Programmers.biz

Many people are under the misconception that web development is easy. They figure that websites such as Facebook or Twitter were only a matter of a day or so of work and can be duplicated without dif…

Many small companies have a website built and then do nothing with it. This is mostly due to fear of the unknown and their fear of technology. Subsequently they are surprised and disappointed that the website ‘does not work’ for them. Consequently they do not bother developing the site as a tool for sales and marketing and it is left to gather cyber dust. However following some simple tips or rules of thumb the company can make the site a very productive channel to market.

When you going to either develop a site yourself or hire a company to do it for you then you want to make sure that there are no corners being cut. There are certain things that go into the developmen…

If you want to get online and are wondering, “How do I make a website?” you have three choices: hire a Web vendor such as a Web designer to make it for you, use an online template-based turnkey service or make it yourself from scratch. This article is specifically for the Web novice that simply needs a place to begin.

We live in a web centric world right now, and if you haven’t already, you’ll most likely be facing website related dilemma(s). For example, maybe you need an email template to send out your company newsletter(s) but you don’t have the first clue as to how to create one let alone create one that works with all major clients, looks outstanding and is easy to customize and reuse.

Or maybe you need a stylish but functional admin panel for a client whom you’ve just built a complex CMS for, but you aren’t a designer. There are an infinite number of possible problems you could be facing and fortunately, there are solutions.

1. Airmail! – Customizable Email Template

“Airmail is a professionally built and designed custom HTML email template! Perfect for just about anyone – usable for everything from newsletters to eFlyers to whitepapers.”

2. Simpla Admin – Flexible & User Friendly Admin skin

“Simpla Admin is a professional template with a beautiful and user friendly interface. With various smart and intuitive jQuery functions, navigating the interface is a breeze.”

3. CleanMail – Email Template Package – 5 Colors!

“CleanMail is a simple yet sexy email template package with 5 different color schemes!”

4. WordPress Wiki Theme

“If you’re looking for a Knowledge Base or Wiki for your company but don’t want or need a full blown Wiki Application. This is the theme for you. Built with a custom Frequently Asked Questions plugin to help extend the functionality of your web site. The plugin acts as a custom write panel that displays in essence short FAQs below posts in their respective categories. The FAQs are searchable and paginate and are not required.”

5. Marketplace Community WordPress Theme

“Marketplace is a both clean and stylish WordPress theme with the intent and focus on creating a community site for industry news, tutorials, etc. This theme includes many popular built in features seen in today’s industry leading community sites. This themes comes with 5 different color options to choose from.”

6. vCard Professional Portfolio

“This is a professional and clean vCard based on Tim Van Damme’s website. With this design you can use almost any background.”

7. Sleek Server Error Pages

“This is a clean, web 2.0 design for website / server error pages. It is flexible and very easy to customize. It comes with 5 of the most common error pages (404, 403, 401, 500 and 503) but it’s very easy to add more if needed. All text is real text so adding more pages is a breeze, no image editing required.”

8. NEOTERIC—The Ultimate Under Construction Page!

“NEOTERIC is a clean single page ‘Under Construction/Coming Soon’ template in 10 SKINS designed to keep your users up to date on your site’s progress.”

9. Under Construction Page with Twitter & Pie Graph!

“Make sure your visitors know whats going on with this Under construction site template that features a feed of your latest tweets (which can be easily removed if you dont use twitter) and a pie chart that is easy to change to reflect your progress!”

10. Minimo – A minimal one page portfolio theme

“Minimo is a simple and attractive one page portfolio showcase theme. This theme is built using the 960.gs grid system framework, giving it a structured and professional look and features custom designed icons. Included is a form mail script, so the entire site works out of the box, simply add your destination email address.”

Conclusion

When working on projects for your clients, what kinds of templates do you find yourself most in need of? Thanks for reading!

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There was a time when an entire website containing several web pages was easily possible on PHP instead of HTML file for each page. As PHP was free to download and could be easily installed, PHP websi…

Sure thing, a great website design is the foundation that you need, to build a successful online business. But, it simply doesn’t end over there - rather it is just the beginning. If you’ve a good SEO-friendly website design layout, you already have the key to success in hand. But, there’s still a long way to go, and 99% of the folks lose their way and commit some of the most common mistakes. So, here are the top 5 mistakes to avoid.

This PLUS tutorial and screencast will demonstrate how to use jQuery and the jGFeed plugin to fetch news feeds remotely and write the results into the existing markup. jGFeed is a jQuery plugin that allows you to retrieve ‘any’ RSS feed from ‘any’ host and return a JSON object for easy usage. Become a PLUS member.

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When I first heard about vanity metrics I wondered if it was something to do with makeup. Not once did I realise that understanding vanity metrics and actionable metrics would change the way I did business entirely, and would increase my useful productivity.

With more than 7000+ plugins, WordPress is the most extendable Content Management System available; in fact, “WordPress is infinitely extensible” as Matt Mullenweg says. In this post, we’ll examine twenty-one really useful plugins to take your blog to the next level.

1. Drag To Share

“Drag to share is the newest trend in social sharing. Just drag an image and drop it into any social website to share the whole page in real time. Most notably, this effect is being used by Mashable. The plugin was developed with the source files created by Dan Wellman. Read more here ”

Download the plugin

2. Paginator

“Paginator is a pagination technique based on the idea of scrolling.”

