Create Your animated 3D Logo Tonight

Let’s have some fun tonight at our relaxed Friday session: create your 3D Logo and make it spin!

For tonight’s participants we have a great logo creator in store which you may want to try out … and keep for future use.

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Bianca Logo

or click on the below to see the animation:

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Bianca 3D Logo

The Download link will be disabled in 3 hours from now!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Build your Flash Website

For the purpose of the March Ycademy online seminar, we will equip Seminar Participants with a professional Storyboard software. The tool allows you to plan your site. Working with a Storyboard will save time and provides a great way of communicating with customers.

Example Storyboard

This is a sample based on screen-shots to show the defined layouts by the Evolution Script.

The storyboard is not really populated, except that it indicates which xml script is concerned. More tonight at the call.

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Storyboard PDF

The storyboard can also be exported in form of a movie as the case may be:

Click HERE for a sample.

Join tonight’s call to see more from the Storyboard!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Create your 3D Logo

Ever wanted to create your own 3D logo? And get one of these Hollywood looks or glow like on Broadway?

Well, it’s possible!

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Yorgo Logo

A bit of color, a nice font, a bit of bevel, some light and a shadow and you are in the race. Of course you can choose some more fun colors and textures or even neon light, your imagination is the limit.

Once you have finished your basic design, add some animation to give it this touch of the rotating Big Mac on next corner’s Junk Food kiosk. An axe to rotate around, a .GIF format, a background to drop the shadow on, yeahhh you may even add some music and you are ready to rotate on top of the Empire State Building … or as the case may be on the Eiffel Tower.

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Yorgo 3D Logo

As these images may stress my transparent image handler on this site, I have loaded the two images to a separate page HERE.

PS: If you are interested in learning how to create your logo in animated 3D format, just register for the March 2010 Ycademy Seminar and build the most smashing site you have ever owned!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Daar-us-Sunnah WP Mosque Theme

Designing a Website for a Mosque is a challenge, namely a cultural one. The beauty of Muslim religious art and the spiritual guidance by the customer need to flow into the web design. The site’s functions needs to take into account a defined set of rules to respect.

We are right now facing this challenge as we are custom tailoring a website for the Daar-us-Sunnah Mosque in London. The Semiomantics Site Smith is developing a framework in the respect of Muslim culture, tradition and spirituality.

This project is sponsored by Global Sports US, London.

WP Best Mosque Theme for Daar-us-Sunnah

The first draft of the WP Best Mosque Theme shows already some of the features:

The features include:

• Brand new Showcase Slider
• Full Width single page layout
• Drop-down for Categories and children pages
• Footer and sidebar widgets + custom Ad widget
• Stylish headers without SEO loss
• Option for image logo or stylish dynamic text logo
• Automatic post lengths
• Threaded Comments, 7 deep
• Gravatar and widget ready
• Tableless code
• Cross Browser Compatible
• Wordpress 2.9.2 Compatible
• Special Theme options control panel for easy customization
• Over 50 easy customization options

WP Best Mosque Screen-shots

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WP Best Mosque white

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WP Best Mosque black

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WP Best Mosque dune

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WP Best Mosque dune single post

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Global Sports US New Headers

Global’s new site will get new headers, based on pictures from London. Here below some samples. The study is about selecting the captivating frame and to add a simple Global logo to it in the top left corner.

Global Headers

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Global Sports US Header 1

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Global Sports US Header 2

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Global Sports US Header 3

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Global Sports US Header 4

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Global Sports US Header 5

At present we play with a hovering header background picture. To display more pictures a rotator can be built into the script signed Semiomantics.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Elegant WordPress

Advanced editing features help to give each post its individual touch and feel. The present post will show some of the features built into this site for Elegant WordPress editing.

Advanced Editing Features

Fancy Header

This is a Fancy Header

Drop Caps

Lorem ipsum…

Lorem ipsum.

Frames (Image container on the left)

  The text wraps nicely around the frame.Frame content can be most anything, however it’s a great feature to use with pictures.

The frame can be centered or aligned left or right.

It can be used for external content as well.

