Open up your Photoshop and copy this image:

Then create a new document and it will have the dimensions of the image you copied, paste the image. Now we will need an image of a marijuana plant (it’s a fake plant so don’t worry) so we can create our hero, use this one:

And paste it in a new layer. Duplicate the man layer and chop the man’s head in the duplicated layer and you should end with something like this, don’t worry about all the hair just make a simple work, not detailed.

Now duplicate the original man layer again (you should have the new duplicate under the chopped one) and move it a little to the right so the man looks like if it had invisible superpowers:

Now lets go to the marijuana image layer and with the Background Eraser Tool (right-click Eraser Tool), click once in the white background of the plant image (so that the Background Eraser has the white color setted -white will be you Backgound Color in the tool window-) and then right-click and use this settings:

Now click in the white background and you should end with this:

But there are some white areas between the leaves, so click on them so you get a fully transparent background but be careful because if you click on a leaf the Background Eraser will erase that color the next time you click. After you are done with that, select the Elliptical Marquee Tool (right-click Rectangular Marquee Tool) and make a selection like this one and press Delete on your keyboard:

Now press Control + J to duplicate the plant image with the transparent background and press Control + T to transform it like you want and erase some parts of the duplicated one, do this like 3 times until you end like something like this:

Next, merge the duplications with the plant layer and place them where the head used to be:

Make a round cut at the bottom of the new marijuana head to make it look like if it comes from inside the shirt.
Do the same with the hands and you will finally have your Marijuana Man!

Before we start I just want to tell you that I did this with an ad campaign in Google Adwords and the effect was amazing, I got my unique visits duplicated from one day to another.

So, this post is to help you improve the quality of your keywords, comparing yourself against the best site in your same category, in order to increase your visitors quantity.

First, let’s Google a keyword (the first thing you want to get listed for in search results) and check the site thats first listed. Visit the site and copy the URL.

In my case I will use cowboy boots, I get the amazing number of 3,750,000 results and my first result is www.bootcity.com.

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and select the Website Content and type the URL of the first result you had in your Google search.

You will get a list of keywords with their respective information, the most important information besides the keywords is the Search Volume column. This tells you how many times the keyword was searched in Google.

At the bottom of the page you can download the keyword list, do it for .csv (Excel). Open the list in Excel and order by the lowest to highest number in the Search Volume column (select the column, click the A-Z button and click Order when you get a warning message, don’t change anything).

We are done, copy and place the keywords on your website and give it some time to do it’s stuff.

Results may vary depending on your site category, also try getting keywords from other known sites.

Happy keyword hunting!

The links you should include are (paste them as they are):
XHTML: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer
CSS: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer

Having this installed will let you have your own server (offline) on your computer, so you wont need to keep uploading those files in order to see the changes that you’ve made on the website.

After being installed, you will just need to place your sites in C:\wamp\www and as soon as you hit Save on a file, you can see the changes…as fast as that.

You can get it from: http://www.wampserver.com/en/download.php

The lastest version is WAMP 2, this includes: Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.6 + PECL, SQLitemanager, MySQL 5.0.51b and Phpmyadmin.

Open up the image from what you want to make a vector. I will use this one i took some weeks ago:

Next, duplicate (Control + J) Background layer and save the PSD with a different name than the photo. Change the name of the new layer to: “vector”.

Now go to Filter > Artistic > Cutout, play with the settings being (the lowest setting):
Number of levels: 3.
Edge simplicity: 0.
Edge fidelity: 3.

You should get something like this, as for the details (remember you need the mayor highlights).

Now, you must extract the object from the rest of the photograph. Do this with the Pen Tool and help yourself with lowering the opacity of the “vector layer” so you can see through it and have the Backgound layer as a guide.

When you finally have the selection, make a new layer with the extracted object and name it “object”, you should get something like this.

I changed the object’s (airplane) color to white (with Blending Options > Color Overlay) so you could see it but change it to black. In the “vector” layer you can see the highlights of the object, now put “object” layer over “vector” if you dont have it like this and with the Pen Tool select the highlighted parts of the object that appear in the “vector” layer. Start selecting the highlighted parts of the object and fill one by one in a new layer, after this you should get something like this:

Here is how you do it:

Lets say you have 3 pages: index.php, about.php and contact.php. You need to have the page include system working so we can use the same variable for the page title changer.

