Webmaster Tips

Joomla 1.5 Module Flash Menu

Joomla 1.5 Module Flash Menu

Flash based Joomla Module “Flash Menu”.
Horizontal,Vertical and Square Menu, Icon format (PNG, GIF, JPG), IconSize 256×256, 128×128, 64×64,48×48 or 32×32, A special glow effect.
This Extensions is licensed under the GPLv2. Flash Menu, Joomla extensions are composed of Module (mod_flashmenu.zip) and Component (com_flashmenu.zip).
For this extension to function properly, You need to install both, Module and Component.

1. Install Component (com_flashmenu.zip)

2. Install Module (mod_flashmenu.zip

Module mod_flashmenu:

Here you can define menu shape (horizontal, vertical or square)
and dimensions of the menu (height and width)

Component com_flashmenu:

– Publish (menu Item)
– Unpublish (menu Item)
– Config (configure menu system)
– New Icon (add new menu item to flash menu)
– Upload Icon (upload icon to use with menu item)
– Delete Icon

Add new menu item:

Navigate to Components –> Flash Menu –> Configure
(here you can see all items that are included in flash menu)

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Best Open Source E-Commerce Shopping Carts

Best Open Source E-Commerce Shopping Carts

It may be that you have thought about using any particular software as the basis for your complete e-commerce website and you are not even considering changing it by near future.

Thus, it is extremely important and significant that you have enough idea about which one is the best for you as you will not be able to change it later.

Following are some of the best open-sourced free shopping carts that are available and easily accessible over the Internet.

You should be checking them out, testing them, and if the functionality they offer suits you then you can just initiate your business right away.

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SEO Tools - Get the Facts on How to Get Started

SEO Tools – Get the Facts on How to Get Started

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process a certain web master or administrator would want his/her site to undergo in order to increase the site’s ranking on various search engines.

Website ranking is very important since the higher your website is ranked, the more frequent it will get visited.

An indication for a high-ranked site is every time you search for a certain keyword phrase (for instance, the keyword is “casinos”), the results found in the first page are the one that comes from the web page of that particular site.

But optimizing a web site does not seem as easy as it sounds. In fact, it is a very long process and does not have a very good success rate when done for a short time.

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Website Performance and Speed Checking Tools

Website Performance and Speed Checking Tools

In other words, if your website is extremely slow to load, then you will be losing many visitors. Having Visitors are useful in grabbing traffic, and if you have less traffic, it will have a great impact on your reputation, and you will be unable to generate the potential revenue.

Therefore, the slow-loading effect should not be ignored at all.

You should know about what your website is built up with instead of jumping into the web coding and then trying on your own to speed up things; this is because it just cannot be done without knowing about the issues that are causing your website to load slowly.

Following are some of the useful and significant web tools and services that would be extremely helpful in diagnosing and analysing your website. Some of the prominent web services are:

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Make online forms with Jotform

Make online forms with Jotform

After making a form, you can integrate it into your website and collect submissions from your users for free. You have two choices to receive form submissions: receive them instantly by email, or you can log into your JotForm account and view form submissions.

JotForm also integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout, WorldPay, 2CheckOut, ClickBank and OneBip payment gateways, so you can even collect payments from your website visitors and customers.

JotForm can check if the form is submitted by a real browser or bot. They also support CAPTCHA verification on the forms you make.
If you open free account, you can make unlimited forms, run reports in Email, Excel, CSV or Web, get 100 form submissions per month, make 3 secure SSL forms per month, receive 3 payments per month and get online forum support.

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Which Web Hosting Providers make it Easiest to Transfer a Website

Which Web Hosting Providers make it Easiest to Transfer a Website?

If you are running a website—a small, personal or a larger business site—a time may come when you want to move to a new host, and you may need a good guide to transfer a website. It is possible that your site has outgrown the current hosting plan you have. You have probably been disappointed by the support or service you are receiving from your hosting provider. You could even simply want to move as you have found a better price deal.

Finding a Good New Website Host

On any single day, website owners in their thousands are transferring websites from one hosting provider to a different one for a variety of reasons. For a website owner, this is usually a very daunting undertaking to go through. The first step towards transferring a website would be finding a suitable web hosting company.

Today, there are endless hosting providers you can select from. You will, however, need to be extremely alert as you select because you certainly will not want to keep on hopping from one platform to the next one so frequently.

