Webmaster Tips

20 amazing HTML5 & JQuery Image Sliders that you probably didn't know about

20 amazing HTML5 & JQuery Image Sliders that you probably didn’t know about

Need some fast and responsive HTML5 or JQuery Image Sliders for your brand-new website? Read on to see some of the best Image Sliders in the market and pick any of these that are to your liking.

These sliders are not only fast but provide incredible interfaces and enhance the look and feel of your site. On top of that, they have amazing Transition Effects and Custom Options so that you can edit them as per your requirements.

These sliders are also compatible with multiple platforms, so you will not have to worry about any setup process for a different platform.

Below, we have also presented some tutorials for the coders. Now, go ahead and choose any one from the following amazing Sliders for your project:

1. HiSlider:

2. Unslider:

3. WOW Slider:

4. Nivo Slider:

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Useful Toolkits and Utensils for Designers

Useful Toolkits and Utensils for Designers

All such designers who are starting with work offline can make use of a graph or blank paper while starting from scratch. You can easily access the pre-designed templates, and for this reason, you need not start from scratch, as this will save you time and help in bringing out your creativity.

Many tools can be easily accessed while you are considering making a web design or plan. All these tools are also available for download. They mainly include grids, pre-drawn browsers, and iPhone and iPad development.

Paper Browser: this is a simple and printable browser that is useful for wireframing. It has a subtle grid in it which is functional for better and enhanced design. It is scaled for certain screen resolutions.

MBTI Sketching Paper: this tool consists of four multiple dimensions while you are coming up with different ideas for certain buying modalities that are humanistic, methodical, spontaneous, and competitive. It is available in four different sizes such as Legal, Letter, A3, and A4.

Concept7 Sketching Paper: this tool is useful in providing the browser window with predesigned grids, lines and also with note areas; it is easily available for A3 and A4 sizes.

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Choosing Your Corporate Identity According To Your Brand

Choosing Your Corporate Identity According To Your Brand

I have seen hard-nosed businessmen at each other’s throats about subtle changes in colour and hue and the exact shade required to convey the right message.

What should the company mission statement and strap-line be? What should be depicted in the logo? Should we use an established font or create one of our own? Opinion is often divided, and therein lurks a greater issue.

Branding is merely the tip of the iceberg. If individuals can’t agree on the core values of the company, then they would do well to invest time into addressing those issues before wasting effort on their corporate branding.

Having everyone working towards the same goal, singing off the same hymn sheet or being ‘on the same page’ might be a dreadful list of clichés, but if core values are at best confused and at worst missing entirely, then this is an early indication that the business may not be destined for success.

In businesses that are already well established, this is an even more serious problem as deep conflicts may exist around the overall direction of the company, which will have an effect on culture and efficiency and spill over into the realm of customer perception also.

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The Best Online Sources for Creative Commons Images

The Best Online Sources for Creative Commons Images

As a Web designer, you may want to use free images to enhance your work. Although the Internet is full of images of all types, you can’t use just anything you find on the Web; this can lead to a lot of headaches, the main being an expensive lawsuit.

Unless you’ve created or taken a photo yourself, you must get permission from the owner/creator before using Web images in your work. This is where Creative Commons (also known as CC) images come into play.

It would be an inconvenience and take too much time if you had to personally ask permission for every single Web image that you wanted to use. Instead, you can simply search for Creative Commons images using the online sources outlined below.

These sources will show you beautiful images that you can use for free in exchange for an attribution link on your website. Best of all, this attribution link is often provided for you by the source; all you have to do is copy and paste it into your website’s HTML.

There are different types of Creative Commons licenses. So you need to pay attention to this when searching for images. Some let you modify, adapt, and build upon the image, while others won’t let you change a thing – you will have to use as-is.

So be sure to look for the appropriate license based on how you’ll be using the image. Without further ado, here are eight of the best online sources for free Creative Commons images.

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Webmaster tips for improving the usability of a webdesign

Webmaster tips for improving the usability of a webdesign

A good web designer will always come up with new and great ideas that will set trends. A GREAT web designer will make a balance between a new web design and the functionality of the site that he is working on.

