I was once an advertiser of a well-known website called Linkworth where it connects advertisers and publishers through various types of link advertising. Be careful guys, Linkworth can destroy your effort by refusing to make payment. When I started partnering with Linkworth, I put trust in it and attracted quite a number of paid publishers. Sadly, Linkworth is here to fool the advertisers. They only care about collecting payment from the publishers and keep the full payment for themselves.

Initially, Linkworth did fulfill the payment. After partnering for an extended period, they stop paying any amount. I tried to contact the company via their contact page but there wasn’t any response at all from them. See the request below:

While searching throughout the web, I found out that even other advertisers were experiencing the same problem of non-payment. This article is served to warn all advertisers out there to stay away from this fraudulent company.

If you are also one of the victims of Linkworth, I suggest you to report them to Scamwatch and BBB to raise awareness and prevent others from being the next prey.

It’s a vicious cycle. Vicious, but productive.

In an effort to share “my process” (which is a nice way of saying “mental illness”) with the world, I thought to write an article showcasing examples put forth by some of the most affluent web designers/design firms around.

Even if you don’t get quite so green at a glance of something far beyond your talent level, as I do, you can still draw inspiration and motivation from any and all of the following.

1. Jason Santa Maria – A List Apart

It seems fitting to start off the list with A List Apart, seeing as it’s a go to resource for web designers of every color and creed. Designer, Jason Santa Maria showcases his trademark use of blank spaces and prominent typography to present the day’s most relevant content for A List Apart’s designer audience.

2. Ablysoft – Xopso

Well to do design firm, Ablysoft, really strikes an aesthetic chord with the Xopso website. With unifying musical imagery throughout, and trendy flat design highlighting interactive menus and graphics, Xopso is a visceral treat.

3. Hudson – Sky IT Group

Hudson studios aims to impress with a high quality corporate website designed for Sky I.T. Group. Impressively sized drop down menus respond to your mouse hovering, bold contrasting colors warm the experience throughout, and a sticky bar assures easy navigation regardless of your location within the site.

4. Cuban Council – Epitaph Records

Cuban Council is a big name in the industry with many A-list credits. Among these is Epitaph records which enlisted CC to design and develop its web presence, which prominently features artists under the label’s umbrella with a nifty media player prominent featured, and various important content pieces interspersed throughout an uncrowded grid layout.

5. Happy Cog – Annie E. Casey Foundation

Happy Cog, the firm founded by the incomparable Jeffrey Zeldman, designed AECF.com with smooth, subtle animations which enhance the site’s content without overshadowing it. I particularly enjoyed the image slider on the homepage, which colors the featured image while fading the other images on the slider into greyscale.

6.      Information Architects (IA), Supertext

Information Architects is the brainchild of Oliver Reichenstein, an extremely affluent designer perhaps best known for his “Good Design is Invisible” philosophy. IA’s design for Supertext, an online copywriting firm, echoes that idea quite nicely. By economically utilizing bright colors among tons of white space and black lettering, the Supertext website’s design emphasizes what’s most important to those seeking high quality copy: text.

7.      Imageworks Creative– Providea

A full screen image is always fun, add 5 to a slider and the aesthetic value multiplies. A semi-transparent menu and logo sit unassumingly at the top of the page, while a triadic color scheme lures users into a state of comfort and increasing interest.

8.      Meng To, HeyZap

Freelance designer, Meng To, proves that you don’t have to work for a big firm to make big designs. HeyZap’s website is an artistic marvel. Using whitespace, a fixed navigation bar, flat design, embedded video, and high quality vector graphics to pepper the front-page with trendy appeal, HeyZap is a masterful work of design savvy.

9.      Fantasy Interactive (Fi), Wacom.com

Fi is another industry big fish and their design example shows exactly why. On-hover animations, and scrolling induced color changes abound across the website, and it’s sticky bar sits comfortingly on the side just in case you find yourself lost inside the engrossing UX.

10.      Huge, Ted Talks

Ted talks wanted big things for its first redesign since 2007, so naturally it looked at the Huge design firm. They delivered in, predictably, a big way. To clarify, Huge worked closely with the Ted UX team to put together a content heavy, internationalized, and extremely usable website.

11.      Focus Lab, Sebonic Financial

Focus Lab finishes up our list with their storytelling-centered design work on the Sebonic Financial website. They worked to meet conservative industry standards via tons of iconography, mucho white space, and a soothing color scheme.

What are your favorite designs? And who designed them? Sound off in the comments.

About the author
Kyle Sanders is an ecommerce entrepreneur, design junkie, and co-founder of CWR, an Austin-based SEO company that specializes in conversion-driven web design and organic search marketing. Outside of the office he enjoys writing, craft beers, and the local music scene in Austin.

Continue reading this post as I’ll be offering you a helpful insight on the significance of CSS preprocessors and their five types which can cut down the additional time that’s consumed in writing lengthy CSS. So, let’s get on!

What’s the need of using CSS preprocessors?

While initially presumed to be an extra layer of complexity in the development cycle, CSS Preprocessor is just not that. The reality is that using a CSS preprocessor can actually turn fantastic for your website development project. For instance, if you want to apply a specific type of styling to multiple elements, you’ll be required to type in the same CSS for nearly half a dozen times. It is a CSS preprocessor that comes handy under such a situation. It not only eliminates the need for writing CSS repetitively but also allows you to define global styles using functions, followed by enabling you to re-use them throughout the CSS using a single line of code.

