Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Aug 05, 2010
Whether you’re looking for a new design or just some summer inspiration, these great Joomla themes will brighten up your website or your ideas. We’ve chosen a range of styles, incorporating everything from professional business looks to soft swirls, so there’s something for everyone.
If you don’t have a Joomla content management system installed, log into your hosting control panel and try out our one-click install. Or take a look at the range of web hosting plans we have available.
Download Free Joomla Templates Here -
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Aug 05, 2010
Adding more and more plugins can bloat out your WordPress installation, so try to use straight coding where possible. You can customise your WordPress blog and add new features without worrying about plugins, widgets and themes using these simple code snippets.
Display Random Links
If you have a lot of links to other websites and not very much space, you can show random links in your WordPress sidebar rather than displaying all of them at once. To do this, open up your sidebar.php file (either in the WordPress theme editor or via FTP). Then define your existing list to show random links by using ‘rand’ in the tag, e.g.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Aug 05, 2010
Whether you want to set up a full-blown gallery or simply display a few holiday photos, there are numerous free ways to showcase your images on your website. Here are our top picks:
1.Lightbox 2
If you’re looking for an adaptable and attractive solution, Lightbox is a good choice. It doesn’t matter what (if any) content management system or blogging software you use as it’s compatible with any type of website. Once you’ve installed the software, simply add an image to your page and then click it to see a larger version with your page background darkened out and the ability to click through your photos. You can choose to group photos with a slideshow-type effect or show them individually.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on May 09, 2010
A couple of weeks ago we looked in to Google’s announcement that they are using a page’s load time to rank a sample of sites (1%) and what it meant for your website.
One of the most resource hungry ways of creating a website is WordPress. With its multiple CSS, JavaScript and PHP files and a heavy reliance on calls to databases a WordPress site can easily become bloated and slow. Web masters who use WordPress need to look at how they can decrease their website‘s page load speeds. Here is how.
How do I find out how fast my website is the first place?
To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools.
To check out your site on spec you can also install Google’s page speed plug-in for FireFox here http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html. This site within Firebug (also required) and gives a page a score out of 100 along with what you need to improve.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Apr 28, 2010
Modern cars are incredibly difficult to break in to and steal, so much so that thieves often find it easier to break in to a house and steal the car keys to make off with it. Hackers targeting your website are faced with a similar problem when it comes to getting access to your website.
Few hackers target the web host directly, with all the money large web hosts such as ourselves spend on security and monitoring it is simply too difficult to gain access. Instead they go directly after the webmaster by downloading a virus on to their PC and getting the FTP log in details so often stored as an unprotected flat text file within software such as Filezilla.
What do they do with the information?
Once they have direct access to your website’s files they are any number of actions they can take:
- Insert links in to your site & create link farms
- Capture your member’s information
- Links to malware
- Spread viruses
- Destroy your site
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Apr 13, 2010
There are a select group of WordPress plug-ins & widgets I go about installing as soon as I have set up WordPress, sometimes even before I have activated my theme of choice. In no particular order, below are the plug-ins & widgets I install within the first 24 hours without fail and think you should too…
Contact Form 7
Have your site’s visitors send secure messages to your email inbox with out exposing your email address.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Mar 16, 2010
Below you will find a list of the best free font resources that you can use to add a touch of creativity to your web pages!
Search Free Fonts
http://www.searchfreefonts.com/
Search Free Font’s has an impressive archive of over 13,000 fonts! The sections are well categorised, with the added option to browse by letter. With every font style you have the ability to type your own text to generate a preview of how it renders, which is a nice way to test before you download. There is also the option to rate and review each font style.
DaFont
http://www.dafont.com
An extensive resource of fonts with various licensing options. I like DaFont for it’s clear layout and navigation which allows you to browse fonts with ease. DaFont has a strong user base with new fonts being added regularly, you also get to make comments and also browse fonts by author. You can preview each font style before you download by adding your own custom text and checking whether it’s suitable or not.
1001 Free Fonts
http://www.1001freefonts.com/
A popular resource of free fonts, each with a large preview of the typeface. 1001 Free Fonts has always been a great resource, but it’s starting to get overshadowed by newer font libraries. If you’d prefer not to spend countless hours downloading fonts, 1001 Free Fonts allows you to download the entire library for $19.99.
Identifying Fonts – What The Font?!
http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
This is my favourite tool for helping to identify font sets that otherwise would go unfound. What makes it so good is it’s complete ease of use and impressive accuracy on the results. You simply upload an image/screenshot of the font (the clearer the better) and What The Font!? will work it’s magic and tell you what that font set is or its closest match and also how to get it.
Embedding Fonts
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/
Use sIFR to embed font’s into your webpage, this method uses modern technologies to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in thetypeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. Great if you wan’t to add a touch of creativity to your h1 tags!
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Mar 06, 2010
If you want to jazz up your WordPress and Joomla installations then add a new (and free!) theme to your website, we have picked out some of our favourite ones below.
Free WordPress Themes & Templates
Easily change the look and feel of your WordPress installation by incorporating a new theme.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Feb 19, 2010
Despite this I can happily build a website that looks pretty good and has working (and secure) scripts. Below is a list of resources for you to take advantage of if you need an element for your website but creating it yourself is beyond your skill set.
Have an attractive looking website without HTML/ CSS or Illustrator
I can hold a paint brush but that doesn’t mean I can paint and just because you know how to use the software that doesn’t mean you can design a beautiful website. To get yourself started or even to use it as it is “out of the box” here are some great websites to download readymade designs. Some are free, others require payment.
Edit images without Photoshop
Admittedly you’ll never be able to hit the dizzy heights of those that can use the likes of Photoshop but you don’t need to for most sites. Being able to rotate, re-size and crop an image is enough for the majority of editing requirements and you can do it all online with these programs:
