Natan

Natan is a fashion house founded by Edouard Vermeulen. We provide stylish & contemporary fashion for women
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

7 Awesome Tips For Writing Brilliant Blog Posts [INFOGRAPHIC]

What makes a blog post brilliant? A brilliant blog post is accurate, original, authoritative, and is written in a way that makes the reader want to come back for more. It is even better if the content you have written motivates people to comment, share, or answer your CTA. If you want your blog posts to be truly brilliant, check out these 7 tips.

by Guest Author via Digital Information World

The 14 Latest and Greatest Sources of Design Inspiration

There’s nothing worse than getting designer’s block in the middle of a project. The clock is ticking, your client is waiting… and everything you design feels blah or clunky.

So what do you do? Luckily, there are tons of inspiration sites out there that exist solely to get your mental gears spinning again.

From a collection of the web’s best typography to a blog about microinteractions, I guarantee you’ll find what you need on this list.

1. SiteUp

SiteUp, a newly launched hub for website designers, is like Behance—minus the uninspired or unoriginal submissions. That’s because every project featured in SiteUp’s daily showcase is manually vetted.

In addition to websites, you can also explore cool experiments and collections (which range from Star Wars to Design Trends 2016.)

Some projects, like “Circular Chaos”, even let you toggle back and forth between different resolutions so you can see what the display will look like on a tablet, a laptop, a phone, and so forth.

If you’re too busy to browse SiteUp every day, I highly recommend signing up for the weekly newsletter, which rounds up the best submissions from the past seven days.

2. Little Big Details

If you’re a micro-interactions enthusiast, you’ll find endless inspiration on Little Big Details. And if you’re not a micro-interactions enthusiast, check out Little Big Details anyway—you’ll soon convert.

This Tumblr, which was created by Etsy’s senior product design manager, collects “the finer details of design.”

For example, a recent post shows that when you play a song from Star Wars, the Spotify song bar becomes a lightsaber.

Although there are only one or two new posts a day, this site will make you hyper-conscious of micro-interactions across the web. When you find one, submit it. (The post in the screenshot is mine!)

3. GoodUI

As every experienced designer knows, beauty and usability are not synonymous. In fact, the two often come into conflict.

When you’re worried that your design isn’t functional, go to Good UI. It’s a static collection of 75 good UI principles. The team has personally implemented and A/B tested each principle with clients, so you can be confident the ideas are sound.

The same team is also responsible for Good UI Evidence. On this site, you’ll find 18 UI hypotheses and their results.

For example, Test #13 shows what happened to the conversion rate when a company added a preview of its app to its product page. (More than twice as many people signed up!)

4. TypeWolf

Creator Jeremiah Shoaf is dedicated to making TypeWolf “the absolute best resource available for everything related to typography on the web.” That’s no small goal, but I’d say Shoaf is doing pretty well.

Every day, he chooses a new example of great typography. There are 157 pages of archives—so if you don’t want to wait 24 hours for the next one, you can delve into past picks.

Each entry is labeled with the fonts the web designer used. Plus, clicking a font name will show you similar fonts and a suggested fonts pairing.

5. The Best Designs

For a well-curated collection of WordPress sites, go to The Best Designs.

It has more than 550 designs, each of which has made it past a fairly rigorous review process.

You can search designs by tag (e.g. “one page” or “retro”), color, or industry. The Collections page is also worth checking out; recent collections include “Top 40 Minimal Portfolio Websites” and “22 Websites with Impressive Illustrations and Animations”.

6. UX Companion

You could play games or scroll through social media while you wait in line or take the subway… Or you could read UX Companion.

I used to be a Solitaire addict, but that all changed when I downloaded this app glossary of UX theories, tools, and concepts. It’s chock-full of handy information.

For example, you can quickly brush up on Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Or Tunneling. Or Five Hats Racks (I no idea what that was.)

Since UX Companion doesn’t require wifi, it’s definitely an ideal choice for becoming a better designer on the go.