Now, let’s get to know about six absolutely stunning CSS preprocessors for you to choose from

Less.js

Popularly known as Less, this is a CSS Preprocessor which extends CSS syntax via the use of variables, mixins, rule-set looping and nested style rules. Loaded with multiple techniques for making the CSS more maintainable, extendable and themable, Less is the CSS preprocessor which runs inside Node, within Rhino and in the browser. Moreover, there are multiple third-party tools which allow you to compile the files and keep a watch over any changes performed to the same.

For example, by using LESS, the below CSS

@base: #f938ab;

.box-shadow(@style, @c) when (iscolor(@c)) {

-webkit-box-shadow: @style @c;

box-shadow:         @style @c;

}

.box-shadow(@style, @alpha: 50%) when (isnumber(@alpha)) {

.box-shadow(@style, rgba(0, 0, 0, @alpha));

}

.box {

color: saturate(@base, 5%);

border-color: lighten(@base, 30%);

div { .box-shadow(0 0 5px, 30%) }

}

will compile to this:

.box {

color: #fe33ac;

border-color: #fdcdea;

}

.box div {

-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);

box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);

}

CSS-Crush

CSS-Crush comes loaded with all the features that a contemporary CSS preprocessor is expected to have. Some of the most important ones include: mathematical operations, auto-vendor prefixing, property inheritance via nested rule sets, variables and many more. One of the greatest assets of CSS-Crush which make it one of the most preferred CSS preprocessors is that it is being implemented in PHP- a popular scripting language that’s being used in recognized platforms like Magento, WordPress and Drupal. As compared to other preprocessors, CSS-Crush doesn’t expect you to configure Node.js or Rails for being able to avail its multiple features.

Here’s an example of how you can define device widths using CSS-Crush syntax:

@set {

smartphones-width: 320px;

tablets-width: 768px;

laptops-width: 1680px;

4k-monitors-width: 3840px;

}

Sass

Sass has been regarded as one of the most recommended CSS preprocessors which comes with two different syntaxes as mentioned below:

• Ø Sass– this is the original syntax
• Ø SCSS– this is a new syntax that’s similar to the native CSS

You can define and use variables in Sass syntax in the following way:

$serif-font-stack: “Georgia”, “Times New Roman”, serif

$monospace-font-stack: “Cousin”, “Courier”

body

font: normal 18px/22px $serif-font-stack

pre, code

font: 600 bold 18px/22px $monospace-font-stack

Likewise, in SCSS syntax, you do it in the following way:

$serif-font-stack: “Georgia”, “Times New Roman”, serif;

$monospace-font-stack: “Cousin”, “Courier”;

body {

font: normal 18px/22px $serif-font-stack;

}

pre, code {

font: 600 bold 18px/22px $monospace-font-stack;

}

Stylus

As a strong contender to the very popular Sass, Stylus is a CSS Preprocessor which comes with 60+ custom functions. One of the most effective functions is saturation() which allows you to adjust the saturation of a CSS color using mathematical concepts. Plus, you can use Stylus for eliminating colons(:), semi-colons(;) and braces ({ }) as well. Here’s how the Stylus syntax looks like:

.button

display block

border-radius 10px

The above syntax will compile to the following:

.button {

display: block;

-webkit-border-radius: 10px;

-moz-border-radius: 10px;

border-radius: 10px;
}

Myth

Myth is yet another brilliant CSS Preprocessor which requires Node.js for allowing you to use specific CSS syntax without having to wait for the web browsers to go on with implementing a new CSS feature. It is Myth preprocessor which will look after all the code that’s necessary for making the property expression function within the chosen browser. For example, here’s a W3C Valid way of using calc():

:root {

–purple: #847AD1;

–large: 10px;

}

a {

color: var(–purple);

}

pre {

padding: var(–large);
margin: calc(var(–large) * 2);

}

Myth will compile the above syntax to the following:

a {

color: #847AD1;

}

pre {

padding: 10px;
margin: 20px;

}

The best part about using Myth is that you need not learn a new syntax. This preprocessor uses existing W3C-standard CSS features.

That’s it!

Final Words

As a coding professional, using any of the above mentioned CSS preprocessors will seriously reduce the amount of CSS that you’re supposed to write for including the desired styling. So, go ahead and choose the right CSS preprocessor for your upcoming web project now!

About the Author
Rick Brown is a veteran app developer with Mobiers Ltd., where you can hire iOS app developer. You can get his assistance, to explore more about iOS app development services and its leverages.

We are in an era, where responsiveness of website is as mandatory as other performances like lesser load time, robustness and seamless support to different functions. To make all these available for you in a single package, most preferable options are either Divi Theme or X Theme.

Both of them are power packed, function rich and extendible themes. It would certainly be wise decision to cross check their detailed features to compare them based on your requirements. Well, in this post, we will put forth some facts about the two WordPress themes: Divi and X Theme. Here we will try to get hold of most important sides of both of them. We will discuss their good sides and later compare them in one to one round to help you decide which way you should go.

The X Theme

X Theme is one of the popular WordPress themes, used to create an eye-catching Website. It comes with different responsive styles and includes a page builder for developing custom pages.

