Hello! Have you ever seen the highlighting effect of darkened corners applied to an image? Have you ever wondered how it’s done? Well, I have and did. One day I tried and sorta achieved the look, but it wasn’t quite right. Then I had a completely unrelated conversation with another photographer that planted an idea in my head. The next morning when I woke up, ding! I knew I knew. So I fired up the computer and loaded ‘shop and sure enough – I figured it out.

Not quite sure what to make of all of those little orange RSS icons out there that ask you to subscribe to them? That’s alright, you’re not alone. Seriously. I’d say that the majority of the web’s community see RSS and Atom feed icons and shrug them off not knowing how useful they are. But if your curious, I’ll explain to you what they are, how they work, and why they’re used. Are you ready to get your learn on? Then continue reading.

Adding an online community to your website can have many benefits. It is one of the best ways to increase repeat traffic to your site by giving your guests a way to connect more deeply with your product, service, or purpose. When considering the impact of implementing a forum on your website, the largest benefit to consider is user-generated content. Your guests may often have very important points to bring to a discussion - points that may have otherwise gone completely unnoticed.

This of course, lends itself to a sense of pride and ownership in your guests. Another benefit to consider is rate at which user-generated content grows. User-generated content grows far faster and generally contains more information than you could publish by yourself. This in turn, gives search engines more content to index your site by. If these benefits sound attractive to you, perhaps adding forum is something to seriously consider.