Red Bubble is a website that allows you to display your photography, illustations and artwork and if you want – sell them as prints, t-shirts, calendars and greeting cards. Because the website does not tie you into selling your work – because some people either sell it already on their own site, or just want a place to show off their images – Red Bubble is also a very warm and friendly social network where contributors rate and comment other people’s work giving constructive feedback and advise.

I’m quite tempted to add some of my own photography to the website, then if feedback is good – maybe sell some of my images.

You can view Red Bubble here; www.redbubble.com

twistori.com is a great example of what the twitter api can be used for, it serves no real purpose – but can be incredibly addictive. select one of the six keywords (love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish) and watch the tweets flow up the screen as the application searches through all the tweets being made in realtime.

this is the first of what will hopefully be a comprehensive list of twitter tools and advise to help your twittering improve. i’ve been using twitter for just over a year (http://twitter.com/martinlucas), it didn’t take long for me to become hooked into what i think is the best social network on the web today.

the first tool is the one i use the most. in my opinion it’s the best os x twitter client – it’s twitterific. the reason twitterific works so well is because it’s simple, it would be very easy to over-complicate an application like this adding lots of various settings and added features (see tweetdeck for example), but icon factory have created an application that gets the job done and is a pleasure to use. there’s also an iphone version for those that have one and want to twitter on the move.

there are plenty of seo (search engine optimisation) tools on the web, as well as tutorials and guides on what improvements you can make to your website to help push it up the search engine results pages for your chosen keywords.

for the last few years i have been using an incredibly helpful pdf guide that i downloaded, alongside various learnt lessons from the past 8 years of releasing websites into the world wild web.

a couple of weeks ago i was recommended this website; http://website.grader.com as a good tool for optimising a website either during or after it’s launch.

once you’ve inserted the url of the website you are going to test, website.grader takes about a minute to gather the report and the result is very comprehensive, easy to read and has easy to follow explanations of each part of the report which also contain helpful suggestions on what you should change on your site to further help it’s journey up the search engine results pages.

last year i designed and build janie’s first website – gold leaf prints – which has now been replaced by www.janiepirie.co.uk.

this site was simplified from the original gold leaf design and content, offering prints and cards rather than all the bells and whistles that gold leaf contained. the site makes use of the paypal shopping cart and cushycms which allows janie to edit certain details on her site, for example when an original painting is sold she can add a SOLD tag on to a print’s page.

janie’s shiny new website can be viewed here; www.janiepirie.co.uk

i stumbled on this blog via twitter and the first post was a little task to do with flickr. you have to go the 6th page of your own photostream and then select the 6th photograph – it may not be your best (mine certainly isn’t) – you should then add the tag ‘flickr meme’ and add it to the following group flickr meme group, and if possible add it to your blog like i’ve just done.

last week saw the launch of a website that i have been working on for the last couple of months. fabric rehab is a company run by two sister’s (nancy and sally) who asked me to design them a website to sell ‘funky fabric’, they have been selling fabric on ebay for a while, but wanted their own web presence – away from everyone else that could be found on ebay’s selling page.

the site had to be bright and easy to use, showing all the categories of fabric straight away as well as highlighting selected or new fabrics on the first page and making it easy for customers to browse and search for fabrics. the logo was already designed – so the colour scheme was taken from that – the layout came from the brief, everything seemed to fit into that layout and the client was happy with where everything went from the start.

the site includes a fabric search, shopping cart that links to paypal and an admin suite that allows the fabric rehab sister’s to add their own fabrics to the website. coming soon will be a blog in which they are hoping that their customers will send photo’s of the items that they have made with the fabric purchased.

you can view the website here; www.fabricrehab.co.uk