Only some people dare to use complete dark backgrounds against to regular cool and official colors. This decision makes their sites look unique and special, Today we have collected such sites which use dark backgrounds for their sites, so take a look and you will find some inspiration for sure, Enjoy….
Great content is at the mercy of site speed. No matter how wonderful your content is, taking more than 4 seconds to load can mean significant loss of traffic and loss of potential income for your website. Why? People hate slow websites. The slower it takes for your page to load, the faster people leave it. Patience is not a virtue when it comes to the internet. That is why site speed is important.
Google is obsessed with site speed and has incorporated it as one of the signals for determining search rankings. In a previous article on determining a website’s quality score , we learned that user experience is now a major element and part of the equation in determining and improving your site’s ranking. A fast site creates satisfied users, improves user experience, and improves overall site quality and performance.
If your website is taking longer to load than necessary, it’s time to take stock and audit the elements causing the delay. Here’s a checklist of some of the things you need to consider as you work on improving your site’s performance:
Here are some of the tools you can use to help you analyze your site’s performance:
Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time. This is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.
Firefox/Firebug Add-on that analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance, based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.
Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views.
Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. They use a global network of servers to monitor customers’ sites 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and can send out alerts via SMS, email, and more.
W3 Total Cache is designed to improve user experience and page speed of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
In conclusion, as far as website essentials go, the adage “less is more” is best. Sticking to only what’s necessary and throwing away what is not needed will help your website float to the top. The faster your website loads, the better your site performs and the experience your users have will be more pleasant, favorable, and hopefully more memorable, making them want to come back for more.
You know you should but you sometimes don’t. And just when you are about to, something goes wrong and it’s already a little too late. It gets a little more complicated when you are handling more than one website, maintaining several eCommerce sites, or handling sites with years and years of content. You could rely on your webhost to do it for you, but, that’s a little too risky for comfort. It’s what every website owner, webmaster, web host should do. Backup. Consistently. Why?
If these statements sound familiar,
“My site got hacked.”
“I accidentally deleted some code and it wiped out all my data.”
“I changed my theme and it messed up all my content.”
“I activated a plugin but it wasn’t compatible and it corrupted a whole bunch of my files.”
you know that you could have avoided the consequences of procrastination if you had kept a backup file before implementing any changes. On a larger scale, systems can shut down, natural disasters can hit, web hosting companies can go bankrupt or close shop. Without your own personal backup system, you could lose themes, plugins, content, images, widgets, customization and a whole lot more. It just makes sense to be ready all the time.
Here are some highly recommended backup options for your peace of mind:
myRepono WordPress Backup Plugin is an easy-to-install WordPress plugin which automates the myRepono API setup process, enabling you to setup automated WordPress backups in a matter of minutes. myRepono is an online website backup service which enables you to securely backup your WordPress web site files and mySQL database tables using an online and web-based management system. The myRepono online website backup service allows you to automate the process of backing up your entire WordPress website and database, including all post, comments and user data, and your WordPress PHP, template and plugin files.
WordPress Backup to Dropbox is a free plugin that keeps your website backed up to Dropbox regularly. The plugin’s simple interface lets you setup your backup cycle in minutes giving you peace of mind that your precious blog posts, media files and template changes are backed up. Simply choose a day, time, & frequency for your backup to be performed. In order to use the plugin you will need a Dropbox account.
BackWPup is a free plugin that creates flexible, scheduled WordPress backups to any location. The backup files can be used to save your whole installation including /wp-content/ and push them to an external Backup Service, if you don’t want to save the backups on the same server. With the single backup .zip file you are able to restore an installation. You can also purchase the pro version that has additional backup features.
VaultPress provides realtime, continuous backup and synchronization of every post, comment, media file, revision and dashboard setting across at least two separate cloud services in addition to the Automattic grid, ensuring no loss of content. Using WordPress hooks to receive alerts when information changes on your site, VaultPress immediately syncs all of your changes with their servers.
Make a quick and easy backup of all of your content, without fiddling with the server or signing up for an expensive backup solution, restore backups with one easy click, t backup all your regular WordPress stuff (posts, pages, comments, taxonomies etc.) and also every table of your database, for every plugin and theme you have with Snapshot, a premium plugin from WPMU Dev. With Snapshot you can create as many ‘Time Machine’ snapshots of your entire database (or individual tables) as you want, automatically schedule backups, save to Dropbox, Amazon S3 or by SFTP, and so much more.