There are many exercises for web designers that promote ease of use and functionality, an excellent maintenance rate and great user satisfaction. I will adduce some of those elements created to greatly increase the site’s usability and functionality.

Intuitive navigation technique

There is an expression roaming around web users: “If you can’t find it on the first two pages of Google search, it doesn’t exist” The point of this expression is that the end-users often redirect their search from one to three links on the site before they give up. Keep it simple and keep it clean.

The intuitive navigation offers users that they jump from site to site and find the required information quickly and easily. While designing a site, keep in mind that users do not have to jump more than three levels in their search.

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3 Must Have Upgrades For Your Blog In 2017

3 Must Have Upgrades For Your Blog In 2017

Like all forms of technology today, the moment you think you have gotten your blog to that point of ultimate perfection…..the whole blogosphere changes again! Maybe there is a new type of malware sweeping across the Internet. Or perhaps shareable content made easier is now the “it” addition to serious blogs. Perhaps the “hamburger” menu button is out and infinite scrolling has already replaced it.

Here, 2017 is no different from other years. Change is on the horizon yet again, and the blogger who wants to start a blog and stay competitive needs to update and upgrade as needed. In this article, learn about three of the top must-have upgrades for your blog this year.

1. Content-Based Upgrades.

While actual numbers can vary from day to day, the current working estimate suggests that there may be as many as 173 million blogs registered online. That is a lot of blogs! Of those blogs, estimates indicate as many as 1.13 million new posts go live every day.

Point being, your blog is competing with a LOT of others for those coveted sets of reader eyes. You are competing even harder for subscribers – readers who like your blog enough to give you their email address and permit you to send them updates. As the blogosphere continues to expand, you need ever-better incentives to nab that all-access pass to your readers’ inboxes during the 30 seconds or so they are surfing around your blog.

The hands-down best incentive for 2017 is “content upgrades.” What exactly does this mean?

Content upgrades are freebies that readers ONLY get when they give you their email address by entering it in the little box and subscribing to your email newsletter. So you want to make them VERY alluring. You want your free content upgrades to be so enticing a reader who leaves without registering to receive it will navigate back to you later to sign up so they don’t miss out.

The top content upgrades for 2017 are shaping up to be:

– Bonus materials that enhance knowledge gained from a popular blog post. An example might be a blog post you wrote about how to make your blog more visually appealing to readers. At the end, you offer a content upgrade featuring the list of the top five colors readers are most responsive to.

– Templates readers can use to recreate your success. If you have achieved great success with a particular infographic layout or a certain video format, you can bet your readers want to know how to do it too!

– Free plugins to increase conversions and sales. Let’s say you write a blog post about how using a certain plugin on your blog took your readership from zero to 500 in 15 days. A content upgrade at the end of the post might be an invitation to receive a free resource list of the best plugins of this type for each blog platform.

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4 must-haves for user-friendly Magento store

4 must-haves for user-friendly Magento store

There is no doubt that user-friendliness adds value to your store. In a good online store, customers can quickly find what they need; see a good presentation of product colours, options, etc.; add the product to the cart without unnecessary clicks and go through an easy and understandable checkout process.

In a bad online store, people have to struggle to achieve what they need, and most of them would leave a messy store without a purchase.
I bet that as an online store owner, you want your shop to be user-friendly and conversions-oriented, right? Then there are some things you should know.
Site Navigation
When you see your store many times a day, and you know which products you have as you spend much time adding and editing them, it’s hard to have a brand new look at your store. This means you are not always objective when it comes to your store usability and to the navigation in particular.
The goal here is to ensure as seamless a shopping experience as possible, so make sure your site structure is logical and easily understood.

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What is A/B Split Testing and How You Can Use it to Improve Your E-Commerce?

What is A/B Split Testing and How You Can Use it to Improve Your E-Commerce?

