Contact Forms

An ongoing collection of slick Contact Forms in web design. Each reference links out to the original feature with a longer website screenshot for context.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

The 100 Best Web Design Tools Ever - infographic

Wether you are a freelancer, a consultant, a marketing employee, or a confirmed designer, this list of the 100 Best Web Design Tools Ever by illustrio should interest you.

The hundred web design tools have been cleverly divided into categories. For each category, you’ll find both free and paid tools. Illustrio team has also wanted to feature one favorite tool for each category.

This list is neither exhaustive nor objective. However it should help people saving hundreds of hours looking for appropriate tools. 3 categories have particularly caught our attention:

by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

Ask the UXperts: The secrets of leading successful product teams — with Jen Marshall

Leading successful product teams is all about relationships and credibility. It’s about understanding the network of players and stakeholders, and figuring out where your strong relationships lie. It’s about building those relationships before you need them and knowing when to leverage them.

Next up in our Slack channel, Jen Marshall will share experiences from her work as a product leader, trainer and product management consultant. We’ll talk about understanding authority, communicating with integrity, and getting the important messages heard.

The Details

• Where: Our dedicated ‘Ask Jen’ Slack channel (You’ll need to request an invitation if you haven’t yet joined our Slack channel)
• When: 4 pm Wednesday 28th September PDT or 9 am Thursday 29 September AEST
  (or find out what time that is for you)

Meet Jen Marshall

Jen is a product leader who believes in continuous learning and improvement: for her products, herself and the product managers around her.

She has deep expertise in news media and publishing, having worked at Fairfax, Optus Digital Media and Sky News. Jen’s early career saw her producing television news bulletins. From there she moved into newsroom leadership roles and began to specialise in digital media. This led to an opportunity to transition into Product Management, which achieved Jen’s goal of becoming more deeply involved in the business.

Jen has experience in eCommerce, telecommunications, commercial evaluation, portfolio management, business casing, senior stakeholder management, contract negotiation, and all aspects of the product lifecycle. Her peers recognise her for her ability to deliver strategy and bring people along on the journey.

Jen holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management and a BA in Communications from Charles Sturt University.

How to Ask Your Questions

If you can’t make the live session but have questions, we’d love to collect them ahead of time and we’ll ask Jen on your behalf. You can submit your questions here. We’ll publish the responses (along with the full transcript) in the days following the session.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking:

1. Sometimes my passion gets mistaken for emotion. Is that something I should be wary of when communicating my ideas to stakeholders?
2. Have you got any tips for commanding respect and framing myself as credible in an environment when I’m constantly explaining what I do?
3. How important is playing the game? Should I expect to have to make compromises if I want to get ahead?

How does Ask the UXperts work?

These sessions run for approximately an hour and best of all, they don’t cost a cent. We use a dedicated public Slack channel. That means that there is no audio or video, but a full transcript will be posted up on here in the days following the session.

The post Ask the UXperts: The secrets of leading successful product teams — with Jen Marshall appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Sarah Hawk via UX Mastery

How to Manage Your Reputation Online

In just a few years, the nature of the web has changed drastically. Gone are the days of static web pages that are passively consumed by visitors. Now, the internet is dynamic and, to a certain extent, user-generated. Anyone can buy a domain, start a blog and publish almost whatever content they want. In this media landscape it’s more important than ever to actively manage your reputation. Not only does it help customer service and brand awareness, it’s also vital in keeping your customers engaged.

Look at it this way: 72% of consumers use social media to engage with brands, and pretty much everyone, including 95% of millennials, expects your company to have at least a Facebook page. In this piece we’ll go over how to find and track people talking about you and how to manage your reputation online.

Find Out What People are Saying & Where

Step one in online reputation management is finding where and when people are talking about you. Ideally, you should be able to search for your brand on Google and see your homepage, social media pages, reviews and mentions, in that order. If your brand is on Twitter (and it should be), use the new Dashboard custom feed to find people talking about you. Custom feeds do more than just alert you to mentions — it finds any tweet that mentions a specified keyword or phrase.

When you set up your custom feed, your name and @username are automatically included in your custom feed, but also include any of your brand names, product names and hashtags that are relevant to your business, and add negative keywords to filter out anything that’s irrelevant. Setting up your custom feed this way will make sure you’re not missing out on any part of the conversation.

You can go back and add or remove any keywords as your business grows and changes.

Monitor mentions of your business on the web using Buzzsumo to find content that talks about your company, brands, products or people. Once you’ve identified influencers in your niche, set up specific alerts to notify you whenever they mention your brand or products. If you’re an international or multilingual site, like WooRank, create alerts for each language you operate in. There’s a chance your Spanish-speaking customers aren’t talking about you in the same way as your English-speaking customers.

Finally, set up Google Alerts for your company. What’s great about Alerts is that when you set them up, it will give you a preview right away. So you’ll not only see what people are saying going forward, but you’ll immediately find what people have already said about you. This can be very valuable since it will give you some history and context surrounding what people are saying about you.

