Website Tips Blog Posts & Teasers

I don't know why they (webmaster gurus) call it year-end maintenance when you do it at the beginning of the year. A good time to clean out the clutter and refresh your website. Not to mention updating your copyright notices. Here are three high impact tasks the every website owner should do every year:

1. Update key pages like About, Index, Contact and Services. You will want to include new portfolio items, testimonials and achievments from the past year.
2. Rewrite or remove out-dated content. This may seem like a duanting task but you could give a priority ranking to what you want to update now or in the future. Bring old pages up to new standards, clean out outdated ads, check spelling, grammer and puncuation.
3. Optimze performance, speed and stability. Take a good look at your coding. Is it modern or contain old or unused bits. Clean out code that you no longer need or has been updated. Minimize CSS and Javascript. Compress and optimize images. In general, less more precise code will improve speed for both the user and search engines. Use lazy loading for images and video. Finally; re-load every page in bulk if you can. This last task gives the search engines fresh timing of the website as a whole. A kind of "Like New" polish.
4. Security and Back up. Update any CMS, plugins or add-ons to the latest version. Review user accounts associated with your workflow. Create a backup of your website. And check expiration dates of any subscriptions and renew if necessary.

Updates to Best Website Tools website this year include; Full website re-upload, New "Contents" menu added, overall template standardization and Archive update.

Bonus Tip;. A little maintenance now can save you from headaches in the future. Wish I had of thought of that 6 years ago when I first implemented this website design. If I had I would have paid more attention to the archive pages. But, this year I did. See what I mean about prioritizing tasks.

Happy New Year From Best Website Tools.

Inside 3d Animated Avatars

3d Animated Avatars a cast of characters with text to speech engine that translates in 26 languages. Discover a new way to do video marketing. Imagine the perfect spokes person for your business, product or service. Create an animated 3d avatar today. Check out this promo style video I made for my business.

I call it BWT-ToC, Table of Contents Flyout Menu button, (in the upper left corner) on most pages in Best Website Tools.

What's cool about this button menu is it changes with the content of the page. Instead of painstakingly going through the page and writing code and creating links and chasing my tail.

I use a javascript and CSS to do the work. And I made a button that pops out a table of contents using H2 headings in order. Have you tried the "Contents" button yet

About BWT-TOC.js

It all started with a visit from a friend. Who said "I have a table of contents that works from the headings on the page, but it takes up a lot of space." Then explained that it scrapes the page for all the H2 tags to create ToC menu of links to each section on the page. Also it's a quick synopsis of what is on the page, nice.

Wish I hadda thought of that! But then I realized after seeing her example it would be better if it were a sticky button on the side of the page with a flyout menu that was scrollable, highlighted where you were in the table and looked like the rest of the buttons on the website.

As you can see the TOC on this page is a popout menu that is sticky, scrollable and highlights the current position in the menu. I can't decide if I want to just keep this little gem of a best website tool or package it up for scalability. Whadda ya think?

Or, I could make a training tutorial on how to make your own flyout ToC. Or I could just keep it for myself. I will probably do all three at some point in the future so stay tuned for that. Need more website tips...

Hi all Tim here. BWT did a study a few months ago of like minded website creators and came to the conclusion that excellent imagery is better for website growth than just ordinary images alone.

Then I thought I need an image to represent this category. Something that shows what it is about. The following image is a screenshot from a video creation tip tutorial I made...

About this image

It is called "davinci-tim-edit-screen-1080x608.png" and is a screenshot of a tutorial I made in Camtasia about DaVinci Resolve. The tutorial is about creating quick stills in DaVinci Resolve 20. Screen capture and editing in Camtasia. With color correction in DaVinci Resolve.

Completely shot and edited by yours truly, me, Tim Koen. I am particularly proud of this shot because every idea (except for the Turkey Dinner) was concieved, carried out and confabulated in house. I made all the screen captures, a-roll, b-roll, did the narration, titling and background layout (with the help of a good cook).

Oh no, not again. Don't you just hate it when DaVinci Resolve loses track of your media? Like when you move a project but forgot to include the image files. Well, I have a trick for you. Watch this video...

