WordCamps are my favorite events to go to because there’s something about the core WordPress community that attracts smart folks with good philosophies that are fun to hang out with. In this post I’ve collated the upcoming WordCamps we know about, including the one in San Francisco. Hopefully there will be one nearby so you can meet other WordPressers in your area.
WordCamp San Francisco will be August 16 at the Mission Bay Conference Center.
. .
. (And I believe I’ll be there.)
will be July 19-20.
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There are people in the planning stages in , Philippines, Beijing, Utah, Hawaii, UK, NYC, and possibly others, so if you live in one of those areas and would like to help set up a WordCamp in your area Google around or connect with bloggers in your area.
Kwietniowe niebo było... żółte i wypełnione postaciami białych ludków unoszących się na biało-zielonych wiatraczkach :)
Taką wizję kampanii "Wybierz III Sektor" zaproponowałam Stowarzyszeniu Aktywne Kobiety i taka wizja została wybrana. Kampania ta ma na celu zachęcić młodych ludzi do pracy w stowarzyszeniach i fundacjach, gdzie będą mogli realizować swoje pomysły, marzenia i pomagać innym. Praca nad tą kampanią była i ciężka i bardzo ciekawa. Dużo materiałów, dużo przestrzeni do wypełnienia a ponad wszystkim pomysł na lekką, zabawną grafikę, wyróżniającą się z morza kolorowych plakatów, anonsów i ogłoszeń porozklejanych po całym mieście - to było wyzwanie!
"Kok desain gue jadi ngaco di Mozilla/Firefox? Di IE bagus kok". Well, ini jawaban gue untuk pertanyaan paling basi di dunia web desain itu.
Gini lho, IE 5 dan 6 punya banyak banget bug, jadi kalo platform development utama kamu adalah IE, dari awal kamu udah berpatokan pada hal yang salah. Jadi kali ini gue mau nunjukin langkah-langkah yang lebih menjamin kompatibilitas antar browser.
Are you sure that your advertising & web appearance is appealing to your viewers or targeted visitors?
Not Sure???
Then this post is highly recommended to you.
Day by day People are inventing new tricks & techniques to capture the viewer’s attention. Obviously, everyone wants to beat this tough competition to stay alive in this dynamic World. Nothing is wrong in that. In fact if we take a look at past few years then we will found many great inventions which actually revolutionized the whole marketing scenario like the concept of PPC, Online Affiliate Marketing, and search engine Marketing & many others.
But beware!! Some tricky techniques may take your visitors or viewers away from your site.
Some of them are as follows:
Interstitials: The contextual meaning of Interstitial is “In Between”. On the web Interstitials are the web pages that are displayed before an expected content page. This is a sort of reference page between two pages. This can be of any type like it can be an Advertisement, User’s information page & others.
If this is an advertisement then it can irritate your visitors as they won’t expect it in between their important surfing activities.
Interstitial can also be very helpful to the visitors by alerting the user that the next page requires a login, or has some other requirement which the user should know about before proceeding. Intelligent and cautious use of interstitial pages can avoid confusion and aid usability.
Pop Ups: Pop ups are small windows that comes out in the foreground of an Internet browser when using the Web. This is a form of online advertising intended to capture the attention or to attract traffic. In this a new browser window opens to display the advertisements when something on the screen is clicked upon or the mouse is moved over an element of a web page. These are usually generated by JavaScript or by other means as well.
The other different form of these kinds of advertisement is Pop- Under; which opensin a new browser window hidden under the active window.
Studies reveals that these forms of advertisements are annoying to users by delivering the commercial or other type of information without the permission; hence violating the user’s web experience. So we should avoid them. However, they can be integrated into some websites for other more practical purposes.
Also, Hover ad web advertisement can be a creative approach to Popup advertisements.
Electronic Messaging Spamming: Spamming is the unethical technique to send unsolicited bulk messages. Advertisers are using this technique profoundly because of low or no operating cost. Other popular types of spamming are Chat Spam, Mobile Phone spam, Blog spam & many others. We should evade these spamming techniques to advertise our products or services, as these might create a negative impression for the respective brands.
Unfavorable Redirects: Some webmasters redirect their visitors to altogether a different landing page then what they have shown earlier. Many time to a different domain also to support their affiliate’s advertisements. This activity compels users to leave your site. These are again very annoying to users. Some times users might not realize that a new browser window has opened & he might have struggle for switching the window.