Remember, when setting up your alerts, don’t limit them to "Only the best results". Depending on how many mentions you usually get, this could really limit the scope of your research. The same goes for how often you receive your mentions. If you get mentioned a lot, it might be best to receive alerts at most, once a day, if only for the sake of your inbox.

Keep Up to Date on Reviews

Business reviews are an important part of local SEO and off page SEO. Reviews act as powerful citations and give your business the chance to piggyback on review site’s ranking power. Putting your name and website URL on Yelp could get it to rank for keywords you otherwise wouldn’t be able to compete on. They’re also an important aspect of the conversion process: 80% of online shoppers trust reviews they read online as much as they do personal recommendations. So it’s really important that you encourage your customers to leave reviews.

Of course, since reviews play such a big role in brand awareness, your top priority is to make sure they’re positive reviews. Obviously, the best way to get positive reviews is to provide high-quality products and services. Assuming you do that, the best way to encourage positive reviews is to make leaving reviews as easy for your customers as possible. To this end, add a link to your business’ profile in these places:

• A call to action or Yelp badge on your website. This can be on the home page, product page or in the navigation footer of the site.
• Your email signature. This includes both your personal email address as well as the email account you use to send automated messages like order confirmations.
• If you’ve got a brick-and-mortar store, put a sign in your window and next to your point of sale. If you’ve got a business card that you add to your customers’ bags after purchase, solicit Yelp reviews there as well.

Continue reading %How to Manage Your Reputation Online%

by Maria Lopez via SitePoint

What High Converting Websites Do Differently (& How to Copy Their Success)

You’ve done everything right. You hired a (costly) web designer and now have a sleek website you’re proud of. You implemented SEO to help you rank higher. People are visiting your website… but they’re not buying.

What gives?

Having a well-designed, or even well-optimized website is one thing. Getting traffic to convert from one is another. You’ve got to constantly pay attention to your audience and how they’re responding to what you have happening on your website.

Looking for inspiration? There are dozens of sites that have this formula down for you to take notes from. Here, get lessons from high-converting websites that you can apply to your own.

1. The Website is Designed for Visitors, Not Web Designers

Web design can be an echo chamber, and designers can often be guilty of designing for design’s sake, and not for the end user or SEO purposes.

An example of this is Flash. Now nearly extinct (but not quite), Flash at first turned the heads of web designers, programmers, and businesses because it provided new visual capabilities for websites. However, in this era of imperative SEO and mobile-friendly websites, it simply no longer stands up to what is required of it.

A user-friendly website, on the other hand, has an impressive — but simple — design. It’s easy to navigate, and the user never has to wait for images to load. The technology is certainly available for these functionalities right now, so companies still relying on older, clunkier design elements would do well to upgrade.

2. The Website “Asks for It”

Even the most perfect web copy, balanced with just-right keyword density, may fail to convert customers without this critical element: a solid call to action. Visitors can read your amazing web copy, but after that, what do you want? Without a nudge in the right direction, they may go to another site where your competitor will be happy to tell them what to do.

A well-targeted call to action (CTA) drives people to take a specific action. Smart websites use one CTA on a page to avoid confusion. Certainly, a web page (especially the home page) should have multiple instances of that CTA, but the drive should be to complete one single action, such as:

• Buy now
• Sign up
• Click to learn more

The CTA should, when possible, create a sense of urgency. You want your visitor to feel like they need to act this instant, not later, to take advantage of the incredible offer you’re presenting. And given that our attention spans are shorter than those of goldfish, now may be the only chance you get to capture their attention.

Here’s an example: on subscription company BirchBox’s page, you see, front and center, a button enticing you to Shop Now. For the visitor that doesn’t want to browse the offerings on the home page, he (or she) can click that button to get down to business. The button is repeated a few other times on the home page.

Sure, a visitor may dedicate half an hour to reading all your web copy, but for those who want shortcuts to the action, place highly-visible calls to action throughout your website.

3. It Uses Buttons That Put the Visitor at the Center of the Action

There’s a new trend in website buttons that go beyond the standard copy of “subscribe now” to highlight the benefits of actually clicking them. These buttons sometimes provide mocking alternatives to clicking the positive one (“Yes, I want to make more money” versus “No, I have enough money.”), making visitors smile. Who wants to be the dummy who says they have enough money and couldn’t use more?

Neil Patel, founder of QuickSprout, has perfected the art of these next-gen buttons. His websites use verbiage that puts the visitor front and center, and provide reasons to click in a few simple words strategically placed on that button.

Test out new wording for your own buttons and see if you can’t increase conversion as a result. You can also test different colors for your buttons to see which have the higher conversion.

Continue reading %What High Converting Websites Do Differently (& How to Copy Their Success)%

by Aaron Agius via SitePoint

3D Portfolio Template with CSS and jQuery

A portfolio template, with a filter that triggers the rotation of 3D sections by using CSS and jQuery.

