New from About Face Designs is the Paisley Collection of its popular Messengers sentimental gifts.

Coaster confusion

After the Spring launch of our new look photo gift personalisation area (which coincided with a general site make-over and some new personalised gift options) we’ve been delighted to continue receiving your feedback and as such have just made some slight changes to our personalised photo coasters product page.

Previously, it was only possible to personalise a set of coasters with one photograph, however the new upload process does actually allow subsequent uploads, merely overwriting the previous photograph you’d uploaded until you click on ‘confirm details’.

We’ve had a couple of instances where customers mistakenly thought they were ordering a set of coasters each with a different picture. Our apologies for any confusion.

Our sets of 4 coasters are supplied with the same photograph on all 4 coasters.

If you wanted another photograph on the coasters, please contact us PRIOR to ordering online as we may be able to help – subject to how busy we are.

Fabulous Photo Gifts.

What i learned from Twitter in just one day…

It was raining hard enough to stop @Julie_K from hoeing her allotment

The Shuttle launch was delayed for a 5th time from @nasa

A few friends were organising a drink in London @maxamphoto

There was a clever iPhone app for the 3GS video @Elke

Mayor of London Boris Johnson (@MayorOfLondon) keeps a 6ft chicken in his back garden @thedailymash

A 3.2 magnitude Earthquake shook LA Airport @gaynorlove

@RNLIrescues – the new Portaferry lifeboat made two rescue calls on its first day

@stuartsharpe wondered what was the greater achievement – Apollo 11 or Apollo 13?

Meanwhile, PR consultant @emilyrobe took the ‘Which classic hollywood actress are you?’ test and got Marilyn Monroe.

@tdrury had a close encounter with painters in his office re-painting their stairs bannisters.

@ApolloPlus40 (tweeting events as they happened 40 years ago in the run up to the Apollo misson) Survey says 51% of Americans favor manned lunar landing to 41 against – change from 49 for, 39 against in February.

All good stuff eh? To follow Fabulous Photo Gifts on Twitter – click here.

photo credit: foundphotos

A picture paints a thousand words – that’s what they say.

Here at Fabulous Photo Gifts , we’re used to dealing with all manner of photographs – family portraits, outings, holidays, pets, weddings etc as we personalise your gift choices and despatch them asap.

You’ll have probably noticed that on our blog, we like to highlight certain posts with an illustration or two. We love photography!

The photos and images we use on our Blog generally fall into 3 categories:

Product pictures – our own photographs of actual examples of our range of photo gifts, many featuring our own family and friends. If you’ve visited our website, you’ll see that we use plenty of large pictures to show customers exactly what they’re ordering.

Own photography – When we’re not busy in the Fab’ Photo Gifts workshop, we like to go out and take beautiful pictures of our own, many of which are held on various stock image libraries for purchase. Some even make it into publications and point of sale materials used by publishers and companies the world over. (see more at http://www.purple13.co.uk – digital photo art of Fabulous Photo Gifts proprietor Mandy Collins).

Stock photography – sometimes something a little more abstract is preferred and for that, we turn to Flickr common licence photography, where very often, little more than accrediting the photographer and linking to the image on Flickr is all that’s required – like the photo above.

Stock photography allows you to draw from a wider pool of images than you may have available to yourself. It also gives you the opportunity to spice up your posts with a well chosen ‘caption’ photograph. See the difference using a few images to illustrate your blog posts can make.

I don’t illustrate every post, it’s not always necessary. I’m also mindful of page load times when there are loads of large images etc. Tread carefully, size to fit, reduce colour levels / dpi / quality etc and you’ll be fine.

Go on! Go illustrate!

photo credit: thunderbirdchild5

You may have read some time ago that we were running our own daily fantasy iPod playlist over on our Tumblr account.

Tumblr is a great place to build an easily indexable collection of blog posts, web site favourites, music and video, pictures etc. and share your collection with everyone else.

There are also some great nifty tools making it easy to share content on your Tumblr account.

I have Stuart Sharpe to thank for first bringing it to my attention. It’s a great sharing platform.

However, the other day, I kept getting an error message when trying to upload a new link. I was patient, tried a few more times but kept getting a ‘report to Tumblr’ message so I did exactly that – reported the fault.

Well I don’t know what time it was where they were but they were soon back with an email and a further email saying that they were looking into. In the meantime, I replied that the problem had either cleared itself through their intervention or of its own accord, either way – thank you.

Here’s the message I received back:

“Hi, Jonathan. It must have been of its own accord. Regardless, I’m glad this issue is resolved. Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with and thanks for using Tumblr! Marc ”

Pleasure doing business with you boys.

You’ll find an equal, if not greater attention to customer care right here at Fabulous Photo Gifts – it’s so nice to know we’re not the only ones put a human face to a sometimes faceless web.