There are huge, big and established hosting companies that are going to show up whenever you carry out a Google search—certainly, you’ve come across names such GreenGeeks, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, BlueHost, Web Hosting Hub and Hostgator, just to give a few examples. Besides these leaders, there are smaller companies in the thousands, ranging from the extremely cheap to some which are fairly expensive.

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Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools

Online CSS optimizer tool

When you decide to optimize your CSS file, you can choose “Optimize CSS via URI” (online file), “Optimize CSS via File Upload” (CSS from your computer) or “Optimize CSS via Direct Input” (by copy/paste file into an online form). You can also choose if you want a CSS optimizer to remove line breaks in your file or not.

Firebug-webmasters a must tool

With a click on an element, you will see the CSS source, and you can edit and preview it. Very useful is that Firebug gives you info on what line is that particular CSS element. Imagine working with more than 1.000 lines of CSS code. This can save lots of time searching for mistakes. Firebug also includes a powerful JavaScript debugger. It lets you pause execution at any time and have a look at the code.

Seomoz SEO tools collection

TermExtractor analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that seem to be targeted at search engines. CrawlTest discovers the problems search engine bots run into while crawling your website. The HTTP response codes your page return, cache dates, title tags and much more. GeoTarget determines how well a site is targeted to region-specific search engines.

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Free Icons Web

Icons

Icon Factory – thousands of free icons

You’ll find packs named “Somatic Rebirth Extras”, “Hello Kitty”, “Star Trek”, “WALL•E + EVE”, “Inauguration Day pack”, “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and many other interesting packs. Icon packs are free only for personal, desktop use.

For commercial works, development projects and websites Iconfactory have royalty-free, stock icon collections in bitmap and scalable vector formats. Website have one more interesting feature for visitors – Preference Settings.

That page allows visitors to configure viewing Iconfactory with their own settings – List Sorting, Preview Size, Page Length. Each setting is stored in a cookie that’s maintained by browser.

Visit  Iconfactory.com

Free Icons Web – over 15.000 free icons

Navigation, Icons, Folder, Network, People, Objects, Database, Document, Character icons, Computer, Button Icons and Gif Animation Icons).

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5 Joomla Language Extensions

5 Joomla Language Extensions

Joom!Fish:

The Joom!Fish is a language extension module that allows you to exert total control over the translation of the Website’s Joomla content. The Web Developer can translate any content to and from any language with the free extension available and with Joom! Fish 2.1, the Web developer, can also exercise control over third-party extensions.

GTranslate: URL:

The GTranslate module is a must-have for all web developers with its extensive list of languages to translate into. With over fifty-eight languages, it has a reach to over 98% of the internet users. The GTranlate has various versions compatible with all versions of Joomla, like Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7and it makes the content of the website known worldwide with a large language base. The GTranslate uses Google Power to translate and then hides tabs and suggestions over foreign words that prove a hindrance to many users.

Translations manager:

The Translations Manager is compatible only with Joomla 1.5, but despite this limitation, it is a powerful extension every Web Developer must be aware of. Once the Translations Manager is downloaded to your website, it manages all language-related content. The Translations Manager will not translate the language but checks the translations for correct usage and proper grammar and makes it an easy and must-have tool for websites.

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30 Beautiful Holiday Desktop Wallpapers

30 Beautiful Holiday Desktop Wallpapers

The 2013 Christmas and New Year’s holiday season is quickly approaching us and will be here before you know it. For many people, it’s their favourite time of year, filled with lots of festivities and quality time spent with friends and family. If you’re someone who loves holiday cheer and decorations, you’re in luck as there are many free wonderful holiday graphics and wallpapers on the web.

To get you started, we’ve compiled a list of 30 beautiful holiday desktop wallpapers that will not only help to get you into the holiday spirit but will also brighten up your computer desktop.

Merry Christmas Bear

This holiday bear is adorned by a holiday wreath with pine cones and flowers.

Merry Christmas Snowman

You can’t help but think of Frosty the Snowman when looking at this wallpaper, although it looks a little mischievous.

Merry Christmas Ornament

A simple Christmas ornament stocking with a tiny little snowman.

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5 Tried and Tested Strategies to Streamline Your Web Design Agency

5 Tried and Tested Strategies to Streamline Your Web Design Agency

Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.