7. Awwwards

Every time I need serious visual eye candy, I head to Awwwards.

Like some of the other sites on this list, Awwwards features a “site of the day.” Sites are chosen based on four factors, each weighted differently: design (40%), usability (30%), creativity (20%), and content (10%).

How many times have you stumbled across a site or app that you love—but you have no idea how to redo the effect without ripping off the entire thing?

Well, that’s why it’s so helpful that Awwwards breaks down well-designed sites into separate elements.

You’ll be able to take inspiration from discrete parts of a project, rather than the whole thing.

8. UIPalette

UIPalette is a one-stop shop for colors, tools, and trends. Rather than having, say, BrandColors open in one tab, Paletton open in another, and FlatUIColor open in a third, use UIPalette to easily bounce back and forth.

Not only does this tool have all your favorite sites, it also has a couple palette resources you probably haven’t heard of—like iOS 7 Colors and Colour Co.de.

9. App Animations

App animations are both lovely and fleeting. However, App Animations is preserving the best ones.

You can browse animations by source (Sunrise, Soundcloud, Skype, etc.), by pattern (loading, swipe, transition, etc.), or by style (blur, grow, pulse, etc.)

While app designers may get the most direct inspiration from App Animations, it’s still definitely worth your time if you design for web. The love and care evident in each animation will almost certainly spark your creativity.

10. PatternTap

Rather than showcasing entire apps, PatternTap features specific designs and UI patterns. The goal is to help designers “learn what works well and why.”

That means you’re trying to design a single element, this is the perfect library to consult.

Maybe you’re putting together a pricing table. Just search “pricing,” and you’ll get 92 results. You can also browse through the library by type, color pattern, or device.

Continue reading %The 14 Latest and Greatest Sources of Design Inspiration%

by Aja Frost via SitePoint

Generating PDFs from Web Pages on the Fly with jsPDF

The Portable Document Format has been one the major innovations in the fields of desktop publishing and office automations.

It’s widely used in web publishing too, but unfortunately very often in wrong ways – like using it to replace contents that should have been built with HTML. This causes many problems regarding usability, accessibility, SEO and so on.

However, there are some cases in which PDF files are required: when a document needs to be archived and must be used outside the web (for example an invoice) or when you need a deep control on printing.

It was just the need to control printing that brought me to research a way to easily generate a PDF.

The purpose of this article is not to simply explain how a PDF can be created (there are many easy way to do this), but also to focus on the circumstances where a PDF file can solve a problem, and how a simple tool like jsPDF can help with this.

Dealing with Printing

Anyone who has dealt with CSS printing rules knows how difficult it is to achieve a decent level of cross-browser compatibility (take a look, for example, at the Page-break support table at Can I Use). Therefore, when I need to build something that must be printed, I always try to avoid CSS, and the simplest solution is to use PDF.

I’m not talking here about the simple conversion of HTML to PDF. (I’ve tried several tools of that type, but none of them has fully satisfied me.) My goal is to have complete control over the positioning and size of elements, page breaks and so on.

In the past I’ve often used FPDF, a PHP tool that can easily give you such controls and that can be easily expanded with many plugins.

Unfortunately, the library seems to be abandoned (its last version dates back to 2011), but thanks to some JavaScript libraries, we now have the ability to build PDF files directly in the clients (thus making their generation faster).

When I started my project, some months ago, I searched for a JS library, and finally I found two candidates: jsPDF and pdfmake. pdfmake seems to be well documented and very easy to use, but since it was a beta version, I decided for jsPDF.

PDF Building with jsPDF

The jsPDF documentation is fairly minimal, consisting of a single page along with some demos, and a little more information in the source file (or in its jsDoc pages), so keep in mind that using it for complex projects can be a little hard in the beginning.