Pre-configured Boxes

Check Lists and Bullets

• Item #1
• Item #2
• Item #3

• Item #1
• Item #2
• Item #3

Toggle Content

Click to expand

I can insert text or media content…

945×516

yorgo design

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Build your Flash Website

Build your Flash Website at the March Online Seminar by Ycademy and get prepared for a smashing wow effect. In a small series of posts I will provide information about the content needed at the Seminar.

Background Images

To build a great looking flash site, we need great images, namely for the backgrounds. Every tab in the menu can trigger its own background for the target page. The choice of pictures will depend on the theme of the site; your imagination is the limit.

The background acts like the setting or the stage for your content. It could be nature, places, spaces, most anything.

Some examples:

Meet me at the beach

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Meet me at the Beach

Meet me in front of the church

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Meet me in front of the Church

Meet me at the Ouzo Place

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Meet me at the Ouzo Place

Background Dimensions

Semiomantics Evolution will give the best surfing experience in full-screen view. The background image will therefore follow the size of the screen and its resolution and we need to load rather large pictures.

The above images come straight out of the digital camera or mobile phone. The raw file is over 3000 pixels wide. I have reduced them to about 1700 pixels wide and decreased the output quality to end up with background images of about 1700 x 1275 pixels and a weight of below 100 kb.

The above backgrounds can be seen at the Evolution Site HERE.

How to format background images as per above?

We will show step by step how to deal with a large image in order to format it for the purpose of the Evolution site at tonight’s call at yorGOtalk.

See you there.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Build your Flash Website

This month, the Ycademy Online Seminar will focus on building a flash powered website along the lines of the Semiomantics Evolution script as seen HERE.

The site can be used as a showcase, a media portal, a gallery or as a site with static content.

Goal

Participants will build a flash driven website for personal use. At the same time the exercise will allow participants to add a new product to their catalog.

Background

Not all internet users need a blog and not every blogger likes the limitations of dynamic content sites such as WordPress. In a media oriented society, where visual expression becomes the main means of communication, the quality of the presentation is of paramount importance.

Flash compression is an interesting way to present images or videos in a smashing way. New flash based templates allow to populate and to manage flash driven websites without engineering the flash frames, i.e. without deep knowledge of flash technology.

The actual content of the site is imported via xml files which are accessible by search spiders. The advanced use of this technology enables users to project flash driven sites to Google Top 10 listings much easier than sites where flash encapsulates 100% of the content.

Semiomantics Evolution

Semiomantics Evolution is a product line which will become available to customers later this month. The basic site frameworks in flash are licensed software; content is provided by the customer or elaborated in collaboration with a web designer who will then embed text and media in the flash environment.

The product line is commercially interesting for Semiomantics designers, since the bulk of the final cost arises from value added by the web designer or site developer.

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Semiomantics Evolution 1

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Semiomantics Evolution News Page

Registration

Seminar Tickets are available HERE.

Price: USD 65.00

Discount for Ycademy Pros: $35.00. (Please get the Coupon code from Bianca).

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Google Top 10 Tuning

A site, which shows only the home page in Google’s search returns has a major problem, namely if it’s a WordPress powered site, since the site lives from its dynamic content.

Boruch Rappaport’s Consulting Site was such a case before it has been tuned by the Semiomantics Site Smith.

Google Top 10 Ranking

The high ranking was not a major problem on the site, since it is running on a Semiomantics script. Semiomantics scripts are tuned for high ranking.

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Boruch Rappaport Consulting

Google Indexing

The main problem was the indexing, whereas Google just stuck to the home page. We therefore needed to get the site re-indexed, however we wanted to choose the wayGoogle should index the site.

The Choice

For easier use and more flexibility we wanted to make sure that the site be indexed under the tags as well as under the category slugs. A shot at the chronological archive was to test our ability to optimize the indexing in an archive targeted way. This could be applied to any archive, such as date, author, tag, category and so on, however by over-stretching the scope you risk to over-publish the same post, which Google won’t appreciate.

The Results

After Semiomantics site tuning, this is the result (the selected search term serves only to demonstrate in a transparent way what’s actually being triggered on Google):

boruch-google1

Google Top 10

1   The Archive by date shows as intended.

2   The most important: the single post page.

3 – 6 Under more results, you get first the tag ‘boruch rappaport’, then some other tags

7  Finally another archive based on the date, this time for another post.

Semiomantics Site Tuning Services

Optimized indexing is a pre-requisit for top ranking under the targeted key-phrases. Semiomantics tuning services are focusing on each customer’s needs and targets. Sometimes the results show up very rapidly, others, like in the present case it may take 2 or 3 weeks to reach the high impact as demonstrated above.

