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++++++++++

10 jQuery Tutorials For Web development

Tutorials

1. Facebook like Autosuggestion

I received a lot of request from my readers that asked to me how to implement Autosuggestion search with jquery. I love facebook API it’s neat, so I had developed Facebook like Autosuggestion user search with jQuery, Ajax and PHP. It’s simple and clean just you have to change the database details.

View Demonstration

2. Coda Popup Bubbles

In particular, Jorge Mesa writes to ask how to re-create their ‘puff’ popup bubble shown when you mouse over the download image. In essence the effect is just a simple combination of effect, but there’s a few nuances to be wary of.

View Demonstration

3. Creating a Dynamic Poll with jQuery and PHP

When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty cool results. In this tutorial we’ll create a poll using PHP and XHTML, then make use of some jQuery Ajax effects to eliminate the need for a page refresh, and to give it a nice little bit of animation.

View Demonstration

4. Create an apple style menu and improve it via jQuery

Since I wrote my last tutorial on how to create a CSS only multilevel dropdown menu I got a lot of visitors who wanted to know how I created the main navigation of kriesi.at. (a so called kwicks menu) The interest in extraordinary menus seems to be high nowadays, so today I will teach you how this is done.

View Demonstration

5. Tabbed Content using jQuery and WP_Query

WordPress provides a huge array of information about your blog and it’s content. Showing lots of this information can become space consuming. A great looking solution to this is tabbed content!

View Demonstration

6. Slide out and drawer effect

The Apple web site is a great demonstration of this effect in action, where the mouse settles on the title of the ’section’ and the associated links are exposed. What makes this effect particularly cool, is that the drawers maintain a fixed height and slide between restricted area.

View Demonstration

7. WordPress Sidebar Turned Apple-Flashy Using jQuery UI

Apple have always been Gods in terms of the way they present themselves and their products. I just love the sidebar on the Apple Startpage, and wanted to use the Accordion plugin in jQuery UI to achieve this! As if that’s not enough for me, I want to be able to show and hide it at my pleasure as well. I’m gonna show you how!

View Demonstration

8. Image Fade Revisited

This episode is revisiting the image cross fade effect, in particular Dragon Interactive has a beautiful little transition for their navigation that some readers have been requesting. Greg Johnson takes it one step further to implement this method using jQuery and the methods shown here.

View Demonstration

9. Photo Slider Tutorial

First we need to start off with some images. You’ll want these images to be thumbnails that also have a larger view available. In this tutorial I’m using a thumbnail size of 50×50 and a full view of 600×400. You can have any size for the “full view” but the thumbnails must all be the same size. We’ll start with 4 thumbnails.

View Demonstration

10. Create a Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & jQuery

One of the biggest challenge to web designers is finding ways to place a lot of information on a page without losing usability. Tabbed content is a great way to handle this issue and has been widely used on blogs recently. Today we’re going to build a simple little tabbed information box in HTML, then make it function using some simple Javascript, and then finally we’ll achieve the same thing using the jQuery library.

View Demonstration

LightGallery- Joomla Image Gallery Component

LightGallery 1.0, this is a simple light weight image gallery with lightbox slide show. From the admin side administrator can create category and add/upload photos.

Admin can create two types of views for client side, category list and image list view. If admin create a category and select image list view, it will display images in the current category. Image list view support lightbox slideshow effect.

Features:
* Administrator can add category and images from admin side.
* 2 type layout for client side,Category list and image list.
* Image resizing
* Lightbox Image slide show
* support SEF urls.

Category List view Demo

LightGallery Image view Demo

Download LightGallery v1.0 from here Download

Advanced Joomla Social Bookmarking Plugin

Advanced Social Bookmarker is a small joomla plugin services to your articles with AddThis.com technology, it records every click from your readers. You can view your site statistics to see what’s being shared & where.

Quickly & easily add social bookmarking buttons in 3 separate places in each article.

*Top right corner of an article:
Digg this badge, Retweet badge, Yahoo! buzz up badge

*Individual buttons after an article (footer):
Display individual buttons for the social networking sites of your choice (Over 170 popular sites to choose from).

*AddThis.com popup window (footer)
To the right of your individual site buttons is a ‘More…’ popup window that lists over 170 social bookmarking options for your readers.

This plugin is easy to install & configure, & makes it easy for your visitors to submit articles & build traffic to your site.

