anyToJSON – Converts Any Data Repository to JSON

anyToJSON is a javascript library that fetches data from anywhere and converts it to JSON.

Support

• CSV flat file
• JSON flat file
• CSV REST API
• JSON REST API
• Databases (ODBC support)

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Code-Free Scrolling Animations and Micro-Interactions with Webydo

This article was sponsored by Webydo. Thank you for supporting the sponsors who make SitePoint possible.

Webydo is a professional web-based application for designers who want to create web and mobile sites for their clients, without writing code. We’ve written about Webydo before on SitePoint, but a lot has changed in the product since then. Last week, Webydo announced their new platform which includes an all-new interface, improved stability and performance, and all the tools needed to create fast and responsive websites without the need for prototyping and wireframing.

I knew of Webydo long before I tried it out for myself because I follow their customer’s web experiments on Behance, but when I saw this Game Of Thrones -inspired website by Sarit Evrani - a well known Israeli digital artist - which tests the capabilities of Webydo’s parallax tools, I had to try it for myself.

Parallax scrolling is when a background (either the whole website body, or a specific section) is moving at a slower rate than the foreground elements, creating a 3D effect as you scroll down the page. Despite a degree of backlash from critics regarding its user experience, it looks wonderful when executed correctly.

Getting Started

Head over to the Webydo website and start a free trial. You’ll be asked to either start from scratch, start with an already-defined structure of your choosing, or else choose an entire template (with minimal faffing around!).

Choose Design, and then select the Maddog Sound “Parallax” theme . Parallax has already been activated in this template, and we’ll use it to quickly understand how it works before trying out our own example. Right away you’ll notice the rulers and floating Layers interface. If you’ve used any kind of design tool before, then Webydo will feel familiar to you.

When you select the knob image in the layout, two things will happen. A box will surround it, signalling that you’ve selected it, and the Properties Panel will open up. Under “Parallax Scrolling Animation”; the first setting is Target, which is where the image will end up at the end of the scroll.

You can change the top and left offset values to customise the animation’s direction, but I find it easier to simply drag the blue-bordered box (adjacent to our selection) instead. We won’t change anything here - simply click “Publish” in the top-right corner to see the animation in action. From A to B, easy right?

Here’s a gif showing off this method:

Continue reading %Code-Free Scrolling Animations and Micro-Interactions with Webydo%

by Daniel Schwarz via SitePoint

Social Love: Strategies to Improve Content Shareability - #infographic

Creating a website today means you have to think about more than just your content. Social media sharing is everything in today's world of marketing. Creating content that your customers want to share is only half the battle, it's even more important to make sure you've created content that is shareable and that your website makes it easy for content to be easily shared on all social media channels.

by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

Isabelle Moreau

Chic and colorful stationery, made in France

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Toolbox of the Smart WordPress Developer: Series Introduction

Is the core of WordPress enough for you? No, probably not. Almost all the time, we install WordPress plugins and themes to help build our websites. And that's all right, because WordPress isn't meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution. We do need extra functionality and design elements, and we meet our needs with plugins and themes... and more.

WordPress help doesn't necessarily have to come in the form of a plugin or a theme. In this series, we're going to have a look at several great tools and utilities that we can use with our WordPress websites. We will go over plugins, themes and other scripts that will help you build better websites with WordPress.

But every series needs an introduction. In this article, we're going to discuss the strengths of WordPress and the tools that we'll see in the future parts.

The Advantages of an Enormous Community

Is WordPress the best content management system in the world? Is it the best-coded one? Does the user experience of WordPress trump that of every other CMS?

While I believe the questions above should be answered "yes", it's generally a hard thing to determine "the best" of a kind. Not only because it's impossible to reach a consensus with everyone in the area, but also because we can't choose "the best" among the ones that are known. "The perfect CMS" may have been developed in a Turkish web design agency (that they use exclusively for their clients), or may be hosted in the localhost of a Chinese teenager. And, philosophically speaking, that single possibility makes it impossible for us to say that WordPress is definitely the best CMS ever made.

Anyway, I'm babbling. The point I'm trying to arrive at is that WordPress doesn't have to be the best content management system in the world, but it surely has the biggest community.

It goes without saying that WordPress is WordPress because we brought it to this day. We designed themes, we developed plugins, and we shared our knowledge—just as I'm sharing my knowledge with you right here, right now. The community made WordPress bigger and, recursively, a bigger WordPress attracted (and still attracts) a bigger community. Every single person in the WordPress community is responsible for the fact that in every four websites, one of them is built with WordPress.

The "Tools" of WordPress

In the beginning of this post, I told you that we meet our needs in WordPress with plugins and themes and more. What does that mean?

It means that there are "tools" made for WordPress that don't necessarily have to be defined as "plugins" or "themes". Yes, some plugins (and even themes) can be defined as a "WordPress tool". But there are "tools" that don't fall into the "plugins" or "themes" category.

Take the "WXR File Splitter" tool, for example. It helps you break your XML backups into pieces so you don't have to upload a single, gigantic backup file. WXR File Splitter comes in the form of a Windows app and a Mac app. So there's no question that we can't call it a plugin or a theme.

Or let's take GenerateWP: It's a website where you can generate WordPress-related code like custom post types or the "readme" files for plugins. It doesn't come as a plugin or a theme—it's just a website.

Now, what do we call these things? The word "tool" is the most proper and widely-used one among the community (though we also use "utility", which isn't a bad choice either). And what do we mean by "tool"? Well, think of it as an actual handheld tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver: We make or change things with these tools.