For site tuning, contact Semiomantics to discuss your project.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Elegant Fonts on WordPress

One of the main elements of the look of a site is the Typeface.  I am testing different solutions to force the desired font view.

Helvetica on WordPress

At present a Helvetica font is on display, visible even for visitors who do not have Helvetica installed on their computer.

helvetica

Helvetica on WordPress

Multiple Elegant Fonts

The next step will be to use different multiple fonts, eventually with text decorations and variants.

More later.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Ycademy Pro Pricing

Ycademy has released it’s new pricing policy.

Ycademy Pro Contribution

The basic Ycademy Pro  contribution remains at $30 per month. Ycademy Pros get full credit for this amount when buying a Seminar ticket for example as well as huge reductions on all products from Ycademy, YORGOO and Semiomantics.

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Ycademy

Ycademy Author Site

The price for the Ycademy Author site for new subscribers is set at $ 250 until March 31. The Author site is a last generation Semiomantics site as retailed by Semiomantics at $1250. The special hosting pack with up to 128 MB memory allowance has a value of anywhere above $45 per month and is included in the fee and Ycademy Pro Contribution. I will personally configure and optimize the sites according to your needs and deliver them to you as soon as they are indexed under your keywords by Google. This will usually take a few days.

The site will be available for as long as you are a Ycademy Pro Contributor as per above.

Note

As from April 1, 2010, the author site will be set up and provided for an initial fee of $500.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Microsoft Office 2010 PowerPoint

Yesterday’s Ycademy online workshop focused on Microsoft Office 2010 – PowerPoint. The Goal was to create a small slide show and to convert it into multiple formats, such as images or movies.

Here below a sample.

PowerPoint 2010 Slides

Slide1

Slide 1

Slide2

Slide

Slide3

Slide 3

Slide4

Slide 4

Slide5

Slide 5

Slide6

Slide 6

Slide7

Slide 7

Slide8

Slide 8

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Elegant WordPress by Semiomantics

The series of post initiated by this post is about editing an elegant WordPress powered Website. The idea is to create a symbiosis between the most powerful scripts from Semiomantics and Elegant web design with high class editing functions.

The result will be a blog for users who want to dispose of advanced editing features allowing for high quality presentation, such as top brands or individuals with a taste for beauty, luxury and lifestyle.

For the purpose of the exercise we will call the theme Semiomantics Elegance.

The Semiomantics Engine

Over the years we have developed add-on scripts and modifications to the WorfdPress backbone which have proven to be unbeatable when it comes to high visibility and performance on Google Top 10. While at the beginning Semiomantics signed blogs did not make many concessions to beauty, recent developments have produced smashing websites while preserving the exceptional power of Semiomantics.

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Global Sports US

The site for Global Sports US above is an example for styled design on a Semiomantics XO framework.

Also we are progressing on making Flash features “readable” by Google. The Semiomantics Flash Project, called Evolution is the best proof:

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Semiomantics Evolution in Flash

evolution-screen2

Semiomantics Evolution in Flash 2

Semiomantics Evolution Sites can be viewed in Full-screen mode for an astonishing surfing experience.

Elegant WordPress

There are quite a number of brilliant CSS based WordPress Theme Designs out there and it is worth while to use such designs as a base for further development and customization. However, as style sheets cannot be protected, there is always a high possibility of being copied, except when it comes to unique functions for advanced performance and editing.

On the base of the WP Best Consultant design and layout, we have created the new project for Elegant WordPress at Semiomantics.

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Elegant WordPress by Semiomantics

The present series of posts will detail the advanced editing and publishing features of Semiomantics Elegance.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Logo Design Study for Zo Nicholas

Here below some images from a first logo design session with Zo Nicholas; the purpose is to create a logo which can be applied online as well as on printed matters. The following images represent the first 20 output shots. More to come.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Business Card and Newsletter Design with Office 2010

Subsequent to the February Ycademy Seminar and our Tuesday session, we have continued to work on branding printed matters yesterday. After the business card we have been using templates for newsletters from Microsoft Office Publisher 2010 Beta.

