Choosing The Right Color Scheme For Your Website

The color scheme you chose will probably be greatly influenced by your audience but it also depends on what meaning and emotions you want your website to be associated with. The meaning of certain colors will also vary depending on the country and culture. For example, the color red usually means passion and leadership for North American people, but it can mean mourning and grief in South Africa.

• White: pure, neutral, clean
• Black: classy, elegance, power, mystery
• Grey: humility, pessimism, balance, formality
• Red: passion, fire, strength, leadership, love
• Green: environment, wealth, youth, greed, creative
• Blue: peace, harmony, conservative, cold
• Purple: royalty, envy, spirituality, pride
• Orange: enthusiasm, energy, happiness
• Yellow: gold, joy, optimism, weakness, light
• Brown/Beige: Earth, natural, friendliness, rustic
• Pink: love, gratitude, health, joy, young

Needless to say you should do a lot of research before deciding on the color scheme you will use. Make sure you research existing websites in your niche but don’t forgot that sometimes thinking a little outside the box can be a good thing.

Online Tools

There’s a lot of web-based tools to help you chose the right color scheme, here are some of my favorites:

Colour Lovers

Adobe Kuler

Color Scheme Designer

Daily Color Scheme

Read more here++++++++++

Some Helpful Site For Building Online Store with WordPress

WordPress is a popular blogging platform and content management system, but it can also be used for powering e-commerce websites. Although its primary purpose is not e-commerce, there are a number of plugins and themes available that will allow you to use WordPress for your online store (some are free and some are premium).

In this post we’ll take a look at some of the resources that can help you to set up your own e-commerce site on WordPress.

Plugins:

WordPress e-Commerce Plugin
An extremely popular plugin that offers a lot of options for setting up an online store with WordPress. WP e-Commerce integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net and more. Designers will have the flexibility to tweak and customize the appearance as well.

Shopp
Another popular e-commerce plugin. The cost is $55 for a single-site license or $299 for a developer’s license. The plugin includes a lot of features, including several payment options and flexible shipping calculations.

eShop
eShop is a free plugin that also has a lot of features and options for setting up an e-commerce site with WordPress.

Quick Shop
Quick Shop is a free plugin that users sidebar widgets to create a simple shopping cart. You can place tags in your post that will generate a form to add products to the cart.

YAK for WordPress
YAK is a free plugin that creates a simple shopping cart that associates products with posts, so it uses the post ID as the product ID.

Themes:

Crafty Cart
A free e-commerce theme designed to work with the e-commerce plugin.

SimpleCart(js)
A new free theme from Chris Wallace (a child theme for Thematic).

Ecommerce Theme
A premium theme from iThemes. A single-use license costs $79.95 and a developer’s license costs $199.

Market Theme
A premium theme that provides you with everything you need to run an e-commerce site with WordPress. The cost is $55 for a standard license or $150 for a developer’s license.

WPShop
A premium theme that is available through ThemeForest for $35. Includes 2 child themes.

eGoods
Another premium theme that is available through ThemeForest for $30. Includes 3 child themes.

ArtShop
Another premium theme that is available through ThemeForest for $30. Includes 2 themes, each with a child theme.

Tutorials:

How to Create an E-Commerce Website with WordPress in Under 5 Minutes
This video tutorial will show you how install WordPress, change the them, and use the e-commerce plugin to quickly get an e-commerce website online. The focus is on getting the basics set up rather than going in to great details of the plugin settings and options.

Getting Set Up with the WP e-Commerce Plugin: Settings and Configuration
This video tutorial covers how to get set up with the WP e-Commerce plugin for your online shop.

How to Build an Online Store with WordPress
A basic article from iThemes about what you will need to get an e-commerce site started with WordPress.

Foxy Cart

56-integrating-foxycart-and-wordpress

70 PHP Tutorials at Its best

1. Introduction To PHP
2. Using HTML Forms With PHP
3. Adding records to a MySQL database using PHP
4. Setting Up Apache, PHP & MySQL On Windows
5. Creating a PHP Looping Statement
6. Introduction to PHP Variables
7. Using PHP Operators
8. Using Variable Referencing
9. Working with PHP Datatypes
10. File I/O in PHP
11. What is Object Oriented Programming (OOP)?
12. Convert Images to Thumbnails Images Using PHP
    
13. PHP by example, Part I
14. PHP By Example, Part 2
15. Sorting an Array in PHP
16. Putting PHP & MySQL To Work
17. Generate Random Quotes with PHP
18. How To Upload Files Using PHP
19. A Class for Validating and Formatting Dates
20. How Many Users Online?
21. How to Show Random Images from a Folder
22. Replacing Text in a MySQL Database Using PHP
23. How To Backup Your MySQL Database With PHP
24. Google Suggest With PHP
25. Track Your Visitors, Using PHP
26. PHP and Cookies, A Good Mix!
    
27. Control Structures and While Loops
28. Hightlight or Censor Words in PHP
29. How to make a Hit Counter with PHP
30. Basic Control Structures in PHP
31. Developing a Login System with PHP and MySQL
32. Upload Files to MySQL using PHP Tutorial
33. PHP and MySql with PayPal
34. Inserting An Array Into A Database
    
35. Calculating Difference Between Two Dates Using PHP
36. Programmatically Deciding Which Database to Connect in PHP
37. Saving PHP Session Data to a Database
38. Using Control Structures and Foreach Loops in PHP
39. Storing Images in a Database
40. Displaying Load Time with PHP
41. Creating and Accessing MySQL Data with PHP
42. Developing a Login System with PHP and MySQL
43. Site Personalization With PHP
44. How to Handle a Many-to-Many Relationship with PHP and MySQL
45. Using PHP Objects to Access Your Database Tables (Part 1)
46. Using PHP Objects to Access Your Database Tables (Part 2)
47. The Explode Function, Split a String by String
48. PHP Caching to Speed up Dynamically Generated Sites
49. How to Setup and use Printing Variables in PHP
50. Creating an Image Gallery with PHP
51. Anti-Automated Registration
52. Creating a Drop Down Selection with an Array
53. Customizing the PHP Error Handler
54. Checking Form Field Integrity within PHP
55. Password Protection and File Inclusion With PHP
56. How to Setup Variable Scope and Global Declarations
57. Creating Dynamic Text Images
58. Perfect PHP Pagination
59. Image Manipulation with PHP The GD Libraries
60. Simplified Image Resizing with PHP
61. Verify a User’s Email Address Using PHP –
62. Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database –
63. Managing Users with PHP Sessions and MySQL –
64. Generate PDFs with PHP
65. Advanced email in PHP
66. Creating a Credit Card Validation Class With PHP
67. Using Regular Expressions in PHP
68. Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR
69. Getting Started with PEAR – PHP’s Low Hanging Fruit
70. PHP Basic Pagination

Some freeware for your web development

GIMP – versatile graphics manipulation package

GIMP – versatile graphics manipulation package

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Each task requires a different environment and GIMP allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme, allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulized into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window.

HTML Kit for more than editing HTML

HTML Kit for more than editing HTML

HTML Kit is a full-featured free editor for HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other text file types. Over 400 plugins are also available, including HTML Tidy for creating standards-compliant HTML/XHTML pages. HTML-Kit has received 95% thumbs up out of 2900+ Download.com user reviews and over 4 million overall downloads.

Inkscape – Vector Drawing Graphics SVG PNG

Inkscape – Vector Drawing Graphics SVG PNG:

“Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more.

It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.”

This software has solved my SVG view and Convert to PNG Problem. I got some icons from GNOME Art – Artwork & Themes which were SVG and was stuck. Then i found more SVG here Open Clip Art Library .

VIM – Advanced text editor VI

VIM – Advanced text editor VI

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor ‘Vi’, with a more complete feature set. It’s useful whether you’re already using vi or using a different editor.

