Archive for the ‘Articles & Tutorials’ Category
In a competitive web space, whatever brings in more customers and leads to conversions is gold. After all, many business owners know the top priority is the customer, and catering to their needs is essential. Multivariate testing is one website optimization technique that business owners can employ in creating an optimized user experience that leads to sales, subscriptions, and sign-ups. You’ve probably heard of or participated in these tests without realizing it. For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, I’ll cover it more in-depth here to get you started on the path of making smart decisions in terms of your online marketing.
Image Source: A symbol of high-speed and technology by Shutterstock
The Website Optimization Process
The web changes at a rapid pace and so do the technologies that reside on it. Understandably, you’re going to have to make some changes to your online marketing and web presence to keep up with the growing trends. In meeting needs of an expanding landscape, you may encounter some positive and negative feedback once changes have been implemented on your own site. For this reason, webmasters do testing on sites so they can minimize the risks while going through the process so they can follow a more step-by-step procedure. There are a number of tests available for these purposes, such as A/B testing and multivariate testing. Both enjoy widespread use in the industry and have their respective advantages and disadvantages, which we’re going to cover next.
Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? There is no strict answer for this question, but one thing is for sure – skeuomorphism imitates life in all the details. It’s a design trend that shows objects close to their real life analogues. In such a way it makes them familiar to the viewers that can act with them as they do in the real life. When the user sees the button in skeuomorphic design, he pushes it, when a switcher – turns on/of, etc. Elements look like objects from real life, and that’s why are inviting for the audience. For example, Apple widely uses this principle in its iOS devices, and all of them are immensely popular for the crowd.
All of you are familiar with audio and visual skeuomorph in design. The first one are most audio effects that accompany your operation with some elements of design (camera, calculator, buttons, etc). The latter are all that textures that are used to make objects close to life.
If you think that skeuomorphism is only a web product, you’re mistaken. There are imitations in the real life too. The fake leather, the hubcaps of wheels in cars (resemble earlier wheel construction), electric chandeliers that look like real candles, etc.
Of course, as each trend, this one has its pros and cons.
Pros
Users feel comfortable with it, it is quite engaging, really sells, it is appealing to the viewers and acts as a good communicator.
Cons
It overlooks functionality, it can confuse, good only for certain sites.
And that’s not all. More about this creative design trend you can learn from An Interactive Infographic about Skeuomorphic Design. If you still have question about:
• History of Skeuomorphism
• Types in Web Design
• Pros and Cons
• List of Free Skeuomorphic Textures
• Examples of First Skeuomorphic UI’s
• Real life examples of Skeuomorphism
feel free to check it out. Being interactive, this infographic will show you everything in creative manner. Revealing the hidden of information will be a captivating journey that you can start just now. Click the objects placed on the shelves, and see what happens. Here you’ll see the full version.
Interactive Infographic about Skeuomorphic Design:
Books have always been a source of inspiration and all the helpful ideas that you can use in your practice. What books can be of a great importance for designers and developers? Which of them should they consider reading? Here is the list of 5 Free HTML Books that can serve a good purpose for all of you who want to learn the new techniques and gain profound skills in web design. So, what will you find within them? Everything you wanted to know about HTML, XHTML and HTML5, the general information and best practices. You are welcome to study these materials thoroughly, and pick up the useful points.
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Head First HTML5 Programming
This book with a number or examples, pictures, puzzles, diagrams and games is a great tour guide that will teach you how to create web applications with HTML5 and JavaScript.
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Dive into HTML5
This is the very source you need to learn all the necessary information about main HTML5 features and standards. A number of users have found this comprehensive tutorial handy, and you can be one of them.
10 Most Influential UX Design Blogs
While working on the user experience – the way a person feels while interfacing with a system, you should have some great resources for get information from. How many trustworthy blogs on user experience do you know? And which of them are really worth reading?
To highlight the most influential of them, I decided to compile the following post. The blogs were chosen on basis of diversity of information, its usefulness and frequency of posting. All of them offer you useful data concerning user experience, and deserve great attention. Good tips, the best practices, critical analysis of issues, the articles that can tell a lot, tools and techniques – this and much more is waiting for you in the following blogs. Reading these 10 Most Influential UX Design Blogs will help you become a better user experience designer.
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Alistapart.com
All of you who make websites will find this blog extremely useful. Here you’ll read all about the design, development, and meaning of web content. This magazine features a special focus on web standards and best practices.
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90percentofeverything.com
Don’t forget to visit this blog by Harry Brignull, user experience designer & consultant. Here you’re lucky to find the information concerning experience design, user research, and rules of usability.
Constant development which is an eternal engine of our life success brings new achievements that make our life easier and …in the same time they are the reason of those new problems which we face with. Your business niche doesn’t matter in this case – being online you can be attacked by hackers every second and it is easier to foresee than look for the needed solution after detecting some troubles.
If you are sure that the solution will cost you lots of money you are absolutely wrong. Let us recommend you a WebsiteDefender Free version which will be able to protect your website saving your money, time and efforts. The very online website security service will monitor your website discovering malware and vulnerabilities giving you necessary recommendations how to keep your website secure. It scans your website, detects broken links, if the content is changed etc. A great list of all those benefits you will get choosing WebsiteDefender Free version is at your disposal. Follow the link and learn more in order not to miss this brilliant chance of your website protection. Some of them are mentioned below:
WebsiteDefender Free version will
- check the presence of your expired SSL certificate
- check DNS hacks aimed to redirect your website to another URL
- alert you to source code disclosure
- detect web server configuration problems (for eg: in .htaccess files)
- detect insecure php configuration
- let you know if your domain name is expired
Modern and free – the very service will astonish you with its potential being one of the bests protection methods you can get at present.
