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Your website is the online extension of your brand, and as such, it should follow the same visual guidelines as your entire business. While your logo is your own trademark that distinguishes your brand from your competitors, it alone does not tell your business’ story, its values nor does it depict the entire picture.

The tone of your business voice is an important aspect of how your market relates to you. Your marketing campaigns and how you choose to run them are indicative of your business’ core values. The fonts you use when addressing these messages can become trademarks of your brand. And the colors – think about the Coca-Cola red – not only is it unique, it’s also recognized by millions of people all around the world.

Colors matter when you create your brand, just as much as they do when they accompany your services and products. It is the fastest way to create a connection between your brand and your audience. This precise reason is why the liveBooks website templates can be customized beyond their initial state.

Let’s focus on adding borders to the images you upload on your website. These borders are a great tool to use that give each image its own presence on your website. They can be white and thin, which goes well with any website that has a color background, they can be colorful and bold, or anywhere in between.

There are two ways you can go about to adding borders to your images.

1. Sitewide borders – In your design editor go to Sitewide – Images. Enable Show borders and define their color, opacity and width. This will add borders to all images on your website. 
2. Gallery borders – In the design editor go to the page with the gallery or image you want to customize. Scroll down to the image settings and enable borders.

If you added site-wide borders and want to disable them on specific pages, you can do so by following the second set of commands. When you’re happy with the result, publish your page and the changes will instantly become visible.

When changing your colors you have to make sure you’re picking the right one. Going solely on visual similarity does not guarantee you’ve made the right choice and you need consistency in your brand. One reason you might not pick the right color is your monitor’s colors: sometimes it’s calibrated and it shows the precise colors you need, but most often it’s not.

That’s why you need to check the HEX code of your brand colors and add it when using the design editor. If you know the name of your color, you can find its HEX code here. In our design editor you can either use the HEX code, or the RGB (red-green-blue) inputs for your colors.

So what are you waiting for? Give this feature a try! Remember, you can always save your design before making drastic changes to your website, so your work is always safe.

Don’t have a website yet? We offer a two week free trial for all our websites, so you can play around our editors and create the perfect website for your business.

Photographers have the chance to meet with Midwest’s leading art buyers and creatives!

Boulevard Artists is a marketing company for photographers with an online platform, events around the US, and face to face meetings. Through two tiers of membership, BLVD and BLVDSelect, we build custom strategies with our roster to get their work in front of the best art buyers in the business and help them close the deal on the biggest assignments.

Boulevard Artists is gearing up for this year’s Chicago and Minneapolis portfolio reviews, an opportunity for commercial and editorial photographers to show their portfolios to some of the Midwest’s most influential art buyers, art directors, and creatives. At these intimate and elegant events, photographers meet with each reviewer for 20 minutes one-to-one and back-to-back. Each event lasts for two full days. Breakfast, lunch and happy hour drinks are provided–there’s plenty of time for the creatives and photographers to get to know each other.

Photographers will have their work seen by creatives from Havas, McDonald’s, Leo Burnett, La-Z-Boy and Crate & Barrel., among others.

Applications are open now for the events in Chicago (Sept 25th & 26th) and Minneapolis (October 2nd & 3rd)!

See the full reviewer list for Chicago.

See the full reviewer list for Minneapolis.

It’s an exclusively professional photography portfolio review, and the work is highly curated.

View application to join the review.

View costs and packages.

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Contact: Joshua Herman, joshua@blvdartists.com

If your business promotes goods and services that are addressed solely at the adult audience, you should give an extra thought on who visits your website. Though the matter of age restriction online is a subject of ongoing debate, our suggestion is to view your website as you would your physical store.

Let’s say you are in the artisanal distillery business. Would you feel comfortable having a 12 year old roaming around the place? Or perhaps you are a photography artist who just opened a show of your latest bridal boudoir images. Our bet is, for both situations, you would feel more at ease if any minor visiting your business would be accompanied by an adult. And since you can’t control who reaches your adult-targeted website, the age restriction pop up comes in handy.

