background preloader

Web Design & Tools

Facebook Twitter

LandingPage-Infographic.png (PNG Image, 900 × 2240 pixels) Understanding Facebook's New 'Insights' Analytics. Facebook recently launched a new, enhanced version of Insights, its analytics package for Fan pages. The old version contained lots of information — demographics, the total number of Likes/Unlikes, number of average daily users, and total page and post impressions — but nothing that helped determine the effect of user activity on sales and marketing. According to a Facebook product guide PDF, the new Insights is designed to help page administrators: Understand the performance of the Page; Learn which content resonates with your audience;Optimize how page administrators publish to their audiences so that people will tell their friends about the Page.

How to Access the New Insights Insights can be accessed by visiting the navigation menu in the left-hand column of your Page. Insights can be found in left-column menu. Once the link is clicked, a sub-menu appears containing the following three items: Fans, Reach and Talking About This. Insights Dashboard Total Likes. Friends of Fans. Date. Remindr. 31 Free Tools for Brand Monitoring. Brand monitoring is an essential task for any company. By tracking what people are saying about your brand, and how often they’re saying it, you can ensure the right message is getting out there. Here is a list of free tools for monitoring your brand. The list includes (a) search tools to help you find what is being said about your brand, (b) alert tools to let you know when people are talking about your brand, (c) aggregators to help you manage conversations about your brand.

And they’re all free. TweetDeck. Autoresponder Message Sample Series | Free Sequence of Emails to Swipe. Free Logo Design Logo Ease. Create a Facebook Page | Custom Fan Page Design - Pagemodo. Webs - Make a free website, get free hosting. Usable Efficiency - Improving websites and the way you build them. Statdash - metrics even your mother can love. Free Web Development Tools for Windows | Microsoft WebMatrix. Dedicated Hosting - Find Dedicated Web Hosting Providers at Tophosts.com. Welcome to our Dedicated Hosting Showcase. Do you need your own web server to make sure you have full control over your online experience?

Will a dedicated server allow you to host custom developed solutions that are key to your organization? Does a dedicated server provide the dedicated resources and reliability you need for your online applications? If the answer to any of those questions is “YES!” Discuss Dedicated Hosting at our TopHosts Forum. CirrusHosting Adds Open-Xchange Web Hosting Plans Posted on 29 January 2014 . Markham, ON (PRWEB) January 29, 2014 – CirrusHosting, a leading provider of VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting, has announced that it will begin providing secure groupware and collaboration services powered by the popular Open-Xchange software stack. Read the full story Posted in Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Small Business Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Littlejohn & Co.

Posted on 17 December 2013 . Read the full story Read the full story. 10 YouTube Videos Every Entrepreneur Should Watch. Top 5 Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make. If you're a small business owner, your website is the central hub of your company, and it's a pivotal part of your marketing and branding. April 05, 2011 Potential customers visit your site specifically for its content—its appearance and usability are critical to its success and how those users view your company. Getting your Web design wrong can have a very negative impact on your business. Here are five common design mistakes to avoid in order to create a great user experience and grow your bottom line. 1. Poor navigation Many small business websites fail to make navigation a priority, but without careful attention to how people navigate your site, you could unintentionally be creating a frustrating experience for any potential visitor.

A good navigation structure should be seamless and will keep visitors on your site longer, which means potentially more readers, subscribers, sales or leads. Website navigation affects usability and accessibility, so make it a primary concern. 2. 3. 4. 5. 33 Free Tools to Make Your Website Better. Cliparts. Art, Design, Photography and Free Resources @ Designzzz.

15 Free Online Tools for Web Designers on a Budget. About two years ago when I became a full time freelance web designer, I made it a point to operate with little overhead. Even though I was confident I could make it as a freelancer, there was some fear that things might not go as planned. Because of this, I didn’t go out and spend lots of money on equipment and expensive software. My focus was on being frugal and saving money where I could. One way I was able to do this was using free online tools or web apps to perform my everyday tasks as a web designer. Here are 15 free online tools that you will find very useful.

Pixlr Pixlr is a powerful online image editing application. Google Analytics Google Analytics is probably the most popular free analytics tool available. Typetester The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. CSS Type Set CSS Type Set allows you to visually and interactively style text and it generates the CSS. net2ftp net2ftp gives you a fully featured ftp client within your browser. Kuler. 30 Must See Web Generator for Lazy Webmasters. Here’s a list of 70 hand-picked, easy to use, and free web generators that will save you tons of time and energy.

I have grouped these tools into 10 categories: Color Palettes, Robots.txt, Website Screenshots, Favicons, Web Backgrounds, Webpage Elements (buttons, tabs, etc), Memes, Forms, Logos, and Dummy Texts. The best part about these tools is that they are completely free (some need you to signup though). If you are looking ways speed up your work and channel more time and energy to new content ideas and marketing strategies, I believe the list is a must-bookmark. According to my last check on WordPress.com stats, there were more than 42 million blogposts published in May 2014 – and that’s just WordPress.com alone. Who has the time to create everything from scratch these days? Category #1: Color Palettes Generator Functions/Details: To generate color palettes based on image input.Allow users to compare, review, and select color combination at ease. Palette Generator Pictaculous Kuler. 15 sites web developers and designers should know - CatsWhoCode.com.

