5 More Handy Web Apps to Save You Time at Work This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Web apps are a friend to all who mash the keyboard from nine to five. They live in the cloud, are accessible from any Internet connection and are great for chopping those mundane work tasks off at the knees. We've previously highlighted a batch of web apps that reduce the headaches and keystrokes associated with common tech chores, and after receiving some great feedback from readers, we thought it only right to hunt down a few more worthy bookmarkables. See below for five more picks, and remember to leave your own time-saving web ditties in the comments. If you aren't fist pumping at your desk right now over these life-changing websites, there's probably little hope for you. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kemie
Anatomy of an Effective Product Page Design The goal of any new e-commerce website appears to be to challenge (and be better than) Amazon.com. The well informed among us would say this is an impossible task and anyone suggesting different is overly ambitious or crazy. Yet with all this ambition, the websites of many online businesses simply don’t make the effort to create a site that could even challenge the Internet behemoth that is Amazon — let alone topple it. So What’s the Problem? The main problem lies in the product page of many e-commerce websites. Although other pages in an e-commerce site can affect conversion rates, the product page is the strong link in any conversion. Yet many websites show only the most basic amount of information required to get a sale, and they think this is good enough. In a world where your nearest competitor is only a click away, you need to make sure you convince your customers that buying from you is the right choice. Required Elements of a Product Page Product Name Price Ikea Buy Button CDNow Images
Protonotes: HTML prototyping collaboration tool. Top 10 Project Management Software for Remote Teams Having trouble communicating with your remote team? Shared the wrong file to the team, and it takes 3 hours to resend to them one by one again? Your remote team misunderstands your project’s milestones and even objective? It never feels good to have these conflicts while bearing the stress of getting project done, but you can actually eliminate these issues by using the online project management software. The rise of remote teams has led to the production of several great online project management systems to address the problems of teams facing productivity issues and the need for real-time updates. It’s only the matter time for you to discover it, but we decided to introduce you 10 online project management software that provides tons of useful features for you such task setting and sharing, real-time updates, file sharing and even online wiki. 1. activeCollab ActiveCollab helps collaborators through its time saving and easy-to-use features. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Fundamental Guidelines Of E-Commerce Checkout Design Advertisement Here is the harsh reality of e-commerce websites: according to recent e-commerce studies, at least 59.8% of potential customers abandon their shopping cart (MarketingSherpa puts it at 59.8%, SeeWhy at 83% and MarketLive at 62.14%). The main question is why do customers abandon their shopping cart so often? Well, that’s exactly what we wanted to find out. The study has shown that it is often difficult to lead customers to the final step in the checkout process when the only thing left is to submit their credit card details. The 15 e-commerce websites that we tested were: 1-800-Flowers, AllPosters, American Apparel, Amnesty, Apple, HobbyTron, Levi’s, Newegg, Nordstrom, Oakley, Perfume.com, PetSmart, Thomann, Walmart and Zappos. In total, the test subjects were given more than 500 usability issues, ranging from being distracted by animated graphics to being thrown off course by an illogical checkout flow. 1. Walmart’s non-linear process. 2. 3. Another example is “Back.” 4. 5.
Khan Academy From kindergarten to calculus, Khan Academy is here to help. Sharpen your skills with over 100,000 interactive exercises. Over 100,000 interactive exercises. You may have heard about our videos, but did you know that Khan Academy has fun interactive math exercises that cover skills ranging from counting to calculus, grade by grade? Every exercise has step-by-step hints, so your child can practice as much as needed. Created and peer-reviewed by a team of math educators, our exercises include full coverage of US Common Core and beyond, ranging from early math through calculus. Review student progress in real time. You will be empowered with instant, in-depth feedback and reports so you’ll know exactly where each student and your class as a whole stand at any time throughout the year. Stay up to date with your child’s progress. You’ll get quick email updates so you can see your children’s progress as they learn, both when they’ve mastered new skills and when they might be struggling.
Five Useful Interactive CSS/jQuery Techniques Deconstructed - Smashing Magazine Advertisement With the wide variety of CSS3 and JavaScript techniques available today, it’s easier than ever to create unique interactive websites that delight visitors and provide a more engaging user experience. In this article, we’ll walk through five interactive techniques that you can start using right now. We’ll cover: Besides learning how to accomplish these specific tasks, you’ll also master a variety of useful CSS and jQuery tricks that you can leverage when creating your own interactive techniques. So, let’s dive in and start building more exciting websites! 1. The footer of David DeSandro’s website uses extruded text that animates on mouseover. View the demo First let’s set up some text (the code is copied from the original site): <span class="extruded">Extrude Me</span> And some basic styling (the code is copied from the original site): Here, we’ve applied some basic styles and added a text-shadow. text-shadow: #000 1px 1px, #000 2px 2px, #000 3px 3px; Styling the Hover State 2. 3.
Create a Website Design using The Bricks UI Topic: Adobe PhotoshopDifficulty: BeginnerEstimated Completion Time: 30 Mins In this tutorial we will be creating a simple but elegant e-commerce layout of a website, it being entirely built by using The Bricks UI e-commerce user-interface set. I will teach you how to start with a blank document and end with a beautiful layout that can actually be used as a design for an e-store. Starting Out Moving Elements As you know we will be “importing” some of the .psd files you can find in the UI set to our new document, and thanks to Photoshop and its super friendly drag-n-drop way of importing, you are basically going to select the required folder/layer and you’ll drop it to your new document. Copying Styling of a Layer If you are pretty new to Adobe Photoshop then you might me interested in a few quick tips/tricks, and here’s a very simple but necessary one. Resizing Elements Step 1 We’ll start the layout by creating a new document which is 1200 pixels in Width and 2150 in Height. Step 2 Step 3
Khan Academy HOW TO: Get Started With the COMPASS CSS Framework Anybody who's built a website of any size knows how quickly CSS can get out of hand. Style sheets can grow bloated and lengthy, making it difficult to find things, introducing redundancy and producing an end product that makes code maintenance tedious. Let's face it — CSS is not very well-designed. Over the years, a number of solutions have cropped up that attempt to deal with these problems. Below, we'll give you a quick introduction to how COMPASS works, and some tips on how to make it work for you. What is COMPASS? COMPASS is an open source CSS authoring framework written in Ruby that attempts to fix a lot of the shortcomings of CSS. Those features include: With all that and dozens more tidbits to offer, COMPASS provides a robust authoring environment for CSS creation that automatically monitors your code as you write it, compiling it down to pure CSS for use on your site. How Does COMPASS Work? Next, the mixin itself contains the rules for our default fonts. Where to Go From Here