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What You Need To Know Before Purchasing A WordPress Theme

- Monday 16 November 2015 No Comments

Are you looking to create a website? Are you considering going with WordPress, but don't know much about what to look out for or how to choose a theme? Whether it's your first website or you are looking to replace an older website built with a website builder, WordPress is a new reality for you.
There are a lot of terminologies and intricacies you probably aren't that familiar with, but in this article, I will give you an overview about what you need to know before purchasing your first WordPress theme.

What's a theme?

Using a theme is mandatory. If your website runs with WordPress, you do have to choose a theme to run the website with.
A theme is like the skin of a website.
A freshly created WordPress website looks pretty generic and naked. After installing WordPress, there is already a theme pre-installed, and there are two to three other themes available to switch to. These are the default themes that are provided by WordPress.
A theme gives a website its unique touch. It takes all the content stored in the website (posts, pages, sidebars, headers, - everything) and by virtue of its coding, it determines how this content is organized and displayed to the website visitor.
It may control the look of the menu bar, of the header and of the footer. It may determine the options a blog post can be display, it may determine the way a logo can be displayed, or it may rule the color sets a website can use. It has the power to enable or disable hundreds of features. In other words, it determines the visual logic displayed.

Selecting a theme

The most basic differentiation to make is on the monetary level. I firmly believe the theme's price shouldn't be the major factor when making your decision, it is however, a valid option for categorization.
There are many free themes offered in several websites like in the WordPress-owned market place. I'll reflect on the disadvantages that come with free themes in the last part of this article, but the reason why I believe a theme's price shouldn't be the significant factor when choosing a theme is because the premium themes come to a price somewhere between $60-90, which is nothing when compared to the cost a hired web designer will charge.

The most important things to consider

Not every theme provides what you need for your unique website project. There are however, a few things that are not really negotiable and which you must be sure of before making a choice.
1. Does the theme fit the website's purpose?
Themeforest is a popular market place for themes. If you browse around there, you will notice there are a lot of categories for WordPress themes available, like Real Estate, Non Profit, Education, Wedding, Photography, Food blogs, etc. There are also a lot of multi-purpose themes available that are adaptable and customizable to special demands you may have (see the last part of this article: Customizing a WP theme).
2. Does the theme require a lot of quality images to look nice - and do you know where to get them from?
All the attractive sliders you see in the demo models require professional shots. Wide-angled images are supposed to promote your business - are you sure you can come up with enough resources for that?
3. Does the theme vendor provide limited or unlimited support?
Check the creator's support guidelines and how long after date of purchase they are willing to provide support to you.
4. Is the theme responsive?
A theme that looks great on all mobile devices is a must-have. Don't go for anything less. To verify that, enter the URL of the demo site into Screenfly and check how it looks on different mobile devices.
5. Browser support
Not every browser displays the same content identically. Look for information about whether the theme looks good in various browsers before purchasing it. If the vendor doesn't provide that info, you can use a tool like Browsershots to do just that. Enter the theme's demo URL and check whether the theme looks good in various browsers.
6. Theme updates
Make sure that the purchase of a theme enables you to get continuous updates. This is an important consideration for security purposes.

Switching a theme

After you have set up a website with pages and posts - a few month or years down the road, you might want to give your website a facelift. A new theme will do just that, it will give your website a more modern, fresh and sophisticated appearance.
That's when the big BUT comes into play; unfortunately, switching a theme is not that easy.
I mean technically it is, but it might require a lot of adjustments.
After switching a theme, there is often a considerable amount of customization work that needs to be done to get the website into an acceptable state.
The reason for this is the incompatibility of the coding that was applied when creating the themes.
As you noticed, I am making use of vague wording. I am vague because there is no way to make a general statement about this. It's always a single case.
One might be lucky and have to invest only a few hours for the website to look nice again.
But more often than not, it will take a ton of additional work to rebuild the site. Just make sure you consider the need for additional time and financial resources when switching your WordPress theme.

Customizing a WP theme

We are blessed with an incredible abundance of awesome looking themes these days.
But this abundance makes it sometimes really, really hard to make a decision. Particularly for a website-newbie, as this might be a really overwhelming task due to an unfamiliarity with the tech vocabulary that the themes are described with, or not knowing what to expect or what to look out for in the selection process.
One important thing that you will want to consider is that your selected theme may need a considerable amount of customization. From the look of a site, one simply cannot determine how much it has been adjusted to special demands to fit a certain purpose of business.
When it comes to customization, the fact of whether your chosen theme is a free or a premium theme will determine the ease of adjustments.