Although you can include plugins within the area of "tools", not all plugins can be accepted as a "tool" in the WordPress community. (Keep in mind that a WordPress tool can come in the form of a plugin or a theme.) It's a bit tricky to have an exact definition, but it's no hassle to know when a WordPress tool is a WordPress tool.

The Tools We'll See Over the Course of the Series

In future parts, we're going to go over 13 quality tools for WordPress. Without spoilers, let me just list them:

1. Kirki: A framework to develop Theme Customizer controls with.
2. GenerateWP.com: A website where you can build WordPress code—and even share the snippets you created.
3. Theme Check: A WordPress plugin that you can use to test your theme to see if it complies with the theme review standards of WordPress.org (which are also respected at ThemeForest).
4. WP Quick Install: A little tool that installs the latest version of WordPress in your server, including plugins, themes, custom options and even custom content.
5. WordPress Plugin Boilerplate: A quality library that you can use to build plugins with an OOP approach.
6. Envato WordPress Toolkit: A useful library for those who sell themes on ThemeForest.
7. WXR File Splitter: A Windows and Mac app that allows you to split the default WordPress XML backup files.
8. WP Serialized Search & Replace: A PHP utility that you can use to perform search & replace operations in WordPress tables without breaking serialized fields.
9. WordPress GitHub Plugin Updater: A library to enable plugin updates in communication with GitHub.
10. WP Session Manager: A plugin that adds $_SESSION-like functionality to WordPress.
11. Vafpress: An extensive options framework that you can use for your plugins and themes.
12. CMB2: A library that you can use to create custom meta boxes working with custom fields.
13. WP-CLI: A set of command-line tools to manage WordPress installations.

We'll also be covering a few tools that have been written about before on Tuts+ Code in a single part, including links to the original articles.

Conclusion

I can already feel that it's going to be a fun series—it's also going to be the biggest series I've written yet. I'm sure I'll enjoy writing about the tools I've mentioned above, and I hope that you'll like what you see.

Are you as excited as I am? Better yet, do you have any more "tool" suggestions that I can add to the series? Share your thoughts with us in the Comments section below. And if you liked the article, don't forget to share it with your friends!

See you in the next part, where we'll be going over Kirki, a Customizer framework!

by Barış Ünver via Tuts+ Code

A True Gaming Experience with the Gamepad API

This article is part of a web dev series from Microsoft. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible. Gaming on the Web has come a long way with HTML5 technologies like Canvas, WebGL, and WebAudio. It’s now possible to produce high-fidelity graphics and sound within the browser. However, to provide a true […]

Continue reading %A True Gaming Experience with the Gamepad API%

by Robby Ingebretsen via SitePoint

How Designers and Developers Can Learn to Like Eachother

History is filled with legendary rivalries. Ali vs. Frazier. Tesla vs. Edison. Coyote vs. Road Runner. But the rift between designer and developer eclipses them all. While both disciplines are necessary to create an effective application, the working relationship is often an uneasy one, fraught with conflict and misunderstanding. Designers, for example, are miffed when […]

Continue reading %How Designers and Developers Can Learn to Like Eachother%

by Joshua Kraus via SitePoint

6 Awesome E-learning Plugins for WordPress

Learning anywhere, any time, is what a student wants. There are many Learning Management Systems (LMS) for creating a course management system online. However, we can also create a course management system through WordPress plugins. Yes, you heard it correctly; a Content Management System (CMS) with course management plugins for building a powerful online learning platform.

In this article, we'll compare six of the best course management and e-learning plugins for WordPress, covering the following:

• teachPress
• Sensei
• WP Courseware
• StudyPress
• CoursePress Pro
• Educator

Before we get started, let’s first look at some of the key features we’d expect to see in a good course management plugin.

Continue reading %6 Awesome E-learning Plugins for WordPress%

by Amit Diwan via SitePoint

Understanding Block Formatting Contexts in CSS

A Block Formatting Context is part of the visual CSS rendering of a web page in which block boxes are laid out. The positioning scheme to which it belongs is normal flow. According to W3C: Floats, absolutely positioned elements, inline-blocks, table-cells, table-captions, and elements with ‘overflow’ other than ‘visible’ (except when that value has been […]

Continue reading %Understanding Block Formatting Contexts in CSS%

by Ritesh Kumar via SitePoint

Cruisetops

Varen geeft het ultieme gevoel van vrijheid. Koppel dat aan de glamour en het comfort van een luxejacht en je creëert een indrukwekkende ervaring waar je nog lang van zult nagenieten. Ga aan boord van Invictus en waan je even one of the happy few

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Les Impertinents

|| For the best experience, please visit the website using Chrome ||

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Lardini

Combining Italian sartorial tradition with textile innovation since 1978. Lardini, is now worldwide recognised as the epitome of Made in Italy sartorial excellence.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Surinder Thakur – Freelance Designe

Hi, I’m Surinder, a Freelancer and UI-UX Specialist. I’m a passionate freelance designer with 8+ years of experience in UI/UX design. I am also an illustrator and photographer. Oh, and I love all things Apple!

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Designing Always On Smart Watch Apps

This is the year when smart watches take off. Some estimate the Apple Watch sold several million units alone on its first day of release. Android Wear watches have sold more than 1 million units in less than a year and the Pebble watch launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for its new Pebble Color product.

As smart watch platforms increase in popularity, it’s time to think about developing apps for smart watches. Smart watch apps differ from smart phone apps, in that most are designed for light interactions. A user may spend hours on their phone, but seconds on their watch. Smart watch platforms limit what an app can do to reduce interaction time. For example, iOS WatchKit suspends a running app when users lower their wrist and Android Wear returns to the clock face when users dim the screen.

