soon!:)

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I have a valuable guest article from Beth Ann Erickson. So, without further ado:

Generate Web Traffic
By Beth Ann Erickson

You've got a website. Good for you! Now comes the hard part: How do you get traffic?

I've read that when it comes to owning your own site, what matters most is how many hits you get.  However, I disagree.

As a writer, you're selling a specialized product - yourself and your writing skills.  This means you may not want every member of the general public visiting your site.  What you do want are potential clients and customers to find you.

How do you do that?

You can start by creating an e-mail signature.  A signature is a blurb your program inserts at the end of every e-mail you send. 

Mine reads:

Make your writing sparkle. Write killer queries. Get published.
Subscribe to Writing Etc. the free e-mag for writers.  Receive the
free e-booklet "Power Queries" by subscribing today. 
http://filbertpublishing.com

Microsoft Outlook allows you to create a signature under "Tools" on the menu bar then select "Options."  Other e-mail programs are probably different.  If you need help, just go to your program's
"help" option and run a search.

Make your signature concise, benefit oriented, and don't forget to include your URL.  Use everything you know about copywriting to write something snappy and memorable.

Now that your signature is done, write ten to twenty key words that describe your web site.

FilbertPublishing's key words include:
Writer, Write, Writing, Freelance, Copywriting, Fiction, Nonfiction... you get the point.

Now you're ready to register with a few search engines.

There are thousands of search engines out in cyber space but most of them aren't going to give you enough traffic to warrant registering with them.  I'd suggest you just shoot for the biggies and then go back to the smaller ones if you want to.

Some of the engines you may want to "submit your site" to are:

http://google.com 
http://AltaVista.com
http://www.dogpile.com
http://www.webcrawler.com
http://nerdworld.com
http://www.yahoo.com

As you "submit your site," you'll be using your key words and signature "blurb" to fill in their forms.

If your web site is about a particular subject, chances are there is a "web ring" you can join.  Go to http://www.yahoo.com, type in "web ring" and check them out.  Filbert Publishing is a member of a
number of fiction writing web rings.

Next, you need to find out where your potential clients hang out.

If you want to write for small businesses, find e-mail lists and newsgroups that cater to these folks.  A quick search in Yahoo or the Google Newsgroup (formally Deja News) will give you enough information to get to work.

Frequent these newsgroups, e-mail lists, and listservs, and join in the conversation.  Don't promote yourself blatantly, but let your new e-mail signature do the selling for you.  Blatant selling is not permitted, but the soft sell of an e-mail sig is certainly welcomed.

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I'm a techno-geek. There's no arguing that. But I'm bad about buying gadgets that I use for like a week (like that ereader I've got around here somewhere) and then never picking it up again.

So, it took me awhile to convince myself to get an iPad. Fortunately, the thing is pretty cool, and if nothing else, I'll probably use it for quite some time as a car TV for my son for roadtrips. (Although if I have to listen to Elmo's squeaky voice for another minute in the car, I'm not sure I'll be rational enough to be held accountable for my actions.)

However, being said techno-geek, one of the first things I had to do was design new wallpaper for my iPad based on various CBAY Books. Since I was working on The Amulet of Amon-Ra website at the time, I made paper for it first. And now, since just this very minute I finished that site, I'm now sharing my techno-geekiness with everyone.

Screenshots of my iPad:

And because you can also hold it horizontally:


Nope, I'm not a geek. Not a geek at all.

Want to show your Amulet pride? You can get the iPad/iPhone background here.

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