Free Themes

The most time-intensive themes to change are free and/or inexpensive themes. If you find a free theme and like about 80% of it, but want to add or remove something from it, you will come to realize that small changes will actually require a lot of work on the back-end. Free or low-cost themes are priced the way they are because there wasn't much time or effort taken to create them. Often times, they are not even intended to be modified or changed. With these themes: WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get. If you want to customize anything in the theme, it will cost you.

Premium Themes

Premium themes are themes that come with a huge amount of features.
Actually, they are more than themes. They are frameworks. Each framework has its own unique interface and dashboard. Learning each one of these frameworks is like learning a new language, but it's not that hard. Many theme frameworks, like the Divi-theme come with a drag and drop interface, which significantly enhances the learning process for a website newbie and makes customization so much more quick and effortless. There is no need to mess around with code.

For this reason, choosing a premium theme which costs around $60-90 will save you a considerate amount of time and money in the long-term. Even if you are a website newbie and don't have enough confidence to build your website yourself, it will prove to be advantageous to hire a designer who focuses on a single framework and is a well experienced expert in customizing this framework. It will cost you many, many hours less to get the customization done than compared to a theme that needs to have a written new code.

Web Design Dubai

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9212330

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Optimizing WordPress Page Loading Speeds Where Plugins Are Used

- Sunday 15 November 2015 No Comments

WordPress has long been using the strategy of incorporating 3rd party plug-ins into their design architecture for their customers. This strategy sound in business concept as it allows WordPress users to easily and quickly create some very nice looking websites where they can add website functionality and features even if they do not have very good coding skills, is still however, flawed architecturally as these plugins are enabled through the use of java-script callouts which need to pull in the full plug-in code for each 3rd party widget being used on a particular web-page each time that web page is loaded. This causes two things to occur on each page load that significantly reduces the speed of page loading:

• First, you are not just loading the native programming logic to the web page that you built and that resides on your server only. You are forced to callout out to potentially dozens of external locations both on your server and on 3^rd party servers in order to fully render your web-page which causes lag-time issues and time delays in loading the page.


• Second, when you load the plugin, you have to load it as written by the 3^rd party which often means that you are loading code that has a number of configurable options that you are note even using for the method in which you are using the plugin. This is a lot of extra programming code being loaded with each page rendering that you don't need and it tends to make your web-page very "fat", often putting the page into the 2-4 megabytes of code loading ranges whereas most custom coded pages are loading at under one megabyte of code. The fatness of these pages also impacts negatively on the speed of the web page rendering.

Google and browser manufacturers have already begun to penalize website owners for the use of java-script callouts on websites through certain strategies of their own. Browser manufacturers such as Chrome and Firefox for example, are limiting the enabling of some plugins on their platforms, mobile devices in most cases simply won't run them, and Google penalizes you by not letting your site be found easily through their search engine. I tested the mobile device rejection of plugins with the draft WordPress site I had created by trying to load the page on my cellphone. After waiting over 40 seconds for the page to load, the device just rejected the load entirely, leaving me in limbo looking at a blank screen. This is why it is recommended to limit your use of plugins and eliminate them from your site over time if you can. Move to native coding strategies on you website wherever possible.
For those WordPress site owners who do not have the technical skills to remove these plugins from their websites, there are some things you can do within the framework of the plugin world to mitigate the negative effects of those you do use on your site so your pages at least will load more rapidly and so you can actually create a version of your site that is viewable on mobile devices. I outline these strategies following.
Certain 3rd party plugin providers and certain web-hosters who support WordPress sites have offered for use some workaround solutions that do help the site's performance to a point and you can get a WordPress page to render on a mobile device.
To improve your site performance, there are a few things you can do.

• Go through all the images on your site and make their sizes as small as possible without significantly impacting the quality of viewing for the consumer. This can reduce the fatness of your page somewhat and I have found that some of the WordPress "Theme" providers are burdening your site with some very dense images that are hurting your load speeds. So run them through a tool such as Adobe Photoshop and thin them down where you can.


• There are some plugin manufacturers out there that offer internal site plugins which will compress components of your webpages so they do not take as long to load. Go to the Add Plugin feature on your WordPress site and search for "GZIP" or "GZIP compression" and you will find several providers that offer compression capabilities that will help you to reduce the fatness of your webpages.


• Far Future Expiration: Find, download and activate this plugin. As per the provider - "When the feature is enabled, this plugin will modify your .htaccess file by inserting code which will add expires headers for common static file types. Expiry header specifies a time far enough in the future so that browsers won't try to re-fetch images, CSS, java-script, etc. and files that haven't changed (this reduces the number of HTTP requests) and hence the performance improvement on subsequent page views." I've done this and it helps shave a second or two on your website page load times.