If a watch app requires longer interaction time, developers must take special care to circumvent platform limitations. An example is a golf swing analyzer app I helped develop that runs constantly to track the user’s golf swing. In this article, I will show you some of the ways to keep an Android Wear watch app “always on”.

Continue reading %Designing Always On Smart Watch Apps%

by Huan Liu via SitePoint

UI Designer India

UI Designer from Hyderabad India

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Drake Trailers Collectables

Start your very own miniature lift and shift fleet with Drake Collectibles award winning range of iconic Australian 1/50 scale truck, crane and heavy haulage replicas.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

EmrFit WaveRider

Science’s answer to radiation. The WaveRider brings to you a patented comprehensive solution to a modern day dilemma.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Getting To Know Stylus

If you are part of the front-end scene, you might have heard of Stylus, the distant cousin from Sass that nobody knows very well. Like Sass, Stylus is a CSS preprocessor which is written in Node.js. According to its GitHub repository, it describes itself as:

[...] a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS.

Okay, revolutionary might be a bit exaggerated. But everything else is true.

What, another one!?

Kind of. But Stylus isn't brand new. It has been around since the beginning of 2011, but I see it as having quite a discrete community. By the way, did you know the latest Mozilla Developer Network redesign has been made with Stylus? David Walsh, who's been involved in the project, also wrote about how to get started with Stylus.

Continue reading %Getting To Know Stylus%

by Hugo Giraudel via SitePoint

Getting Started With Craft CMS

Creating a Web App From Scratch Using Python Flask and MySQL: Part 8

Toolbox of the Smart WordPress Developer: WordPress GitHub Plugin Updater

Don't want to host your plugin in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory? Of course, you can decide not to—it's a free community after all. But you must host it somewhere so the plugin can be found, and you also should provide your users with updates to your plugin. Most people who decide not to host their plugins on WordPress.org tend to use Github but WordPress doesn't know how to update Github–hosted plugin, it needs help. And today, we will help you help WordPress update your plugins with, you guessed it, a helper class.

In this part of the "Toolbox of the Smart WordPress Developer" series, we're going to go through WordPress Github Plugin Updater, a tool to handle the update process for WordPress plugins hosted on Github.

Why Use GitHub Instead of WordPress.org?

Like every other modular content management system, WordPress has a plugin repository in WordPress.org. And I wouldn't be wrong if I said the WordPress.org Plugin Directory has become the community standard for hosting free and open sourced WordPress plugins.

But as I said in the beginning, this is a free community. WordPress doesn't require us to host every plugin and theme we make in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. People can choose to move away from WPPD and it's perfectly natural.

The first stop people host their WordPress plugins after WPPD is GitHub. Utilizing the awesome revision control system called Git, GitHub is one of the best places to share your open sourced software with the rest of the world. And for the last couple of years, more and more WordPress developers publish their new plugins over Github.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Switching from WPPD to GitHub

I think that there is a balance between the advantages and disadvantages of hosting WordPress plugins on GitHub instead of WPPD. I'm going to lay out the ones that comes to my mind but I'd love your input on this as well, so don't hesitate to shoot a comment in the Comments section after reading this.

When you host your plugins on WordPress.org:

• You have to use SVN.
• Your plugin has to be approved by a WordPress.org reviewer before you can upload it. (This is both an advantage and a disadvantage to me as having a second set of eyes on the code is good for spotting security flaws.)
• You can only use GPL (version 2 or later) as licensing.
• Your plugin updates will be notified to your users rapidly.
• Emergency plugin updates (for security reasons) will be pushed automatically to the users.
• People can find your plugin straight from their admin panels, which is a huge plus.
• You can use the support forums of WordPress.org

And when you decide to switch to GitHub:

• You will be able to use Git.
• You will have infinitely more freedom.
• You can use other types of licenses (like MIT or CC, even though CC isn't recommended for software).
• You can create a wiki, accept commits and talk about issues with your users.
• You will not have any ratings for your plugins, which is bad for feedback.
• You will need to finish this tutorial in order to provide plugin updates easier.

There's also a nice debate over WordPress Tavern which—I think—you should also read.

Integrating the WordPress GitHub Plugin Updater Into Your Plugin

Ready to provide update notifications for your users?

First and obviously, you need to download the WordPress GitHub Plugin Updater from its GitHub repository. You'll only need the updater.php file, so don't worry about the others.

After that, you need to put the updater.php file somewhere in your plugin folder and include it in your plugin. For example, if you put the updater.php file in a folder named github-plugin-updater and you want to include it in your main plugin file, you need to add the following line to that file:

<?php

include_once( 'github-plugin-updater/updater.php' );

?>

You also need to initialize the WP_GitHub_Updater class with the correct arguments that connects your plugin to your GitHub repo:

<?php

if ( is_admin() ) {

        $config = array(
                'slug'                                  => plugin_basename( __FILE__ ),
                'proper_folder_name'    => 'plugin-name',
                'api_url'                               => 'http://ift.tt/1KnaCAC',
                'raw_url'                               => 'http://ift.tt/1CGJypo',
                'github_url'                    => 'http://ift.tt/1KnaFw0',
                'zip_url'                               => 'http://ift.tt/1CGJypq',
                'sslverify'                             => true,
                'requires'                              => '3.0',
                'tested'                                => '3.3',
                'readme'                                => 'README.md',
                'access_token'                  => ''
        );

        new WP_GitHub_Updater( $config );

}

?>

• slug: Your plugin's slug.
• proper_folder_name: The name of your plugin's folder.
• api_url: Your GitHub repo's API URL.
• raw_url: Your GitHub repo's raw URL.
• github_url: Your GitHub repo's URL.
• zip_url: Your GitHub repo's ZIP URL.
• sslverify: Whether to verify SSL or not.
• requires: The minimum WordPress version that your plugin requires.
• tested: The maximum WordPress version that you tested your plugin.
• readme (deprecated): The README file to check the plugin version from.
• access_token: Your GitHub access token, if you're using a private repo.

