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Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts

Sunday, June 26, 2016

A Web Designer's Toolkit for 2016 and Beyond

A Web Designer's Toolkit for 2016 and Beyond



Web design is a very dynamic niche. Every year, dozens of new tools get released and updated. Their purpose is to reduce the use of code and make web design more suitable for users. In this article, we reviewed some of the top web design tools for 2016.

Visual Composer

If WordPress is your CMS of choice, you definitely need to try the Visual Composer. This is one of the most popular page builders that allows you to create richer pages that will definitely stand out. Currently, the Visual Composer is powering more than 1 million websites. The reason for its popularity is the use of drag and drop features that completely eliminate coding from web design work.

Visual Composer’s regular package can be bought for $34 (additional $10 for prolonged support), and it contains more than 40 premium content elements, 60+ predefined layouts and more than 150 third party add-ons. All this is complemented with SEO friendly page building environment and standard WordPress text editor. One of Visual Composer’s most important feature is the easy shift between its front- and backend editor.

Contact Form 7

This WordPress plugin helps you to create contact forms and scoop visitors’ orders and data. It comes with many pre-made forms and ability to add contact form input fields with the use of short tags. Contact form customization takes place on admin screen page and when you finish, you can insert it into a page layout by pasting a simple line of code into your page editor. All other customization can be done with the use of HTML and CSS in admin screen or on the spot, which enables admins to completely unleash their creativity, and create outstanding forms.

Avocode

Many web designers have troubles with transferring their designs into code. Avocode is very helpful for frontend developers, since it helps them to transfer their visuals into code snippets. This code generator comes with many helpful features, including:

Conversion into CSS- converts content and design elements into CSS and supports Less, Suss and Stylus.
Finding color codes- converts colors into codes. Web designers just need to pick a color and this Avocade feature tells them it's HEX or RGBA code.
Customization of Code Output- easily changes code variables, including: fonts, distances, aligns, gradients and colors.
Retina Graphics- scales imagery to satisfy retina pixel density. It can work with several different photo formats.
Easy Files Import- imports files into software with the use of ’drag and drop’ feature.
Photoshop Support- Avocode supports PSD files and preserves all of their layers.

Macaw

It is a web design tool that allows you to write HTML and CSS code, by creating, editing and positioning graphic elements. By using this web designing tool you will easily learn how to make a website. It is a perfect for web designers who are more accustomed to graphic elements and photo editor surroundings. These are some of the Macaw main features:
Stream- it is a layout engine that calculates margins, clears and floats and enables designers to add different elements to static document.
Alchemy- tool that converts graphic elements into HTML and CSS code.
Responsiveness- helps designers with optimizing their website for tablets and smartphones.
Typography- comes with wide variety of different fonts.
Styling- changes various elements in front-end surroundings.
Components Storage- stores all graphic elements in a media library and allows designers to use them for different projects.

Antetype

Antetype is a UX design app. It is equipped with all tools UX designers need for creating high-end prototypes. Antetype widget library contains more than 400 pre-designed widgets that can be added or customized to satisfy user’s needs. It also allows designers to create their own widgets and export them as pixel- or vector- based graphics. Like several other apps we mentioned in this article, Antetype can also generate CSS code and make designs responsive and retina-ready.

Web designing process starts from an idea. This is the most important part of website creation, so before you start using great tools we listed above, think about innovative features that can make your future website different and unique.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Why Your Business Needs to be on Snapchat infographic

Why Your Business Needs to be on Snapchat infographic



Snapchat is unlike Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Periscope. Its fleeting nature adds a sense of urgency companies should not hesitate to tap into.
This infographic, produced by Surepayroll, breaks down the Snapchat basics and highlights how you can build your brand’s Snapchat following.
Click image to enlarge+.