Links that open in a new window: This is a very common mistake doing by the webmasters. They make the site’s internal links opened in a new browser window. This is not good for users & site owners as well. It actually resets the back button of the new window which may creates a big problem for users who want to go back to their previous page. We should not force then to open a new window without knowing them about this fact.
Splash Pages: Splash page is an introductory page (or very first page with some graphics or images like “Enter in Site”) of the website with eye-catching graphics (Flash, animations & more) and with no actual content (Sometimes very less content).
These splash pages with fancy designing techniques increase the load time of the site, which can push visitors away from the website. Visitors need the required information very fast without wasting their time.
Also, a Splash page keeps your site away from Search Engine indexing as usually these pages include flash animation, javaScript & other fancy techniques. Search Engines are not very friendly with these techniques.
Similarly there are many other things which can hamper your website or advertising growth.
Anything which might get your visitors away from you is always a bad thought!!
I have changed again the bottom nav bar to a light grey in the Windows Vista style.
It's v. 3 already. ;-) I began with some dark grey gradiant who was ugly !
I keep the 3d icon I made upon. It's a little kitsh but I like icons. ;-))
And there were cinema 4D made of course !
I design the nav under fireworks. I just love this piece of software. It's export all the nav as jpg or gif just the way I wanted to : in a mouse click with export function ! You just have to name your slices properly.
I use a 1pixel border with no antialiasing, then a linear fill gradiant who match Windows Vista style gradiant. I use the "pipette" to clone colors from fireworks system itself. I love the way Fireworks can catch any colors on your screen, including other programs or windows colors ! Why PhotoShop can't make it ?
Then, I set up an handy "biseau" effect with to add some inner lighten effect.
Tell me if you like the new nav bar with tab (we said "onglet" in French).
In my last post, I noted that Coremetrics has begun releasing benchmark data collected from their ~300 clients. A couple of the stats really caught my attention:
The typical conversion rate is 3.29%
Conversions Where Site Search Was Used - 14.84% of consumers used site search during their visits - conversion rate 5.60%
The shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.42%.
Wow....think about it....
out of 100 people, only 3 of them actually complete the desired action. AND
out of 100 people that begin a shopping cart, only 32-33 of them complete the transaction and buy something (through the website - we don't know if they walked in the store later and concluded the sale there); AND
of the people that use internal search, they convert at a much higher rate than the ones that do not.
While some of my esteemed colleagues have decided that it's not about conversions, it's really about engagement (I'm not naming names, you know who you are :-) ), it really is about conversions. That's the bottom line. For every small improvement a site owner makes to improve their conversion rate or reduce their abandonment rate, they get repaid many times over. The philosophical diversion into "engagement" is really code for "we know people are leaving the site and completing the sale offline, we just don't have a way to tie all the data together". When that day comes, conversion will come back into vogue in a huge way.
Take this rate that Coremetrics has given us as a benchmark. If this conversion rate of 3.29% can be improved by just one-half of one percent, sales would increase by 15%. That translates to real money. Similarly, 68 of 100 people walking out of your virtual store when they have things in their basket that they abaondon in the last aisle represents real money that didn't make it into the till. Everything that can be done to chip away at that represents real money.
So, how do you identify those improvements? Strip it back to its basic elements; look at what you've created - how usable is it, how findable is it, how free of defects, does it respect the visitor's privacy, is it accessible to all potential customers? Are the key pages that lead people to the conversion event optimized? Do they have the right stuff in the right places with the right call to action to propel people forward and keep them moving forward to completion? You'll notice these questions don't have anything to do with studying how people have reacted to your site; rather they have everything to do with understanding deeply what you've given people to interact with. Traffic is a measure after the fact - it's forensics. Evaluating traffic is great for understanding what people did; it is not a predictor of what they would do if things were different.
To help you visualize the impact that small improvements in conversion rates and abandonment rates can have, I've created a . I am not an accountant or finance expert. This is not complex econometric modeling. This is just a simple way for you to plug in some numbers that are meaningful to you to see that the impact over time is real and measurable. Have fun, dream big, and see what it might mean :-)
So I have had the DISTINCT pleasure of implementing a "new & innovative" navigational control from the brilliant minds of our Creative department at work. Let me lay down a little bit of the ground work of how this surfaced:
Creative doesn't want navigation to fall below the fold. They don't want there to be any natural scrolling on the site. Apparently the built in scroll bars in all the browsers just aren't "creative" enough for there taste. They also want to represent the hiearchy of the sub navigation via a tree structure (hence the Tree). On top of that, they don't want to confuse the user with showing anymore than one element at a time. So when one parent is invoked all other expanded parents are collapsed(hence the Accodian).