In order to notify your users, all you have to do is change the version of the plugin in your main file's headers. (It seems that this tool used to check the README file for a line containing ~Current Version:X.X~ but as of version 1.6, it looks for the main plugin file first.)

And that's it! Following these steps will enable update notifications for your plugin.

Wrapping Up for Today

If you want to host your WordPress plugin on GitHub, and want to provide update notifications for your users, the WordPress GitHub Plugin Updater is one of the essential tools you should be making use of.

What do you think about this tool, or hosting WordPress plugins on GitHub in general? Share your thoughts with us by commenting in the Comments section below. And if you liked the article, don't forget to share it with your friends!

by Barış Ünver via Tuts+ Code

The Beginners Guide to WooCommerce: Checkout Options, Part 1

The Beginners Guide to WooCommerce: Checkout Options, Part 2

Nike - Geç Kendini

An interactive, playful video experience promoting Nike Women 2015 Summer Styles. Responsive website for desktops, mobile and big touch-screens where visitors can shop, share and get inspired.
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

DayTrip

Spacious launching soon page for 'DayTrip' - an upcoming app that helps you plan spontaneous missions. Really like the subtle texture within the big typography logo against the well thought of header image. Great idea and it's good to know the experienced Paravel team are behind this one.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

How to Use LinkedIn Publisher Statistics to Refine Your Marketing

Do you use LinkedIn Publisher? Want to get deeper engagement from your posts? LinkedIn Publisher now offers the ability to review stats for your published posts, which helps you refine messaging, target the right audience and directly engage with the people who interact with you. In this article I’ll share how to access LinkedIn Publisher statistics […]

This post How to Use LinkedIn Publisher Statistics to Refine Your Marketing first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Viveka von Rosen via Social Media Examiner

7 Ways to Track Your Social Media Marketing Activities

Are you tracking your social media marketing results? Do you know where to find metrics to help you improve? Tracking social activity helps you attract a higher-quality following, communicate more effectively and provide content that resonates with your audience. In this article you’ll discover seven ways to track metrics and improve your social media marketing. […]

This post 7 Ways to Track Your Social Media Marketing Activities first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Vince Chiofolo via Social Media Examiner

iHover : Collection of Hover Effects with CSS

iHover is a collection of hover effects using pure CSS, inspired by codrops article, powered by Sass.

• Pure CSS!
• Sass CSS
• Modular code
• Bootstrap compatible (Bootstrap is not needed though)
• Well documented

The post iHover : Collection of Hover Effects with CSS appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain

jAlert : jQuery Alert/Modal/Lightbox plugin

Whether you call it a lightbox, modal, popup, or window, jAlert is an excellent replacement / alternative for Simple Modal, FancyBox, or whatever plugin you’re used to.

The post jAlert : jQuery Alert/Modal/Lightbox plugin appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain

jQuery MentionsInput Plugin

jquery.mentionsInput is a small, but awesome UI component that allows you to “@mention” someone in a text message, just like you are used to on Facebook or Twitter.

The post jQuery MentionsInput Plugin appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain

Paulzi Form – JavaScript Form Helpers

Paulzi Form is a javascript form helper library.

Features

• Html5 form* attributes polyfill
• Changing the behavior of all forms
• Do not send empty fields
• Ajax form send
• Change status of submit button
• Form alerts

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

Train Marketing Biceps: Your 10 Minute #AdWords Management Workout - #infographic

An Adwords overview suitable for advertisers working with third-party digital agencies and wanting to evaluate what a ‘management fee’ should in most cases be buying for them. In other cases, for those who have not refined their workflow and management process and feeling a little over committed after noticing a huge skyscraper of workload peering down at them; learning to maintain multiple campaigns can get a little tricky.

The ’10 minute AdWords Workout’ could be defined as a non-comprehensive, easy to follow series of best practice overviews.

“When do I optimise”
“What do I optimise”
“How do I optimise”

Programmatic marketing, automation and scripts to aside, Klientboost coin three terms defining set personas and approaches for manual workload:

The Slimmer

‘Cut your losses’ approach, chomping through the campaign and rolling it back to a more manageable state. It’s a reasonable goal; things have got a little out of hand ever since you started increasing the reach of a campaign, before you had a chance to understand frequency and impression share. A smaller and more restricted campaign build makes it easier to manage 9i.e. know what works, and what does not).

Karate Chop High

Duration: 60 Seconds

Use your search query reports to examine the search queries that have triggered clicks, and find high costing phrases you don’t need. On the other hand, if the keyword generates a high volume of costly clicks and no conversions, consider axing it from the campaign.

Change Ad Schedule

Duration: 60 Seconds

When you venture into the ‘Dimensions Tab’ you will find a section to view performance by day of week, and hour of day. Make a decision on whether or not it is beneficial to advertise in the middle of the night, or middle of the day, chances are you have a top of the page position when everyone is asleep and drop down to the right hand side when competition increases during lunchtime searches.

Geographic Locations

Duration: 60 Seconds

Rather than attempting to compete with advertisers nationwide, start picking more accurate geographic locations. This will ensure you are able to channel your budget towards the areas you get the most clicks and conversions from. You can find this data in the ‘user locations’ report, dimensions tab.

