The Best IFTTT Applets For Efficient Social Media Marketing

The IFTTT is the abbreviation of “If, This, Then, That” which is an online service that has the ability to turn major web-based apps or any Wi-Fi connected device into your personal concierge. This tool is not that hard to understand but it is still new for many, because, very few people know about...

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by DIW via Digital Information World

How to Create a Portfolio Site That Will Get You Hired

Being a developer, designer or writer is a great way of making a living. But what if you need to attract a new job or clients? In today’s market competition is fierce, which means you need to stand out.

Having a professional LinkedIN profile (link to LinkedIN article) is surely a good start, but if you really want people’s attention you need to market yourself with a portfolio site. This is basically your personal LinkedIN page, only with much more room to display your skills.

Developers, designers and writers each have different skill sets and work to display, but they all have one thing in common: they need to sell themselves to potential clients.

In this article I will show you some useful tips for making a portfolio site, along with some great live examples.

Continue reading %How to Create a Portfolio Site That Will Get You Hired%

by Jacco Blankenspoor via SitePoint

5 Best WordPress Site Builders for the Technically Challenged

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

As an entrepreneur or innovator, you know that great ideas are rare and time-sensitive. Which is why you likely don’t have the time to wait weeks or even months to launch your campaign or businesses’ website. Luckily, some of the great technical minds have engineered WordPress website builders that take even the most novice internet user to website building pro in days or even hours.

Much like WordPress themes, builders are in great abundance and vary even more so in quality. Which is why this article aims to dissect the five best WordPress website builders and outline how you can use them to build an elegant, custom, and fully functioning website fast.

1. Divi

Divi is arguably the most popular WordPress builder on the market right now. With their attractive design and impressive range of features, it is no surprise it has made the list. But at its core what makes it so attractive?

• The theme is meticulously updated and new features are released very regularly.
• It’s a front-end developer tool meaning whatever you build is what your visitor sees.
• It utilizes a drag-and-drop builder, making it perfect for non-technical site developers.

Some WordPress builders are plugin-based and others are theme-based. Divi is theme based meaning you get a theme for your WordPress site and a builder for the price of one.

Divi comes with a multitude of layouts and as such can range from being an eCommerce store, an agency website, a photography portfolio, a blog, a news site, and more. It can be just about anything you can dream up.

The Divi Builder has a great UX which makes it easy to navigate and straightforward to use. You would create a page like you normally do, but instead of opening the editor to start messing with HTML and CSS you would click the big purple button aptly labeled "Use The Divi Builder".

You get the option to create different sections of your site that visitors will scroll through to view your content in the modules you desire. These modules are drag and drop and fully customizable down to size and unique color palette.

The modules have simple titles to make the build process straightforward and customizing a breeze. Just drag-and-drop a Blurb to add customer testimonials or grab Call To Action to create compelling buttons and sections for newsletter signups or buy now buttons.

The end result is a beautiful, completely custom, and responsive website that looks like an ad agency designed it for thousands of dollars. To preview sites built with Divi (like the one below) or try it for free visit Divi’s gallery on the Elegant Themes website.

Website built with Divi Builder

2. Layers

Layers is another plugin based WordPress builder that employs drag-and-drop functionality making it ideal for maximum customization and a user-friendly experience. The creators of Layers sought to create a builder so intuitive that you would be a "pro" the first time you used it. Beyond the obvious, why does Layers stand out in the crowded WordPress builder space?

• Behind the scenes of the Layers theme, you get an intelligent HTML structure that optimizes your site for the high search ranking results
• Layers is ideal for shopping sites because it comes prefabbed to play well with WooCommerce, the most popular eCommerce platform on the market.
• It has a point-and-click interface, much like its top tier competition which makes it incredibly simple for a novice to build bold and beautiful websites.
• It’s free to download and use on your WordPress theme

Layers Builder in action

Layers makes it easy and affordable to get up and running quickly with their low-cost themes. Combine one of their themes with their free builder and you have the recipe for a truly great website. To gain even further functionality, you have to spend roughly twice the price for their Layers Pro package which gives you premium options like resizing your logo, sticky headers, greater color customization, and more (see below).

Website built with Layers Builder

If you’re ready for alluring (like the site above), highly customizable, and arguably the most user-friendly theme on the market then check out the Layers theme.

3. Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is a standalone WordPress plugin that gives you the versatility of working with any theme you choose. You don’t have to waste any time wrestling with your WordPress editor or tweaking lines of HTML to build mobile friendly websites that look great.

Continue reading %5 Best WordPress Site Builders for the Technically Challenged%

by Jacob McMillen via SitePoint

HyperApp: The 1 KB JavaScript Library for Building Front-End Apps

The problem is creating sophisticated web applications and dealing with the complexity of the tools we have at our disposal.