This theme is way too popular among developers and DIY admins because of its flexible structure and abundant options. Since its release, X has introduced many attractive features, and that’s why it is gaining popularity on the market. Once the theme installation and activation is complete, you should get registered with its official website to avail other addition benefits like prebuild plugins/addons to extend the capabilities of your theme.

I would recommend you to install the demo content because it will help you view what X Theme can do for you. It will give you an idea how your site will look after adding X Theme. In other words, the demo feature develops the WordPress theme customizer and allows you to perceive what can be accomplished by using X.

Cornerstone: A Page Builder of WordPress

Cornerstone is the WordPress Page building extension that is included with X. It allows you to customize things on the front end as it works in the front end. The page builder is used with blog posts and pages.

This page builder offers 49 unique elements such as Google Maps, Audio, Video, Image Sliders, Post accordions, etc.

You can add new rows/sections, and then take a decision on the column structure. You can drag and drop any element into the portion of your content.

You can easily improvise the size and looks of column and rows. In fact, you can change the background colors and also define margins, borders and padding.

The WP theme customizer

X Theme enables you to change elements of your Website design by making the use of the WordPress Theme Customizer. However, there are not many design options as compared to WordPress themes, but still, it offers some exciting options.

You can also modify elements such as page widths, blog, portfolio, typography, your header and footer, social media sharing and many more.

Further, the WordPress theme customizer allows you to see any changes that you make in real time.

X Theme Includes Four Amazing Designs

X includes four different types of designs that are also known as “Stacks”. You can select any one of them in the WordPress theme customizer. Option for all stacks is represented beneath the stack selection box. Let’s overview the four unique Stacks:

1. Integrity: A design comes in light and dark color schemes. You can use it to create portfolios, blogs, ecommerce sites and more. With this, you can change the design from light color scheme to dark and can edit the blog header as well.

2. Renew: It is one of the most creative designs and you can use it in any type of a website. Renew stack enables you to change assorted background colors and link colors and provide some fundamental blog settings such as changing icon’s color or editing the blog title.

3. Icon: It is a minimal design that offers excellent support for blog posting formats. This stack allows you to enable and disable post icons, change the background colors and text colors related to the post formats.

4. Ethos: This stack offers a magazine design that features post carousels and post sliders. With this, you can customize background colors; configure your post slider for your blogs. It allows you to define side padding for navbar links.

Multi Extensions

The third version of X described that extensions add extra functionality to the X Themes. We have already discussed about Cornerstone, the WordPress page builder that is used to create alluring posts and pages.

Well, X Themes offer sixteen unique extensions and all are free to download. But you need to purchase the theme and enter your API key in order to download it at free of cost. These extensions are not limited to extend basic functions of theme but also support third party functions like mail chimp and google analytics.

An Overview on X Theme

X Theme offers a plenty of amazing features to consider it as a long term prospect for your website. It includes 4 different stacks and sixteen extensions that enable you to make the theme compatible as per your requirement by implementing additional functionality. Moreover, you can easily configure these settings. Letting you have an hassle free solution all time.

The Divi WordPress Theme

On the other side, Divi is established as one of the versatile WP theme in the web development world. When Divi was released at the end of 2013, its parent company – Elegant themes offers more than eighty awesome WP themes. And now more companies are driving towards Divi WP Theme after the introduction of its standard features and functions.

The new version of Divi 2.4 was the greatest upgrade of Divi since its launch. It has added new exciting features to make your site look appealing and stunning. Do you know Elegant Themes have added more than 1000 new settings in just few upgrades?

Drag and Drop: Page Builder

Divi offers drag and drop page builder that allows you to create unique pages easily and smoothly. It is a user-oriented page builder that gives great flexibility to the user.

In older versions of Divi, the page builder was used only on pages. But Elegant Themes have ejected this limitation. So, now you can use the page builder on any WP post type.

It also provides an amazing selection of modules that enables you to add images, videos, blog, posts and tables directly into the content area.

Divi 2.4 added six new modules including Fullwidth code, fullwidth image, fullwidth post title, fullwidth header, regular post title and regular code.

There is no doubt that Divi has always supported WP theme customizer, and new version 2.4 has also included a new module customizer. With this, you can change a number of settings such as colors, margins, fonts, padding and more.

However, Elegant Themes has modified the way that columns and rows are added and developed. It allows you to quickly change the column structure of table. You can also make rows of full width, can add column background colors and add custom spacing to columns.

The WordPress Theme Customizer

You can modify any aspect of your website design through the WordPress theme customizer. Divi 2.4 version added a wide array of new features to the theme customizer such as ability to change the width of your pages and sidebars with an ease.

With the navigation option, you can easily change the height of the logo and also modify the style and type of your font.

You can use fixed header option to adjust the menu look when your user scrolls down the page. Hide your navigation menu and show a call to action with the help of this option.

Divi: A Versatile WordPress Theme

As we discussed, Divi is one of the powerful theme that offers many new features. With this you can create intriguing and unique pages and content.

This theme offers 18 responsive pre-made layouts and excellent post format support that makes it universal for all types of sites.

X verses Divi: Which is better option?

Well, both the X and Divi Themes are quite similar in nature. Both of them include a page builder that can help you to style the page content, both themes use the WordPress theme customize as well.

The Cornerstone page builder and Divi page builder offers excellent solutions for designing beautiful content. However, they work in different styles; but still, they share some of the same features and modules.

