Zymmetrical News: New features update

Zymmetrical - Many new exciting new features and upgrades have been taking place on Zymmetrical recently, so much so we have been hardly able to keep up on communications about what has been updated. Here is a quick summary of recent changes:

1. Site layout changed to full-screen width to please designers with large screens

2. Completely new social interaction system, example visible here. Some highlights from this system include:

* Twitter Integration - optionally add your Twitter account info (no worries, fully encrypted and secure) and whenever you enter an entry in the "Journal" it will automatically post it to Twitter too.
* Groups and Profiles - Make your own groups and add friends and associates, highly customizable profile fields
* Private Messaging - New and improved, with instant popup new message notification across the site
* Unique Privacy Settings - You can share as much or as little info as you like, every profile field has multiple options for privacy
* Accept, Reject or Ignore - Full control over who you interact with
* Advanced Member Profile Search - More options, faster connections
* Photo gallery - Easy to use, post and share images
* Activity Feeds - See who is doing what in realtime
* Unique Web Addresses (coming soon) - Get a pretty vanity URL like "www.zymmetrical.com/yourusername/"

There is really too much to list here, and we are still in progress with rolling this out and integrating it throughout the site, so have a look and stay tuned!

3. Improved suggestion box at http://zymmetrical.uservoice.com. Have an idea for improvements or pet peeve with an existing site feature? Quickly and easily get your idea documented, and voted on by other members. See something in there you like? Vote it up!

4. New Blog system at www.zymmetrical.com/blog/. Nothing revolutionary here but it was getting lonely on the old blog system, so we have now added Comments, Trackbacks and some other features essential for a healthy blogging experience.

5. Weekly email sales report is now available in the Sales Manager. If you would like other kinds of reports, just drop an idea in the suggestion box.

6. Two exciting projects going on behind the scenes in our Labs, not much can be shared at this point other than they are all ground-breaking and great for Artists. Check back on the Labs page soon for a preview of these projects.

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Stock Photography Sales Statistic May 2009

This is my stock photography sales statistic for May 2009. You can find a complete list of stock photography agencies that I work with at H. Lehnerer Photography.

This are for me the best 4 preforming stock agencies for May 2009:

1. Zymmetrical
   
2. Fotolia
3. Shutterstock
4. StockXpert

Zymmetrical was the big surprise in May 09 with an EL sale. May 09 showed an increase of 36%.

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Zymmetrical: New ways to get paid

Zymmetrical - We are excited to introduce two great new improvements to getting paid at Zymmetrical:

1. Scheduled payments to your Zymmetrical Prepaid Debit MasterCard®.

It's fast, secure and offers you the most flexibility with your money. Once you have registered your card, we send you your money automatically on the 15th of each month, when you have a minimum of $20 in owed earnings.

Apply today by going to your Sales Manager page, clicking 'Payouts' and selecting the 'Payoneer prepaid Mastercard' option. Start getting paid faster while cutting the costs associated with other methods of payment. Other benefits include:

* Use everywhere MasterCard® is accepted - online and at any point of sale
* Withdraw cash from any ATM - in your local currency.
* Your funds are secure. As long as the PIN stays uncompromised, your funds are MasterCard protected even if your card is lost or stolen. A replacement card will be mailed to you and the balance transferred.
* No bank account needed
* Online access to your account, payments, balance and transaction history 24/7

We are excited to offer you this new method to receive and manage your payments, making Zymmetrical a better place to do business.

For questions about the Prepaid Debit MasterCard®, contact Payoneer:

Live assistance: www.payoneer.com
Email: support@payoneer.com
Voice: Within the United States: 1-800-251-2521 x2
Outside the United States: 1-847-461-1386 x2

2. Scheduled payments to your Paypal account.

No more having to make 'Money Requests' in Paypal. Now simply register your Paypal email account address in the 'Payouts' section of your Sales Manager , and we will automatically send you your owed earnings on the 15th of each month, when your account has a minimum of $10 in it. Easier for you, easier for us.

Other recent improvements..

Some improvements in the last month alone:

- added a new shopping cart with direct credit card payment and Clickandbuy options
- added over 230,000 files to the inventory
- numerous UI tweaks and improvements
- site performance souped up with quicker pageloads


So.. keep in touch!

We are serious about support and thrive on your feedback. There is a long way to go to turn this industry around and we rely on your faith - really!

Thanks for reading and we will be back soon with more good news.

Source: Zymmetrical

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Zymmetrical News: Tutorial writers wanted

Zymmetrical offers the Tutorials area in their message forum as mind-share between the the talented designers, photographers and other creatives that use this website.

$ Get paid to submit tutorials $ - Read below on this page for more details..

On a regular basis we will present member-submitted tutorials that will help you advance your skills on the following topics:

- Photography
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Indesign
- Adobe Lightroom
- Quark
- Typography
- VJ Software
- Photography
- Design
- Self-Promotion and Marketing for Creatives
- ..have your own idea? Let us know

Submission & Payment
We accept tutorials from anyone. The basic rules: - We offer no guarantee any submitted tutorial will be accepted and reserve 100% editorial discretion on which tutorials make it in - if you aren't sure, ASK! - Tutorial must be 100% original, written by you - We retain exclusive rights on the tutorial once it is paid for, meaning you may not submit it to other websites, unless otherwise agreed to - You can include 1 description of yourself and 1 link at the bottom of each tutorial.

TUTORIAL COMMISSIONS - Negotiable - $10 to $300, dependent on quality. Submit and we will give you a fair shake! Payouts via Paypal or Payoneer.

To submit a tutorial, please email it to us at info@zymmetrical.com If you are a first-time submitter, it is HIGHLY recommended that you send us a message via our Help Center describing your tutorial idea, BEFORE you spend a lot of time on it. Remember, we will be ruthless with low-quality, low-content, or generally boring tutorials, so please check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Tutorial Creation Guidelines
Create your tutorial using the message input system in this message forum. You may upload images via the included uploading tool, or if that is giving you grief, email them to us directly. We don't really recommend using HTML tables, but if you absolutely must (for a complex layout), ensure that the overall table width is no more than 650 pixels wide. Otherwise it will break the layout of this website and that makes us upset (and causes deductions off your payment for the work of cleaning stuff up).

1. Study other tutorial sites. How original is the idea behind your tutorial? Has the topic been done a thousand times before? It’s easy to find out – Google is your friend. There’s no point writing what a numerous people have covered already. Look at the tutorials that seem to have had a lot of traffic – what is it about their tutorial that is so good? Conversely, look at the unpopular ones – why might they be receiving less attention?

2. Use correct spelling and grammar. This is an obvious point but important one. Poor grammar and punctuation gives off an unprofessional image; a well-written, articulate article on the other hand is much easier to work through. Some visitors may not speak the language the tutorial is written in as their first language so they may be confused by slang and abbreviations. If you struggle with spelling and grammar ask a friend to proofread your tutorial or run a spell check in some Word Processing software. If we have to 'clean up' your tutorial a lot to make it read in the 'King's English' then we will devalue the price paid on it according to the amount of work we have to perform.

3. Let them know what they're in for. Give the user as much information about the tutorial as possible. Clearly explain any prerequisites to the tutorial such as any third party files the user may need, platform versions the tutorial is compatible with and software versions it is will work with. Additionally, try to attach a difficulty rating to the tutorial and give them an estimated time as to how long the tutorial will take.

4. Write step-by-step. Step-by-step doesn't mean you have to detail every mouse click, it means the process must be thoroughly documented. If you are targeting beginners then hold their hand and walk them through it. On the other hand, if you are targeting experienced designers/photographers take them through the fundamentals.

5. Include plenty of non-text elements. A page full of text can be boring and very difficult to get through. Include anything you can to make the page more pleasing to the eye and easier to follow: code excerpts, diagrams, screen shots. The types of elements you include depend largely on the subject matter of your tutorial.

6. Describe your tutorial properly. Be as specific as you can when naming your tutorial. For example “Nice Effect in Photoshop” doesn’t tell the user anything about your tutorial. Remember the words in the title of your tutorial are the ones that the search engines and tutorial directories will use to identify it when people search for it. Ask yourself this question: if I were searching for a tutorial like this what would I enter into the search engine?

Source: Zymmetrical

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Zymmetrical News: Message Forum Tuned Up

Our Message Forums just got an extensive overhaul, with the goal to make it an absolutely comfortable place to communicate in - whether it's a suggestion or question about the site directed at us, or shooting the breeze with fellow Creatives.

What is shiny and new:
- New search capabilities multiple filter and criteria options.
- Points and rewards system.
- Improved forum navigation with AJAX Printer friendly option for topics.
- Email topic to a friend.
- Tag topics with keywords.
- Who’s Online with up to the minute accuracy.
- Improved upload capabilities for topic attachments.
- Use Quick Reply to quote multiple replies from multiple pages.
- Quickly jump to first unread post or the last post of a topic.
- Option to hide avatars and signatures of other users.
- Improved topic status capabilities.
- Improved method for creating polls.
- Improved support for mobile devices.
- Email notifications are sent as plaintext and html.
- CAPTCHA support to prevent spam from anonymous users.
- Automatically detect URLs in posts and convert to links.
- Automatically reduce the size of extra long links.
- Numerous performance improvements.

If you haven't participated yet, come on down and get involved - Zymmetrical thrives on your individual expertise and personality.

Source: Zymmetrical

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Zymmetrical News: Voila! Keywording in 7 languages

On the flip side of having created quite possibly the fastest batch upload and describe system in the industry,the multi-language functionality of Zymmetrical has expanded further.

As mentioned in the previous news item about the new Submissions page, Artists can translate the keywords going into the system from the following languages, into English: Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Now, the keywords (tags) of all files put online for licensing are translated into all the 6 additional languages supported by our international mirrors:

Zymmetrical.de (German, de-DE)
Zymmetrical.es (Spanish, es-ES)
Zymmetrical.fr (French, fr-FR)
Zymmetrical.it (Italian, it-IT)
Zymmetrical.nl (Dutch, nl-NL)
Zymmetrical.pl (Polish, pl-PL)

Next on the list to expand the buyer experience on Zymmetrical is the expansion of currency and payment options, to help smooth out truly useful, local portals.

Source: Zymmetrical - Keith Tuomi

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