How A/B Split Testing Helps Your E-Commerce Website and Business

Identifying Changes in Web Pages and Effect on Customer Experience – How do we measure customer experience, and how do we know what is effective in our e-commerce design and implementation? These are questions that can be answered with statistics produced from A/B split testing experiments. For example, if you currently have a web page design and see high bounce rates and low click-through rates, you may want to identify why users are either not staying on your site or are not buying from your product or service selection. By changing everything in your design, you’ll never know what works and what doesn’t work – what is attracting users and what is shunning them away. Therefore, A/B split testing expresses statistical evidence created from incremental changes in your design or website’s effectiveness.

Understanding Your Purchase Funnel – With e-commerce website checkout pages, many internet marketers will look at the purchase funnel effectiveness using A/B split testing for different designs and routing patterns. The highest conversions will result in the implementation of either scenario A or B. The beauty of A/B split testing is that you are able to see what the change in design style or buying experience does to your click-through rates, overall sales, and bounce rates over the course of a couple of weeks. Design two different versions of your purchasing experience, make incremental changes along the way and measure the results of the action taken. Over the course of three to six months, you will fully understand the best strategy that creates the most interest.

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Why and How to Improve your Web-Site Speed

Why and How to Improve your Web-Site Speed

Now, Google offers the so called Page Speed Service, and it is said to be something that “automatically speeds up the loading speed of your web-site”. With this service, Google asks you to send them the entire web project, and they will “have it optimized” for you. Namely, they modify it in various ways, and, in the end, the version of the web-site that they make does load faster. The service is free, but there is a rumour that this will not last forever. You can say that it is only logical that, after some time passes, Google will be able to charge for their optimizing services, again, due to the constant development of this company.

First of all, it is important to state that the load time of any page is dependent on many factors. However, the most important ones are connected to images, animations, and other web-design experiments. So, here is a list of some tools where you can check your site speed:

Pingdom Tools

On this web-site, you can test the load time of every object that you have on your web page (like, for example, HTML, CSS, every image, Javascript, and so on) individually, so you can see which object loads the slowest. That way, you know what to work on.

GTmetrix

This web-site can be used as a tool to analyze the performance of your page. It combines Firefox performance add-ons like Yslow with Google Page Speed. The site also gives suggestions on how to improve your site both in terms of speed and some other things.

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4 Cybersecurity Threats That You Should Know and Protect Against

4 Cybersecurity Threats That You Should Know and Protect Against

As the digital world grows and evolves, so do cybersecurity threats and attacks that you face as an online business owner. With cyber-criminals devising more sophisticated methods to infiltrate your system and steal highly-sensitive data, it can be challenging to secure your business from all sides. The good news is there are some excellent ways to keep your business and your customers protected against cyber-attacks. In this post, we’ll cover these four cybersecurity threats you should know and protect against to keep your business’ and customers’ interests protected.

1. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)
A DDoS attack crashes your network or server by flooding them with unwanted traffic. This makes it impossible for your website and its services to stop working. An attack like this can cause downtime that might cost your business sales opportunities and crash your website to the point that your business ceases to exist. If that’s not serious enough, there is the risk of your private data being breached since DDoS attacks are also used by cybercriminals to extort money and information from their victims.

However, there is a solution to help you stop this kind of attack in its tracks, and that is by adopting a cyber kill chain model in your cybersecurity strategy. This preventive measure helps you make a complete and detailed assessment of your security to identify your weak spots. Think of it as getting inside the mind of a hacker, where you take a “first-person view” of the steps to carry out a cyber attack. With a cyber kill chain, you can see the layout and process of a successful cyber attack from start to finish and identify the stage where a potential threat is most likely to occur. Doing a preventive assessment through a cyber kill chain helps you reinforce your cyber security strategies, secure your business from all corners, and get the peace of mind to run your business smoothly.

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Get Started With iOS 7 Freebies

Get Started With iOS 7: Freebies

1. iOS 7 GUI PSD

Full iOS 7 graphical user interface (GUI) PSD based on the Beta 1 release will help you create an app prototype and pitch it to stakeholders.

2. Tab Bar Icons iOS 7

A nice collection of iOS 7 inspired icons in two different styles: full color and stroke. Initially designed to be used for the tab bars, suitable in any other context.