When it comes to styling a site, then Divi theme is far ahead from X Theme. It offers hundreds of configuration options in the WP theme customizer that are not available in X.

In fact, Divi is available with 18 pre-made layouts, while X’s demo content feature offers only 33 different layouts for its four design stacks.

So, we can say both the themes are incredible WordPress themes that help you to create an elegant and complicated websites easily and efficiently. But we also cannot deny that Divi is slightly ahead from X Theme.

About the author
Lucy Barret is WordPress Developer at WPGeeks Ltd. She guides her team of experienced WordPress developers to execute each and every HTML to WordPress conversion projects with guaranteed 100% client satisfaction. Follow her company on Google+.

Finding UI and UX tools that fulfill all the requirements of the designers and come in their budget can be a difficult job. To reduce the hassles we have made a list of the tools that every designer would love to work with.

1. Proto.io

Proti.io is one of the most popular and widely used UX and UI tools with prototyping and collaborative features. The tool provides all the basic features that any UX and UX tool should have, however, the thing brought it in the list is that it offers a much faster and easier prototyping with a great collaboration feature.

Feature check list

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

2. Pidoco

Pidoco is also one of the most popular UX and UI tools that offers all the essential feature a designer might seek, for example, prototyping, collaboration, wireframes, templates and testing etc.

The highly attractive feature of this tool is its prototyping and its ability to simulate the look. And, in case you lose control of your position in the middle of the design approach, the tool offers a solution by positioning a design templates on global layers.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

3. InVision

InVision has all the core and essential features of a UI and UX tool and what makes it stand out of the list is the ease of use. The tool provides real time collaboration and a powerful prototyping. The tool has great collaboration feature as well as the task management, both features can be the USP of InVision.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

4. Firefly

Upload your design with any number of updates and the tool will track and store all the versions, or collaborate with your team in real time or keep the control of the configuration while working with the rapid prototyping, Firefly is a tool that fit in the expectation criteria of any designer.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools	N/A
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

5. UserTesting

User testing is a UI and UX testing tool that brings a whole new advanced testing method for your projects, either the website design or mobile apps. The tool also provides the videos and metrics to get the insights of the users using the products you have created and let you share the results within your team.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Online courses websites
Design blogs websites

6. Notism

Notism offers prototyping as well as the collaborative features. The UI and UX tool is more popular for its collaborative capability than any other features, however the feature that put it in the lime light is the real time video collaboration feature, to communicate your ideas and information to your team. It provides the ability to create interactive prototypes and share them with your team along with the notes or any information or sketches etc.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Websites offering templates
Design blogs websites

7. Prott

The tool provides a rapid prototyping feature for instantly shaping and sharing your ideas. Prott is mainly a rapid prototyping and collaborative tool that is best suited for designing mobile applications. The tool supports both, the iOS and android, platforms.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools	N/A
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

8. PowerMockup

The UI and UX tool works like the PowerPoint and creating a prototype in this tool is as simple as creating the presentation on PowerPoint. It is an easy to understand tool and if you are a complete non-technical person you might be going to love working on it. The tool offers prototyping and collaborating features along with office integration.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools	N/A
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

9. PickFu

PickFu is not a designing tool but a poll service that helps you find the best suitable design relevant to your work. For example, if you are about to publish a book and juggling with the number of designs for the cover page, the tool provides you a polling solution where you can upload the designs online and find the most preferred one on the basis of polls. You can ask questions to selected responders and get answers, feedbacks or comments.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

10. Vonn Mobile Material Design UI Kit

The Vonn mobile design UI kit by Visual hierarchy is a UI and UX designing tool for mobile apps. The kit has changed the typical slow, painstaking process of app creation into a fast and easy one with its compatibility with Google’s Material design guidelines. The tools offers 100 kinds of beautiful templates in 9 categories and provides you the ability to create spectacular and fresh looking apps with bold colors and great animations.

Feature check list:

Prototypes websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

11. AppCooker

AppCooker works for Apple iPhones, iPads and iWatches and makes the app creation much easier and less time consuming in terms of programming. The tool provides an impressive realistic look for the prototypes and also, saves the time and money. Working with Appcooker gives the feeling of carving your own master piece by its great prototyping and testing feature with sharing option and the support for cloud services.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Online tutorial
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

12. Marvel

The Marvel’s UI and UX tool is a fast, easy and attractive solution for interactive prototyping. The tool with its basic features is free for unlimited projects, all you need to have a Dropbox account to connect with and share your designs. It is a simple platform where any one, from designers, entrepreneurs, startups, agencies to the students can work on.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

13. Myna

Myna’s most attractive and useful feature is the A/B testing which grasps everything in real time as you move forward. It is a great tool that makes sure that your best design should be seen by more of your clients or potential clients by optimizing the tests on fly. Rather focusing on the page views the tool focuses on individual visitor and conducts the test on the basis of that.

With Myna you get instant results of the tests, even, you can make the changes while the test is in progress.

Feature check list:

Prototypes and collaborating websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

14. Antetype

Antetype is the UI and UX tool any designer would want to work with. The tool has every feature that a designer can need while making a rich, hi-fidelity prototype. Plus, it offers 400 widgets for all major platforms with option to add more.

Feature check list:

Prototypes websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

15. Ace Module UI Kit

The Ace module UI kit is the UI tool for iOS 8 mobile apps. The kit includes 75 PSD templates, more than 100 icons and screens that allow almost 1000 different apps to be created. It is an easy yet power tool completely dedicated to the high quality mobile app development.