Perhaps it’s the rain that’s had the Fabulous Photo Gifts workshop thinking of holidays, or more likely it’s all the wonderful holiday photographs we’ve been receiving from you to personalise everything from jigsaws to our new photo engraved crystals.

All that sand, sea and fun – no wonder we’re so happy in our work.

Which leads me onto a discussion we had the other day about tunes that remind you of a particular holiday. Two, well three tunes stick out in my mind.

The first would be Lucille (you picked a fine time to leave me loose wheel as we used to sing) playing non-stop on the caravan campsite pub every evening.

The second would be Tenpole Tudor’s Wunderbar which played heavily as we left for a week’s Scout camp.

The third is Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s ‘The way it is’. At the time, I was travelling with a mate from work for a weeks camping in Devon. We kept hearing this song but never heard who it was by – how very annoying. At the time I remember we thought it sounded a bit John Cougar Mellencamp’ ish.

The camp was a bit of a washout and we ended up in a very comfy B&B for most of the week – serious strain on our beer money i can tell you!

Anyway back to Bruce Hornsby…. sometime later, a group of us started up our own little record club – the 5 of us would each pay a £1 a week, and every week, we each got a turn at buying an album (we’re talking vinyl LP for around £5.50 – early ’80’s). You then passed it around the other 4 members and if they liked it, they taped it (or not as the case may be – most of us went out and bought the album ourselves anyway) I remember we enjoyed Paul Simon’s Graceland, Berlin’s Count Three and Pray, Genesis Invisible Touch to name but a few.

So when my turn to spend the fiver came up, of course I rushed out and bought the Bruce Hornsby LP. It’s still about somewhere although the equipment to play it on has long since bit the dust.

Oh well it’s my birthday (very soon) so perhaps I’ll have to treat myself off of iTunes???

In the meantime, catch up with some of the songs mentioned above on our daily fantasy iPod playlist over on our Tumblr account – http://fabulousphotogifts.tumblr.com/

For a limited period only, you can now order one of our personalised photo colour changing ‘WOW’ mugs in red or blue.

Same price – same great quality as our regular black personalised WOW mug.

For more details or to order and personalise one online today – click here

That’s right!

We’re giving away a FREE personalised mousemat with all orders over £50 at Fabulous Photo Gifts.

No catches or hidden gimmicks – just spend £50 or more in a single order at Fabulous Photo Gifts, email us your preferred photo for your FREE mousemat and we’ll get on with it straightaway.

It’s our little way of helping make the Summer sizzle! (and helping you get an extra free pressie’ into the bargain).

Click here to see an example of our superb quality, fabric personalised photo mousemats.

Just a quick update for you following customer feedback on our range of personalised photo coasters.

We’ve had quite a few requests of late for different photo’s on our traditional set of four coasters.

So that you can now order exactly what you want, and how you want it – you can now choose between sets of 4 coasters with the same image, pairs of coasters (2 off) with the same photograph or individual personalised coasters, in both square and round shaped.

See the new line up of personalised coaster options at Fabulous Photo Gifts.

I sometimes think I’d like to change my avatar (the little picture that accompanies your blog and twitter posts). Something that says a bit more about who I am, what I like or is more indicative of our business of personalised photo gifts. Now there’s a radical thought.

Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve had:

Fozzie Bear (from the Muppets) – he’s always happy, nothing gets him down, a real friend who’d do anything for his friends, sometimes shy and a little timid.

A banana – I like bananas, I like the colour yellow, they suggest tropical sun drenched paradise.

A jigsaw piece – Our company started out just personalising jigsaw puzzles with your own photographs. That was three years ago. Today, we still have the largest selection of jigsaw puzzles you can personalise – we’ve just added more gift ideas as we’ve gone along.

Mandy’s picture – It’s Mandy’s business really – I just do all the online stuff and upkeep for her website. Problem is, she’s a little camera shy – can you believe it?

Keeping the same image – a mug shot of me on a childrens rollercoaster ride (click here to read the full story of that one), suffice to say the smile (i’m always smiling) is more a hanging on for dear life grimace on this occasion.

You see I had a bit of a dissagreement with a friend the other day on the subject of avatar changes. My view is that once you start using one avatar, it’s ’suicide’ to change it. My feelings are that your avatar becomes your quick reference for regular followers amongst a fast changing sea of faces and icons.

It’s something instantly recognisable that a follower can spot – a bit like tying a j-cloth around the handle of your suitcase when you travel abroad so you can spot it easily on the luggage carousel.

I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that by changing your avatar you’re not bothered about your followers being able to continue following you – there is RSS etc to keep them informed, but anything that you change that will make it harder for and possible cost you followers / customers cannot be a good thing.

If you do feel compelled to change your avatar, be prepared to work really hard to ensure that everyone knows what you used to look like.

P.S This is our 401st Blog post – you have been reading….