• Implement a "caching" plugin for your site - I went with WP Super Cache. This plugin "generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an HTML file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts."


• Another strategy is to distribute your site pages to servers around the globe so that people are loading your site from more local servers than from your server which could be thousands of miles away. To do this will require you to implement a plugin, a web-hoster provided utility, and you will need to make changes to your domain.txt records as well so it is a more complicated strategy to employ. Web-hosters who support this will have utilities for the purpose within their dashboards. I am using Bluehost at present and their utility (and also the name of the related plugin that I am using) is called "CloudFlare". So if you have some technical depth and know how to repoint your domain records, this is another strategy that you can employ to help speed up your website rendering capabilities.


• Lastly, to get at least some of your webpages to render properly on mobile devices / smart phones, will require you to enable another plugin on your website built for this purpose. The recommended utility for this purpose is the WPtouch Mobile plugin. WPtouch is a mobile plugin for WordPress that automatically adds a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website. Recommended by Google, it will instantly enable a mobile-friendly version of your website that passes the Google Mobile test, and ensure your SEO rankings do not drop due to not having a mobile-friendly website. I've implemented it and now my blog pages are rendering OK on my smart phone.

The tips provided above will help you improve the performance of your WordPress site so be sure to check them out.

Web Design Dubai

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9222056

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How Can You Avoid Monotony in Web Design?

- Saturday 14 November 2015 No Comments

Web designing is an art. Web designing is monotony as well. Let us clarify. No matter, how professional a website looks, the creative acumen of the designer is always evident from it. Yes, you are working within a confined space and with set criteria (the client's orders). However, there is no doubt about the fact that there is a constant process of your creative energies when it comes to selecting layouts, fonts, images and a lot more. However, things might get a little monotonous with too many client projects in the fray. Avail the tips mentioned below in order to avoid monotony when it comes to web designs.

The many use of flat design

One of the stock elements of modern websites is flat design. Yes, most web designers out there employ flat designs. Flat designs have both positive and negative aspects. However, it is not really prudent to use these designs indiscriminately just because every other designer is using the same. It would be sagacious on your end to ensure that you are actually studying the needs of the business thoroughly before coming up with a layout. The same applies to Photoshop and Sketch. At a technical level, an efficient designer should be able to comprehend the positive and negative aspects of both the disciplines in compliance with the business needs.

Sliding banners: Will they be as effective as they used to be, in the years to come?

A lot has been said regarding the sliding banners. A lot of web designers use these attractive banners backed by catchy tag lines and bright colors. In the recent years, however, it has been noticed that visitors are more comfortable with lesser cluttered one page designs. You can still find most of web developers continuing with this particular practice. You can be one of the few who don't really conform to the conventional.

Font Awesome

Make sure you are researching well on the multiple icon styles before zeroing in on one. The common practice is to use Font Awesome in combination with flashier icons. And, this is where most of the designers go overboard - quite generically. Icons are definitely one of the most notable ways of establishing brand identity. However, there is no room for random flash-flashy for the sake of being flashy.
Please make sure you are keeping these points in view while zeroing in on the next web design.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9217193

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What You Need to Build a Successful Website

- Thursday 12 November 2015 No Comments

It really does not matter if a local business wants to use a website to sell more of its products or if it is looking to promote its local business. It also does not matter if a business wants to operate only online. There are plenty of examples of success for all of these goals. While there are examples of success, there are also plenty of examples of failures. If the website is not properly designed, it will not do what is needed. Building a successful website design requires certain things and without them, it could struggle to perform.

· Have a purpose - Every website needs to have a reason for existing. If it is designed to sell products or if it is designed to promote a brand, the website designing should be towards that purpose.

· Know the attention span - Most people that visit any website will focus on a specific part of it as soon as they visit it. The web design should include something that stands out. A logo is one of the most eye-catching things to include on a website.

· Know the audience - If the website is for a local business, it may be best to turn to web design groups to get the local touch that is needed. Otherwise it may be good idea to turn to the best web design agency that can be found to make sure that the design is able to target the people that will generate revenue for an e-commerce website.

These are the things that need to be thought about at the beginning of the web development process. As the website is being built, there are other things to consider.

· Make the site simple - Web designing can be very complex and there are many things that can be added to a website. It is better to keep the site simple and easy for the visitors to use. It goes back to the attention span of the visitors. If the site takes too long to digest the person will simply go to another website. The number of pages should be limited to keep navigation easy and fast.