If this wasn't brilliant enough, remember the first concern.. don't want to see a scroll bar even though we are jamming 100 links in 4 sections in the sub navigation. So, the last requirement is if one of the "panes" in the accordian section is larger than X height we want to allow them to scroll within the pane.
Which leaves us with a Scrollable TreeCordian which I wrote using MooTools 1.21b.
I'm a web designer, website marketeer, graphics, business oriented, sales guru, quasi wanna be web consultant. I presume spilling my brains on this blog will hopefully assist me in making a techy geeky name for myself. I will start posting technical to-do's, have-done's, will-do's and other applicable instructional informational blogs about my every day experiences. Today I will speak to my personal computer's configuration, how I power use my Gateway M-6834 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5450 @ 1.66GHz 1.67GHz puter with 2GB of RAM running Windows Vista Home Edition.
First of all, here is the software that I run:
- AC3 Drivers
- Back up a perfect image of your harddrive and restore your computer that way at will
- Best darned design studio available to mankind...
- One-Click Optimizer is great to clean up the drive from time to time
- In depth .tmp, .reg., and various cleaner
- The only way to watch a movie
- The best email marketing client I've ever used...
- Want to watch .flv films?
- File deletion program, best for files the windows will not let you delete
- Best darn FTP program a man has ever used
- Search features only...
- Try the flight simulator over your neighborhood, really cool
- No ads, love it... have my entire company on it..
- .torrent, P2P, and other naughty things...
- Need it for the decompression of downloads
- Unfortunately a must have in business
- for Motorola cellphones
- wouldn't use anything else, period
- Love it, but bloatware...don't know what I'll switch to when v.8 comes out
- Easy and quick, best
- Great text editor for fast stuff
- Another decompression tool..
- Mac like menu program
- Does it all...
- Needed when 250GB and and external 250GB is not enough dangit..
- for anonymous surfing
- PHP, MySQL, Apache installer
- Decompression...
This configuration helps me keep a great design machine and keep it clean at the same time.
Hey guys, check out this website i made pretty recently. Its called the TLU Association, which stands for Tech Lovers United, and it's pretty spiffy. Check it out, see the mission and point of the site and let me know what you think. Its the new site on the Nirvana Network part of all the websites. Talk to you all later.
Quando um visitante visita o seu site pela primeira vez, a impressão é formada muito rapidamente. Uma boa primeira impressão aumentará dramaticamente as chances de que o visitante volte novamente enquanto uma primeira impressão negativa é difícil de ser modificada.
Confira abaixo 21 fatores importantes (não necessariamente na ordem que se encontram) que influenciam a primeira impressão que um visitante tem de um site:
1. O tempo de carregamento: A maioria de nós não é muito paciente e páginas que carregam lentamente não irá nos encorajar a voltar. Por outro lado, páginas que carregam rapidamente encorajam o visitante a navegar pelo seu site sabendo que não terão que esperar muito para que cada página carregue.
2. Mensagens de erro: Se os novos visitantes encontrarem mensagem de erro e por isso não poderem acessar o conteúdo do seu site, eles não terão uma boa impressão e provavelmente não voltarão.
3. Cores: A aparência do seu site obviamente será um fator muito importante no impacto que causa nos novos visitantes. Escolher a pode ser difícil mas felizmente há algumas ferramentas on-line que podem ajudar.
4. Logomarca: O logo deve ajudar a construir a marca do seu site da maneira como você quer que os clientes pensem a seu respeito.
5. Imagem de Cabeçalho: As imagens do cabeçalho podem ter um forte efeito nas primeiras impressões.
6. Tipografia: Uma boa tipografia pode fazer toda a diferença
7. Layout: Um dos elementos de design mais importantes é o layout. Qualquer que seja o layout que você use, você deve chamar a atenção para os itens mais importantes. O layout deve ser usado não só para criar um visual atraente mas também para permitir que o site seja fácil de se navegar.
