In this article, we’ll explore a scoring system for rating and comparing websites, we’ll visualize those ratings using infographics, and we’ll see what data and structure this method provides for reviewing websites.
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A few concerns keep bobbing up now and then for Web developers, one of which relates to how to lay out a given design. Developers have made numerous attempts to do so with existing solutions. Several articles have been written on finding the holy grail of CSS layouts, but to date, not a single solution works without major caveats.
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There is no doubt that WordPress is the best content management system (CMS) for your website. Sure, countless CMS’ are available, ranging from open-source to paid, and you’ll hear evangelists on all sides swearing that their choice is the best. But Drupal, Joomla or any other CMS doesn’t hold a candle to WordPress for its ease of use, security and reliability.
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I hear a lot of people talking about the importance of sketching when designing or problem solving, yet it seems very few people actually sketch. As a UX professional, I sketch every day. I often take over entire walls in our office and cover them with sketches, mapping out everything from context scenarios to wire frames and presentations.
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Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? Being a Web developer, and therefore having a job that’s often linked to content creation, it’s likely you have. It’s a fairly overused but true statement about what draws visitors to a site.
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Do you know what makes a design good? Is it merely an opinion, or is there something more to it? Breaking design down seems like such an abstract thing. Even the designers who are able to create thought-provoking work seem purely talented and have natural abilities that can’t really be nailed down to a process. But what if there were principles that captured why design and art worked the way that they do?
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Redesign. The word itself can send shudders down the spines of any Web designer and developer. For many designers and website owners, the imminent onslaught of endless review cycles, coupled with an infinite number of “stakeholders” and their inevitable “opinions,” would drive them to shave their heads with a cheese grater if given a choice between the two. Despite these realities, redesigns are a fact of any online property’s life cycle. Here are five key indications that it’s time to redesign your website and of how extensive that redesign needs to be.
The first and most important indicator that your website is in need of a rethink is metrics that are beginning to tank. There certainly could be other reasons for this symptom (such as your product not fitting the market), but once those are eliminated or mitigated, a constant downward trend in conversions, sales, engagement activities and general user participation indicates that the efficacy of your current design has worn off.
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If you like the idea of being your own boss (I certainly do), chances are you get the itch sometimes to create your own product — a product whose direction you control, that you do not have to compromise on with someone else, and whose fruits you get to fully enjoy, instead of being paid by the hour or a flat rate. It could be a Web service, a WordPress plugin or a desktop application, but the core problem is the same: how do you pick an idea that will succeed?
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People often ask how I arrived at a finished illustration. Honestly, it’s different every time, but it always starts with a hand-drawn sketch.
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The beauty of WordPress is in how easy it is to adapt for different tasks. One can extend it with just a couple of lines of code. In this post, we’ll review 10 shortcode snippets that will tweak and optimize your WordPress theme. You can add all of these code snippets to the functions.php file in your WordPress theme.
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