The time, money and effort you exert in backing up your files is nothing compared to the price of losing all your website content, files, traffic and income, and the effort to recover (if possible) all of them. In this case, an ounce of prevention is indeed better than a pound of cure.
Advertising has evolved in so many ways throughout the years. The leap of advertising from traditional print media to the blinking gifs during the early days of the internet to the more sophisticated video showreels of today has been an interesting journey.
Online or digital advertising first entered the scene in the mid 1990’s when HotWired launched the first banner ads from major companies like AT&T, Sprint, Volvo, MCI and others. (Check out this illustrated timeline.) This was followed by PPC (Pay-per-click) keyword advertising, keyword ads, mobile ads, pop-ups and pop-unders, Google Adwords, video ads, all the way to today’s technology-empowered “word-of-mouth” via social networking and viral advertising.
Spending on digital advertising has been steadily on the rise. Digital media advertising in the form of contextual ads, banner ads, cross platform ads, email marketing, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, etc. are already part of a big chunk of the advertising budget of major companies. In fact, global digital advertising spending broke $100 billion in 2012. That’s a lot of money spent on cyberspace billboards. Is it really worth it? How effective are your advertising efforts? How do you measure your R.O.I. on your advertising campaigns? What if you don’t have that kind of a budget? How much are you willing to spend to generate a lead? Where do you start?
Here are some simple steps to help you as you plan your own marketing strategies:
There are different kinds of performance measures. A Performance Indicator (PI) is a measure, which gives an indication of performance. Typically a performance indicator is an outcome measure and not an input OR in-process measure. Key Performance Indicators are the critical gauge of a site’s success or failure. Some sectors say that Cost per Lead is a good LPI, while others argue that there are other factors that need to be considered in determining the correct LPI.
Know your “enemy”. Well not quite the “enemy” because they could later on be allies, affiliates, or partners in the future. The point is to be aware of your competitors, find out what’s working for them, the ads they run, where they run them, the affiliate programs they belong to. In short, learn from their successes and their mistakes. You can also use a paid service called WhatRunsWhere – a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online, where they are running ads, from who they are buying inventory, and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website: who is advertising there, who is selling the inventory for them, and what ads they are running. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights from the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns, resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI for online advertising campaigns.
Start smart by starting small. If you’re still getting your feet wet in media buying you can start your campaign in little doses. Target web and mobile audiences, choose a frequency cap of when your ad is displayed, and choose a campaign max to a manageable number for you to study and tweak if necessary. There are self serve ad buying platforms like www.sitescout.com where you can create & manage your ad campaigns easily. Test ads and copy. Use copy that converts well on the website and utilize it throughout your campaign.
Analyze your data. After 5,000 to 10,000 impressions Identify performing banners. Your banner could be driving down your placement and overall site numbers. Display the best performer until it fatigues. Identify performing sites. A site left to run wild can ruin your campaign. Turn off banners with low CTRs.
Tweak your campaign basics for maximum optimization. Identify times when traffic runs best and run traffic during those times. Tailor your creative or your ad banner to match your audience. Focus on what works and improve on it some more.
Now that you’ve gotten a little bit of experience, broaden your net. Retarget, add more sites, add more banner sizes, offer affiliate commissions, or go direct (www.buyads.com) The point is to take your marketing campaign up another notch.
Whatever evolution advertising goes through, the objective of advertising remains the same, that is, to draw attention to a product, service, or event to persuade an audience (viewers, readers, or listeners) to take some action in the form of sales or attendance. In other words, conversion. Try these strategies and share your stories. We’d love to hear from you.
In this article we are going to showcase some tutorials to create buttons and badges in Photoshop, which really help you to improve your website designing skills. This post will teach you to create your own buttons and badges for your website. We list 20 Helpful Photoshop Tutorials that teach you making Buttons and Badges with ease.
One WordPress theme, 7 days, 800 copies, $36,000 grand. A lot of WordPress authors and developers on Themeforest would love to achieve even a fraction of that and most of them are probably scratching their heads wondering why. This popular theme has even dislodged U-Design from its top spot for the past few weeks and to think it’s the only item in this author’s Themeforest portfolio. If you are wondering what theme achieved such a feat check out AVADA, a responsive multi purpose theme created by ThemeFusion.
Let’s dissect this theme a little bit further and try or simply attempt to figure out why the market is loving this theme.