· Include a way to contact - One of the things that all visitors want to be able to do with an e-commerce website is to contact the company. It may be for a question or for something else, but the methods to contact the website should be easy to find and easy to use. It will help build trust with the visitors.

· Include Links - Links at the top and the bottom of the page make it easy for visitors to navigate around. They should be clear and obvious because that is what people look for.

· SEO is a key - If you want people to visit a website, they have to be able to find it. SEO tools are the best way to improve the searchability of a website. SEO tools should be used carefully. There is a mix of tools that can work. Just using the SEO tools does not guarantee success. They have to be used properly. The best web design company says that most sites do not use SEO tools properly and actually hurt their website.

· Make it mobile - More people than ever before are accessing websites through mobile devices. It offers e-commerce businesses a way to reach people when they are on the go and are often times more likely to utilize what a website offers. Creating a website that works on mobile devices requires different coding and may be a little more limiting than a traditional design. While it may require the hiring of a website designing agency that specializes in this area, it is worth doing to reach a larger audience.

· Make the site responsive - Responsive websites are designed to work with whatever kind of device that a person is using to access the site. It will work with traditional laptop and desktop computers and it will also work with mobile devices. It optimizes itself for the user depending on what type of device is being used to access the website. This allows the owner of the site to create only one website that will work for everyone.

It is even possible to set up an e-commerce website that does not require the website to actually store the products or to ship them to the people that buy them. The website is simply the middle man and another business deals with the actual physical inventory.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9210659

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Best Logo Design Tools for Beginners

- Wednesday 11 November 2015 No Comments

A logo visually represents the identity of a business and thus it plays a vital role in business' branding. As it is a creative art that makes a brand easily identifiable, it should be articulately designed with professional expertise and creativity.

A successful design may fulfill the goals set, but a unique and enviable iconic design will have to be simple, relevant, enduring, memorable and adaptable. And to design such a logo, there are various logo designing tools available which is not only beneficial for experienced designers, but also proves to be the best for the beginners as well.

Below listed are a few best logo design tools

Logomaker: This is one of the most affordable and excellent designing tools, which facilitates designing, editing and illustrating easily as well as quickly. It has the widest library collection of icons and effects that enables creating marvelous logos easily. Some of the features of this tool include:

> This tool helps to create beautiful and exclusive logos using various icons, colors and adding text.

> Logomaker's library includes a vast library of original graphics, colors, vector shapes, designs and fonts, which assists you to create a perfect emblem for your business.

> The logo design technology, built into logo generator, easily guides the user through the designing process.

Adobe Illustrator: This is the world's most powerful vector graphics editor, which is incredibly supportive for professionals as well as new designers, to create professional designs and artworks. Some of the trending features of this tool are:

> It enables to create logos with greater precision.

> It is easy to recover and restore files, which is lost due to improper shutdown, illustrator crashing, operating system error or a power failure. Illustrator provides you with options to diagnose the issue and fix any errors.

> Graphics are synched with creative cloud libraries, and due to this libraries are empowered to keep everything up-to-date with the latest edits, right at the fingertips for seamless flow.

> Mercury Performance System enhancements that bring GPU acceleration to both Mac and Windows, also facilitates pan, zoom and scroll far more quickly than before.

Laughing Bird: This logo designing tool assists in creating a beautiful iconic logo, easily and instantly. You can transform a beautiful website into an awesome looking sales page in minutes. It is a simple to use tool with no complicated menus or confusing icons. Some of the best features of this tool are:

> It includes 200 ready to use and easily customizable templates, to help you to design a professional logo in no time.

> It also has built in images (all high quality graphics), that can be easily mixed and matched as desired.

Sothink logo maker: It is one of the quickest logo designing tools, used not only by professionals but also newcomers can use this stunning software to design professional looking logo. This designing software comes in 2 versions; 'Sothink Logo Maker' and 'Sothink Logo Maker pro version'. The important features of this tool are:

> Both the versions provide abundant free logo elements and templates.

> They have an amazing built-in effect for one click usage.

> Both the versions support multiple formats for importing and exporting.

Logo-Smartz: This innovative and feature packed logo design software tool has an unlimited collection of icons and clipart to help you in logo designing. It provides step-by-step instructions, which is of great help to the newcomers. The amazing features of this tool are:

> This logo designing tool assists you in creating appealing and professional logo instantly, even your graphic design knowledge and experience is sparse.

> It has over 1800 high quality pre-designed logo templates which includes a broad range of professionally designed, premium quality logo templates.

> It also provides over 5000 top quality vector graphic symbols and 200+ font styles for creating logos.