Feature check list:

Prototypes websites
Testing tools
Websites offering free templates
Design blogs websites

All the tools we put in the list here are quiet versatile and can be the best choice for the designers to get a help in their work. If you have any more suggestion that could go in the list, please feel free to comment below or leave your feedbacks if the information was useful for you.

About the Author 
Author is a content developer and writer at Codecondo. He loves writing and sharing topics on web development, designing, web programming and latest trends going around in web world.

Although none of them have yet shared the actual value of the deal, but sources say this cash and stock deal is worth around $30 million. In his interview with VentureBeat, Mullenweg said that Woo acquisition is six times larger than anything the company has done till date. He also clarified that WooCommerce is now the third major line for Automattic after Jetpack and WordPress.com, which the company is best known for.

17 Acquisitions Made by Automattic Yet

However, this is not the first time when Automattic has acquired something. In the past too, it has acquired several people, products, services and businesses. Let’s take a look back at all Automattic’s acquisitions.

Gravatar

Gravatar, which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar, is a free service that provides globally unique avatars for users, developers and site owners. Created by Tom Preston-Werner, Gravatar was acquired in October 2007 by Automattic.

BuddyPress

BuddyPress is popular open-source social network software created by Andy Peatling. In March of 2008, Automattic hired Peatling as a full-time employee and acquired the BuddyPress.

Intense Debate

A feature-rich commenting system, created by Jon Fox and Isaac Keyet, was acquired by Automattic in September 2008.

Polldaddy

Founded by David Lenehan in 2006, Polldaddy is a polling and survey software that was acquired by Automattic in October 2008.

Blo.gs

Founded by Jim Winstead in 2002, the ping-update service was first bought by Yahoo! in 2005 and later transferred to Automattic in 2009.

After the Deadline

A grammar, style and spell checking service created by Raphael Mudge and acquired by Automattic in September 2009. Since June 2012, ATD is available as a module in Jetpack.

Plinky

Plinky, created by Thing Labs, is a service that lets users easily create inspired content. Automattic acquired Plinky in June 2010.

Code Garage

A popular WordPress backup and security service that was founded by Peter Butler in 2010 and eventually joined Automattic in December 2012.

Simperium

In January 2013, Automattic acquired Simperium, a data syncing service founded by Fred Cheng and Mike Johnston in 2010, along with its popular note-taking app called Simplenote.

Poster

A blogging app for iOS that was developed by Tom Witkin and bought out by Automattic in June 2013. After the acquisition, the app is no longer available for purchase.

Lean Domain Search

In July 2013, Automattic acquired Lean Domain Search, a domain name generation and registration service founded by Matt Mazur in 2012.

Cloudup

A free file-sharing service founded in 2010 by Guillermo Rauch and Thianh Lu. In September 2013, Cloudup joined the Automattic family to improve media library and co-editing features of WordPress.com.

Longreads

Founded by Mark Armstrong in 2009, Longreads service is dedicated to help users discover and share the best long-form stories online. In April 2014, Longreads joined Automattic.

Scroll Kit

Acquired by Automattic in April 2014, Scroll Kit is a powerful visual editor founded in 2011 by Cody Brown and Kate Ray.

Parka

In August 2014, Automattic acquired Parka – the company behind popular security tool BruteProtect – to make WordPress more secure than ever. Sam Hotchkiss, who calls himself open source traveler, founded Parka in 2013.

Code For The People

A UK based WordPress development company with six employees was acquired by Automattic in November 2014. According to Mullenweg, CFTP’s Babble plug-in was the key part of this acquisition.

And now, WooThemes joined Automattic Family!

Why Did Automattic Acquire WooThemes?

Obviously, the main purpose of this acquisition is to bring eCommerce functionality to the WordPress. In the past few years, WooThemes established itself as a key player in the eCommerce space – where WordPress still lags far behind its rivals like Magento, Shopify, Squarespace and Wix. Like WordPress, not only WooThemes has developed an active community around its signature product WooCommerce but also fulfilled eCommerce requirements of hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. Let’s take a look at following interesting statistics:

• Recently, the WooCommerce plug-in passed 7 million downloads and 1+ million active installs, which itself is a really big thing.
• According to BuiltWith’s Ecommerce Usage Statistics, WooCommerce has been overtaken Magento, not only in the entire internet (24.56%) but also in the top million sites (19.64%).
• WooThemes itself confirmed that WooCommerce now powers more than 600,000 eCommerce websites – that’s more than 24% of the online store space.
• According to Magnus Jepson, Co-founder of WooThemes, WooCommerce makes up over 85% of their overall sales and processes.
• Above all, WooCommerce is one among the most popular plug-ins in the WordPress’ database.
• It’s now being used by many reputable websites – like Small Press Expo and Internet Systems Consortium – which regularly get a huge amount of traffic.

All these statistics make one thing clear: WooThemes now has prominent reputation in eCommerce world and there is no better complement than WooCommerce for Automattic to make WordPress more competitive against other eCommerce platforms. That’s the only reason; Automattic acquired WooThemes instead of building their own in-house eCommerce solution.

How Would the Acquisition Affect the Future of WordPress?