Add Negative Keywords

Duration: 120 Seconds

Sometimes it is harder to know what to bid on, in comparison to what not to bid on. Decrease the reach of your keywords by finding and adding words you know will not lead to a conversion, using your search query report.

Increase Quality Score

Duration: 190 Seconds

Increasing the quality of a campaign includes factors like expected click through rate, landing page relevance, geographic locations and device performance. To make things more measurable you might decide to add new keywords into a single adgroup, and increase the likelihood of all future data generated by that keyword, to be localised at the adgroup level.

Lower Keyword Bids

Duration: 30 Seconds

If you know a keyword has been performing well, and achieved a consistent level of clicks and conversions, you could be a little cheeky and drop that bid by around 5%—10% to see if you can maintain the same performance for a lower cost.

Change Your Offer

Duration: 30 Seconds

Users get bored of seeing the same offers, and even when they don’t – they will be attracted by the best and most recent offers shown by competitors. If you can improve your current promotion with an update, go ahead and do so. This tactic will ensure your online approach is in competition with other online advertisers, as opposed to expecting a price twice the size to be considered a good deal.

The Maintainer

Appears to be a Usain Bolt of AdWords Management, whizzes through his adwords campaign every other day making sure a client is getting true value for money clicks, views, engagement and more. A logical goal during optimisation is to improve ‘relevance’. Ensuring a keyword the advertiser is being found for is offered on the linked website and communicating the information a potential buyer requires in short text or shopping adverts, and extensions.

Speed Adding Negatives

Duration: 180 Seconds

If you see a word that you most definitely did not want to pay for in your search query report, simply press CTRL+F or CMND+F and see how many times you were found for the same keyword. Remember to look at the bottom right of the table; over there you can switch the number of rows from 30 to 500. The maintainer ensures they are being found for the most relevant search queries, and block out the bad. Customise your columns and import data like ‘bounce rate’ – whatever it takes to speed up the identification of bad quality keywords.

Negative Keyword List Adding

Duration: 15 Seconds

At fifteen seconds, some might say Klientboost need to account for adwords screen loading speeds; after compiling a list of generic, and account specific negative keywords- the maintainer will boost through campaign builds by adding huge negative keywords lists in a few clicks.

Bad Ad Pausing

Duration: 60 Seconds

Ensure the ads you are pausing have been served in a good ratio to the ‘winning ad’, otherwise you will end up comparing an advert that only 5 people saw against one with 500 impressions that inevitably would have generated more clicks and conversions. However, with a bit of segmentation to make sure your ads are not losing clicks and conversions due to the right hand side – the maintainer will keep a close eye on ads to understand how best to talk to the customer.

New Champion Ads

Duration: 90 Seconds

For effective experiments, the maintainer will know to change a single line of a winning text ads (i.e. a/b split test) to identify the variables causing and effect in key campaign metrics. Call it a before and after test, and remember use a campaign experiment setting for statistical significance, or set ads to rotate evenly.

Bad Keyword Bid Lowering

Duration: 90 Seconds

When looking through keywords, Klientboost advises maintainers to lower the bid. I guess this is the best thing to do, but a side tip from digitalinformationworld.com is to move towards an automated bidding strategy like ECPC or CPA, which have the ability to learn markets and drop bids to 0 for you.

Good Keyword Bid Increasing

Duration: 90 Seconds

Again as above, but the opposite; a maintainer would boost down the keyword list and increase the bids on better performing keywords. However, now is the time for that maintainer to learn the value of bid strategies, and using automation to drive additional conversions to his site.

Creating & Saving Custom Filter

Duration: 90 Seconds

The quicker you can access the data you require, the quicker you can make decisions the next time you bolt through your workout. Create layouts for your data using custom columns, use filters, ad labels and make it easier for your future maintainer self to log in and work through this workout plan far quicker.

The Bulker

Flex your biceps, use positive data to improve performance and show your ‘auction insight’ competitors what you are truly made of. This workout is not for just ‘heavy weights’ but for those wanting to grow their campaign in the right direction. It makes sense to add more bulk to the campaign after profitability has been achieved via ‘slimmer’ and ‘maintainer’ workouts. So in short, once you have ensured everything is working, the only way is up.

Impression Share Increasing

Duration: 120 Seconds

In your custom columns, you will find impression share reports. If exact match impression share is too low, refine your match type or add more negatives to decrease the size of your reach. If you lost impressions due to budget, the campaign needs some more financial juice. Losing by rank can in some cases be controlled by bid (if you can no longer control quality). Go ahead and reach for 90%+ impressions share when you know things are working well.

Competition Spying

Duration: 180 Seconds

Use the auction insights to report to see how you weigh up against competitors and after that, Klient Boost share some cool third party tools that give you more insight into where your competitor ads appear and where. At DIW we would simply set the bids to target ‘outranking share’ and automatically outbid your competitors.

Broad Match Keyword Mining

Duration: 60 Seconds

Invest un-utilized budget on researching new variations of your working keywords, by going for broad match to find synonyms. This will then give you a portal to access new users who may have never seen your ads, and give back additional keywords to use in new adgroups.

Bid Modifier Increasing

Duration: 60 Seconds

Using the dimensions tab which should now be your joint favorite location with search attribution for data, understand the three key factors increasing competition. Time of day, schedule and device will see an increase in competition at varying points of your campaign; apply bid modifiers to reinforce your bidding power for the most competitive environments.