Quick JPG Stills In DaVinci Resolve 20

Website tips for this post are:

• How to grab a still frame (the hard way). Locate your frame for a still in the timeline. Change to Color page and find the still again. In the viewer with your cursor over the image, right click to open a popup menu. Select "Grab Still." This will generate a copy of the frame in your Gallery. Then find the still in your Gallery and right click on it. Then find "Export" and click on that. A file directory window opens where you can accept the name or change it if you like. Then hit "Save." Wow, that is a lot of clicks, isn't there a better way?
• How to grab a still frame (the easy way). Locate your frame for a still in the timeline. Tap "Shift + P". Name your still and save.
• Okay, you will need a little prep for the easy way. Follow the steps laid out in the above video to create a new keyboard short cut, that grabs a still and exports it right to your computer.

Need to get some video editing done. Get expert screen capture videos made by BWT Videos...

Ah Thanksgiving, tis the season to shoot the family, videos that is. In this video I shot my own family. Men, women and children all shot in the face with my Black Magic PCC 4k. A fine camera with a lot of firepower. Just kidding of course the family is fine. Check out the video to see if they survived Killer Turkey Dinner...

How To Quickly Grab Stills In DaVinci Resolve

Website tips for this post are:

Some videos are nothing more than a series of still shots that are animated and time stretched. In other words a bunch of individual frames edited together. Sounds simple right? Not so fast gunslinger. First you have to export the frames out of the footage as still frames. How you gonna do that, in DaVinci Resolve 20, Quick Draw Mcgraw? With a custom made keyboard shortcut, pardner.

1. Open up the "Keyboard Customization" panel under the "DaVinci Resolve" menu, and in the search box type in "export." Then open the dropdown menu with a list of options.
2. Locate "Current Frame as Still" option, then...
3. Select the keyboard shortcut textbox and type in a shortcut that isn't already used. In this example I chose "Shift + P" Hold down the shift key and tap the "P."
4. Click "Save." Now you have a shortcut to quickly capture stills from video frames. Now when you position your playhead over a frame on the "Cut", "Edit" or "Color" page you can capture a still by holding down the "Shift" key and clicking the "P" key.

Koen Family Turkey Dinner video employed this technique to grab stills from over 55 minutes of footage to generate a synopsis type video of much shorter duration. Almost anything is possible with exceptional editing capabilities. Make your video stand out from the competition...

Clean Small Parts is the latest installment in Reedjet Rebuild series. This video features 4k, widescreen and time lapse cinematography. Check it out...

Clean Small Parts

Website tips for this post are:

Is 4k resolution right for your next video? Depends on your desired result. Advantages of 4k over say (1920x1080)FHD are increased resolution and sharper pictures with more dynamic range but also has much, much larger file sizes.

• Persistence of vision: is how the eye works, It takes about a tenth of a second for the brain to even percieve motion. And another tenth of a second to react. At around 16 frames per second the brain begins to see gaps in motion. This phenomina is called flicker. Motion becomes smoothed out with higher frames per second.
• Time lapse: allows you to change the number a frames recorded per second. If you record motion at a lower frames per second (fps) and then play it back at a higher fps motion appears to go faster but it looks choppy and overspeed. Which can be used to compress time in a video.
• 4k vs. UHD: this video is an experiment I wanted to do. At the expense of using up all my disc space recording at the higher 4k, 4.2:1 DCI (widescreen) resolution as opposed the the normal UHD (3840x2160) like most video that I shoot. I went with a frame rate of 3fps and playback at 30fps.
• 3fps vs 30fps:this video is sped up by a factor of 10. That means if the video is 57 seconds, then I actually spent 57 minutes cleaning parts. An amount of time that would fill up my portable ssd recording drive. So, time lapse works for this video and saved a lot of disc space.

Shooting time lapse is ideal to record events that take a long time. Like cleanning small parts in a Parilla Reedjet motor. I knew this footage would be boring as all get out, but would look great (At least to me). what do you think...

More Website Tips: November 2025 « 

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