It will likely be a couple of weeks yet before the site is open to the public, but the address for the moment is http://kristinsemporium.blogspot.com/. The design may change in the future, but it’s a starting point. We’ll also be hooking it up to a Facebook page.

Kristin’s Emporium is located on main street, Lakelse Avenue, in Terrace BC across from the Coast Inn of the West hotel.  A great little shop with unique gifts and clothing, sterling silver jewelry, smudging and incense supplies, hats, scarves, t-shirts, belts, semi-precious stone jewelry… a long list of ever changing products.

Now, I need to try & obtain ownership of the domain, which is currently owned by the hosting company.  But once I do, I’ll get my new, revamped site up and running.

Stay tuned here!

www.whiteriverhelicopters.ca

The website is built using WordPress.  The template I built from scratch using Artisteer and The Templateer.  The options for the company have expanded into emails for the employees, and a private log-in for internal document sharing (training to come yet). The site uses Google’s Picasa to store and generate the photo gallery.  Other employees can be set up to edit this gallery.

I’ve also helped expand their internet presence by submitting the site to various Canadian helicopter service directories, plus listings on Linked In, TripAdvisor.ca, a channel on YouTube, and a business page on Facebook.  Searches through Google Picasa help improve site ranking.

Depending on the exact keywords used, my clients Lakelse Air and White River Helicopters usually claim first and second listings on Google search for helicopter charters in the Terrace area.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/White-River-Helicopters/196646030353475

http://www.linkedin.com/company/white-river-helicopters-inc

http://picasaweb.google.com/whiteriverheli

http://www.youtube.com/user/WhiteRiverHeli

While I won’t upload a copy of each year, I will upload a portion of the 2008 calendar.  It’s not the complete calendar – back page is missing as well as the mini-calendars for 2009. The page print order is a bit off on this sample, the process of rearranging the pages for printing was starting to occur with this version of the file. The PDF of the Lakelse Air 2008 calendar sample is 6.5 Mb.

* These files have been reduced in resolution to allow faster loading over the internet. Print quality is reduced and some colours appear differently from the high-quality print jobs.

Lakelse Air brochure 2006 PDF of brochure created in 2006

Bear Creek_brochure 2008 PDF of brochure created in 2008 for the AMEBC Roundup mining convention and MineralsNorth trade show.

Lakelse Air brochure card

Here are samples of some of the projects I’ve done in the past.  Most of them combined the use of Microsoft Publisher and a graphics program like Macromedia Fireworks (before it was purchased by Adobe). *Some of these samples have been reduced in resolution to allow them to load faster on the internet so print quality is reduced as well.

These are old ads done primarily for AMEBC’s monthly magazine “Mineral Exploration”.

Bear Creek Minerals North full page ad

I’ve attached  to this post a PDF that explains the skills I’ve been taught in this course – keyword research, linking, blogging/social media assistant, web analytics, affiliate marketing, online market research, search engine marketing, email marketing.  You can view the PDF by clicking on IMVA_Learning_Outcomes.

I have at least two more courses to make my way through as time allows.  They will be more advanced skills in blogging and social media marketing.

There are some great, very affordable alternatives to the Office suite.  If you’ve got a very reliable internet connection Google Docs is among my  top choices.  I can work from scratch on the internet, or upload a spreadsheet/doc from home and access the same exact file at the office via the internet.  The files can also be downloaded to work on a local copy. And I can share access to files with other select users. Changes made by multiple users can be highlighted & viewed.

Another choice I’ve briefly tried when it first came out is OpenOffice by SunJava.  It seems to have a bigger learning curve (may be my Microsoft experience influencing this) and may put novices off.  But you can’t go wrong with the price and it is a power suite of software.

When I first started this hobby, I knew very little beyond my grandparents. Thankfully both my grandmothers had created scrapbooks and albums with an assortment of newspaper clippings, obituaries, funeral programs, wedding announcements, birth announcements.  While some of the info may be incorrect, these secondary sources have proved invaluable.

I’m slowly digitizing all this data, recording the sources in my family software, double checking dates/retrieving copies of original sources.

Do you have a genealogy project that you need help with? I’m available in the Skeena Valley area. I’m experienced in using software such as Family Tree Maker, The Master Genealogist, Clooz.  I also have a range of websites resources that I use.  Stuck on how to organize all your documents? Or gathering info from cousins? Or do you need help building your own family website?

Check out my personal genealogy websites for ideas and some of my tips:

www.estacaille.org
www.braniffs.ws **as of Dec 10/2010 this site has a bug in it since upgrading the software and I haven’t had a chance yet to fix it completely.

Sometimes you never realize how time intensive it is to preserve some of the old memories.  The one album I have, the pages are slightly bigger than the scan bed of my scanner so a second scan is sometimes required, and then I can crop and splice the images into one page.

Do you have a mass of photos/documents that you’d like scanned, but don’t feel motivated to sit down and take the time to do it?