> This tool has also some exciting arrangement tools which will help you manage (bring forward or take backward by one layer and group/ungroup) the logo elements in a convenient way.

Apple Motion: This is an efficient designing tool introduced by Apple Inc. It is an effective tool to create stunning effects and designs. Some of the notable features of this designing tool are:

> This logo design tool has a rich content library to create awesome designs.

> The Dynamic, real-time feedback makes it easy to experiment freely with this tool.

> It has more than 100 behaviour options to choose, to quickly animate text on or off the screens.

Jeta Logo Designer: This is a simple and easy to use logo designing tool, equally preferred by both professionals and newbie. It is recognized as fast, reliable and powerful software to design logo, web graphics and icons. Some of the best features include:

> This software has more than 5000 vector icons & shapes, nearly 400 templates for logo, 200 shape styles and much more.

> Templates can be easily customized or used as a base for new logo designs.

> It is easy to modify a logo by replacing the shapes and styles.

Corel Draw: This is one of the effective tools for designing vector graphics. Some of effective and user friendly sub-tools that come with this tool are: Corel photo-paint, Corel power-trace, Corel connect and Corel capture. The notable features of this tool are:

> This is a user-friendly tool to create stunning, unique and impactful logo designs.

> It has several new pre-defined workspaces, including Page Layout and Illustration, to help keep all your logo design tools organized and easily accessible.

> With new multi-display support, it becomes easy to move your work across multiple screens.

Adobe Photoshop: This is the most effective and efficient logo design tool that provides designers, ease of designing logos with effective artistic filters, textures, color levels, alpha masks and channels. For a newbie, this tool provides enormous support, through helpful tips and tutorials. Some of the impressive features of this tool are:

> It is a very useful and interesting tool for beginners.

> It assists in designing scalable logos without compromising on quality.

> It helps in every type of editing and designing tasks from simple retouching to complicated 3D illustrations and designs.

Conclusion:

Besides, the above listed; there are many other logo designing tools that are feature rich and extremely beneficial for both professionals as well as for beginners. These designing tools not only assist in designing impressive as well as unique logos, but also ease the task of designing.

The author is an IT professional at Ace Web Academy having years of experience in the industry. He is also proficient in imparting various IT related courses, to those seeking knowledge and efficiently contributes to the revolution going on in the information technology sector. He keeps his students updated about the new developments in this sector and doesn't mind going beyond the regular syllabus to educate them completely with relevant and current topics.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9209645

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Major Benefits of Working With a Web Design Agency

- Tuesday 10 November 2015 No Comments

Most of the business heads of startups will be undergoing this question, website design agency or freelancer? At present, this thing is a long running debate that every company head will face in opting the right person or team for their online business. So one should be vital in making the right choice.

undoubtedly, the secret behind every successful company is well designed and skilfully executed digital marketing campaigns; that include their websites, SEO, web applications etc. In order to survive in today's markets the business needs to go for a good web design agency.

Benefits of Working with a Web Design agency

Dedicated team:

Generally, the entire team of a web design agency will accommodate all of your web design and digital marketing needs. It consists of various multi-faceted talented team players who can cover many areas of web design and development; as well as digital marketing. This means that everything related to your business including the design and marketing needs are taken care by the same team in the same place; that means you can get the complete end product of you business from a single source i.e. Through a web design company.

Flawless service:

Working with a web design agency, you will obtain an ongoing service and support such as SEO and marketing services that not only portray more custom to your business but it also builds efficient campaigns with mutual communication.

Wider range of resources:

The major benefit in working with website design agency is the fact that they offer handful resources when compared to a freelancer. This includes a broader range to software licenses all these serves more possibilities for your website.

More Efficiency:

Working with a proficient team that are based under the same roof has its own benefits; one of these benefits is the efficiency of implementation when it comes to functioning on a project. An agency consists of different skilled people in a team integrated with the ability to implement multiple tasks across different areas of a project in whole to get greater efficiency.

Experience:

Experience comes with proficiency and familiarity to particular industry that tends to overall quality and victory of a project. The height of experience is a quality subjective to any agency. An agency will be capable to take and more patrons at one time as there are more people on board who possess more skill in dealing with numerous clients.

Latest Trends:

A good business firm should move with the latest news, trends, and tools in the particular industry they are in to. So the website design agencies are up to date with all the latest trends in website designing agency.

So the bigger organizations those who are looking forward for a stronger and more encircling advantage for their business growth will preferably opt for a well embedded team of web design agency. Be careful in choosing the right services that can help your company growth.

Web design Dubai

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9213482