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Thingamablog blogging application

Thingamablog blogging application

Thingamablog is a cross-platform, standalone blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your weblogs almost effortless. Unlike most blogging solutions, Thingamablog does NOT require a third-party blogging host, a cgi/php enabled web host, or a MySQL database. In fact, all you need to setup, and manage, a blog with Thingamablog is FTP, SFTP, or network access to a web server.

Thingamablog allows you to:

• Set up a blog in minutes via an intuitive wizard
• Maintain multiple blogs
• Effortlessly manage thousands of entries
• Dynamically update blog content
• Write entries offline (Dialup users)
• Publish your blog with a single click
• Create a unique layout with customizable templates
• Import entries from RSS/Atom feeds
• Set up flexible archiving options
• Organize your entries by category or date
• Save entries as drafts
• Define your own custom template tags
• Syndicate your blog via an RSS or Atom feed
• Ping services like weblogs.com, BlogRolling, and Blo.gs

You have to install Java to run Thingamablog. Java. Java Technology is required to run applications, hese are usable in multiple operating Systems and use a JVM or Java Virtual Machine. – Java Software from Sun

Zoundry Raven – Portable WYSIWYG Publisher

Zoundry Raven – Portable WYSIWYG Publisher

“Multiple Blogs Made Easy – Do you have multiple blogs for different audiences? We make it easy to write and publish to separate blogs all with one editor.”

Tabbed true WYSIWYG Editing – True WYSIWYG writing and XHTML source editing. Drag and drop images, video, and text from the Web. Unicode (UTF-8) support. Preview posts in your blog’s template.

WordPress 2.2+ Page & Tag support – Use Raven to create and modify your WordPress Pages just like any other blog post. Set WordPress tags as well as import tags from all of your posts.

Raven2Go: Portable Application support – Install Raven as a Portable Application on your flash/thumb drive. We’ll stay out of your Windows registry and let you take your Blogging on the road.

BlogDesk – Offline Weblog Client

As an offline weblog client, BlogDesk lets you comfortably write and effortlessly publish new entries to your blog.

No need to use those annoying HTML Tags in the WYSIWYG editor. Images can be directly inserted and are automatically uploaded. Even publishing simultaneously to multiple blogs is a matter of a click.

With the ImageWizard you can not only insert images to your posts – it’s possible to edit them as well (crop, resize, rotate, shadow etc., see Examples). Even Thumbnails can be created – the preview will be shown in the blog and a click on the image will open it in its original size (just like here in the right column). Linking and uploading those images is automatically done by BlogDesk.

BlogDesk is totaly free of charge and optimized for the blog systems

• WordPress (
• MovableType
• Drupal
• Serendipity
• ExpressionEngine (pMachine)

.htaccess Tricks and Hacks every webmaster must know

The .htaccess files (Hypertext Access file) is a very powerful configuration tool on Apache web server. The Apache web server has a number of configuration options that are available to the server administrator. The .htaccess is a simple ASCII text file placed in your website root directory. You can create and edit an .htaccess file using a text editor like notepad.

As a configuration file .htaccess if a very powerful and a slight syntax error can result in a severe malfunction of your server. So to avoid that always try to keep a backup copies of all your files from the server before working with the .htaccess file.

1. Creating a custom error page with .htaccess on a linux apache is a very simple task. Using you a text editor like notepad you create an .htaccess files. Custom error pages give your website an professional look and catch those visitors who reach your website following a back link.

ErrorDocument 401 /error/401.php
ErrorDocument 403 /error/403.php
ErrorDocument 404 /error/404.php
ErrorDocument 500 /error/500.php

CMS battle: Drupal vs Joomla

If you are digging for CMS comparisons and trying to decide which one is best for you, here is the comparison

Here are some statistics from CMS Matrix for a more detailed comparison. It shows that Drupal is extremely modular and Joomla has a heavy core, thus a terrible architecture. That means Joomla is hard to extend and messy under the hood. Drupal, on the other hand, looks beautiful.