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>My website > < ? 	$page=$_GET['page']; //page title changer
						if ($page=="about"){ //if the page you are viewing is about.php it shows "About me" text in the page title
							echo "About me"; //shows "About me" text on page title
						}elseif($page=="contact"){ //same as above but with contact.php
							echo "Contact me"; //same as above but with "Contact me" text on page title
						}else{
							echo "Home"; //shows "Home" text on page title
						}
					?></title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="http://www.mywebsite.com">home</a> <!-- Menu link -->
<a href="?page=about">about me</a> <!-- Menu link for about page -->
<a href="?page=contact">contact me</a> <!-- Menu link for contact page-->
< ? 	$page=$_GET['page']; //include system. loads the file when you click the link
	if ($page=="about"){ //if you click the about link it will load about.php
		include('about.php'); //it loads about.php inside the index.php
	}elseif($page=="contact"){ //same as above but with contact
		include('contact'); //same as above but with contact.php
	}else{
		include('home.php'); //loads home.php if no link is clicked or if did not find any of the links/files above
	}
?>
</body>
</html>

I read a lot of tutorials but later on, when my site had months running, i found about the PHP Switch Statement and this is the easiest way to have your PHP Navigation.

Copy and paste the code, you will find the explanaition in it.

< ?php
//First of all, let me tell you that you need to have a file with this code placed where you want the files to load and that if you include anyother file in the ones you are calling, you have to include them as if they were in the main folder.
//You can change $navigation to anything you want, like $page or $section but remember to change the 3 "navigation" words to your new one.
$navigation=$_GET['navigation'];
switch ($navigation) {

//You have to use it like this, when the file is in the same folder with the index. You can put any name in case and have the file in any folder at your site. http://www.yoursite.com/?navigation=section1
case "section1":
include('section1_file.php');
break;

//Another example, the file is in a subfolder but people wont know it, they will only see http://www.yoursite.com/?navigation=section2
case "section2":
include('section/section2_file.php');
break;

//As you can see in this last example, you can have your file in any place and put any name in your "case". http://www.yoursite.com/?navigation=lastsection
case "lastsection":
include('folder1/folder2/section3.php');
break;

//This will be your index or default page you want to show when people has just landed on your site and this will be the page it will show when people try to access any page that you havent declared here.
default:
include('home.php');

}
?>

So let me explain it to you as i would have liked that someone explained it to me.

If you are a copy-paste kind of guy, then just copy the PHP code below, in it there are the explanaition of each thing you need to know.

//sendemail is our button name, and if it is clicked, we will run this PHP code
if($_POST['sendemail']){
//do you remember all those name="something" and id="something" that we had to use before? then, here is why
//it will get all those variables (text typed in the fields) and use them for the email
$name ="$name";
$email="$email";
//lets say you want a default subject, then just change $subject="$subject"; to $subject="Default Subject";
$subject="$subject";
//or maybe you want a default message, than just do the same as before.
$body="$message";
$header="from: $name < $email>";
//if you want the email to be sent to other people, then just add them seperated by a comma (,)
$for ='miligraf@miligraf.com';
//this is how it works mail(receiver's email, the email's subject, the email's message, name and email that was typed in the form)
$send=mail($for,$subject,$body,$header);
if($send){
echo "The email has been sent, thanks for contacting me.";
}else{
echo "The email could not be sent, try later.";
}
}else{?>
<!-- Comments in HTML go grey  -->
<!-- since we are in a new era we wont use any tables, instead we will have some div's to tell them where to go -->

<form method="post"> <!-- your first field, Name, you will need it if you want to have the sender's Name or you can have a default Name made by you but i will let you know where to put it later -->
<!-- remember that the values of name and id must be name, like this name="name" id="name" -->
Name:
<div><input id="name" name="name" size="40" type="text" /></div>
<!-- remember that the values of name and id must be subject, like this name="subject" id="subject" -->
Subject:
<div><input id="subject" name="subject" size="40" type="text" /></div>
<!-- remember that the values of name and id must be email, like this name="email" id="email" -->
E-mail:
<div><input id="email" name="email" size="40" type="text" /></div>
<!-- remember that the values of name and id must be message, like this name="message" id="message" -->
Message:
<div><textarea id="message" cols="40" rows="10" name="message"></textarea></div>
<div><!-- this is the button and we give it a name that we will use in the next part -->

<input name="sendemail" type="submit" value="Send" /></div>
</form>

Searching the web, this is what I ended up with:

<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie7.css" />
< ![endif]-->
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie6.css" />
< ![endif]-->
< ![if !IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="firefox.css" />
< ![endif]>

The only problem is that it is not XHTML standard…

What is Alexa rank?

Is a rank that measures mainly your site traffic. If you have a low rank, lets say 350,000 then you receive like 1,000 unique visits per day and so on, if you have a high rank like 6,000,000 then you receive around 40 unique visits per day.

How do I know the Alexa rank from a site?

There are two ways:

First way, you can head to http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/miligraf.com (change miligraf.com for the site you cant).

Second way, you can install their toolbar at http://www.alexa.com/site/download/

I recommend the second way because while you are navigating the internet and visiting different sites, the toolbar loads their rank and show it (like the PR tollbar).

Whats the use I can give to this rank?

When you are looking for a site to affiliate, you can know how many unique visits per day (aprox.) they have and that will help you decide with which site you affiliate. It also helps when you want to advertise on a site and the most important thing…to know how many unique visits per day your competitor has.