Several types of work take place in a web design agency. Besides the actual web design process, you also have to manage sales, administration, finances, development, client collaborations, project workflows, and plenty more.

Each of these processes is important, and little inefficiencies in any of them can cause massive delays in finishing your outputs and accomplishing your targets. That is why you must ensure that your operation is organized and streamlined as much as possible.

In this guide, I will share with you six tried and tested strategies that you can use to streamline your web design agency.

Let’s dive in.

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5 Simple and Impressive Content Management Systems For Web Designers

5 Simple and Impressive Content Management Systems For Web Designers

PageLime

With PageLime, you can create multiple sites and assign different users and permissions to each. Your content is edited using a real-time live preview, so you can see updates to your site right away. It also stores versions of your site in case you want to revert back to an older rendition. It also has integrated SEO fields so that you can edit your metadata right from within the editor. Other features include photo editing and resizing, saving pages as templates, and the ability to brand your site with your logo and custom colours.

Surreal CMS

Surreal CMS lets you manage multiple websites with its customizable rich-text editor or connect your already-made websites (via FTP) to edit from within their interface. There are SEO fields that let you edit the page title, description, and keywords, and you can also integrate with Google Analytics in order to track your traffic and views. It also keeps a page history so that you can remove individual revisions if needed. Managing your files and folders is easy with their File Manager; plus, you can edit and resize images using their Image Editor. An impressive feature is the built-in Tidy tool that lets you validate your markup and fix any issues found.

CushyCMS

CushyCMS lets you have unlimited sites, pages, and editors. You won’t need to know any advanced coding or programming – just basic HTML only. It’s extremely customizable with a lot of different possibilities. It offers many branding features, such as a custom logo, custom domain, custom colours, built-in schemes, and custom welcome emails. It also includes a customizable WYSIWYG editor and the ability to add your own custom styles and classes.

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20 Amazing Illustrated Websites for Your Inspiration

20 Amazing Illustrated Websites for Your Inspiration

When you are in the web design industry, there is no limit to what you can include in your websites. Really! You don’t believe it? Well, you better do. Because when the top trends are responsive, flat designs and minimalistic effects, there are some websites developed by very creative designers that incorporate complex designs, flash videos and HTML5 snippets to enhance the look of their website and give the user a truly unforgettable experience. 

You can use these ideas as inspiration for your website. If you need to create websites that use Illustration as a factor, here is a beautiful array of websites that use some exceptional Illustrations and effects as a part of their awesome websites:

1. Complete Baltics

2. Startup Film

3. 826LA

4. Pete Nottage

5. Taco Spillet

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20 Best CSS Frameworks to help in your Web Designing needs

20 Best CSS Frameworks to help in your Web Designing needs

These frameworks can help you build completely functional web templates within a few minutes and with minimal knowledge of CSS coding. In this article, we display some of the best CSS frameworks that help web designers and developers all over the world explore their potential to build responsive and beautiful web applications. Please visit this list and share your views with us.

1. Foundation 5:

2. Gumby:

3. Twitter Bootstrap:

4. Skeleton:

5. Pure CSS:

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The Top 8 Color Palette Sources for Web Designers

The Top 8 Color Palette Sources for Web Designers

Luckily, there are quite a few sources for finding beautiful colour palettes or even creating your own using various methods like 3D, blending, uploading images, randomizing and more. So let’s take a look at 8 of the top colour palette sources for web designers and see how each one can inspire you to create brilliant, vibrant designs.

ColoRotate

ColoRotate is a beautifully designed site that lets you browse colour palettes and create your own in 3D. You can spin and tilt the diamond to get different views and create palettes with up to 16 colours each. They also offer a Photoshop plugin that lets you edit colours within a 3D widget and share your palettes online.

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a personal favourite because it’s not just a source for colour palettes and patterns; it’s also a great community for designers and other colour lovers. You can browse and create your own colours, palettes, palette templates, and patterns. They also offer several tools to help you build colour palettes, colour schemes, Twitter themes, and patterns.

ColorSchemer

ColorSchemer has a huge collection of colour schemes for download. You can also connect with others in the colour forums. If you want to create your own colour palettes and access over a million pre-made colour schemes, you can download ColorSchemer Studio 2 on your PC or Mac for $49.99. They also have an iPhone/iPod Touch app, Mac dashboard widget and Windows colour picker desktop tool.