HyperApp was born out of the attempt to do more with less. We have aggressively minimized the concepts you need to understand while remaining on par with what other frameworks can do. What makes HyperApp unique among the alternatives like React, Preact, and Mithril, is its compact API, built-in state management, and the unrivaled, small bundle size.

In this article, I'll introduce you to HyperApp and walk you through a few code examples to help you get started. Experience with other frameworks is not required, but since you are interested in HyperApp, I'll assume you have some knowledge of HTML and JavaScript.

What is HyperApp?

HyperApp helps you build interactive web applications. It follows many of the principles popularized by React like one-way data flow, JSX, and Virtual DOM.

HyperApp is based on the Elm Architecture. This means that application design is like application design in Elm or React/Redux.

Try it online

import { h, app } from "hyperapp"

app({
  state: "Hi.",
  view: state => <h1>{state}</h1>
})

The examples in this article use JSX for familiarity, but you are not required to use JSX with HyperApp.

Here is the example above using Hyperx and ES6 template literals.

Try it online

import { h, app } from "hyperapp"
import hyperx from "hyperx"

const html = hyperx(h)

app({
  state: "Hi.",
  view: state => html`<h1>${state}</h1>`
})

And for completeness, here is the example again without using external libraries.

Try it online

import { h, app } from "hyperapp"

app({
  state: "Hi.",
  view: state => h("h1", null, state)
})

Concepts

Virtual Nodes

HyperApp exposes h, a function that follows the HyperScript signature and is used to create virtual nodes.

h("div", { id: "app" }, [
  h("h1", null, "Hi.")
])

A virtual node is a JavaScript object that describes an HTML/DOM tree. The example above produces the following object:

{
  tag: "div",
  data: {
    id: "app"
  },
  children: [{
    tag: "h1",
    data: null,
    children: ["Hi."]
  }]
}

JSX is a JavaScript language extension used to represent dynamic HTML. Hyperx is an ES6, standards compliant alternative. Both boil down to the same h function call behind the scenes.

Hyperx/JSX in:

<main id="app">Hi.</main>

Vanilla out:

h("main", { id: "app" }, "Hi.")

The state, view, and actions

'Hello World' gets boring fast. Here is an interactive example using the essential ingredients of every HyperApp application.

Try it online

app({
  state: 0,
  view: (state, actions) => (
    <main>
      <h1>{state}</h1>
      <button onclick={actions.add}>+</button>
      <button onclick={actions.sub}>-</button>
    </main>
  ),
  actions: {
    add: state => state + 1,
    sub: state => state - 1
  }
})

The state represents the entire data model of your application. In this case, it is a number and its initial value is 0.

state: 0

When the app function runs, the state is passed to the view and its value is displayed inside an <h1> tag.

<h1>{state}</h1>

There are also two buttons in the view that have onclick handlers attached to them. The handlers are the actions that get passed to the view as the second argument.

<button onclick={actions.add}>+</button>
<button onclick={actions.sub}>-</button>

Notice that neither actions.add or actions.sub update the state directly, instead, they return a new state.

add: state => state + 1,
sub: state => state - 1

When the state is updated as a result of calling an action, the view function is called and the application is rendered again.

Visualizing the architecture

Users call actions by interacting with the application and they are the only available mechanism to update the state. Under the hood, HyperApp injects actions with code that knows when to render the application.

Actions that have no side effects are also known as reducers. If you are coming from Redux, this will make sense right away. A reducer is a pure function that receives the current state of the application and some data to compute a new state.

Visualize a chain in which each link represents a state configuration. The most recent link in the chain is the current state. The view function receives the current state and actions and uses them to construct the DOM tree. When an action is called, a new link in the chain is created.

Side effects

You can call multiple actions inside an action. You can call actions inside a callback passed to an asynchronous function like fetch too.

HyperApp knows that if an action returns null or undefined the state does not need to change and it skips the render pipeline. Incidentally, if an action returns a Promise, HyperApp does not update the state either and leaves it up to the resolve callback to figure out what to do, e.g., call other actions.

Examples

GIF search box

Let's build a GIF search box using the Giphy API. In this example, we'll demonstrate how to update the state asynchronously.

Try it online

Continue reading %HyperApp: The 1 KB JavaScript Library for Building Front-End Apps%

by Jorge Bucaran via SitePoint

The 5 Best WordPress Themes for SEO Visibility

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Theme selection to optimize your website’s SEO is more important than you might think. SEO can easily be negatively affected by poorly written themes. Specifically, the following points can hurt your SEO or the user experience causing your search engine rankings to suffer:

• The inability to remove spammy links. Too often free or low-cost WordPress themes are given away in some campaign to generate leads and come with code and links that can hurt your organic search visibility.
• Poor usability can result in higher bounce rates
• Non-mobile friendly designs will suffer to Google’s SEO scrutiny
• Poor design will result in a lower average time per page which tells Google your content isn’t relevant resulting in a lower ranking
• Slow loading time from a bloated them will also go against Google's best practices for SEO
• Regular updates and ongoing support. Very few free or low-cost themes are patched for security purposes or upgraded when new versions of WordPress rollout. This leaves your site open to all sorts of vulnerabilities from hacking to poor SEO performance.

