Feel Free...!!!!

Feel Free

I thought it about time to post up some of my Artwork again.. Loosen those ties guys... and well just Feel Free.. It's well amazing.. 

Meanwhile... I've been busy designing and making some more necklaces for Orlando Menswear. At the moment I'm currently working on a rather striking necklaces made with the beautiful blue gem stone Lapiz Lazuli. Meaning 'lapis', the Latin word for stone, and 'azula', the Arabic word for blue. It was once one of the most precious and expensive gem stones and because of this many pictures of the Madonna, were created using paint made from pigment ground from this stone. So if your looking for the truest blue of them all this is the magical 'Ultramarine'. Coming soon...

Vintage Men's Style...So Deschevele...

Native American Bear Necklace

I thought it was about time that I posted another in my occasional series of men's style/fashion tips. I love... the look of the vintage style distressed beads.. which I use in my jewellery designs @ Orlando Menswear...and what better to go with them than Vintage jeans...

Too new and jeans.. well.. just don't.. cut the mustard...And definitely no creases down the middle plea...se... (reserve them for when you wear your nice little striped polo shirt...Perfect for visiting your mother in law....!!!!).... We're thinking....Cool ....Warrior.. the kind of guy who would.. Well...Wear my Native American Bear Necklace...

Beams Plus Slim-Fit Washed-Denim Jeans £190

Source: mrporter.com via Jolie on Pinterest

 

Try teaming them with a suitably dishevelled shirt... so deschevele....And no ironing required...

Hartford Classic Linen Shirt £100

Source: mrporter.com via Jolie on Pinterest

   

Go easy on the boot polish... Try these for size...

Church's Sahara Suede Burnished Desert Boots £235

Source: mrporter.com via Jolie on Pinterest

 

And don't forget... Real Men... Smear their butter on their toast...

 

Browser Compatibility Problems!!!

Just as a I thought it was safe to get back to my jewellery design…. O my G… Browser Compatibility Problems @ Orlandomenswear.com …… Well…I paused to think… how on earth am I going to cope with this…I sighed and reached over to my pile of Dummies Guides…this time ‘HTML, XHTML and CSS’ by Ed Tittel and Jeff Noble (if you wish to know more, check out the Amazon widget at the bottom of my sidebar..). I was advised to go to the great Validator in order to find out what was wrong with my seemingly innocent HTML. From what I could decipher, this Oracle told me it had something to do with old HTML in my front page layout.. (Oracles speak in strange tongues..)…It didn’t like my Meta tag language very much either. I decided this might be something to do with my using a very old copy of Dreamweaver… which due to somewhat straitened circumstances …I cannot afford to update. Thankfully, however, my trusty guide advised me that all was not lost, I could actually go to the ball after all… With a wave of the magic wand.. A free WYSYG editor called Kompozer appeared and I was able to design a table for my front page in quite a straight forward way, without any depreciation in the design. I then pasted my table into a ‘Test’ page on my website, to check it’s compatibility with other browsers. I’ve been working on my website so far on a MacBook with a FireFox browser. It didn’t look to cool in Safari. With a little tweaking I deduced that I needed to widen my Header in my CSS style editor, as my logo and search box were cut off at the bottom. It is a little wider than I like in FireFox now, but in order to make it look good in Safari I had to compensate. I then checked out how it looked on Internet Explorer on my Mum’s PC Laptop, then went onto see how it looked in Google Chrome and Opera. It now appears to be fine in all these browsers. Just to be on the safe side, I  also decided that I had better check my links using Broken Link Checker. I thought this wise, as I transferred all my posts from my Blog… Jewellery by Jolie… on Blogger, using the WordPress plug-in Blogger Importer. All the links seemed to be working apart from a link to M&S where an item was no longer stocked. Sigh of relief….
I apologise if you have had problems viewing my Website, please contact me if problems persist, and I will see what I can do ( famous last words..)….
Now time for some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). On the advice of ‘The Idiots guide to Creating a Website’, by Paul McFedries (if you wish to know more, check out the Amazon widget at the bottom of my sidebar..), I submitted the Url  Orlandomenswear.com to Google, Bing and Alexa. I found this a little problematic in WordPress, as you are advised to paste the Verification Meta Tag into the HTML in the Header part of your Web Site. You can’t do this in WordPress as the Header is in CSS. Thankfully, I found a plug-ins for this WordPress SEO, by Mervin Praison. Go to Plugins – Add New – search- WordPress SEO – Install – Activate. Go to the bottom of the Dashboard and a large M will have appeared – Google Authorship and Analytics Settings – Webmaster Tools. Thanks Mervin! Finally, following the advice of Paul McFedries, I decided to submit my url using multiple search  engine submission sites Add Me and Submit Express.
Now… fingers crossed.. its back to some jewellery design….