SOURCE : http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2016/06/infographic-why-your-business-needs-to-be-on-snapchat.html

Breaking Down the Anatomy of a Successful LinkedIn Profile INFOGRAPHIC

Breaking Down the Anatomy of a Successful LinkedIn Profile  INFOGRAPHIC 



“Today, the vast majority of business professionals and job seekers are using LinkedIn as their resume to proactively learn about new opportunities that can advance their careers. As a result, LinkedIn has quickly risen to the top of the recruiting chain. With its millions of users and targeted groups, this social platform is a key tool for recruiters to find and hire top talent. Are you maximizing your odds of being noticed on LinkedIn?”
This infographic, created by Akkencloud, illustrates the anatomy of a successful LinkedIn profile, helping you get found and stand out among the competition.

Source : http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2016/06/infographic-breaking-down-the-anatomy-of-a-successful-linkedin-profile.html

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

How to Choose the Best WordPress Theme for Your Website (Infographic)

How to Choose the Best WordPress Theme for Your Website (Infographic)



Before you go searching for the best looking WordPress theme, to start building your new website or blog, take a few minutes to consider how a theme can impact things like your brand, user experience and search engine ranking.

Too many times have I seen someone purchase an all singing and dancing WordPress theme, to then struggle trying to get it to fit their vision, only to find out that it doesn’t do want they ended up wanting it to do.
By thinking about our content first and how that might fit within a themes design and then looking at the performance and coding standards of the themes demo website, we can start to get an idea if the theme will work for us and if it’s actually any good in all aspects, not just the look and feel.
Of course we might want to make changes so it’s a good idea to try and get a feel for how flexible a theme is, but also to choose one that is most inline with how you see your content evolving as your website grows.
A theme may look fantastic with it’s demo content but we need to be thinking of how it could easily adapt to our vision and include the types of content we want to present to our visitors. A WordPress theme needs to suit the type of website we want to create, but we also need to ensure that it gives us some things as standard such as; being suitable for all screen sizes, fast loading, and well coded to W3C standards.
For more information and advice on how to choose the best WordPress theme for your website please see our infographic below where we go into detail to give you the right mindset and things to think about when looking for a WordPress theme to purchase.
Do you have any WordPress theme stories or nightmares to tell? If so we would love to hear them! Please share in the comment section at the very bottom of this post.

Source : https://www.wpshrug.com/blog/choose-best-wordpress-theme-website-infographic/

Saturday, June 11, 2016

WordPress vs Static HTML – What’s Best for Your Business Website?

WordPress vs Static HTML – What’s Best for Your Business Website?



Do you want to launch a business website but not sure how to get started? Recently while attending an event, one of the users asked us what’s the advantage of using WordPress over a static HTML site. If you had a developer tell you that you need a HTML site or was wondering because you had heard this elsewhere, then you’re in the right place. In this article, we will compare WordPress vs HTML and what’s best for your business website.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). Content Management Systems allow YOU to manage your website from a user friendly interface.
You can make all the changes on your website from an admin area which is quite easy to understand, even for absolute beginners.
While there are many CMS out there, WordPress is the most popular one because it powers nearly 26% of all websites on the internet.
It is important not to confuse WordPress.org with WordPress.com. WordPress, the open source CMS is available on WordPress.org. On the other hand, WordPress.com is a blog hosting service. Please see our guide on the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of using WordPress.

Advantages of Using WordPress

Easy to Update – You can simply login to your WordPress site and add new pages without paying your developer. WordPress is easy to use and has an intuitive user interface, which makes it easy for you to create or update pages on your site.

Professional Templates – There are thousands of ready-made templates that you can use on your site. These themes are developed by professionals from all over the world.
Incredibly Powerful – WordPress websites can be easily extended with plugins. Byinstalling plugins, you can add any functionality to your existing website such asadding a contact form, adding a reservation system, adding a photo gallery, and more.
Full control and Ownership – You get full control of your website, its domain name, and all its contents. You can make any changes you want, and there is no limit on how much your site can grow in popularity, traffic, sales, and users.

Disadvantages of Using WordPress

Learning Curve – While WordPress is easy to use but it takes a while for most beginners to get familiar with the software. There is plenty of help available to get over this learning curve quickly, but it will take a little effort.
Maintenance – You will be responsible for keeping WordPress, installed plugins, and themes up to date. You can also use manged WordPress hosting who can do this for you.