These all contribute to the overall user experience, and will consequently affect your SEO. With that knowledge as a base, we set out to find the top five WordPress themes for SEO visibility. This list will outline our top five and give you insights into how they will strengthen your site’s SEO performance.

1. SEO WP

According to Brian Dean, renowned SEO expert, SEO WP is his top recommendation for SEO optimized WordPress themes. What makes it so special?

• From the minute you download it, you a get blazing fast theme load time of only three seconds, which greatly improves the SEO of the website and the overall user experience.
• Your website is fully responsive and will look great on any webpage. They validate every site with a Google mobile-friendly check.
• Consistently updated each month to have the best written code for SEO and to make sure it is free of all known bugs.
• Lightweight design and code cuts the average size of your site in a third.

In addition to a solid SEO foundation the theme comes with a free live composer page builder which allows you to customize the theme to any layout you desire.

Read more about the SEO WP theme or read user reviews and try it out on ThemeForest.

2. BoomBox

BoomBox is a solid theme choice right out of the box. It was designed specifically for SEO because its purpose is to cater towards creating viral content and building popular websites that generate a large amount of traffic each day.

Continue reading %The 5 Best WordPress Themes for SEO Visibility%

by Jacob McMillen via SitePoint

Here are the 5 Things Great Designers Do Differently

Demand for UX designers is rising every year. General Assembly estimates that UX design will be one of the most-promising careers in 2020, but with more demand…comes more supply. Here are the 5 things great designers do differently to beat their competition.

———

Pretty much every sector from health, to finance, to tech, and even retail, needs user experience designers—these master problem-solvers are geniuses at creating both online and offline experiences that prioritize the needs of the users.

Looking to hire a great UX designer? Here's what one looks like:

1. Great Designers Write Damn Good Microcopy

Have you ever felt lost at sea when using a website or app because the UI text was too vague? What about when you're filling out a form and it's not quite clear what it is that you need to do? Well, this confusion is a direct result of bad microcopy.

As Joshua Porter says, “Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.”

When microcopy is too vague or robotic-sounding, the user doesn't resonate with the communication as well as they would do with a more conversational, humanlike tone of voice. Great designers understand that writing interface microcopy is a core aspect of the design process, and it’s just as important as prototyping, visual design or user research.

Let's take this form design by Tumblr, for instance. Do you see where it says, “(you can change this at any time)”? Just this short snippet of microcopy tells the user: "Hey, don’t work yourself up about it, you can come back to this step later". It's informative, it's empathetic, and it gives the user options. Without this microcopy, the user might force themselves to think of a suitable URL.

2. Great Designers Learn the Rules…and Break Them

Great designers do more than think outside the box—as technology evolves and the needs of users change, they learn how to redefine the entire space when necessary. Great designers learn as much as humanly possible about the box before deciding to break the rules, as they know that reinventing the wheel is costly and sometimes risky.

Having a fair amount of knowledge about the users before designing the experiences, allows designers to deviate from these so-called design rules when necessary. Knowing these rules, and why they were established to begin with, means being able to understand the consequences of breaking them (both the risks and benefits).

Great designers are innovative. When they do break the rules, they come up with fresh ideas to solve the issues that users are having, when the usual solutions aren't working. The implementation of these ideas is how design trends are born!

3. Great Designers Steal

Yes, you read that correctly. Great designers steal, then they improve. And I'm not the first to make this claim. As it turns out, Picasso, one of the most influential fine artists of the 20th century, felt the same way.

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." ~ Pablo Picasso.

In the example below, Smena created this snazzy paper shredder image.

Hanna Jung, a designer at Google, restyled the image slightly and added animation to it. It's quite clear that Jung did not come up with the original concept, but was nonetheless inspired to tweak it and make it into something even better.

We find another example in Brandon Termini’s fresh take on the navigation system for a technology company’s web site.

Inspired by Termini's navigation concept, Ilya Kostin decided to try something similar and the result was nothing short of elegant.

4. Great Designers Declutter Ruthlessly

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." ~ Hans Hofmann.

What's usually deemed as unnecessary in interface design is visual noise, too much text, over-animated objects, and basically anything that steals the spotlight from the necessary elements. Great designers knows this—they experiment various ideas, then reduce the overall design to declutter.

Continue reading %Here are the 5 Things Great Designers Do Differently%

by Tobi Abdulgafar via SitePoint

Essential Meteor Tips