Branded News Letter and Business Cards

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Business Card and Newsletter by Ycademy

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Business Card and Newsletter by Ute Schaedler

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Business Card and Newsletter by Zo Nicholas

Above three examples from last night’s session with the output from Zo Nicholas and Ute Schaedler besides the session sample.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Branding your Printed Matters

Using Microsoft Office, it is a relatively easy task to brand your printed matters. The most recent Ycademy Seminar dealt with the various features provided by Office 2010 and this weeks calls will apply the branding concepts further.

Business Card Design

Starting from a template in Microsoft Publisher 2010, we can adapt the templates to the style and design of our websites.

Here some examples from last night’s workshop:

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Business Card Design

businesscardu

Business Card Design by Ute Schaedler

businesscardfelisa

Business Card Design by Felisa Ryan

businesscardh

Business Card Design by Hanno Coetzee

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Business Card Design by Zo Nicholas

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Polaroid Effect with Photoshop

Referring to last night’s training, here some additional tips and instruction to create the Polaroid effect:

Polaroid Effect with Photoshop

T600 wide format
T600 high format
T600 expired wide format
T600 expired high format
Time Zero wide format
Time Zero high format
Time Zero expired wide format
Time Zero expired high format
Finisher
Finisher INDOOR

Use WIDE for photos in wide format e.g. 3000px width x 2000px height
Use PANEL for photos in panel format e.g. 2000px wide x 3000px height
(you can use images of ANY size and up to 599 dpi)

Choose the desired action with the right alignment and press PLAY in the action tab

After rendering you can optionally change/adjust all parameters in the Layer tab e.g. decreasing the opacity of the grain layer etc.

When you’re done choose the FINISHER action and press play. It will flatten the image, add a layer with streaks like they occur on real Polaroid prints and furthermore a bevel and a fill layer with the background color.

Sample Scrapbook or Grunge Design application from last night’s deYcademy Web Design Workshop

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Grunge and Scrapbook Design

The above was just a quick sample. Leave a link to show your creations.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Preview Semiomantics Evolution

Semiomantics technologies have been applied to dynamic content sites and CMS such as WordPress. The next step is to integrate Semiomantics SEO libraries into flash driven sites in order to serve better customers with a need for graphic design and photography oriented web sites.

In collaboration with Ycademy we are developing a first media focused flash project which will be relatively easy to customize and to adapt to customers’ requirements by Semiomantics Consultants.

Semiomantics Evolution Preview

Here below you find some first screen-shots of the pre-configured flash driven Semiomantics Template. It’s still a going concern, but it will be ready for testing and use next month. Depending of the Ycademy Pro schedule of the next few weeks , we may well make the new theme the center piece of the March Seminar :-).

Use your mouse to navigate over the images with the magnifying glass to check out the details.

Flash Experience with Semiomantics

A flash intro can be added to the below, which will display in a left aligned overlay.

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Semiomantics Evolution Home

The screen-shot is originally 1680 px wide; the whole site can be viewed in full screen to give the most eye catching surf experience.

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Semiomantics Evolution Gallery

The albums are selected from the top left, the individual images from the scroller on the right side.

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Semiomantics Evolution News

The news scroll menu on the right triggers the full post on the left.

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Semiomantics Evolution Detail

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Semiomantics Evolution Menu Detail

We want to keep the model simple and flexible in order to be able to customize it quickly. It’s just a few clicks from the above to a gray scale black and white artistic or photo site or to a video kiosk or to … you name it.

Please leave your first impression in the comments here below. Thanks.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

More Astir Beach Vouliagmeni Mist

Subsequent to a comment on my facebook, here are more Astir Beach Mist images from sunny Vouliagmeni:

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Astir Beach Mist 3

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Astir Beach Mist 4

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Astir Beach Mist 5

Enjoy!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

New Semiomantics WP Themes

We have added 2 new items to the Semiomantics Showcase, both very basic designs which have been rewritten for Semiomantics high performance.

Semiomantics GM

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Semiomantics GM

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Semiomantics GM Single Post

Semiomantics B

semiomantics-basic

Semiomantics B

Both themes are tuned for high performance in minimalistic style and with minimum features; ideal for font lovers.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.