What is a Static HTML Website

HTML is the markup language used to display web pages. Most websites on the internet use HTML with a variety of markup and scripting languages to create web pages.
Typically you will need to hire a web developer to create an HTML website for your business. They will use HTML, CSS, JavaScript and some other technologies to build your website.

CMS software like WordPress use database to store and retrieve content. On the other hand, HTML websites have all your content in static files.
Having said that, Let’s take a look at advantages and disadvantages of a HTML website for your business.

Advantages of a HTML Website

Little to No Maintenance – Once your website is live, you do not need to install any updates or regularly backup. If nothing is changed, you can just backup your website once and forget about it.
Low Requirements – HTML websites don’t need servers with PHP or MySQLinstalled on them. They can run on cheaper server with low resources. Although most good web hosting companies offer PHP and MySQL support.

Disadvantages of a HTML Website

No Updates – Unless you know HTML/CSS, static HTML websites can be very difficult to update for beginners. You will need to hire a developer even for smaller tasks like adding new pages, updating old content, or uploading videos or images.
No Additional Features – If your business grows and you want to add a feature to your website like a store, a survey or poll, a gallery, etc. All of this would require you to hire a developer and in most cases they would recommend you to move to WordPress.
Costs – Considering that you will have to hire people even for smallest tasks, the cost of a HTML website could get much higher than a WordPress website.

What is Better? WordPress or HTML?

Now that we know the pros and cons of both WordPress and HTML websites. Let’s talk about which one is better for your business website.
If you are certain that you will never want to update, change, or add anything new to your website, then by all means go for a HTML website. It will be faster and will serve your purpose.
If you want to have the freedom and control of your website and not waste money on monthly retainers paying developers to add images, then WordPress is obviously the better choice.
For those who want grow their business website to make you more money, then WordPress is the way to go forward.
Using WordPress you can add content to your website without hiring anyone. You can create as many pages as you need at any time.
You can add a blog section to keep your customers updated, or even build your ownemail list and keep bringing more customers to your business.
You will be part of a global community of businesses using WordPress to manage their online presence. You will find plenty of free help, resources, tools and pluginsto grow your business every day.
Instead of paying developers loads of money for smallest things, you will be able to spend that money on growing your business with WordPress.

How to Get Started With WordPress for Your Business Website?

First, you will need to sign up for a WordPress hosting service provider. These are specialized companies that will host your website on their servers.
We recommend Bluehost as they are the official WordPress hosting providers. They also offer our users a free domain name and 50% off hosting (see our Bluehost coupon).
WordPress is famous for its quick and easy installation. Take a look at our step by step WordPress installation tutorial for beginners.
After the installation you will need to select a theme for your website. You may also want to checkout the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites.
We hope this article helped you compare WordPress vs HTML and the best solution for your business website. You might also want to see our list of 19 types of websites you can create with WordPress.

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

WPForms – Most Beginner Friendly WordPress Contact Form Plugin

WPForms – Most Beginner Friendly WordPress Contact Form Plugin



Not a single day goes by where someone doesn’t ask us about what is the best WordPress contact form plugin? With so much demand and the recent WPBeginner survey responses, it became clear that we needed to build a WordPress forms plugin. So we did.


Today, we are extremely proud to announce the launch of WPForms, a drag & drop WordPress form builder that is hands-down the most beginner friendly WordPress contact form plugin in the market.
Now with just a few clicks, you can easily create a beautiful contact form, email subscription form, payment form, and other type of online forms without writing a single line of code.
Since a lot of our audience is churches, non-profits, and startups who don’t necessarily have a budget to afford a premium plugin, WPForms Lite is 100% free and has all the basic features that you will need.
For those who want all the features that WPForms has to offer such as multi-page forms, payment integrations, marketing integrations, conditional logic, and more, then you should check out our premium version.
See the video overview of WPForms below:

WPForms Features

Unlike other contact form plugins, WPForms is not built from a feature-first mindset rather it’s built from a user-experience first mindset.
What that means is that you can actually use all the features that WPForms comes with without having to hire a developer or learning how to code.
We literally took the pain out of creating online forms and made it easy. Below are some of the features why smart business owners, bloggers, designers, and even developers love WPForms, and you will too.
Drag & Drop Online Form Builder

We built WPForms with WPBeginner users in mind, so our goal was to make everything extremely easy to use.
Our drag & drop online form builder allows you to create WordPress forms in minutes. You can easily add custom form fields, rearrange them, and basically create a complete form in 5 minutes or less (no coding required).
Pre-Built Form Templates

We believe in creating smart workflows that make complex tasks easy.
Most other contact form plugins require you to build your form from scratch, but the truth is that it’s often not necessary unless you absolutely want to.
WPForms comes with pre-built form templates to help you save time. You can add, remove, or re-arrange fields as necessary.
Whether you’re looking to create a simple contact form, request a quote form, donation form, payment order form, or a subscription form, we have a form template for you.
Mobile Ready, SEO Friendly, and Optimized for Speed
WPForms is 100% responsive and mobile-friendly.
Since speed is crucial for user experience and SEO, we optimized every query on the front-end and the back-end to ensure maximum speed.
You can embed your forms on any page with optimized title and description giving you all the flexibility you want from a contact form plugin.
All the Fields & Features that You Need

WPForms has all the fields and features that you are looking for.
From radio buttons to file uploads to multi-page forms, it can do everything you need it to do.
You can easily integrate your forms with an email marketing service like MailChimpor AWeber. You can collect payments for bookings and orders with PayPal (Our Stripe integration is coming soon).
The best part is that you can do all of this without hiring a developer.
See the full list of WPForms features along with videos of each.

Why did we build WPForms? (History)

Our founder and CEO, Syed Balkhi, has a great behind the scenes of WPForms blog post that goes into details on why we built WPForms.
To keep the story short, the most popular WordPress contact form plugin, Contact Form 7, has over 4 million active installs.
This is their version of “simple and flexible”:

So why is it so popular? Because a lot of users can’t afford to purchase a premium option, and Contact Form 7 is free.
Now you have a much better alternative that’s actually easy to use and free:WPForms Lite.
Our mission for WPForms is to build a WordPress forms plugin that’s EASY for beginners, marketers, and business owners who are not tech savvy.
A quote from Syed Balkhi’s blog post explains it all:
We made simple tasks EASY rather than letting the complex tasks define how hard simple will be.

Limited Time Special

If you’re interested in the premium version of WPForms, then you’d be crazy to miss out on this deal.
Like any other premium plugin, WPForms licenses require annual renewal for updates and support.
However for limited time only, we’re offering an ULTIMATE lifetime license for our early supporters.
What that means is that you get grandfathered in, so you don’t ever have to pay for annual updates and support while still enjoying every new feature that we will ever release.
Use this WPForms coupon code: WPB10 to get an additional 10% off your purchase.
This is a limited time launch special, and it will expire so take advantage of it while it lasts.

What’s New in WordPress 4.5

What’s New in WordPress 4.5



WordPress 4.5 named “Coleman” was released just a few minutes ago. It is the first major WordPress release of 2016, and comes with some exciting new features. In this article, we will show you what’s new in WordPress 4.5, and which features you should try after updating your websites.

This is a major WordPress release, and unless you are on a managed WordPress hosting service, you will have to manually initiate the update.
Important: Don’t forget to create a complete WordPress backup before starting the update.

Theme Logo Support

Adding a logo to your site from customizer has been a long awaited feature. Many premium WordPress themes allowed users to set logos from theme options, but there was no standard way to do it.
With WordPress 4.5, theme developers are now able to enable theme support for logo. This will allow users to set a logo for their website using the customizer.

Remember it is a theme feature, which means that it needs to be defined by your theme. If a theme does not support this feature, then you will not be able to see it in customizer.

Better Previews for Site Icons

Site Icons were introduced in WordPress 4.4. This feature allows users to set a favicon and application icon for their websites.
WordPress 4.5 brings a slight improvement to the feature. Up till 4.4.2, you only saw the preview of site icon when setting the image. With 4.5, you also see a preview under site identity panel after you have set the site icon.