Anyway, jsPDF is very easy for basic PDF files generation. Take a look to a simple “Hello World” example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Hello world</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Hello world</h1>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ift.tt/1VlbJV5;
    <script type="text/javascript">
        var pdf = new jsPDF();
        pdf.text(30, 30, 'Hello world!');
        pdf.save('hello_world.pdf');
    </script>
</body>
</html>

This HTML page generates a one-page PDF file and saves it on your computer. First you have to link to the jsPDF library (in this case, from cdnjs.com), then a jsPDF instance is created, a line of text is added, and the result is saved as hello_world.pdf.

Note that I’ve used the 1.0.272 version, and that it’s not the latest: at the time of writing this, the most recent version is the 1.1.135, but it has many issues, so I am still using the previous one.

You can see how extremely simple it is to build a basic PDF file (you can find more examples at the jsPDF site).

Continue reading %Generating PDFs from Web Pages on the Fly with jsPDF%

by Massimo Cassandro via SitePoint

Echo – Convert HTML Tables to JSON/CSV

Echo is able to read tables from a website or a html file and convert it to JSON or CSV. Perfect for saving data from a website and loading it into excel, database, etc.

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

The Complete Guide to Gmail Ads

(How We Got $.10 CPCs & Leads As Low As $7)

This article was originally published on Growth Everywhere.

What if I said you could still find targeted clicks for under $0.15 in AdWords today?

Clicks that converted at a low cost per acquisition?

With click-through rates up to 20%?

Sounds pretty unbelievable right? Take a look at this:

This is Google’s Gmail Sponsored Promotions. They brought it back recently and our team has been testing it out with AWESOME results.

Here’s an example of what it looks like inside of Gmail:

As you can see in the table above, the CPA numbers we’re getting are as low as $6.52! Our target cost per acquisition (CPA) is around $80, so that’s up to a 87.74% decrease in CPA!

Some of you are probably thinking, “Well, the numbers look good but the conversion volume and conversion rates seem low.”

Let’s talk about conversion rates first:

The image above shows conversion rates (CVR) of 0.25% and 1.27%—not super sexy numbers but it’s important to know that display ads don’t typically convert as well as targeted ads. You’re in a good spot as long as you have low cost per click (CPC) and high click volume.

Now let’s talk about conversion volume:

‘Display Impression Share’ means the number of impressions you’ve received out of the total estimated number of impressions you are eligible to receive. For these targets, it looks like there’s still room to grow. The best thing about Gmail promoted ads? There’s an abundance of targeting options to help scale your campaign.

In this post, you’re going to learn how to set up Gmail Sponsored Promotions for long-term success.

1. How to Create a Gmail Promoted Ad

First, log into your AdWords account and go into any Campaign that you have. Then select the ‘Ads’ tab, click on ‘+Ad,’ and select ‘Ad Gallery’:

After that, select ‘Gmail Ads’:

From there, you have four different ad options to choose from. For the sake of simplicity, let’s go with the ‘Gmail single promotion template’:

To show you just how easy it is, here’s an example of an ad I just created:

Expanded form:

2. How to Create the Ad

There are three sections to fill out to get rolling—but don’t worry, it’s easy! In the first section, you’ll fill out the following:

• Ad name - What you want to call your ad. This is for internal use only. An example would be ‘Single Grain Enterprise Marketing Ad 1/1/2018'.
• Display URL - The URL that will be shown to the viewer (not necessarily the final URL).
• Landing Page - The final URL that will be shown to the viewer. As a reminder, don’t forget to add UTM tags for tracking purposes here.

Here's what it looks like:

In the second section, you’ll fill out the following:

• Logo - This is the logo viewers will see in the collapsed (smaller) ad. The recommended size is a 144px x 144px square image. Don’t have a logo? You can use Canva or Pablo to make a nice image quickly.
• Advertiser - The name of your company (or you if you’re advertising your own brand).
• Subject - This is your headline. Make sure you write a magnetic headline to get people to click!
• Description - A short description of your offer.