Keyword Bid Increasing

Duration: 60 Seconds

Use the segment option and evaluate top vs. other stats, sometimes the keyword will look like it is performing but falls to the right hand side every once in a while. Simply increase the bid to test your chances of winning more clicks at a higher rate from the top of Google or take chill pill and activate the flexible bid strategy for top of the page targeting.

Ad CTR Improving

Duration: 60 Seconds

Using the descriptions and headlines that work from other ads, roll out across other adgroups whilst maintaining keyword relevance to boost CTR using the language your customers most prefer.

Ad Extension Testing

Duration: 30 Seconds

You might know, the relevance of your ad extensions are a factor governing eventual ad rank. Create short sitelink descriptions to maximise ‘white space’ on mobile devices, ad new extensions, source new editorial reviews and make sure you compare performance using the segment ‘vs other extensions’ to evaluate the impact of changes.

Thank you to Johnathan Dane from Klient Boost for sending us what we would would say is one of the best AdWords gifographics to date. We look forward to learning more perspectives on how to manage campaigns and working through more workout plans.

During the interim, see Google’s official best practice guideline website which hosts tons and tons of actionable advice, guides and instructions.

by Imran Sq via Digital Information World

Web Design Weekly #192

Headlines

Interoperable CSS

Writing CSS isn’t easy, especially at a large scale. Thankfully we have Glen Maddern and a few other super smart people exploring how we might author CSS in the not too distant future. (glenmaddern.com)

Practical Questions around Web Components

Ian Feather investigates some of the more practical questions and issues still remaining for Web Components today. (ianfeather.co.uk)

Sponsor Web Design Weekly and reach over 23,000 Designs & Developers

Articles

What is WebAssembly?

If you were a little confused by the announcement of WebAssembly by Brendan Eich like I was, hopefully this article can help clarify things. (medium.com)

Drop Downs Should be the UI of Last Resort

Luke Wroblewski does some side-by-side analyse of how forms can be imporved by using simpler, more appropriate controls over drop downs. (storify.com)

Mathematical Web Typography

Brent Jackson explains an approach to creating modular typographic systems on the Web. If you are looking to take your web typography skills to the next level, this is a great read. (jxnblk.com)

How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer (ustunozgur.com)

Mobile is eating the world (ben-evans.com)

Tools / Resources

SVG Filters

A nice demo that showcases the types of filters that SVGs have available. If you are also keen to read more about SVG Filters, this article by Mike Sierra is quite good. (jorgeatgu.github.io)

A Look at Some CSS Methodologies

In this post Kieran Potts looks at 5 CSS methodologies that can help with managing CSS in large scale projects. If you are battling with a large codebase this is worth a read. (sixrevisions.com)

Viewport sized typography with min and max sizes (eduardoboucas.com)

bling.js – Getting The $ of jQuery Without The jQuery (github.com)

Create an SVG Sprite (blog.teamtreehouse.com)

Inspiration

Inside Design at Dribbble (invisionapp.com)

Checkbox Trickery with CSS (codersblock.com)

Card Expansion Effect with SVG clipPath (tympanus.net)

Jobs

Front End Developer at Shopify

Shopify is looking to grow the team responsible for building the next generation of commerce. As a front end developer, you’ll work alongside some of the most talented people in the industry crafting world-class experiences (shopify.com)

Love writing about the web?

If you are super passionate about the web and love writing about it Web Design Weekly is looking for a few authors to write on a casual basis. If this interests you, please get in touch. (web-design-weekly.com)

Need to find passionate developers? Why not advertise in the next newsletter!

Last but not least…

A CSS Nesting spec is in the works (tabatkins.github.io)

When Responsive Images Get Ugly (codepen.io)

The post Web Design Weekly #192 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Nine Fiverr Gigs That Save me $6,642 per Month

Over the past 14 months, I've spent $5,008.50 on Fiverr. That’s more than 1,000 gigs. Five-thousand dollars seems like a lot to spend on Fiverr, right? Not really. This $5,000 has saved my business tens of thousands of dollars on costly freelancers. I made a bold claim in the headline – that I saved $6,642 […]

Continue reading %Nine Fiverr Gigs That Save me $6,642 per Month%

by Ryan Stewart via SitePoint

Recursion in Functional JavaScript

You may have come across references to recursive functions while programming in JavaScript. You may even have tried to construct (or deconstruct) a few yourself. But you probably haven’t seen a lot of examples of effective recursion in the wild. In fact, other than the exotic nature of this approach, you may not have considered when and where recursion is useful, or how dangerous it can be if used carelessly.

What is Recursion Good For?

Recursion is a technique for iterating over an operation by having a function call itself repeatedly until it arrives at a result. Most loops can be rewritten in a recursive style, and in some functional languages this approach to looping is the default.

However, while JavaScript’s functional coding style does support recursive functions, we need to be aware that most JavaScript compilers are not currently optimized to support them safely.

Recursion is best applied when you need to call the same function repeatedly with different parameters from within a loop. While it can be used in many situations, it is most effective for solving problems involving iterative branching, such as fractal math, sorting, or traversing the nodes of complex or non-linear data structures.

One reason that recursion is favored in functional programming languages is that it allows for the construction of code that doesn’t require setting and maintaining state with local variables. Recursive functions are also naturally easy to test because they are easy to write in a pure manner, with a specific and consistent return value for any given input, and no side effects on external variable states.

Looping

The classic example of a function where recursion can be applied is the factorial. This is a function that returns the value of multiplying a number again and again by each preceding integer, all the way down to one.