According to W3Techs’ CMS usage statistics, WordPress (either self-hosted or hosted) dominates nearly 24% of the entire web. As Automattic is working toward reaching a 51% CMS market share, WooThemes acquisition would definitely play a vital role in expanding WordPress capabilities. For years, WordPress has been working on publishing and now taking over WooCommerce, it will be focusing more on selling in future.

Automattic is currently staffed with 325 employees spread across 37 countries; on the other hand, WooThemes has 55 smart eCommerce focused employees distributed across over 16 countries. With the merger of WooThemes, Automattic owns a powerful team of 380 people who will be working together to take WordPress eCommerce to new heights. Concretely, bringing 55 talented people into the company provide users more accessibility to run an independent eCommerce store.

What Does It Mean for Existing WooThemes Customers & Products?

No, not at all! Regardless of which WooThemes product (theme, plug-in or anything else) you’re using, everything including your licenses will continue as usual as before and therefore, there’s no cause for you to be worried. Although in the next few months, you can expect some improvements to WooCommerce from Automattic because their focus for now is to make the plug-in as easy to install, integrate and use as possible.

When asked about bringing WooCommerce to WordPress.com, Mullenweg asserted that it won’t happen until next year. He also clarified that WooCommerce will neither be merged into the WordPress core nor be rolled into the Jetpack. It works great as a plug-in and needs a lot of improvements to be made. Besides, he assured that the Sensei courseware plug-in will also get special attention and extra resources from Automattic since the Woo team is extremely passionate about it.

Final Words

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, WooCommerce’s acquisition is the biggest and most profitable deal so far in the world of WordPress and it certainly would prove to be an amazing milestone for the Automattic. Rather than starting everything in-house, the company decided to go to the route of acquisition – because they know talent acquisition is much easier than recruiting – which is a very wise business decision.

About the Author
Ajeet is a senior web developer at WordPressIntegration – US Based PSD to WordPress Company, where he is responsible for writing custom JavaScript code during PSD to WordPress theme conversion process. In his spare time, he writes on different topics related to JavaScript, WordPress, and HTML5 to share his work experience with others. You can follow WordPressIntegration on Facebook

]]> 0 Brian http://www.templatelite.com http://www.templatelite.com/?p=2073 2015-05-12T13:30:53Z 2015-05-12T13:30:16Z


With the flourishing mobile and web technologies, the user behavior is also changing. It has been observed that today, almost everyone possesses a smartphone or any other Internet-enabled device, and most of the mobile users prefer accessing the Internet via their handy devices. This has certainly added to the overall mobile traffic on the web (in fact, it has crossed the traffic generated from desktops).

All these changes have encouraged web designers to opt a responsive design and efficiently target mobile users. With responsive website, you can ensure that your site appears great on any device and display the content in a legible fashion, without compromising on the overall quality. Many websites have already adapted responsive design, if you are still missing it, you are most probably lose a huge chunk of your business. Thus, it is recommended to go responsive and heighten your business visibility.

Here are a few golden rules that can help you embrace an outstanding responsive website with a flair and boost your business values.

1. Use Optimized Images



Showcasing large images on web portals can influence your desktop viewers, but it can dramatically impact the UX of your mobile users. Therefore, one must tweak images to make them appear visually appealing, while consuming minimal area on the screen real estate. For this, you will need to plan an image size by considering the screen size of the targeted device. You may have to design different images for desktop users and mobile users.

2. Integrate Compressed Data

To efficiently reduce the number of bytes that a page sends across the network, you can use compressed files; and gzip offers a great solution for this. By doing so, you can improve your site performance with an optimized loading speed, as it helps make an ideal usage of the server resources. It, thus, allows users to seamlessly navigate through your website.

Moreover, while compressed files can leverage your site performance, it is also advisable to minimize your CSS and JavaScript files by eradicating the extraneous white space and break lines.

3. Reap the benefits of Media Queries



Media queries in CSS3 offer great benefits that facilitate web content to respond appropriately by taking several aspects of a targeted device into account. It works proficiently to identify a few attributes of the targeted device like its resolution, orientation, width and height. Then, on the basis of this info, it implements the suitable CSS rules. Thus, media queries augment responsive design and play a significant role.

4. Try To Avoid Navigation Menus

By avoiding the main navigation menu, you can efficiently target small-screen mobile devices. However, you can rather offer an intuitive icon with text to indicate users that there is a menu. Like, it is viable to create a highly interactive drop-down menu to display the navigation menu. This helps make a great usage of the screen real estate, while ensuring an easy accessibility on any device. Thus, it is always recommended to replace a menu featuring multiple options with a drop down menu.

5. Invest in a viable hosting solution



Your server quality greatly impacts your site performance, and for this reason, it is advisable to kick around and choose an effective and proficient hosting package. There is a slew of hosting services and service providers available in the market. Each hosting package comes with an array of advantages and a pricing structure. To make it certain that your chosen service is the best suitable for your project, one needs to invest time and efforts in researching the available hosting services and their features.

A great way to seek the best service is to determine the hosting packages used by the successful websites in different niches and then, streamline your choice of keeping your website objectives in mind. There are several sources available on the Internet with which you can easily identify the hosting service provider of a particular website and go through its customer reviews and quality delivered.

