I have been using Laurel Pankratz to photograph me and my family for a couple of years now. Her business and Web site is called Eilas Photography. She also has her own photo blog.

Laurel took the shots currently on my blog. She has also taken our family pictures for the past two Christmas seasons. She is a superb photographer and reasonably priced. I highly recommend her.

I have read a great deal about SEO, but it all seems so theoretical. This is the first article I have read that deals exclusively with WordPress blogs. It is also extremely practical. The editorial staff of WPBeginner walk you through the exact steps you need to take to make your blog more SEO-friendly. If you have a WordPress blog, this is must-reading.

For a while now, I have been looking for a simple way to create a Web form on my blog. Since I am a publisher, I occasionally give away books. I needed a simple way for my readers to sign up for this. I looked at several solutions, but Wufoo is exactly what I needed. It is super easy AND super powerful. Once I have collected the names, I can export them to an Excel spreadsheet, comma delimited file, or a text file. My IT department can even connect to the database through Wufoo’s API and extract the names.

This service is very similar to iStockPhoto, except that it is designed for video and television producers. It has thousands of video, music, and sound tracks available for your iMovie and Final Cut Pro projects. I used it today for a book review project I am creating in iMovie. Very cool.

Adobe BrowserLab, is a fully hosted online service that lets professional Web designers preview how their sites will look in various Web browsers on the Mac and Windows platforms. You can create “browser sets” and use hotkeys. Other services do what BrowserLab does, but none as elegantly.

This little web app is a great tool for making sure that your blog and related feeds are all working. It simply pings your site and then generates a very simple but useful report. And, it’s free! (Thanks for the tip from ChurchCrunch.com.)

This tool validates your RSS or Atom feed. It makes sure that your subscribers are always able to get your feeds. I use this whenever I make changes to my blog to make sure I haven’t messed something up.

This was created by the same people that developed Wesbite Grader. It provides you with a grade based on your number of followers, updates, and engagement. It also shows who are the highest ranking Twitter users in specific regions and cities.

Website Grader is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your web site or blog. It provides an overall score that includes things like web site traffic, SEO, social popularity, and technical issues you need to fix.

If you are looking for a Web hosting service, you couldn’t do better than Media Temple. This is the service I use and the one recommend. It’s not the least expensive, but it is one of the most reliable and has great support. It is the same service used by ABC, NBC, Sony, Starbucks, Adobe, and TechCrunch. I have the Dedicated-Virtual server.

If you occasionally post email addresses on your web site or blog, this simple web app is essential. It takes a regular email address and encodes it through the use of “character entities” (you don’t need to understand this), so that spam robots can’t harvest the address.

Ever wonder if a web site is down for everyone or just for you? This handy little web app tests the site from multiple locations and then reports back. It is fast and accurate.

This is the tool I use to verify and compare other people’s web site and blog traffic. It isn’t perfect, but I have found it reasonably accurate. I usually compare other’s traffic to my own, since I know what my own is.

This web site will take screen shots of your web site or blog, using numerous different browsers. It enables you to see what other people will experience when they visit your site.

This is the service I use to get the photographs that I use in my blog posts and slide presentations. They have a great selection. Most photos cost $1.50 each.

This is the service I use to manage my blog’s email subscriptions. I used to use Feedburner, but FeedBlitz blows it away. It is much more customizable.

I am amazed that people don’t know about this resource. It is simple and easy to use. Think of it as “Google for Twitter.” You can search for specific users or content.

Everyone writes an “About” page for their blog. Few people put much thought into it. But it is more important than you think! This post provides five specific tips for how to maximize your About page.

Website Optimizer is a free resource from Google. It will help you optimize your web site or blog’s SEO capabilities. It’s a great diagnostic tool.