For example, the factorial of three is:

[code language="bash"]
3 × 2 × 1 = 6
[/code]

The factorial of six is:

[code language="bash"]
6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 720
[/code]

You can see how quickly these results get big. You can also see that we’re repeating the same behavior over and over. We take the result of one multiplication operation and multiply it again by one less than the second value. Then we do that again and again until we reach one.

Continue reading %Recursion in Functional JavaScript%

by M. David Green via SitePoint

AngularJS For Test-Driven Development: Open Assignment

Connecting the IoT and Node.js to IFTTT

IFTTT has huge potential in its ability to connect devices quickly and easily. There was one thing it had been missing for a while - the ability to send and receive generic HTTP GET and POST requests. If you wanted to use IFTTT for something, the specific use for it had to be defined by IFTTT and published on their site within a channel. That is, until now!

IFTTT recently released the Maker Channel. It is exactly what developers have been waiting for! It allows you to define triggers that are set off when they receive a HTTP request, along with actions that can make a HTTP request to a defined location. This opens up IFTTT to be used for virtually anything. It is now completely up to the imagination of the developer community.

To show what the Maker channel is capable of, we are going to set up a simple Arduino to communicate back and forth with IFTTT via Node.js. To experiment with sending triggers to IFTTT, we will toggle a LIFX lightbulb on and off via an Arduino powered light switch. To try out an IFTTT Maker action, we will connect an RGB LED to our Arduino which will change color any time we are mentioned on Twitter. Don't like Twitter or don't have a LIFX bulb? Not a problem at all, switch out the action/trigger with something else on IFTTT. Work with the Facebook channel instead of Twitter or trigger actions on your phone instead of a lightbulb. This is a lot of fun to tinker with.

If you are new to IFTTT, I previously covered the basics in my article on Connecting LIFX Light Bulbs to the IoT Using IFTTT. This article assumes you know all about triggers and actions, and now are ready to take it to the next level!

The code

If you're keen to get straight into the code and try it out, you can find it here on GitHub.

How This Will Work

We are going to have a local Node.js server running with an Arduino connected via USB. Pressing a button on the Arduino set up will trigger a HTTP request to IFTTT to tell it to toggle our LIFX light. Our Node.js server will also have Express running to handle any incoming HTTP requests. Whenever IFTTT sees a new mention of us on Twitter, it'll make a POST request to our server to trigger our Arduino's LED.

Our Arduino Sketch

We'll be connecting up a simple button and an RGB LED to an Arduino.

Setting Up The Maker Channel

To get started, we will need to go to the Maker Channel on IFTTT and click "Connect". Once it is set up, you'll reach a screen that looks like so:

On this screen, it provides your secret key you'll need to trigger IFTTT actions via HTTP commands. Of course, you'll need a bit more info than just the key, we need a URL to POST to that'll trigger the action. To find this, click the link that says "How to Trigger Events". It'll open up a page that contains the URL you'll want to use, conveniently with your key attached to it.

The URL we'll be using for our LIFX bulb looks like this: http://ift.tt/1GIlwv9}}. The URL part which says light_switch is our event name. We use this when putting together our IFTTT recipe. If you're not triggering a LIFX bulb, choose a name that matches your event more accurately.

Toggling IFTTT Using Maker Triggers

Our Maker channel is active and ready to be used. We will begin by looking at how to toggle our IFTTT action - toggling a LIFX lightbulb on and off using a button from an Arduino.

Making the recipe itself is quite simple:

1. We go to the Create New Recipe page on IFTTT.
2. Select "Maker" as our Trigger Channel.
3. Click on "Receive a web request" as our trigger type.
4. Enter our event name of light_switch.
5. Choose "LIFX" as our Action Channel.
6. Click on "Toggle lights on/off" as our action type.
7. Choose the LIFX lights we'd like this to affect.
8. Give the recipe a title and click "Create Recipe"!

In our Node.js code, we use johnny-five to access our Arduino. When the board is ready, we define our button connected to pin 7 in the btn variable:

[code language="js"]
board.on('ready', function() {
console.log('Board ready');

btn = new five.Button(7);
[/code]

Continue reading %Connecting the IoT and Node.js to IFTTT%

by Patrick Catanzariti via SitePoint

Coloring Android Apps with Palette

madebylong

The creative outlet of Digital Designer, Justin Long.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

4PMe

Site oficial da 4PMe

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Northern Black Forest

The official website of the Northern Black Forest (Tourismus GmbH Nördlicher Schwarzwald) invites the user to explore individual trips and different activities in the Black Forest.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

La Rouillere

Discover the finest wines from Provence (south of France, near Saint-Tropez) on the new responsive website La Rouillere !

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Gradients.io

Gradients for designers and developers

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

JiouK De.Sign

Minimalist website at the French graphic Design

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Bademeisterei – KosmetikManufaktur

We produce bath supplements, soaps and other high-quality cosmetic products in our Austrian manufactory. Needless to say – as it used to be – by hand.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Satariano

Optimized for a high-def full-screen this state-of-the-art site showcases the finest in furniture and decor in Malta.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Cufo Portfolio Theme

Creative Theme for Professionals – Freelancers, Photographers

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Award Winning Designer

I am an award winning designer at Hannover Messe 2015, Germany for Best Pavilion in Large Enterprise category at Make in India and a Professional Commercial Artist based in Pune with over 10 years of experience.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Part 2: Developing a Plugin

In the first part of my series, an introduction to the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, we looked at how the code is organised within the Boilerplate. To continue with this series, we’ll apply what we’ve learnt previously to build a real working plugin. We are going to take a look at how quickly we can get our plugin up and running using the Boilerplate code, with as little work as possible.