Besides, we want to share with you some additional and useful information you may be also interested in – Free WordPress plugins will be one more resolute step towards your security. Being created specially for WordPress platform they suit all its peculiarities perfectly adjusting them in all needed aspects.
Protect your website right now in order to avoid some unpleasant surprises the world of modern techniques may present you with – from now on you know how to do it.
TemplateMonster is happy to present its new creation – a Responsive Animated WordPress Theme.
This template is a result of thorough work of highly professional development team. During the production process all best practices were considered which led to absolutely unique product birth. Here you can view live demo of the theme. Please make sure that it stays open in a new tab in order to have the possibility to peep into during reading the rest of this post as not all animated elements can be demonstrated on a screenshot. You may have a look at template’s pages before we start our closer review.
What have we observed when we scaled the responsive page before? We saw how it gradually adjusts to the window width and rearranges the content. Test this theme, rescale the page and you will notice how smoothly content accommodates to “the new resolution.” No separate layouts any more, this theme is responsive in full sense of the word.
Explore What’s New in Opencart Templates
In our today’s blog post we would like to familiarize you with the newest features implemented into Opencart templates. In order not to overload you with extra information, we selected three revisions worth your attention. Here they follow:
Revision #1
Banner model has been improved and modules for carousels and sliders were developed on the basis of the new model. Now you can insert a caption you wish into slider via the administrative panel provided that the relevant elements are present in website design. If the text is not on all slides, it will appear in proper places. The modification will be applied to all Opencart templates.
Have a look at the examples of new-style captions in Opencart templates.
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Revision #2
A fully-functional module of categories, which includes the output of pictures, descriptions and titles, has been developed. Install it anywhere you want, set pictures size, number of categories and position in the administrative panel.
View the following screenshots to see the new look of the “Categories” page.
Designing for Touch Screen: Usability Tips
We guess it’s the proper time now to discuss the principles of touch interface design as more and more contemporary devices are being controlled with the help of our finger tips. The issue is that our anatomical traits are so varied that the same virtual keyboard can’t be convenient for everybody.
The creation of styluses solves the problem and lets the users with thick fingers relieve the stress from hitting several buttons with one tap.
Google Play is the best place to find out whether you’ve succeeded in creating usable design or not. Google store teems with plenty of applications; of course free ones are the most popular.
Principles of decent touch interface design
Everything You Wanted to Know about Responsive Web Design Displayed as Interactive Guide
We believe that there is no single person quite unfamiliar with infographics. From time to time we face the necessity to draw a plan or to systematize the data in the form of a scheme. Usually such brief visual aids work well and help us present loads of information in a simple intelligible manner.
Due to the increased popularity of infographics and their common use, web community became much more fastidious. Static infographics went away to the background and the interactive ones enjoy public acknowledgement.
The word interactive itself supposes that viewing our Responsive Web Design Interactive Infographic will be engaging and entertaining process, as animated elements responding on clicks, scrolls and hovers will show serious information in easy and playful manner.
Here you will find all essential points on Responsive Web Design compactly packed in 15 blog articles, 5 quotes, 11 free PDF books, Google recommendations, as well as 65 tutorials, 20 plugins, 19 tools and some examples of Responsive Website Templates.
The infographic was created in the form of a board game, but here the rules are even easier than in your childhood. You don’t need to throw the dice and worry about the quantity of your points. You will get your benefit almost on every cell. During the thrilling trip you will encounter the icons such as: light bulb, book, quotes, graduate’s hat and toolkit. Click those tiny images and they will reveal the hidden info on the topic.
Below is a tight static version of infographic developed especially for the blog post, under it you will find the link leading to the full version.
Sliders always serve as a kind of entertainment for users due to their striking effects. But web developers try to go even further creating design elements increasing website functionality without extra importunity or attention withdrawal.
Each day something new appears on web design market. Original progressive types of sliders are being developed on monthly bases. Internationally, designers trust only the most reliable products, such as NivoSlider. The item is considered the most fascinating and usable, it has been downloaded more than 1M times during the first year of its release. NivoSlider can be downloaded for free, it’s shareware. It is the best way to impart your website a really amazing look. Have enough patience, continue reading and we will tell you thereunder how the smallest plugin can turn ordinary image presentation into something absolutely different.
NivoSlider is a jQuery plugin weighting as low as 12kb compressed, serving for creating beautiful image sliders. It transforms an image wrapping element into a slider and proposes 16 original transition effects such as slicing, sliding, fading, folding and many many others. The plugin is able to represent prev-next buttons and navigation to manipulate the slides. The transition effect maybe a random choice of NivoSlider or you can set the one, which will be used constantly. The user also has a possibility to determine the number of slices, animation speed and pause period according to his preference. We provided several demo examples to show you the NivoSlider in action:
Nivo Slider with Default Theme & Default Settings
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Nivo Slider with Orman Theme & Box Animations
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