Responsive Previews in Customizer

Customizer in WordPress 4.5 comes with responsive live previews for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Simply click on the device icon to switch the view between devices. This will give you a generic idea of how your site would look on different screens.

Optimized Image Generation Performance

Responsive images were one of the major improvements in WordPress 4.4, which allowed WordPress to show smaller image sizes to users on smaller screens.
WordPress 4.5 takes it to a new level by improving the performance of how WordPress generates image sizes.
Previously, WordPress used 90 for the image quality when compressing images. Now it will use 82, which produces nearly identical images with much smaller sizes.

Improved Comment Moderation Screen

WordPress 4.5 cleans up the comment moderation screen and makes it more usable. Until 4.4.2, when you clicked on the link in comment moderation notification email, you saw a page like this:

This page didn’t allow you to edit a comment and if it also ignored plain HTML formatting used in a comment.
This is how the comment moderation screen looks in WordPress 4.5.

Same Domain Links in Comments will not have Nofollow attribute

Previously, all links added into comment content area had nofollow attribute added to them by default.
WordPress 4.5 will not add nofollow attribute to links pointing to the same domain.
If you or your users add link to a post or page on your site in the comment text, then WordPress will not add nofollow to it.
However, if a user add your link in the URL field when submitting comment, then WordPress will add nofollow and external attributes to the link.

Visual Editor Enhancements

Most WordPress users spend most of their time writing content. This makes visual editor one of the most important areas in the overall WordPress user experience.
WordPress 4.5 builds on some existing improvements and adds a few new ones to make writing faster and more enjoyable.
Inline Link Editor
One of the keyboard shortcuts in WordPress is CTRL+K (Command+K on Mac), which allows you to insert links in posts. Until 4.4.2, it opened the insert link popup which was a bit distracting.
In WordPress 4.5, pressing CTRL+K shows an inline insert link menu. Simply type the URL and continue writing your post without removing hands from keyboard.

New Inline Text Shortcuts
Inline text shortcuts were introduced in WordPress 4.3. These shortcuts allow you to quickly add formatting markup while writing posts.
WordPress 4.5 allows you to use three or more dashes — to add a horizontal line. You can also use backticks `code` to add code.
We reported in what’s coming in WordPress 4.5, that there will be shortcuts for bold and italic too. Unfortunately, those shortcut patterns didn’t make it into 4.5.

You can see a full list of shortcuts available in WordPress by clicking on the help icon in the visual editor.

For those of you who don’t want to use these shortcuts, you can disable inline text shortcuts in visual editor.

Login With Email

Many online services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. let you sign in not only by using your username but also with your email address.
While you can easily forget your username, most people don’t forget their email address.
WordPress 4.5 allows users to sign in using either their username or email address as username.

If you were using a plugin to allow user log in with email in WordPress, then you can safely deactivate that plugin.

Under The Hood Improvements

WordPress 4.5 also brings some exciting new improvements for developers.
Updated Libraries – WordPress 4.5 comes with new versions of bundled libraries for Underscores, Backbone, jQuery, and jQuery Migrate.
Selective Refresh in Customizer – Previously, some changes in customizer required entire page reload. WordPress 4.5 comes with a framework to allow selective refresh in the customizer. It is fast and will allow developers to do great things with live previews. (#27355).
Customizable Embed Templates – WordPress 4.4 introduced embeds which allowed users to embed posts from their own and other WordPress blogs. WordPress 4.5 makes embed templates customizable so that theme authors can adjust embed display to match their theme. (#34561)
WP_Site Class – WordPress 4.5 comes with WP_Site class for multisite WordPressinstalls. (#32450)
Script Loader – WordPress 4.5 introduces wp_add_inline_script() which makes it easier to add inline scripts. (#14853, #35873)
We hope this article gave you a good overview of what’s new in WordPress 4.5. We are particularly excited about optimized image generation and embed templates. What are you excited about?
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