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

Up and Running with ESLint — the Pluggable JavaScript Linter

Does the term "linting" sound familiar to you? It's a process of using a tool to automatically check your code for potential problems. There are several key benefits you can reap from using such a tool.

• Keeping your code style consistent. Linters allow you to check you code style for issues like spacing, indentation and placement of braces. Once your team agrees on the coding style, it can be documented in a config file and checked automatically.
• Spotting potential errors and bad patterns. Linters can also be used to perform more advanced checks to uncover possible errors such as duplicate variables, unreachable code or invalid regular expressions. A warning from the linter will allow you to fix the errors before they even reach runtime.
• Enforcing quality. When you follow a certain style guide in your project, it is important to enforce it with tooling, otherwise, there will always be people tempted to cut corners. If a linting tool is wired into your build process, you may simply prevent the project from starting or being committed into your repository if there are unfixed errors.
• Saving time. The main benefit derived from the previous three is that linters save you effort during development. You'll no longer need to spend valuable time arguing with your colleagues about a misplaced brace, and you might uncover a bug or two on early stages.

There has already been an article on the available linters for JavaScript but today we'll focus on one of the tools mentioned by the author — ESLint.

ESLint

ESLint is a linting tool created back in 2013 by Nicholas C. Zakas and is currently the most powerful and extendable linter available for JavaScript. It provides a rich set of features which make it the ideal choice of your next linting tool. These features include:

• A multitude of rules which can be additionally configured to your taste.
• An API for creating your own rules.
• Numerous plugins with rules for specific libraries, frameworks and practices.
• Built-in support for ES6, ES7 and JSX.
• A recommended set of rules, as well as third-party configurations available to quickly get you started.
• Can be integrated with multiple editors and IDEs such as Sublime, Vim, JetBrains products and Visual Studio Code.

Setting Up a Project

Before you implement ESLint in your own existing projects, it would be wise to give it a trial run on something simple. Let's set up a test project which we'll use as a playground for further exploration. It will only have a single JavaScript file, the required npm modules and a couple of npm commands to run the linter.

First of all, we'll generate an npm project (if you're unsure about installing or using npm, see this tutorial). Create a new folder, open it in the terminal and run npm init. You will be prompted for some information about your project and once you answer all of the questions, npm will generate a new package.json file in the same folder.

Once we're done with npm, we'll also need a JavaScript file to lint. Let's create one called scripts.js and save some code there:

function doGood() {
    var message = "doing good!";
    var message = 'or am i?';

    console.log("doing something");;

    var toDoList = ["List",,'things',"to do"];
}

You don't need a linter to already spot some of the problems in the code. But hey, we don't want to hear it from you or me, rather from ESLint itself.

Installation and Configuration

To install ESLint all you need to do is run npm i eslint --save-dev from the inside of your project folder. We could have installed ESLint globally, but I'm a firm believer that every project should bundle its own dependencies to make sure that every developer working on the project is using the same tools.

Once ESLint is installed, we need to configure it before running it for the first time. This can be conveniently done by running ESLint with the --init flag. Since we don't have ESLint installed globally, the command will look like this:

./node_modules/.bin/eslint --init

This command will start the configuration wizard. The wizard will offer you three ways to create the configuration:

• Choosing Answer questions about your style will require you to answer some questions about your project setup, such as which environment are you targeting, ECMAScript version, modules, usage of CommonJS or JSX and some styling preferences. This is a quick way to set up a project with a minimal set of recommended rules.
• Choosing Use a popular style guide will allow you to base your configuration on one of the popular styles guides from Google, Airbnb and others. This option works well of you already follow or plan to base yours on one of these styleguides
• Inspect your JavaScript file(s) will try to derive the linting rules from your existing code base. Works well when you already have an existing code base which you wouldn't want to change.

Since we're just getting started with a new project, let's choose the first option and sign up for the newest ECMAScript features:

The last question will allow you to choose the format of the configuration file. The options are JSON, YAML and JavaScript but we'll go with JSON since it's probably the most familiar to everybody.

Once you've answered all of the questions, ESLint will generate a .eslint.json file with the following content:

{
    "env": {
        "browser": true,
        "es6": true
    },
    "extends": "eslint:recommended",
    "parserOptions": {
        "sourceType": "module"
    },
    "rules": {
        "indent": [
            "error",
            4
        ],
        "linebreak-style": [
            "error",
            "unix"
        ],
        "quotes": [
            "error",
            "single"
        ],
        "semi": [
            "error",
            "always"
        ]
    }
}

As you can see, it contains some environment configuration as well as the rules it asked you about. The extends property is set to eslint:recommended which means that ESLint will use its own set of recommended rules as a base which you can later override. We'll leave it as is for demonstration purposes, but later you can either remove it, or replace it with a different third-party rule set.

Continue reading %Up and Running with ESLint — the Pluggable JavaScript Linter%

by Pavels Jelisejevs via SitePoint