Creating a good website isn't an easy task, but there's a few tools that can definitely make your developer or designer life easier. In this article, I have compiled 15 extremely useful website that any web developer or web designer should have bookmarked. ColorCombos When designing a website, one of the firsts (and most important) steps of the process is to choose a color scheme. Color Combos allow you to browse thousand of different colors combinations for getting inspired for your upcomming design.

LIpsum Who doesn’t know the extremely popular Lorem Ipsum text? What the font? You just saw a logo or website using a particular font and you enjoyed it. ConvertIcon Favicons are a must have for any website, mostly because on modern browsers as such as Firefox, it is displayed along with the site name in tabs. BgPatterns background Patterns is definitely one of the current webdesign trends. HTML Encoder Do you display code on your website? Test Everything Sprite Generator Load Impact IconFinder. Web performance, delivered. By Ram Ramani, Engineering Manager Update 7/29/11: We were notified of a bug in the measurement tool that sometimes causes incorrect measurements.

If your results indicated a slowdown on your pages, please run the tests again, and make sure you specify a fully qualified domain such as www.example.com. We apologize for any inconvenience and confusion this may have caused. Details: Measurement tests run for bare domains (such as example.com, without the prefix www) previously indicated that pages were loading more slowly, rather than speeding up, when using Page Speed Service. Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their web pages faster.

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. 3 ways to build social commerce on your site. When Howard Schultz came on board with Starbucks in 1982, he advised the company to evolve its business from coffee beans and accessories to coffeehouse culture and espresso by the cup. The idea was initially met with rejection from company founders. Given Starbucks’ meteoric rise since then, the rest is history, with the lesson that businesses must be cognizant of market trends and embrace new channels that promise growth. Similarly, retailers ignore social channels at their own risk, and a number of recent market trends have coalesced to make social commerce top of mind.

A majority (58%) of all consumers now research products online before purchasing, and half of those consumers publish comments or reviews online about the products they buy. Global e-commerce revenue figures continue to grow at a faster rate (19%) than the economy as a whole. Over 750 million users have flocked to Facebook to interact and share with friends. Ratings & reviews Social login Mobile. Free Chat Messenger for your desktop. Build a Website in 10 Minutes! You know I’m a big advocate of simplicity. Simple is great value! When it comes to designing and building websites, taking the short, direct route benefits you in so many ways! You can get a site up and running and test different appeals and content very rapidly today. If you’ve been smart, you will then be able to be responsive – change your content quickly, even change the whole look and feel of your website.

These days, smart production equals WordPress! When you’re familiar with the WordPress platform, you can set up a functional site on cheap hosting with a few clicks, install a theme and the essential plugins, and be up and running quite quickly. But there is a learning curve. That’s where “ItsBuiltForYou” comes in. This service was developed by a couple of my advanced students, and it cuts out the whole learning curve for people who really aren’t web developers and just want to get a great-looking website live. Check it out >>Â I just got this in my email.. Websites With Lower Google Rankings See Higher Ad CTR [Study] A study from Chitika shows that the lower your position is on the search engine results page, the higher the likelihood that visitors will click on ads on your page. The 10th position sites showed nearly double the click-through rate (CTR) of those sites ranking in first position.

The Chitika SERP/Ad CTR Study The study was designed for sites that have on-page advertisements as their primary way of making money. While the increase in traffic from a higher position has long been seen, no one has checked on whether ad interaction behaviors change based on the precise SERP point of entry. As such, Chitika "decided to investigate the correlation between the position of a site on Google’s first page of results and the CTR of ads within the site. " Here's what they found: As you can see, the CTR scales up as the position goes down, with first position having under 0.5 percent CTR compared to fifth position's roughly 0.7 percent and 10th position's nearly 0.9 percent. Why would this be the case? Web performance, delivered. How to build a Facebook community. Here are 14 ‘levers’ you need to be pulling Like any social tool, Facebook needs to be worked in order to achieve specific marketing, event or fundraising goals. Yes, you need to have a an effective Facebook Page where fans can easily interact (see “11 Quick Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Fan Page” by @franswaa).

And yes, you need to have compelling content. However, even with all this, if you don’t consistently nurture your Facebook relationships, you’ll end up with visitors — potential fans — wondering, “Are they still in business?” What you get by working your Facebook levers You’ll grow your fan base organically, which means they’ll stick around.You’ll be able to identify your biggest supporters.You’ll stay current on what’s important to your fans (also called “market research”).

Facebook levers (manual) Many of the levers you pull on Facebook require time, attention and consideration. 1. Facebook Pages and Groups allows you to send messages to fans. Your best fans are busy fans. 2. 3. How To Build Your Facebook Landing Page (If You’re Not A Programmer) Update: As you know Facebook no longer supports FBML for its tabs, which is what this post was based on, but there is an updated post about How to build a Facebook Landing Page with iFrames – Don’t miss it!

Building a Facebook Landing Page is easier than you think, even if you are not a programmer. This week we’ll look at a topic that might seem basic for some. For other people, specially new visitors, this might feel like “been there done that”. Yes, there are too many blog posts out there that have discussed the topic but I’ll promise you this: In the usual SocialMouths style, we’ll go over the why, the what and the hows of building a landing page for your Facebook Page.

Why is it important? What do we need to consider? A guide to building a basic Facebook landing page. Also as usual, let’s start at the beginning. Why Is A Landing Page Important? The landing page is usually setup as the “Welcome” tab for people that has not “Liked” the page. What Is The Main Goal? What Else Can We Do? 1. Landing Page Best Practices.