3 outcomes of your age restriction pop up

1. Your visitor is too young to read. This, by any mean, doesn’t mean they’re not tech-savvy. They can go from link to link until they reach your child-sensitive website. The age restriction pop up will prevent them to enter your website unless they click the right answer. There’s one in two chances they get it right. If you phrase the question right and link the redirect to a kid-safe website, chances are you successfully guide your potential visitor to another page that is better suited for them, with very little chance they will go back to your page to choose the other option. We’ll come to setting up the pop up later in the article.
2. Your visitor does know how to read and is thought not to lie online. This is the best situation you can hope for. It’s when your visitor has been given guidance either at home or at school as to how to behave both online and offline. This implies that your age restriction pop up will be answered truthfully and the kid will not enter your website, instead they will be redirected to another website.
3. Your visitor read your pop up and decides they will enter regardless. It is an outcome you might encounter and you’ll probably never hear about it. This course of action is beyond your control and there is very little, if anything, to do about it. It will be your choice if you wish to set up your galleries with a disclaimer as the first image, or if you would feel that a disclaimer should serve as the subtitle of your pages. This will be your personal choice and should be considered when it doesn’t interfere with your brand’s overall concept.

Your age restricted website as seen by Google

To see if your website should have an age restriction pop up, you can view Google’s policy on adult content here. This guideline will shed some light as to what is not considered child friendly. One thing to take out of it is that your age restriction will not decrease the rank of your page.

How to set up the age restriction pop up on your website

• In your account, go to the Settings page (gear icon)
• Under Business Type, select one of the four types:
  1. Brewery
  2. Distillery
  3. Specialty Foods
  4. Winery
• Log out of your dashboard and log back in
• Select Settings (gear icon)
• Rollover Extras under the Settings header
• Select Age Verification under Extras 

Setting up the proper pop up

Now that age verification is enabled on your website, you can go ahead and set up the message that will pop up on entry, as well as the redirect link.

First, in the Age Verification tab, you must enable it.

1. Fill in the title – this can be the title of your page or any other message you wish to convey to your visitors.
2. Fill in the prompt question – the answers your visitors will be given are Yes (which allows them to enter your website) and No (which will automatically redirect them to another website of your choice).
3. Add the Under 21 redirect URL – our advice is to send your underage audience to a website that is targeted at them and, at the same time, draw their interest so that they will not return to your page and choose the other answer.
4. Publish your changes to add age restriction to your website. To disable this feature, simply toggle the age verification feature.

When age verification is enabled, your pop up will appear regardless of what link your visitors use to enter your website.

Age verification is just one of the many features that make liveBooks a reliable platform for your business website. Not convinced? Head over to our website and start your free trial today!

The Internet is full of GIFs, and for good reason – they are the perfect image format to portray a visual loop compressed in a very small size. They go well with the widespread mobile usage – their loading time is short and they use very little mobile data. They are easy to share and embed, whether in blog posts, chatting and, yes, as part of your portfolio website, too.

GIFs are not usually known for their high quality, but they can render 256 colors in 8-bit color images. That’s why, the sharper looking GIFs you might commonly find online portray mostly geometrical figures, logos or 3D renders. This is the general tone set by the majority of GIF posters, but that’s not all GIFs can be.

The greatest thing about your GIFs is that they can create a meaningful context or portray emotions. They create an unseen bond with the viewer and a sense of fulfilled expectation. They are super easy to add to your liveBooks website. These reasons alone should convince you to at least give GIFs a chance to be part of your portfolio.

Create GIFs from photos

Adobe Photoshop is the best tool to use when the source of your GIFs is your image gallery. Head over to the Adobe help page for a short and great tutorial on how to create animated GIFs from your images. The plus side of using your dedicated software when creating GIFs from images is quality control in a private medium.

Use snippets from your videos

Sharing videos is great, but creating GIF teasers from your videos to add them to your home page grid gallery is ten times as awesome. You can create GIFs from videos in Photoshop, and the link in our previous paragraph has a section dedicated to that.

You can also use online GIF creators such as Giphy – it creates GIFs from your YouTube or Vimeo videos, but you can also upload your video source from your computer. While the resulting GIFs come in good quality and don’t have a watermark, each time you create a GIF it is automatically uploaded to the Giphy library.

GIFs on your liveBooks site

You can add GIFs to your site just like you do with any other image – add them to your image collection or straight to the image block. They act like any other image, so you can adjust their widths, add overlays or hover effects, or even set them as backgrounds.

Our suggestion is to use them in grid type galleries, where their size is usually smaller. This way they will create the awesome dynamic effect without looking too grainy.

The pronunciation debate

You can say it like in gift, or like the peanut butter Jif – the debate is still on. But one thing’s for sure, regardless of how you want to pronounce it, you should give GIFs a try on your website.

Sign up for a free trial today and get in all the action the liveBooks website builder has to offer!