Plugin Options:
Show/Hide top right Digg this badge
Show/Hide top right Retweet this badge
Show/Hide top right Yahoo! Buzz this badge
Include any text/HTML above the footer buttons
Include any text/HTML below the footer buttons
Easily add your AddThis.com username to track your site statistics
Easily rename the ‘More…’ button
Easily add your twitter username
Easily add/arrange individual social site buttons before

Demo: http://www.prova.fm/advertising/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=30:can-your-business-improve-from-crowdsourcing&catid=8:category-advertising-help&Itemid=30

Download Link: http://www.prova.fm/tools/prova_advanced_social_bookmarker.zip

5 Questions to Ask Your Web Developer

Building a website can be a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle–sometimes the picture looks good, but when you look closely, pieces are in the wrong places. A website might function, but as soon as you make a change or an update, the picture falls apart.

How do you avoid hiring a designer or developer that builds a website like this? Here are some questions you can ask and some feedback to help you understand their answers.

1. What web standards do they follow?
This is a great question that will fluster someone who doesn’t have standards. What are web standards? This is the way of designing and coding a website that allows the website to grow with technology and the web visitor.  This means using clean code and technologies like:

• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): a simple mechanism for adding style like fonts, colors, and spacing to web pages
• XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language): a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax
• ECMA Scripts: the standard version of JavaScript used on most web browsers.

You don’t have to know how to write the languages; you just have to know what the standards are to understand the answer.

A simple way to help you connect to this question is to remember that people online don’t all use the same web browser or operating system. Designing and developing to standards gives your website the ability to look and function the way it should on different platforms.

2. Do they design for SEO best practices?
It’s no secret today that everyone wants a website that can be found on search engines. Implementing search engine optimization may not be what you want your designer or developer to do for you; however, how your site is designed or coded can affect your strategy when you are ready. When you interview developers, this is a great question to ask and see if the person you’re interviewing is familiar with how to code to meet SEO standards. Here are a few items that affect SEO best practices:

• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): Designing a website to meet SEO best practices means using style sheets to cut down on the amount of code on your web page. Search engines like text, not code.
• Script files: When you use dynamic items on your site like image galleries or mouse-over menus, usually these are created through JavaScript. To follow proper SEO standards, script files should be created for pages instead of having the script on your web page.
• Web page content: Your text or content should be on the page as much as possible this can even include your website navigation. There are ways to make text visually appealing without having the designer put it inside an image. Images that contain words are not picked up as content by search engines.

If SEO is a strategy you are considering down the line, it’s a good idea to make sure your site will be built with this strategy in mind.

3. How do they plan for change or growth?
One of the most stressful lessons learned is that the website you built yesterday will not allow you to grow tomorrow. Being told you have to start over is one of those statements every business owner can’t bear to hear. Before you begin, ask the question, “Does the technology you’re using allow me to grow or add additional functions?” You may even want to take this further and think about tools you’d want to add down the line. You can also ask designers or developers to provide you with a brief list of tools they have already integrated with sites like yours. This allows you not only the opportunity to see if they are knowledgeable, but also whether they’re supportive in providing you with ideas.

4. How do they test their work?
As I mentioned above, not all of your consumers use the same technology. But to ensure things are operating the way they should or displaying correctly, web developer need to test their work. This issue might seem trivial, but you’d be surprised how many firms only test for one web browser. I recommend you ask specifically what web browsers and versions they test for during the development process. If you’re building an online community, social or e-commerce website, testing is an important part of your success. Secure payment gateways need to be tested in a real environment. Be sure to get the specifics of what your firm considers to be part of a test phase and what it’s being held accountable for after the website has gone live.

5. How do they handle support requests?
After a website has officially launched inevitably there will be a problem–it’s technology; it happens. The question you want to know before you put pen to contract is how does your new firm handle support or bugs–technical hiccups with the website? Every firm will approach this differently, so pay close attention to how it phrase its response and commitment.

Building a website depending on the functions you need can be a lot like putting a puzzle together. The key to success is finding the right firm who understands the pieces that need to come together for your business.

Jennifer Shaheen, the e-marketing and Technology Therapist, has more 10 years experience working with small- to mid-sized businesses on their e-marketing and web development needs. You can learn more about her by visiting her web site, TechnologyTherapy.com

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

20 Excellent Free Rich-Text Editors

Rich-text editors, also known as online rich-text editors, are web components that allow users to edit and enter text within a web browser. Rich-text editors are used in numerous ways such as in enhancing your comment input form or as part of a web application that allows entry of user-generated and formatted content. Rich-text editors are essentially web-based WYSIWYG (”what you see is what you get”) editors.

There are many rich-text editors out there. What’s even better than a lot of choices? Many of the best rich-text editors currently in the market are free.

Click to read the full article here

20-excellent-free-rich-text-editors