This infographic from Zing! Broadband shows the importance of website speed when it comes to conversion. In 2012, people spent $59.1 billion during the Black Friday weekend and the Cyber Monday sales brought in $1.62 billion. 167 million US consumers shopped online or 53% of the population. Estimated growth is 192 million by 2016.

Average page load time for the top 200 retail sites was 10 seconds, 10% faster than 2011.

[View Infographic]

There has been a huge dilemma among web developers as to what to get acquainted with first, the basic JavaScript or the more advanced features that use it such as jQuery, MooTools etc. The popular answer to such a question has always been the latter option. Learning the latter might be the easiest way around. But taking shortcuts always have their repercussions. Learning jQuery without getting acquainted with the basic Java script may lead to the developer running into problems later on.

The Pros and the Cons

Using script libraries is the easier way but not the best way. When one has ready made libraries of scripts in their possession and the library is user friendly and provides good tutorials for the beginners, it may not take a long time to master it. There are some great tutorials that may make even an absolute beginner master it and start working within a short period of time. There is a huge library of codes which can perform a huge range of functions. One does not have to write extensive lines of code as in raw JavaScript or others. The programming can be done with some speed as there is a lot of support for the library such as available plug-ins that speed up the process and can be downloaded readily. Yet all these come for a price.

Read the rest of this entry…

Every year, business owners spend approximately 2.5 billion dollars on email marketing. Although this figure is higher than it may have been past years, many experts like Max Starkov and Mariana Mechoso Safer, who recently published a report on digital marketing budget planning on Hospitality Net, this number is still too low. Starkov and Safer claim that business owners have under spent on digital advertising by close to $20 billion.

In particular, Starkov and Safer claim that entrepreneurs have under spent on mobile advertising. Many are reluctant to embrace this type of advertising because they’re unsure how to approach it without the help of an email services. The need for more spending in this arena is especially clear when one looks at the percentage of time that consumers spend with a certain medium versus the percentage of advertising budget that entrepreneurs allocate.

For instance, advertisers allocate about a quarter of their budgets toward print advertising while consumers only spend a mere seven percent of time. In contrast, marketers spend only one percent of their budgets on mobile marketing while consumers spend ten percent of their time. Many of the most successful companies are using this discrepancy between spending and potential ROI to their advantage, and they’re allocating as much as 75 percent of their advertising budgets to digital marketing. In general, advertisers are spending almost a quarter of advertising budget on  email marketing alone.

To afford this marketing expense, entrepreneurs are diverting money from other marketing sources like print advertising or radio spending. Some business owners find investing in email marketing to be so lucrative that they even take out loans to afford their campaigns. However, the way which entrepreneurs fund advertising campaigns is far less important than how they allocate the funds once they’ve been earmarked for an email marketing campaign.

Increasing The Efficacy of Email Campaigns

As you will discover when you consult with a company doing email service providers, there are critical steps that you can take to make your campaign more successful. The first and arguably the most important of these steps is creating a campaign that avoids batch and blast tactics.

According to a recently published EConsultancy blog post, when an entrepreneur segments email campaigns, they increase the number of messages that are opened by 30 percent. Because only 20 percent of emails are ever opened, increasing the chances that your email will be opened by its recipient is a crucial step in creating a successful campaign.

A Differentiated Email Campaign

A differentiated campaign means that not everybody on the list gets the same email. Instead, they receive mail that has been tailored to their particular demographic. In some cases, this can be as simple as sending different emails to the citizens of different countries. An Englishman is far more likely to open an email that references his currency and holidays than he would be to open one that references American currency and holidays. Once opened, these differentiated emails boast a click through rate that is over half of the rate of an undifferentiated message.

To segment emails, business owners should dive into their personal analytics. By looking at which customers viewed which pages or which customers left which items in their carts, business owners should be able to accurately assess which types of emails will appeal to these customers.

Every business needs a website to have a distinct online presence and every website needs to have a ‘Contact Us’ page. It may seem simple on the surface, but designing a ‘Contact Us’ page is not a walk in the park; a simple screw-up can throw users off. Here are some to tips to help you design an excellent ‘Contact US’ page for your website:

Same theme as the rest of the website

Many web designers try to get fancy with the Contact Us page in an attempt to make it stand out. However, all it does is annoy users who have to check the web address bar to ensure that they are at the right website. Keep the page simple and ensure that it follow the same theme as the rest of the website.

Read the rest of this entry…

Developed by Alex Sirota (iosart), Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator created gradients using pure CSS3 without needing to create any images and apply them as repeating backgrounds for gradient effects.

To use this tool, you need a recent version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera or IE. The resulting CSS gradients are cross-browser – they work effectively in these browsers and also will degrade gracefully to a simpler gradient in older versions of Internet Explorer.