Avada’s layout can be classified as clean, straightforward, and professional-looking with very neutral colors and lots of white space. If you are familiar with real estate open houses, real estate professionals really spend a lot of time to “stage” a property before “opening” it up to the market. Care is taken to display only enough design elements to highlight the property’s unique and outstanding features, pulling back from adding unnecessary and distracting clutter. This deliberate “staging” is intended to give the potential buyer the room to imagine what he can do with it to meet his own needs. The focus is on its potential and what it can become. Avada is like that, a well-staged theme with lots of potential for all types of buyers. The demo is clear and easy to maneuver, giving customers a taste of all that it can be for whatever need they have.
This premium theme is not just a pretty face. It has enough built in features and functions to create the website you need for yourself or for your clients. Everyone wants to create a website that is unique and representative of himself or his brand. Avada has a plethora of feature and function choices that, when mixed and matched together, with the client’s own images and content, can create a one of a kind and totally different website every time. Here are some of Avada’s easy to customize features that you can “play” with:
Aside from the extensive, detailed documentation and easy to follow HD narrated video tutorials, Avada generously includes the entire set of PSDs (20+ files) for those who want to customize the theme even further. Buyers get 100% free support via their support forum. Customer feedback has been, overall, favorable so far. Providing WordPress theme support is not an easy task especially if you are servicing thousands of buyers. To receive favorable feedback regarding their theme support indicates that they have a support system that really works. This translates into higher buyer confidence which translates further into higher sales.
Avada has sold almost 15,000 copies to date and has received more than a thousand 5-star ratings which is something worth noting. Receiving a 5-star rating from 2 or more people can be easily dismissed but 1,000 or more satisfied customers can’t be ignored.
Fluke or luck? We think not. A good product with a lot of hard work backing it up sounds more like it. If this is the trend that the market is supporting as far as WordPress themes are concerned, then it is good sign that the market and the industry are headed for better days.
Get Avada Now!
The average WordPress user probably starts off with a simple and very basic desire to set up his/her own website. There are many platforms out there but the platform that most users end up with or choose to use is WordPress. These users either attempt to set up their own website on their own and learn as they go while others hire someone to do it for them. Not many are familiar with the legal or technical aspects surrounding the use of this software but it does not remove the responsibility of finding out the software’s terms, conditions, and proper use. Let’s familiarize ourselves with some of these technical terms. Some of these terms are quoted verbatim to remain true to its original intent.
WordPress is a free and open source publishing software and content management system (CMS) with a focus on ease of use, speed and a great user experience. “WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.
Open source doesn’t just mean that you can view the source code — it has political and philosophical implications as well. Open source, or “Free Software”, means you are free to modify and redistribute the source code under certain conditions. Free doesn’t refer to the price, it refers to freedom. The difference between the two meanings of free is often characterized as “Free as in speech vs. free as in beer.” The GPL is free as in speech.
“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software – to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software & to any other program whose authors commit to using it.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
The reasons for WordPress releasing under the GPL are both practical and idealistic. WordPress was born of the very freedom mentioned earlier. The predecessor to the WordPress project, b2/cafelog, was also an open source project.
(source: WordPress.org/gpl)
According the GNU.org and its Free Software Definition, you have the freedom:
to run the software for any purpose or any kind of job
to study how the software works, change it and improve it
to redistribute copies in a manner that does not conflict with central freedoms
to redistribute copies of your modified version to benefit the whole community
The GPL and WordPress conflict is not new. There have been several occasions before when conflicts of interest have risen between theme providers (ex. Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg) and the WordPress Foundation’s interpretation of how the GPL license is applied. The most recent debacle involving Jake Caputo, ThemeForest, and WordPress (resulting in Caputo’s banning from speaking at WordCamps) surfaced earlier this year. Envato and WordPress have been at odds because of the alleged violations of the GPL by the former. Envato claims to be GPL compliant while at the same time been implementing dual-license or split licensing particularly on WordPress themes and plugin. What’s wrong with that?
Here’s a simple analogy to illustrate this.
Choosing a publishing platform is like choosing a car brand. You have several choices: Chevy, Cadillac, a Benz, or a Toyota. Whichever you choose, the technology to create it, the patents, the materials used, and all the basic components like the framework, the engine, the wheels, and everything that makes it run to take you anywhere you want are already built into its system, subject to the manufacturer’s warranty. When it transfers to you, the car manufacturers have no control with what you do with it – use it for business, donate, repaint, etc.
As far as publishing platforms are concerned, you have WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla as the vehicle of your content. In the case of WordPress, the HTML code, the PHP and everything under hood that makes it run are built in and are 100% GPL. When it is transferred to your possession, free or otherwise, you have the freedom to modify, change, sell, copy, distribute, and do whatever you want under the GPL license provided that it retains all those freedoms that you enjoyed when you first got it.