This article will focus on creating and activating the plugin, as well as developing the admin facing functionality of the plugin. In order to follow this tutorial, you’ll need a basic understanding of PHP and WordPress, as well as having a working knowledge of the WordPress Plugin API.

About the Plugin

We’re going to develop a simple plugin that will display the number of days since a specific post was last updated. We’re also going to offer a couple of simple customizations to the plugin, allowing the user to choose a specific number of days after which a post will be considered outdated, as well as the position of the notice in the post content.

Preparing the Boilerplate

As mentioned in the first article, we can either download a fresh copy of the Boilerplate and do the search and replace ourself, or we can use the unofficial WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generator to speed up the process. Let’s use the generator for our plugin.

Head over to the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generator website and fill in the form with the appropriate values. Let’s just call our plugin “Outdated Notice”. Here’s a sample form with the fields filled in.

Continue reading %The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Part 2: Developing a Plugin%

by Firdaus Zahari via SitePoint

PHP Channel’s 2015 2nd Trimester Update

Another three months have passed, and our author roster has expanded again.

We’ve got six more authors joining us this trimester and they are, in order:

Narayan Prusty, India

Narayan is a very active blogger at Qnimate who actually wrote for SitePoint extensively before - on the WordPress channel. It was only recently that he decided to dive into PHP related topics as well, debuting with a piece on sending emails with PhpMailer - one of the oldest and most reliable email sending packages in the PHP ecosystem.

---

Continue reading %PHP Channel’s 2015 2nd Trimester Update%

by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint

CycleByCycle

'CycleByCycle' is a wonderfully illustrated One Pager exploring different bicycles and their cultures. Nice touch with the spinning wheel animation as the new bikes load and the overall tone within the big typography is great fun. Feeling a bit more contrast needed for the Crew link (on lighter scheme sections) but when it loads the imagery of the team is nice and big. Also enjoyed the IE joke during the preloader:)

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

When Less is More – Why Minimalism STILL Rules the Web

Design trends come and go. But some trends are eternal. Minimalism is one such trend. HTML5, CSS3 and all the other technology behind websites has grown dramatically over the last decade, making it possible to have more complex webpages today than ever before in history. And yet, I think minimalist designs still rock.

[I may be biased though. I've been ruthlessly editing my life the last few years to reduce the clutter and the stress. I moved way out to the suburbs where I get this gorgeous view. I haven't had a cable connection in years. My 6 year old thinks 'regular' TV with ads is weird and irritating.]

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Just because technology today enables you to add fancy bells and whistles and the kitchen sink to your website, doesn't mean you should. Here's what happens when you go all out embracing the latest technology and add every possible bit of it onto your home page:

Yes. That's the real deal - the home page over at Possible which includes sliders, animation, parallax. Go take a look. Perhaps you'll spot your favorite there too.

Bad designs aside, here are some concrete reasons why a minimalist website may actually be good for business.

Business and Marketing Reasons

1. It forces you to polish your message.

What's the purpose of your website? What are you trying to convey to your users? Focus on that. Don't let it get lost in the clutter on your site.

With a minimalist design, you don't have room to play loose. Every element on the page is deliberate. Every element serves a purpose. You can't be wishy washy about your message. You can't write a thousand words and hope that viewers will get the message. You can't use generic stock photos and graphic fillers. You're forced to consciously choose only what's absolutely required and reinforces your message.

2. Convey your USP Better

Since there's less clutter on the page, you have a chance to make your USP (Unique Sales Proposition) stand out and shine. Take a look at HelpScout. Their home page has a very clean, elegant design. There are a total of about 10 words above the fold (other than the menu), and a single clean background image that subtly shows people diligently working - perhaps the support team that's going to man your helpdesk.

Check out some other great examples of good and bad USP over here. Notice a common thread among the 'good' USP examples? They're mostly clean, minimal designs.

3. Less Clutter = Better Conversion

Yes, this should be obvious. But it isn't. Just check this screenshot of the Threadless website just a few weeks ago. Can you find the subscribe button?

Or better, look at the contrast between Yahoo and Google. Can you guess which of these users are more likely to find and use that search button on?

or...

A clean minimalist design helps highlight your CTA in clear, non ambiguous manner.

4. Responsive is just waay easier

Mobile highlights the whole 'less is more' experience much better than any thing else. Those who've been designing mobile first, understand the crunch that the smaller screen enforces, and are already used to somewhat minimalist designs. You just can't afford clutter on a 3 inch screen.

But it also works the other way around. It's so much easier to make minimalist sites responsive, or even port them for mobile. Simply because the layout is simpler, there are fewer elements, and on the whole, lesser, more meaningful content.

User Experience

5. Space. Whitespace. Breathing space.

I don't know if it's just me, but there's this sense of calm whitespaces bring. Like it's ok. I don't have to rush. A site that uses whitespace effectively conveys that sense of calm and authority. They know what they're about. They know what matters. They're not going to bury you with stuff. You have the space to be yourself. The ZenHabits blog captures this beautifully, radiating zen.

6. Navigation is Easier

The minimalist agenda to reduce the clutter also holds for navigation menus. Like everything else, the menu is forced to have only as much as absolutely necessary. Again HelpScout got it right. Their top menu has just four elements. They highlight the most important thing visitors would like to know - Product, Pricing, Blog. Everything else, like the About page, the legal stuff and the help docs are tucked away under "More". No cluttering the top header space. No 3 and 4 level deep menus. This just makes it easier for users to find the right page.

Continue reading %When Less is More – Why Minimalism STILL Rules the Web%

by Richa Jain via SitePoint

James Oconnell

Responsive launching soon personal page for UK-based designer, 'James Oconnell'.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love