8. Propagandas: Uma das piores maneiras de se causar uma má impressão é ter um site cheio de propaganda. A maioria dos usuários de internet esperam encontram propagandas na maioria dos sites, porém propagandas em excesso e uma má localização no site pode ser um grande desestímulo para os visitantes.
De uma maneira geral, você deve evitar colocar propagandas em locais que impeçam a leitura adequada dos conteúdos, a menos que o objetivo do seu site seja fazer dinheiro através de cliques em anúncios. Anúncios animados podem faciolmente distrair e aborrecer os leitores. Se você colocar propagandas distantes do corpo do texto, os visitantes não irão se incomodar.
9. Sua reputação: Alguns dos seus visitantes de primeira viagem estarão familiarizados com você ou com o seu site antes mesmo de visitá-lo. Em muitos casos eles podem ter lido sobre você em outro site que faz um link com o seu, isso é muito comum entre os bloggers.
Se os visitantes tiverem lido uma recomendação positica a seu respeito antes de visitar o seu site, você terá desenvolvido uma certa reputação na mente desse visitante e isso certamente afetará a primeira impressão que ele terá do seu site. O oposto acontecerá se ele tiver lido ou ouvido falar coisas negativas a seu respeito antes de visitar o blog.
10. Facilidade de navegação: Nós provavelmente estivemos em sites que pareciam ter um ótimo conteúdo para se ler, mas só que não conseguimos encontrar o que queremos. Talvez uma das coisas mais frustrantes em um site seja a navegação pobre. Por outro lado, uma navegação bem construída pode ajudar os visitantes a ter uma experiência positiva no site.
11. Propósito Claro: Novos visitantes devem conseguir perceber rapidamente o propósito de um site. Muitos sites incorporam isto de maneira efetiva quando usam a página "Sobre nós" ou algo do gênero para comunicar claramente o sque o visitante encontrará no site.
12. Elementos Não Profissionais: Alguns itens tais como gifs animados e contadores de visitas podem causar uma má impressão. Em geral, qualquer coisa que faça o seu site parecer como se ele tivesse sido feito há 10 ano deve ser evitado.
13. Qualidade das Imagens: É impressionante como uma imagem de alta qualidade pode causar um grande impacto no design. Felizmente, há muitos recursos online para se conseguir imagens de alta qualidade a um baixo custo e às vezes até gratuitamente.
14. Acessibilidade: Alguns usam navegadores antigos, outros tem conexões lentas, etc. Se o seu site não for acessível para essas pessoas, pode ter certeza de que você terá causado uma má impressão.
15. Pop-ups: A maioria dos usuários tem algum tipo de bloqueador de pop-ups, mas ainda assim alguns sites ainda os usam. A maioria dos usuários não gostam de pop-ups que não são bloqueados e isso pode causar uma má impressão. Alguns sites ainda usam pop-ups de maneira efetiva, então antes de usá-los em seu site, você deve pesar os prós e os contras.
16. Áudio e Vídeo:Alguns usuários apreciam estes elementos em um site, basta ver o sucesso de sites como o YouTube, mas não permita que eles sejam carregados no seu site automaticamente, deixe o usuário ter a liberdade de escolher se querem reproduzí-los ou não.
17. Associações: Os visitantes poderão ser novos no seu site mas eles ficarão impressionados se o seu site estiver associado a outros que eles conheçam e respeitem.
18. Qualidade do conteúdo: Claro que a qualidade do conteúdo não poderia ter ficado fora dessa lista. Enquanto o conteúdo pode não ter tanto impacto instantâneo como os aspectos de design do site, mas terá um impacto posterior fazendo com que os visitantes retornem.
Isso é válido especialmente para os blogs. Um visitante que entra em um blog com um ótimo conteúdo irá se lembrar dele de uma maneira positiva.
19. Tom: Além do conteúdo propriamente dito, o tom do discurso também causará impacto na primeira impressão. Muitas vezes o blog tem um conteúdo relevante mas o tom negativo do discurso cria uma má impressão.
20. Número de comentários e trackbacks: Quanto maior o número deles, melhor será a impressão.
21. Animações Flash antes do carregamento da página: Quer seja de maneira positiva ou negativa, as animações em flash certamente causam impacto. De um modo geral, elas desagradam porque tornam lento o carregamento da página. Esse recurso é mais apropriado para sites em que o usuário já espera por ele, como é o caso de sites sobre filmes e música.