Here’s what it looks like:

In the third section, you’ll fill out the following:

• Image - A larger image to be used in your expanded (larger) ad. Upload a 300px x (200-500px) file.
• Headline - Same as above - make sure you write a magnetic headline!
• Content - Your enticing offer.
• Call-to-action button - Your final opportunity to get people to click on your ad. Make it count. If you need ideas, here are some great CTA examples from HubSpot.
• Call-to-action button URL - The final URL that the user will land on.
• Header (optional) - Add a header image that spans across your ad (630px x 50-200px).

When you’re satisfied, click on the ‘Select an ad group’ button right next to the ‘Save’ button at the top to pick the ad group in which you want the ad to be placed.

3. Important Settings

Here are the initial settings I like to go with when starting a Gmail advertising campaign. Keep in mind that your mileage will vary.

First, click on ‘Settings > All Settings’. The key settings:

• Type - This is the type of campaign you have running. I go with ‘Display Network only - Drive action’ because I want the campaign to be focused and I care about driving specific results.
• Delivery method (advanced) - This is a section that you’ll need to click on to expand. When I’m first starting out, I like going with ‘Accelerated’ so I can collect as much data as quickly as possible. If your budget is limited, go with ‘Standard’.
• Frequency capping - Generally I like to limit the amount of times I show my ads to a viewer, but in this case I have no cap because my engagement has held the same.
• Ad rotation - I start with ‘Rotate evenly: Show ads more evenly for at least 90 days, then optimize’ so I that I can give one of my two competing ads a real chance to stand out against the other.

Continue reading %The Complete Guide to Gmail Ads%

by Eric Siu via SitePoint

ES2016: Should the Future of JavaScript Be Developer-Driven?

Recently, it was announced that the next version of JavaScript (ES2016) will be comprised of a very small feature set, namely Array.prototype.includes (which determines whether a specific value is included in an array or not) and the exponentiation operator (which raises a number to the power of an exponent). Considering the plethora of new features introduced by ES6, some people might be surprised at exactly how small a release ES2016 will be. Others, on the other hand, may be happy that there are only two new features to learn—a manageable goal by most people's standards.

While ES2016 being so small caused a few raised eyebrows, it also highlighted another issue—that the Array.prototype.includes method was originally going to be named Array.prototype.contains, but it turns out that this name is not web-compatible (read it would have clashed with the MooTools library, potentially resulting in many broken websites).

And so it was renamed.

What we're asking today is whether it is a good thing for the community to be driving the direction of the language like this, or whether it's "kinda whack" that the spec was changed because of a library conflict. Two of our authors (Moritz and Tim) take opposing viewpoints on this issue.

Tim: the Spec Should Rule, Libraries Should Obey

If you ignore its quirks, JavaScript is easy to grasp and really flexible—it makes a great first language. It also makes a great second language. Many developers I know had history programming in other languages prior to writing JavaScript, and with Node becoming increasingly stable and better, I believe many others will follow.

It seems the programming world disagrees on naming a method to check whether an array item or substring exists in an array or string. C# and Java have .contains() for array-like and string classes, Ruby has .include?(), Python has the in-operator and PHP has the in_array() and strstr() functions. It's kind of a mess. In JavaScript-land however, there's jQuery, Underscore, MooTools and a bunch of other frameworks/libraries that all have .contains(). Perhaps we can speak of a little convention going on here.

If they intend to take old libraries into account when naming APIs, I fear this is only the beginning of super weird names

I get the philosophy that changes may break many websites and/or apps, but we have to realise that with the diversity of existing libraries, breaking changes will occur. I hate the thought we are willing to make design choices to dodge one bullet. It's not that I disagree with the chosen name, but this philosophy may lead to bad design choices in the future if it may break 1% of the web because of bad design choices on their part.

Continue reading %ES2016: Should the Future of JavaScript Be Developer-Driven?%

by Tim Severien via SitePoint