6. Learn The Breakpoints And Grids

Before beginning the responsive web development, it is better to get yourself clear with all the basics. There are several useful things that can contribute to a prolific web design that appears great on all devices. For instance, breakpoints and grids allow one to create a valuable, responsive design that helps ensure a great readability and accessibility.
• The Grid based system allows one to create a web design over row and column structure.
• Breakpoint defines a point where content has to be moved to the next line, rather than keeping everything in a line.

7. Get Rid Of Extraneous Content

Keeping the unwanted content and UI elements at bay helps rev up the loading speed of a site, while enhancing the UX. Adding multiple elements in an interface will make it appear messy and clumsy, which can ruin the overall look and feel of a site. Therefore, it is better to get rid of elements that are not adding to the site’s usability and appearance.

8. Ensure an absolute legibility of content

Keep the small-screen devices in your mind while designing, and optimize the content accordingly to ensure that your content can be read without any headache. For this, implement a significant text size like 16 px or 12 pt. There are numerous proficient tools like FitText that facilitates one to create responsive text with a flair.

9. Take The Screen Orientation Into Account

There are two types of screen orientations, including portrait and landscape. Both the orientations must be considered while designing responsive website. And since, a whopping number of mobile users prefer landscape more, you must ensure an invaluable look and feel of your website, especially in the landscape orientation.

10. Use An Ideal Button Size



Screen size is paramount and must be kept in mind throughout the designing process. To augment navigation and accessibility ease, it is imperative to precisely design the UI elements. Minimum size for creating easily accessible buttons is 44 x 44 px. And, padding offers an absolute solution for this, rather than margins.

Take these tips into account and consider the invaluable Google guidelines to design an ultimate responsive website. This way, you can deliver awesome UX with an outstanding web performance on all devices.

About the Author
Victoria Brinsley is a mobile app programmer for Appsted Ltd – a reputed Android app development company. In case, you are willing to avail a detailed information on the same, get in touch.

]]> 0 Brian http://www.templatelite.com http://www.templatelite.com/?p=2069 2015-03-18T10:05:25Z 2015-03-18T10:04:23Z
Are you looking out to build a fully-responsive WordPress website? Are you worried about tweaking your website imagery for varied screens? If your answer is a “Yes” to both these questions then you’ve reached the right post.

What all has been covered in this post?

This is a tutorial which explains you the simplest technique for creating responsive images which need to be included in your WordPress posts/pages.

A brief on the method that will be explained in this tutorial

The method that will be explained here purely relies on CSS height and width properties. That means, it would work well on virtually all devices and browsers. The only concern is that the web design layout needs to be a responsive/fluid layout.

Fundamental concept used for the method

All the variations covered in this tutorial will be based on a fundamental concept wherein CSS will be used for assigning a percentage-length unit to the width property and a value of auto to the height property as shown below:

img {

width: 100%;

height: auto;

}

Since the <img> element available within the container has a width property of 100%, the image’s width will always be equal to its container, no matter what is the viewport’s size. This will make the image fully-responsive. Also, since the value for height is set to auto, the image will scale proportionally.         

Creating a Basic Responsive Image

For creating a basic responsive image, you need to have a div which acts as the container of the <img> element. The HTML associated with the same is displayed below:

<div class=”container”>

<img src=”image03.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

</div>

In the above HTML, container has a width property of 84% ensuring that the image has both, left and right margins. Also, the image has a max-width of 840px, making the layout not wide enough for display on large screens.

Also, the CSS associated with the creation of a basic responsive image is shown below:

div.container {

width: 84%;

max-width: 840px;

margin: 0 auto; /* this will center the container */

}

img {

width: 100%;

height: auto;

}

Here, you need to note that the <img> element will be responsive irrespective of the fixed height and width HTML attributes specified in the markup.

Creating a full-width Responsive Image

In order to have responsive images which are 100% of the viewport’s size(i.e. full-width), you simply need to remove the container’s max-width property i.e. 840px and allot it a new width of 100% as shown below:

.container {

width: 100%;

}

img {

width: 100%;

}

Creating responsive images which display side-by-side in columns

There are situations wherein we want the images to be displayed in the form of thumbnails on a grid. Hence, in order to achieve responsive images in columns, all you need to do is simply reduce the CSS width property and allot <img> elements a particular display property value i.e. inline-block. Here’s an explanation of some layout schemes for display of responsive images:

Two-column Responsive Image Layout

In case of a two-column responsive image layout, you can simply set the CSS width property to about 46% i.e. roughly half of the container’s width. Why I haven’t set it to 50%? Reason is simple. Just to give the images proper margins on the sides.

The HTML for this is shown below:

<div class=”container”>

<img src=”image01.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

<img src=”image02.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

</div>

CSS for the same is shown below:

img {

width: 46%;

display: inline-block;

}

Three-column Responsive Image Layout

In case of three-column responsive image layout, the concept is exactly similar to the one followed for a two-column image layout, with only one difference that the width property needs to be set to about one-third of the image container’s width i.e. around 33%.

HTML for this will be as shown below:

<div class=”container”>

<img src=”image01.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

<img src=”image02.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

<img src=”image03.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

</div>

CSS for this will be as shown below:

.three-columns {

width: 33%;

display: inline-block;

}

Incorporating conditional breakpoints in responsive images

By having conditional breakpoints in responsive images(the ones which are displayed in columns), the images don’t get collapsed in case their size is being reduced. For including conditional breakpoints in images, you’ll need to use the media queries.