Orlando Menswear Store is now officially open.....

Arrowhead Warrior Necklace

I declare Orlando Menswear Store is now officially open!!!..And this is my first blog... Those of you who have been following my blog will know that it has taken quite some time to get this site going. So I feel it is quite an accomplishment to get this site officially launched!!! I was intending to tell you every thrilling installment of my struggle to create this web site... This being a site about the day in the life of a Jewellery designer starting her own business. However, I felt I had to keep working away and get it constructed.. There were some hairy moments... and so I haven't blogged for a while. I thought I might share what I have learned, none the less...

 Taking the advice from The Dummies guide to Social marketing. I decided I wanted a WordPress blog,and on further investigation found that many web sites are designed with WordPress. Including Etsy and Life Magazine. I thought I could maybe be a bit more ambitious and have a store of my own. I followed the recommendation of the Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies and chose the Server Bluehost as they already have WordPress installed, so you don't have to launch your website into hyperspace using FTP.. Which does take a lot of the stress off. Needing more information.. I bought...WordPress For Dummies, WordPress Web site design For Dummies, HTML, XHTML and CSS For Dummies and Blogging for Dummies... If in doubt, buy a Dummies guide or five... On the advice of the WordPress web site design guide, I decided to modify a theme. There are free themes which you can select through WordPress in the way you can choose a Template in Blogger. I chose the theme Pinblack which is inspired by the Pinterest site, which I like. It's not as easy as it seems modifying a site...just a word of warning...I altered the CSS style sheet and it's rather like a detective game trying to find out which fonts, backgrounds etc..are the ones you are looking for.. and once you decide to change the colour theme.. you have to keep on going until it all coordinates..It took a bit of tracking down.


For my Store I designed the layout in Dreamweaver MX. I luckily have an old version I bought, when I designed my web site for Ziffo eleven years ago. Fireworks MX isn't compatible with Mac Os X 10.5.8, but thankfully Dreamweaver still works!! I created the layout in Dreamweaver, copied the HTML, and pasted it into the WordPress page window. I also used Dreamweaver to create a layout for the HTML in the sidebar. I pasted the HTML into the Text widget section. I decided to use Mal's E-Commerce, for the Shopping trolley, which I also used in my Ziffo web site. You can link your store to his site using hyperlinks and it's reasonably straight forward.... What's more it's free for the PayPal version. I tried using the WordPress plug-in Cashie Commerce, but I found it a little complicated. Next I decided to be brave and upload all my blogs from Blogger, I used a plug-in for WordPress called Blogger Importer. You can find this by going to Plug-ins on your WordPress dashboard - Add new- type in Blogger Importer. The nice thing about WordPress is you get lots of free plug-ins, tools, widgets etc..It only took a minute to import, but about three days to check the HTML and re- load the featured images so they appeared on my Blog Board.

It's now back to SEO again ( l am learning the jargon... for the uninitiated that's Search Engine Optimisation..)...I am amazed to find that that's now a specialized subject and there are now books devoted to it!! I thought you might be interested in the books I used for this project...So I've put all the Amazon books I mentioned on a widget in my side bar. I've got this widget thing going.. while you're at it, check out my current favourite tracks on the Amazon MP3 player... Cool...