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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s obvious that the theme that sells the most is well-liked by the users, and will certainly help you come up with a winning website. Below are 20 of the best selling WordPress themes that you must have a look at:
Avada has been the top selling WordPress theme on Themeforest of all time with more than 150,000 purchases. The theme developers call it as the “Swiss Army Knife” of WP themes since it provides endless possibilities in creating a winning website design. It provides beautifully-crafted and professional looking demos that make it super easy for users to set up a complete WordPress design of any style – without having to code.
The X Theme comes bundled with expanded demos that can be used to build a site of any particular niche. It helps in creating web pages with the help of WordPress popular “Cornerstone” page builder – that makes the process of creating website prototypes faster. The best part about this theme is that it enables to make edits to the theme style in real time. In addition, it helps in editing the content of the site on the fly.
It’s the most user-friendly theme that enables to build beautiful looking WordPress sites at a blazing fast speed – in just 2 minutes. Enfold features an awe-inspiring responsive and retina-ready layout that easily adjusts to fit the screen size of the visitor device and look great irrespective of the size of the device screen. The admin area of the theme is powerful yet simple to use. You can study about the theme features, by going through its comprehensive documentation and video tutorials.
This is an excellent theme that is ideal to be used by both experienced developers, as well as, non-technical users without any coding knowledge. The uDesign can help you build your website based on your preference with minimal time and efforts. The best aspect about this theme is that it is mobile-ready and can be accessed across all the devices, regardless of the screen size and resolution.
Salient is the best selling WP theme in terms of aesthetics. It comes with unique designs that will help you showcase your brand in a distinctive manner, giving you an edge over your competitors. The theme is optimized for mobile devices and looks stunning on different screen sizes and resolutions. It’s retina-ready, contains a drag and drop page builder, is WooCommerce compatible and so on.
Do you want to create a WordPress site based on iOS 7 or material inspired design? In that case, The7 theme is exactly what you want. It is the most advanced theme that features a responsive, fluid and retina-ready layout. The theme offers tons of customization options – that renders the ability to make any changes to the look and feel of the theme.
The theme is trusted by over 26,000 users and is perfectly-suited for beginners. It features exceptional design that will help you stand out from the rest. Besides this, it provides automatic updates, unmatched customer support and unique shortcodes. Karma visual composer page building tool makes it easier to create content-heavy pages in no time.
Another feature-packed multi-purpose WordPress theme, Jupiter will best fit your needs to build new-generation WordPress site. This theme comes with the most advanced template system and offers 25 design templates – available in 6 categories. It boasts a lightweight admin panel that makes customizing the theme layout fun and easy.
If you want to build a DIY (do-it-yourself) site, then Striking is the right theme for you. It’s a highly flexible and customizable theme that can be used for building any sort of creative website (like photography, video, etc.), e-commerce site, blogs and many more. It comes with features that provides better control and customization ability that you may not find in any generic premium WordPress theme. It helps in building simple sites that can be easily customized based on your growing and complex needs.
Creators of BeTheme proclaim it to be “the biggest theme ever”, which can’t be denied considering that you get access to 130+ pre-made designs for the price of one. What’s more? The designs can be installed in just 1-click. This theme is ideal to be used by users who love to create grid-based layouts, since it gives the option to begin with a base grid and pick a layout.
This is the best selling fully-responsive WordPress theme for creating photography sites. The theme comes packed with a rich feature-set, including unlimited fullscreen backgrounds, 7 unique galleries, 35+ shortcodes, widget-ready footers and sidebars and many more features.
This is one of the best selling blog and magazine theme. It is a 100% responsive and retina-ready WordPress theme that gives you the ability to turn-off the responsive mode. It is compatible with two of the most popular WordPress plugins called BuddyPress and bbPress. Furthermore, it comes with a TiePage builder that helps in building beautiful homepage layouts.
Modernize best suit your needs of building a WordPress site based on modern design style, containing awesome features. The page builder of the Modernize theme enables to create web pages using the drag-drop module. Furthermore, it also provides several other options such as color elements, 350+ fonts, 15 predefined background patterns and a lot more.