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3. TypeKit Plugin for WordPress

“This is a convenient way for WordPress users to use the Typekit font service in WordPress web sites. This will enable users to quickly change the fonts on their sites. Further this plugin provides the ability to designate where TypeKit will be used in their site.”

Want to learn more about TypeKit? Watch our screencast.

Download the plugin

4. Custom Coming Soon Page

The “Custom Coming Soon Pages” WordPress plugin allows you to display a “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction” page to normal visitors or regular members of your WordPress site, while the site administrators continue to see the fully functional website.

This will enable you to perform upgrades, fix nasty bugs or preview jazzy enhancements to your design live on your WordPress based website or blog without letting your users and normal visitors see crappy error messages or changes to the design until you really want them to.”

Download the plugin

5. Custom Class Selector

“The Custom Class Selector plugin allows users to style their post content using custom classes made available by the active theme. Theme developers can make custom style classes available within the visual editor by adding a simple function to the functions.php file included with their theme.”

Download the plugin

6. PHP-Widgetify

“Like a normal text widget, this allows you to easily post text and HTML, but now you can execute PHP too! This makes merging with other themes easier.”

Download the plugin

7. Pretty Comments

“Add some formatting capabilities to the comments textareas.”

Download the plugin

8. Custom Login Page

“With the Custom Login Page, you can change the background image of your login page, the background image/colo of your login form div, the main logo image of your login page, and add custom CSS – all through a simple interface. Remember to view the Help tab at the top of the settings page for the plugin.”

Download the plugin

9. eCSStender for WordPress

“This plugin uses the eCSStender javascript Library. This library is a parser that takes your CSS after the browser.

The library re-interprets the css using the plugins and adds new abilities to the browsers. You can for example add CSS3 Selectors support to IE6.

Download the plugin

10. Freebie Images: Free Stock Images Plugin

“Spice up your blog with high quality free stock photos & images created by professional photographers and illustrators: Easy to use search interface with advanced filtering and Drag & Drop functionality.”

Download the plugin

11. SecurePress Website Security Analyzer

“SecurePress is a “Live” patent pending security system for WordPress.
With the introduction of SecurePress, WordPress owners now have a clear choice in website protection. No more piece-meal security patches and plugins. The SecurePress widget installs enough free features to get you started towards securing your site. The ability to see and record your attacks is an excellent starting point. The free reports and statistics available within the dashboard help you to better understand the level and magnitude of these attacks. The free price tag is another excellent reason to download! When you’re ready, and after familiarizing yourself with the dashboard, you may want to upgrade to the full version to enable the vast blocking capabilities of SecurePress Pro and turn this application into a monster security shield.”

Download the plugin

12. Prev-Next Keyboard Navigation

“Prev-Next Keyboard Navigation adds JavaScript to allow moving through postings on index and archive pages using the J/K keys to skip to the next or previous post.”

Features

1. Scrolls the current post to the top
2. View next post with “J”, previous post with “K”
3. After the last post on a page, continues to the next page

Photo by John Khan

Download the plugin

13. oEmbed Provider

“The oEmbed provider plugin makes WordPress an oEmbed provider, compliant with the XML and JSON specification at http://www.oembed.com.

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.”

Download the plugin

14. My WordPress Secure

“This plugin is very simple: it removes the WP-Version from the head of the document – thus, avoiding bad-intentioned people from knowing what version of WordPress you’re currently running. “

Download the plugin

15. Private Messages For WordPress

“This plugin allows users of your blog to send private messages (PM) to each other. The number of PMs can be controlled via the plugin’s option page.”

Download the plugin

16. Simple WordPress Framework for Plugins Development

“Simple WordPress Framework is a Plugin to help you create new Plugins. Even though this is the first version (Beta), it is fully functional. It was designed using the standards and requirements specified in the WordPress Plugin API Manual and follows the correct programming structure, functions and procedures that are required to build a plugin in WordPress. In every PHP file, you will find notes and urls referring to the WordPress API articles that are relevant.”

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17. No IE6

“You can install this plugin to inform your users that they are running an old browser.

This is using the jReject jQuery plugin. The WordPress plugin simply uses hooks to insert the jQuery plugin into your theme.”

Download the plugin

18. S3Vault

“S3Vault is a WordPress Plugin to protect your Amazon S3 files by generating expiration links. You can post your S3 files for download, or play videos inline without worrying about others sharing your S3 file links.”

Download the plugin

19. Envato Marketplace Items

“The Envato Marketplace Items plugin retrieves items from an Envato Marketplace and API set of your choice, then caches and shows the results as a gallery of 80px square thumbnails.”

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20. WordPress Admin Bar Improved

“This Plugin replicates all of the menu links in your normal admin area at the top of your main site for logged in users (i.e. you). You can go right to the “Write Post” or manage options pages in one click from anywhere on your blog. No more having to go to your dashboard first. You can even have it replace your admin area menus if you want.”

Download the plugin

21. Excerpt Tools

“If you require a specific excerpt length for each post, this is the right plugin for you. It adds an excerpt box to pages and shows a customizable jQuery character counter with the ability to limit the amount of characters.”

Download the plugin

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