Below is the HTML and CSS for responsive images which will be displayed in one column on a smartphone, in two columns on smart tablets and in four columns on much larger screens:

HTML

<div class=”container”>

<img src=”image01.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

<img src=”image02.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

<img src=”image03.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

<img src=”image04.jpg” width=”840″ height=”420″ />

</div>

CSS

/* For display on small devices (e.g. smartphones) */

img {

max-width: 100%;

display: inline-block;

}

/* For display on medium devices (e.g. tablets) */

@media (min-width: 240px) {

img {

max-width: 46%;

}

}

/* For display on large devices (e.g. desktops) */

@media (min-width: 640px) {

img {

max-width: 22%;

}

}

That’s it!

Wrapping Up

I’m sure the information furnished in the above post would have motivated you to serve different versions of your site’s images, thereby introducing a visible improvement in the mobile web performance.

About the Author
Samuel Dawson is a expert professional with Designs2HTML Ltd which is one of the top most psd to wordpress conversion service company. He has vast experience in front end development technologies.

]]> 0 Brian http://www.templatelite.com http://www.templatelite.com/?p=2056 2015-03-12T06:28:04Z 2015-03-12T06:15:19Z
If you’ve just started working as a web developer, then you will apparently want to use a programming language that is learnable and can make the development process faster. PHP is one such great programming language that is widely-used for developing websites as well as web applications. Over the last few years, PHP has matured to a great extent and keeps on adding several new and exciting features. However, there are some ground rules of PHP (i.e. best practices) that as developers you should be aware of.

This post will help you learn about some of the most important PHP best practices that are worth considering.

1. Go Through the PHP Manual

If you’re a novice PHP designer or developer, then it’s imperative for you to become familiar with the PHP manual. Getting acquainted with the manual will help you gain resourceful insight into PHP and related topics. The manual mainly comprises of several articles containing helpful comments. So, rather than visiting forums and community to seek answers to any PHP related issue, you can save some time and refer to the PHP manual directly for getting the needed help.

2. Don’t Forget to Experiment With PHP Frameworks


PHP without a doubt is a great language, you can use for web development. In fact, it offers a wide number of libraries and tools to help you meet your varied web development needs. But, the problem is that as soon as you’ll begin working on a project using PHP only, you’ll probably need to look for third-party resources (ideally code or libraries). And nothing can be worse than writing code on your own. This is where PHP frameworks come in handy.

There are several PHP frameworks available over the Internet, using which you can easily create PHP based websites and web apps without having to become a PHP expert. Have a look at the below given image to know about some of the best PHP frameworks:

3. Adopt an Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

IDE’s provide developer with powerful and highly useful tools, helping them to write code in a quick and efficient manner. Additionally, the tools come loaded with rich set of features including syntax highlighting, error warnings, and shortcuts more. And thereby, helps developers (especially beginners) to make less mistakes, at the time of writing code. Some of the IDE’s, you can use are PHPEclipse, Aptana Studio etc.

4. Utilize the DRY Approach

DRY (also referred to as Don’t Repeat Yourself) is a popular approach that is used for curtailing redundancy in the code. This is not a PHP-specific programming concept, and can be used for many different languages like C#, Java, etc. Let’s have a quick look at an example to understand more about this approach:

$mysql = mysql_connect(‘localhost’, ‘admin’, ‘admin_pass’);

In case we use the aforementioned code in multiple places, and somewhere we have added the wrong parameters, correcting them will probably take a lot of your time. Now let us make use of the DRY approach:

$db_host = ‘localhost’;
$db_user = ‘admin’;
$db_pass = ‘admin_pass’;
$db_name = ‘WordPress’;
$mysql = mysql($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass);

Using the DRY approach as explained above will also prove useful – in changing the database configuration – when we transfer our project from one server to the other.

5. Preventing SQL Injection Occurrence in Scripts

When a user input some details on a web page, an SQL attack (also called as an SQL Injection) occurs if the data that the user entered is not validated. And because of poor input validation, the attacker (ideally one having access to your database) may create a fake superuser in your database. There are solutions that help to overcome this issue, such as:

• Make use of mysqli_real_escape_string().
• Execute a prepared statement using “PDOStatement::execute”. Following this technique won’t add user input directly into the SQL query. And will rather make a call to the “PDOStatement::bindParam()” method to bind variables to the query.

6. Assign Relevant Names to Variables and Functions

If you’re working on a project as a part of a team, then it is important that the variables and functions you’re using in your code are meaningful and are assigned relevant names. If not, understanding your code can give other programmers a really hard time. And thus, you should avoid using generic and insensible names for your variables and functions.

7. Avoid Placing phpinfo() in your Webroot

When writing a PHP file, you’ll come across Phpinfo that looks something like:

Placing it anywhere on the server will make you learn everything about the server environment instantly. But placing a file that contains phpinfo() in your server’s webroot can make your server susceptible to attacks. And so, it is advisable that you should put phpinfo() at a secure place in your file. And delete it once your work is being completed.

Conclusion

Although, this post doesn’t provide resourceful insight into PHP best practices, but will definitely help you know about the most important practices that you shouldn’t ignore.

About the Author
As a certified programmer at Xicom Technologies Ltd., Amanda Cline has an impressive expertise as PHP programmer. If you need to hire PHP developer then simply get in touch with Amanda via Twitter and Google+. She has also written interesting and informative articles on Custom Software Development, Web Application Development etc.

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