This is yet another responsive, multi-purpose WordPress theme that is designed to cater the needs of users wanting to build modern-style websites. Kallyas is a highly flexible theme that can be used to create a site for any niche – be it real estate, agency, non-profit organizations and more. In addition to this, the theme is ready as an e-commerce platform and comes with pre-made styles that will help you build an online store within minutes. Some of the features of this theme are 12 homepage designs, live page builder, numerous top page sliders, hero scenes and much more.
If you’ve been looking out for a theme that separates design from content, then inFocus is the right choice for you. The theme comes with everything that makes customization a breeze. It’s Revolutionary Skinning System enables to create a more personalized and unique skins. You can learn every aspect of the inFocus theme framework, including its admin panel and CPT (custom post types) through its extensive documentation and so on.
With more than 12,000 satisfied users, Inovado is a responsive and retina-ready theme that serves as a powerful business tool. It is an extremely versatile theme that comes with robust customization settings. The theme help customize the layouts, styles and colors in just a few minutes. It comes pre-packed with tons of features like built-in mega menus, revolution slider, WooCommerce shop, 25+ pre-configured layouts, over 240 font awesome icons, etc.
Trusted by more than 90,000 users, is suffice to say that the Core Minimalist Photography Portfolio theme is worth a try. Apart from creating a photography site, this theme can also be used for building personal site. The theme features a responsive design, 3 homepage styles, 8 custom widgets, styled typography and many other features.
Dandelion provides everything that will help you display your products and your niche in a polished and professional way. It is a highly flexible theme, and most importantly, it makes the task of changing the color scheme simple – without having to use an image editor. The theme can be used for building responsive websites like business site, portfolio, and personal sites. It contains a rich set of features, including jQuery sliders, unlimited skins, flexible portfolio galleries, etc.
This is a great theme for setting up a versatile e-commerce online store. It comes with unlimited layout options and skins, and thereby allows you to customize the theme based on your exact needs. You can choose to have a full width or a boxed style layout and can also add content on the main page with widgets and shortcodes. The theme is translation-ready, comes with 8 slider options, 300+ font icons, responsive design and several other features.
Last on our list of best selling WordPress themes is Commodore – that feature a classic design with a glossy look. The theme looks great, no matter whether it is being accessed via a Retina MacBook Pro, a Retina iPad, or any other high-resolution device. This is because theme automatically adjusts to the visitor’s device pixel-density ratio. It’s a fully-responsive theme that comes with WordPress Customizer support, flexible typography, theme updates, layout builder and a lot more.
Are you searching for a suitable premium WordPress theme to setup your site? In that case, you can refer to the best selling themes listed above. All the themes come loaded with a wide variety of features, and are designed to meet the need of varied industry verticals.
About the author
Ava Garcia is a WordPress developer by profession and is working with OSSMedia Ltd- a WordPress Outsourcing and WordPress Theme customization services company for the last 5 years. She loves to share information regarding web technology.
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
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 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 has been regarded as one of the most recommended CSS preprocessors which comes with two different syntaxes as mentioned below:
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;
}
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 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!
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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, 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 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.
A feature-rich commenting system, created by Jon Fox and Isaac Keyet, was acquired by Automattic in September 2008.
Founded by David Lenehan in 2006, Polldaddy is a polling and survey software that was acquired by Automattic in October 2008.
Founded by Jim Winstead in 2002, the ping-update service was first bought by Yahoo! in 2005 and later transferred to Automattic in 2009.
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, created by Thing Labs, is a service that lets users easily create inspired content. Automattic acquired Plinky in June 2010.
A popular WordPress backup and security service that was founded by Peter Butler in 2010 and eventually joined Automattic in December 2012.
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.
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.
In July 2013, Automattic acquired Lean Domain Search, a domain name generation and registration service founded by Matt Mazur in 2012.
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.
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.
Acquired by Automattic in April 2014, Scroll Kit is a powerful visual editor founded in 2011 by Cody Brown and Kate Ray.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%;
}
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;
}
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!
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.
This post will help you learn about some of the most important PHP best practices that are worth considering.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.