The conflict between Envato and WordPress arose because of the licensing policies of the former, that were not, in the eyes of WordPress, GPL compliant. As far as WordPress is concerned, if your theme is “riding” on the WordPress framework and cannot run independently apart from it, then it inherits and is subject to all the GPL attributes as well.
On the other hand, Envato’s split license states that:
Envato’s marketplace license for themes or plugins sold on the marketplaces covers all the components of these items, except for the specific components covered by the GPL. This is why it’s called a split license: because different license terms can cover individual components that make up a single item.
The PHP component and integrated HTML are covered by the GPL. The rest of the components created by the author (such as the CSS, images, graphics, design, photos, etc) are covered by the marketplace license.As explained earlier, our license also allows for specific components of an item, which inherit the GPL from the platform they’re built for, to be licensed under the GPL. Using this split license complies with the GPL’s requirements, while still providing protection of the author’s copyright on assets they’ve created.
There are valid points on both sides. Proprietary licensing violates the spirit of the GPL while on the other hand, piracy on the creative output of theme authors are also valid concerns. Conflicts arise to reveal gray areas that need to be dealt with or addressed. Striking a balance between GPL compliance and protecting the creative or intellectual output of theme authors is a tough juggling act. We believe the conversation will still continue.
Envato did a survey about licensing among their users and published the results specifically relating to GPL. They have announced that a 100% GPL option is now available for authors on ThemeForest. Jake Caputo has also posted that he has again been invited to participate in WordCamps.
Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress
WordPress, GPL, and Copyright Case Law
Matt Mullenweg – Q&A – WordPress & GPL
Themes are GPL too
Mobile devices have changed the way people access the internet. More and more people use it to search for information relevant to their locations. As a result, mobile internet and mobile computing have helped boost local businesses that have an online presence. If your local business isn’t online yet, you need to be. Here are some delicious food and restaurant WordPress themes to help drum up some noise for your business:
Bistro Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive theme that includes a great booking app system to help you monitor & manage customer bookings and reservations. It also features: a specials, promotions and event management system, a calendar system, photo galleries, google maps integration with driving directions, countless custom widgets, and is also translation ready.
Eatery Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive restaurant/cafe theme that includes: a flexible full menu system easily customizable using custom posts, a built-in 24hr-enabled reservations form template, shortcodes options for elegant text styling, image galleries & slideshows, numerous color theme options with 5 preset color styles to start with, and global currency support.
Elegantia is a rich and luxurious-looking premium WordPress theme for restaurants & cafes. It has many features specifically designed for a restaurant business like: ajax-based Reservation template, Food Menu Module, Events Module, sortable Gallery module, ajax based and Google maps-enabled Contact module, and an impressive Homepage with full width slider and services information.
Coffee Shop is an easy to install premium responsive WP template for cafes and bistros. This dark styled responsive theme is feature packed. It includes: custom post types and templates for menu, events, staff, it is fully localized, has numerous color options, custom widgets, and includes 5 layered PSD files for further customization.
Delicieux Premium WordPress Theme is a visually appetizing theme perfect for restaurants. It comes with a Drag and Drop Page Builder feature for managing different page elements in the theme. It features a menu system, a google maps enabled contact page, a widgetized footer with 6 layouts, a blog page with 8 layout options, and advanced theme options panel for creating custom theme changes like background image changes, sliders, and shortcodes management.
Welcome to WordPress Wednesday! Each week we’ll be answering as many of your questions about the blogging platform WordPress as possible. If you have questions you’d like answered that aren’t covered here, feel free to drop them in the comment form below. Covering topics such as themes, plugins, popular tutorials, current WordPress promotion codes, and more – be sure to jump in with your questions and comments.
QUESTION: I’d like to use something other than my recent posts as my home page. Is that possible within WordPress?
It’s not only possible it’s relatively easy. The first step is to create a page to serve as your new home page. For the purpose of this example, we’ll call it “My New Home Page.”
While you’re still in the Write Page subpanel, create a second page:
Now you’re ready tell WP to use your new page as the home page:
View your site. “HOMEPAGE” should now be your home page. You also do not need to put the title in all caps. This was simply done for our example.
Note: Any Page content you have entered for the page you designate as your Posts page will be overwritten by the listing of your recent posts. The content will still be there, it simply won’t show while you have that particular page set as the Post page.
See also the WordPress Codex page: Reading Options Subpanel
If you have a question you’d like me to address or (better yet) if you have a WordPress tip, trick or tutorial you’d like to share let us know!
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