Features include:

• Powerful Photoshop-like interface
• Cross browser CSS output
• Horizontal, vertical, diagonal and radial gradients
• Sophisticated multi-stop gradients
• Opacity support with multiple opacity stops
• Hex, rgb, rgba, hsl, hsla color formats
• Support for full multi-stop gradients with IE9
• Import from image (convert image gradient to CSS)
• Import from existing CSS
• Alter gradient by hue, saturation, lightness
• More than 135 gradient presets
• Saving custom gradient presets
• Sass output
• Flexible preview panel
• Gradient permalinks for sending and sharing

Image/Content Sliders are meant to improve the interactivity and accessibility of a website, being used in portfolio pages, news websites, blogs to feature posts, small presentations etc. Not only they make your site user-friendly but they can also feature content in a small space. Years ago, Flash used to be the most popular choice to make Image Slideshows because of its animation capability. Things changed and JavaScript Sliders have taken over the territory helping you to feature the content in an eye-candy way without worrying the visitor does not have Flash enabled, especially the mobile users.

In this post, I’ve compiled a list of 10 Premium Image/Content Sliders that are one of the most popular and best rated sliders on Codecanyon:

1) RoyalSlider – Touch Content Slider for WordPress

RoyalSlider for WordPress is a cross-device jQuery content slider with touch-based navigation and responsive layout. Having a user-friendly admin area where you can manage slides, change slider settings, customize interface and add blocks-captions using custom WYSIWIG editor, RoyalSlider is one of the most professional content sliders I’ve used.

Features include:

• Touch navigation for mobile
• Animated captions
• Fluid layout
• Smart lazy-loading
• Simple shortcode embed
• WYSIWIG blocks editor
• Support and free updated

[Source]
Read the rest of this entry…

Performing multiple queries at once can be an effective and fast process using less code without any extra calls to the database. mysqli::multi_query can help you do that by executing one or multiple queries which are concatenated by a semicolon. However, not all servers have mysqli installed and when you also sell a product that requires a database import during the installation wizard you want to make sure that even the servers without mysqli will make the import successfully.

Read the rest of this entry…

In 2012, every day, more and more people decide to launch a blog. However, not everyone realizes that there are actually many kinds of blogs, not only simple text-based online publications.

That’s why I’ve decided to publish this list of 7 most common kinds of blogs to give you a broader look at the blogosphere before you take the final step and launch your own blog.

1. Traditional blog

This is what comes to mind when someone says “blog.” Traditional blogs are mostly text-based, with some images published inside the posts every now and then. Quality traditional blogs rely on publishing insightful content, usually featuring some kind of “how to” advice.

2. Photo blog

Used mostly by photographers or other people interested in photography or graphics in general. Photo blogs usually have themes that allow them to publish content that’s wider than in a traditional blog. There’s rarely any text inside the posts.

3. Video blog

The idea is very similar to a photo blog, but this time it’s all about videos. Thanks to services like YouTube we no longer have to take care of hosting videos ourselves. We just have to upload them to YouTube and then grab the ember code. Video blog themes are usually equipped with some shortcodes that support various video platforms and such.

4. Magazine style blog

Most of the time when we see an online magazine we don’t even realize that in the background it’s run by WordPress or some other blogging platform. Magazines feature a large amount of content and often publish multiple entries every day. Such situation requires themes that can handle this much content and are able to showcase it in a visible form. That’s why a traditional blog theme won’t do the trick here.

5. Portfolio blog

Portfolio blogs are quite similar to photo blogs but they do contain some text along with the photos. The goal here is to showcase the author’s skills or services they offer. For this, the works of the blog owner have to be showcased in an attractive form (so the portfolio can do its job). That’s why portfolio themes usually feature some kind of Flash animations or jQuery magic.

6. Micro blog

In its beginnings, Twitter was supposed to be a micro blogging platform, but the idea has soon become extinct. In essence, micro blog is a place where the author shares very quick entries consisting of just a couple of sentences (or one sentence). For example, the most common case here is a “quotation blog.”

7. Company blog

Company blog isn’t actually a separate kind of blog. It’s more like a combination of some of the previous kinds. The idea is that various businesses/companies want to have a blog as an addition to their sites. They usually don’t publish content very often, so the theme the blog uses has to be good at showcasing past articles and not bringing too much attention to the fact that a new piece of content hasn’t been published in a while.

This closes my list, but feel free to comment and let me know of some other kinds of blogs you can think of.

There are many content management systems out there, but the two most popular are WordPress and Joomla. Both of these are known for being great with SEO, and they can be configured for nearly any type of website. If you are thinking of using one of these systems, then read this article to see which CMS is best for your needs.

SEO Comparison

Both Joomla and WordPress have plugins that enhance their SEO prowess. At the same time, which system is best without plugins?
Joomla has a lot of SEO power. You can set metatags and keywords, and you can change the URL architecture for the best SEO potential. This will help you rank your articles and blog posts.
At the same time, Joomla does not have the same SEO potential that WordPress has. WordPress allows users to customize all the same things that Joomla does, but it also includes automatic pinging.
A ping is a signal sent to the search engines. This is used to tell them that something has changed about your website. While pinging abuse can be bad for your website, a moderate amount of pinging will quickly bring search engine spiders to your page.
The worst part about WordPress SEO is that it takes a lot of work to configure everything you need for the best SEO potential.

Read the rest of this entry…