Every week, we take a look at the one of many satisfied BlueFur customers, giving them an opportunity to shine (and hopefully get some more traffic too). Today, we turn our attention over to Allan Schroeder of Allan Schroeder Photography. He is an award-winning photographer who specializes in commercial, editorial, and destination photography.

It’s not like he’s sticking to his own backyard for some of his best shots either. If you go through the portfolio on his website, you’ll find that he has produced stunning images from five different continents around the world. His images have been featured in such places as National Post, Time Magazine, Architectural Digest, and The Vancouver Sun.

He also happens to be very active in the social media sphere as well. You may or may not already be familiar with the Allan Schroeder name, but you may know him on Twitter as @IcemanYVR. He is indeed a Vancouverite at heart, but Allan can be found traveling all around the world as well. Naturally, his camera is always close at hand.

If you are a BlueFur customer and would like to be featured in a future blog post, send an email to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

Combining many of the strengths of a magazine-style layout with a traditional blog-style layout is the Light Folio Theme for WordPress. This free download is a great match for many professional blogs and sites focusing on niche products.

Above the fold, you get a dynamic scrolling feature image that swipes across horizontally every few seconds. Next to it is an accompanying text box that swipes vertically to match with the feature image, ensuring that the picture suits the text.

Underneath this are three boxes for three more featured articles, including thumbnail images and post excerpts. And then below that is space for a more traditional reverse chronological blog layout, featuring post excerpts and thumbnails as well.

Other highlights include the metallic grey color scheme, a theme option panel, easy logo change utility, Gravatar support, a widget-ready design, and the separation of trackbacks from comments.

For more information on Light Folio Theme, check out DynamicWP.net. There is also a live demo for you to try.

We’ve reached the end of another work week, so it’s time to take another tour of the blogosphere. Here are some great blog posts to keep you entertained over the weekend.

Ho Yummy takes us on a little culinary adventure. Vancouver is known for having some of the best food on the planet, but you don’t have to go to a fancy restaurant to enjoy it. Something as simple as a viet sub can be incredibly satisfying without breaking the bank. Positively delicious!

Clint Osterholz of All Freelance Writing comes forward with quite the amusing piece on his experience as an entrepreneur. Can you identify with some of these freelance clients he hates? Have you had the talker, the first-timer, the dinosaur, or the mom?

Tyler Cruz makes his living online, so he’s always on the lookout for new money-making opportunities. In one of his most recent posts, he provides an in-depth review of InfoLinks including a full case study. How do you feel about in-text advertising? Has it been successful for your sites?

Scott Young, you could say, is at a crossroads in his life. Seeing how he is able to further his career from just about anywhere on the planet, he is faced with quite the decision. Should he wander the world or build up a home base? There are certainly pros and cons to both approaches, so I think it ultimately comes down to a personal decision specific to the individual.

Justine Ezarik is known for making some funny videos on the Internet and this week is no exception. She takes her skills to spoofing Taylor Swift’s Fairy Tale, writing and performing a song about how today is a “total fail.” She has a “behind the scenes” video to accompany her music video too!

Whether you are new to the business world or you are a veteran of the arena, it is in your best interest to get as many people as possible to know about your company, your products, and what you can do for them. You want them to be actively engaged with your brand, so that they will be more inclined to send business your way.

There are naturally many different strategies that you can employ as part of your marketing strategy. You may take out newspaper ads and Google ads, or maybe you try developing a company blog like this one. Another area that many businesses consider is social media, like Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as email marketing to a targeting mailing list.

When developing these avenues, it is easy to slip over that fine line between active engagement and spam. You want to reach out to a new audience and get them interested, but at the same time, you don’t want to be perceived as spam. That’s a negative relationship that you definitely do not want to foster. At the same time, you want your brand to be at the forefront.

At what point, in your opinion, does a company Twitter or Facebook account cross over from legitimate branding and marketing into spam territory? How do you decide whether you become a fan of a Facebook page or a follower of a Twitter account?

Want to foster more of a conversation with the readers on your blog? Finding that the comment system is getting overwhelmed and it’s far too hard to follow a discussion? Maybe you want some live feedback from the audience, allowing them to interact with one another in a free and open manner?

It may have been quite some time since you last stepped your virtual foot into a chat room, but you can now integrate the same idea into your WordPress blog with 123 Flash Chat. Rather than directing visitors to a separate site altogether, you can run a full-fledged chat client on your own website. The Internet chat room is back!

There are two main options for using this plug-in. First, you can choose to have a lite chat client embedded into the sidebar on your blog. By using this, readers can continue to chat while reading the different content on your site. Second, you can provide a link to a standard chat client, which would then appear as a pop-up window. For both, you can define the width and height of the client, as well as its skin and language.

More information, including the download link, can be found at 123flashchat.com. Note that there is an attribution link that comes along with this free WordPress plug-in.

More so than ever, the business environment has changed in regards to how companies communicate with their customers. In the past, we would only see commercials on television and press releases blasted out to news outlets. It was a one-way form of communication. As Internet preferences shift, so have the means of communication.

Take this blog, for example. If this was a traditional company website, it would host the company information, the products and services available for sale, and perhaps a contact page of some kind. With the blog, however, readers have the opportunity to leave their mark via the comment form. This creates a conversation rather than a simple soapbox. The same can be said about having Facebook and Twitter pages.

The reward is that customers and consumers can feel more connected to your company, giving a more personal connection that can result in a long-lasting relationship. They get to know the people behind the brand and the reverse is true as well. Fostering these kinds of relationships can be positively critical to your company’s success.

On the downside, there is a significant risk that people may not always have positive things to say. They can have negative feedback and this becomes public in a very immediate way. The key, then, is to address these concerns in as timely a fashion as possible, putting out any fires before they get out of hand. Every company can improve in some way; you just have to listen to your customers.