3. iPad iOS 7 Keyboard Portrait

Daniel Crystal has designed iOS 7 iPad keyboards, both light and dark versions. Useful for creating app previews or showing the interaction of the app.

4. Start making iOS 7 Icons with the App Icon Template 3.0

The new iOS 7 came out with slightly different icon dimensions and requirements. This free app icon template will serve you in the process of updating your current icon or creating a new one.

5. Template for iOS 7 App Icons

Another app icon template includes some time-saving features like slices for fast png export, a new vector grid, smart objects for easy preview of different sizes and a vector mask of the icon body with new rounded corners.

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How to Setup a cPanel-based VPS For Your Website

How to Setup a cPanel-based VPS For Your Website

VPS hosting refers to a Virtual Private Server that’s sold as a service to customers by a hosting service company. It imitates a dedicated server in a shared hosting environment and is technically considered both dedicated and shared hosting.

A VPS kind of hosting is just one of many types of web hosting accounts to choose from in order to get your website up and running online. To get a website online, you need to store the files for your website on an actual web server. But, setting up and subsequently managing a web server can be very costly as well as difficult. On the other hand, purchasing web hosting enables a person to rent adequate space on a web server, which makes it much easier since the only thing that’s required is to simply upload their website files. Today, there are three main types of available web hosting accounts, including the following:

• VPS Hosting
• Shared Hosting
• Dedicated Server Hosting

Each one of these different types of hosting accounts varies, everything from their setup to the level of customization and various features each one offers.

What’s the Difference Between VPS, Shared, and Dedicated Hosting?

With a dedicated server, the customer rents the whole server. Usually, this is for individuals that have incredibly high volumes of traffic to their sites and require that their server be setup in a certain way. However, most people don’t need an entire server to themselves. By renting just a small part of the server, you can save a great deal of money if you’re just starting out. Shared hosting refers to sharing a part of the server with other people rather than renting a whole server alone.

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The 10 Best Free Webmaster Tools

The 10 Best Free Webmaster Tools

iWebTool Web Tools

iWebTool showcases the top Web tools, which also include useful webmaster tools. There are Search Engine tools to help you check for important things like backlinks, cloaking, PageRank, keyword density, URL redirects, etc. The Domain Checkups tools will help you check your traffic rank, server status, website speed, broken links, reciprocal links, and more.

Plus, there are HTML and Miscellaneous tools that include generators, optimizers, viewers, extractors, cleaners, calculators, and testers.

Search Engine Optimization Webmaster Tools

Are you clueless about SEO and would rather try to figure it out yourself instead of hiring a professional? Submit Express offers you a wide range of free SEO tools that can be used to help boost your search engine rankings and website traffic.

You’ll have access to the following tools: meta tag and keyword analyzer, link popularity checker, XML sitemap submitter, keyword suggester, keyword traffic estimator, SEO dictionary, meta tags generator, PageRank checker, page snooper, broken link checker, link counter and reciprocal link checker.

Webmaster Toolkit

Just as the name implies, the Webmaster Toolkit is the ultimate stop for free webmaster tools and resources. This suite of tools includes SEO tools, Web utilities, domain tools, HTML tools, and resources. The large selection of SEO tools includes keyword research, keyword analysis, a search position checker, a search engine simulator, a meta tag generator and a Web page analyzer.

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Attacat - A Great Tool to Audit Cookies

Attacat – A Great Tool to Audit Cookies

If you are looking for a great tool to help you audit your website’s cookies and check if the website complies with the cookie directive, then check out Attacat. Some of the advantages of using this tool are the fact that it does not require any registration, it is simple, and, furthermore, it is free.

What this tool does is: find and identify cookies on your site, check if there are any cookies from third parties (that you might not know about) and help you comply with the cookie regulations.

After you have installed the extension in your Google Chrome, all you need to do is to make a few simple steps to generate the report.

First, open only one window and tab and clear the cookie history from your Chrome. Then open the extension in the browser and click on the “Start Recording” button. As you have activated the recording, go to your website and do everything an average user would do (browse, buy, register etc.). After you are finished, click on the “Stop Recording” button and then “View Report”. Easy as that.

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