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Super Cool Responsive Menu Designs

Super Cool Responsive Menu Designs

Responsive Design has become a necessity nowadays instead of a new way of design.  With the mobile market increasing by leaps and bounds, it has become imperative to build websites that scale properly and look beautiful on any and all devices. Hence, we need to design all aspects carefully. That includes how the menu is displayed when the site is scaled down.

Thankfully, there are many ways to shift the menu. We can use Toggle Menus, Multilevel Menus, etc. Many plugins were also developed for the same purpose. However, even with these, it is not completely easy to develop them. This is why we have displayed a list of the best tutorials and plugins for developing amazing responsive menus that scale down beautifully.

1. Trunk.js

2. Codrops – Responsive Multi-level Menu

3. Codrops – Slide and Push Menus

4. Big Menus Small Screens- Responsive Multilevel Navigation

5. Slicknav

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Blurred Background Websites for Your Inspiration

Blurred Background Websites for Your Inspiration

One of the reigning trends of 2014, apart from flat, responsive designs are blurred backgrounds. These backgrounds get the focus completely on the content of our websites. They enhance the emphasis on the objects of our site and hence, provide more impact on the user than the regular designs. Thus, these kinds of designs have become very popular. Not only are they simple, but also they provide a sleek and professional look to the site.

If you do not have an idea regarding these kinds of sites and are interested in using this concept for the design of your site, then here are a few of the most brilliantly designed blurred background sites for your inspiration. Some of them are WordPress themes, some portfolios, whereas others are for mobile websites. But all of them are awesome. Check them out:

1. Vellum

2. Identi-U

3. True Canvas

4. inCreate

5. Suspended Animations

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Image manipulation tools - Alternatives

Image manipulation tools – Alternatives

Photobie
(http://www.photobie.com/):
is a very user-friendly tool for both new bees and also professionals for image editing. This software is absolutely free to use, and you don’t have to pay for anything, even if you have to upgrade.

Photo! Editor
(http://pho.to/editor/): This software comes up with a wide variety of image editing features. If you have a digital camera and you frequently correct the photos you take, this software is an ultimate need for those as it provides great convenience. Like many other image editing tools, you can use the red eye removal features, but the differentiating thing in this software is that you can add different kinds of effects or even funny caricatures. Also, you can enhance the quality of the image by minimizing the blur feature so that you can make a portrait for your home if you want to.

Photoscape
(http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php): This software is one of the most widely use applications for image editing. The interface is very user-friendly, and there are pre-defined effects that you can use to resize images, add brightness or even apply different filters to the software. Also, Photoscape allows you to current images like colour adjustment or light correction so that you can get the optimized image you want.

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Responsive Twitter Bootstrap Skins & Designs

Responsive Twitter Bootstrap Skins & Designs

Twitter Bootstrap skins facilitate easier and faster web development. It is a free resource that contains both HTML and CSS templates for typography, buttons, forms and even JavaScript extensions! It is the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile-first projects on the web. Bootstrap is available on GitHub, the open-source development’s social network.

The following bootstrap skins & designs have a lot of extra features like CSS3 transitions & effects, back-to-top scrollers and Date-pickers, to name a few. All these bootstrap skins are LESS (a CSS pre-processor) customized.

1. Boske:

2. Metro Klass:

3. Kucluk:

4. Flatner:

5. Antagon:

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20 Beautiful Web Designs that emphasize Blue

20 Beautiful Web Designs that emphasize Blue

I know that creating amazing websites that are responsive, minimalistic and snazzy is an intensely creative process and needs to factor in many issues. Now imagine restricting yourself to a single colour.  Seems much harder, right? It complicates the process. It increases the complexity by at least twice as much.

You must be wondering, “So why restrict yourself? Use the complete potential of the colour palette! That is much more sensible”. That may be so. But what if you had no choice in the matter? What if you are working for a company and your client is bent upon a particular colour? They may be fixated because each colour has a significant effect on the consumer, and they want to leave no loop holes in their website. Here is a collection of websites focusing on one such colour that signifies stability, trust, depth, et cetera to the customers.

1. Lovedays

2. Eleks

3. Socialis

4. Soniaby

5. Volkswagen Think Blue

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