Archive for March, 2011
jQuery is a real treasure for web developers and front-end users because it makes life easier for both of them. It has became a good tradition to share some useful jQuery plugins with you guys, and today is the day when the new piece of these goodies will be revealed. The following collection is a mix of fresh and new plugins that certainly would make your website a better place to be. We want to say thanks to jQuery community that puts its efforts in creating more new plugins and developing amazing jQuery framework, pushing it to the limit. We also want to say that you really rock guys! Well, enough ranting – let’s get acquainted with our newcomers.
1. Website Tour with jQuery
As you may have guessed this jQuery plugin allows you to create an excellent interactive tour through your website that will help your visitors find out more information about it. The tour has a very user-friendly navigation that helps users browse it with comfort.
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2. jqDnR
Add the power and simplicity of drag and drop technology to your website by installing this light-weight jQuery plugin. This is a great way to enhance your website’s usability and make it more user-friendly.
There’re a lot of websites that have a lot of visitors daily, and basically the more visitors a website has the more difficult it is for the servers to handle the crowd – this whole thing slows down your website. There are multiple ways the website owners can handle this situation, one of them is by using the CDN technology (CDN stands for Content Delivery Network). The number of websites using CDN service grows every year and this sort of positive trend once again proves that CDN is a very promising and useful technology which helps you improve your website’s performance.
So, why should you use CDN network for your website? Frankly speaking CDN networks are the only perfect solution for the website with a lot of traffic and for the projects that care about global availability of their website content. So, the first reason is speed. Yes, it helps you to save priceless seconds that are so rashly wasted while your page is being loaded from the originating server. Secondly, CDN gives you the ability to have a huge network of servers all over the world that deliver your page faster and in a more reliable way according to their geographical proximity to the respective users. And the third reason is the bandwidth – if you own a blog or some popular project that receives tons of traffic, CDN servers will help you stay online and keep your content actually visible to all of your priceless users. But these are just a couple of major advantages that CDN technology gives you, now let’s take a closer look at it.
Content delivery network (CDN) is a simple system of computers that stores copies of various content (images, audio and video files) to maximize the odds that the users will freely access the data. The technology that stands behind CDN is placing geographically dispersed “caching servers” for covering maximum of various locations all around the world. The point is that when you host everything only on your own hosting servers (html files, scripts, images) it increases the number of times the files are being addressed on your server, which slows down your website and increases page load time. But by creating a number of sub-domains for images, videos and scripts and placing all these on CDN edge servers you’ll receive a very good result due to the parallel download effect.
Types of services
- Streaming – it is not a secret that video streaming requires a lot of bandwidth, and if you are going to deliver a high quality video content CDN will be the best solution for you.
- Downloading – for those websites that offer various types of software and other heavyweight content it would be reasonable to upload the content to CDN servers which will increase files’ download speed.
- Acceleration – CDN technology is using a huge number of backbones that naturally accelerate content delivery. The most popular method used by many websites is delivering graphic files via CDN servers and HTML files via the customer’s server.
- Server-Side Processing – some large web projects also use CDN servers to deliver their scripts (Java, ASP etc.) which is also a great method to reduce the numbers of times that the customer’s server is being addressed and therefore decreases page load time.
- Peer-to-peer Processing – the first P2P project was the famous Napster, and now bitTorrents are using peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. So, as you may have guessed this type of processing requires you to have a software installed on the user’s computer (like Torrent clients).
CDN Providers
Commercial CDN providers
Free CDN prodivers
As a popular open source solution, Joomla has a very flexible architecture and ever more developers build various components and modules for Joomla, which makes it more and more popular among other platforms. This time we will show you the top 10 free Joomla extensions you could use in case you’re looking to add a photo gallery to your Joomla project, they will surely help you take your Joomla website to the next level. The biggest advantage is that by using the following simple solutions you can easily add awesome image galleries for your Joomla-powered website without any hassle at all, plus totally for free. Yet note that all these extensions, except for Ignite Gallery, are for non-commercial use, so you may want to pay attention to the respective license terms.
Our today’s range of Joomla extensions is sure to give you slick new simple ways to display your photo album or personal portfolio and additionally you’ll have flexibility in setting up your Joomla photo gallery to be able to change it the way you like. That will help to reduce the amount of space wasted on the web page and highlight your most prominent works. So if you would like to use image gallery extensions on your Joomla-powered website, see the options we have for you:
1. Sigplus
Simple and powerful extension that delivers a great set of useful features including lightbox, slider and carousel options among others. Also you can configure many important features such as image margin, border, padding, slider/rotator orientation, animation speed and so on.
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2. Phoca Gallery
This extremely popular and efficient Joomla photo gallery solution has a bunch of cool features that will make your photo gallery simply perfect. Lightboxes, slideshows, shadowbox effects and many other wonderful options are available with using Phoca Gallery.
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Alright, people. Today on our blog we’re going to tell you about our blog itself. Perhaps it’s not that much fun as our regular publications, but if you’re a blogger or an owner of virtually any sort of web-oriented business, this is definitely something you should take a look at.
As some of you may know, some time ago TemplateMonster blog has joined a new network of design blogs and resources. The network was gathered by AdBoomer.com, they handle ad sales for us and so far there are 6 design blogs and resources on that network. The point behind it all is providing an advertising solution to the companies interested in working with TemplateMonster blog and other blogs and resources that have the audiences kind of similar to the one we have. What’s in it for you – you will ask? Well, from now on we’ll have other people negotiating about the ads sold on TemplateMonster blog, while we will be able to concentrate on delivering web design and development content to you. Plus, if you want to place your ads there, the following info will also be useful.
All of the resources currently available on AdBoomer are our good friends, which is basically how they got there. But this is not the point. The point is that in case you’re looking to be advertised on TemplateMonster blog (or Templates.com blog, or DesignFloat social network) you will now have to address AdBoomer.com and you may be sure you’ll receive good results in terms of what you spend vs. what you receive. There are multiple solutions available there, for basically all price ranges (the cheapest offer available there is a $50/mo banner placement on a 100K+ blog, and there are pretty good discounts available there pretty much all the time). Plus, in addition to the ordinary banners, there are alternate solutions also available – including a featured entry placement on a 25,000+ daily impressions DesignFloat social network, which we have tried ourselves and were absolutely delighted about (go ahead and learn more about awesome results we’ve received by working with DesignFloat featured entry option in a case study on DesignFloat blog).
By the way, as you can see, TemplateMonster and a number of other commercial projects that we’re friends with (such as Moto CMS, VideoSmash etc.) are also using this advertising network, which is yet another proof making the AdBoomer advertising one heck of a good deal.
Another important thing about this AdBoomer network is that it’s open for new relevant blogs and resources to join. And joining them is 100% free, there’s no any kind of entrance fee or anything like that. But we’ve got to say that there are certain requirements – not only does it have to be relevant resource, or a design blog, it also has to meet certain requirements in terms of traffic, content and products it possibly sells. So in case you own a project you think will fit, than you have to know that in addition to a quality targeted traffic you may receive from AdBoomer ads, you may also join the network and get paid for the ads you’ll publish.
In case you have any questions about the new project we’re into, or you want to place your ads, or you want to apply for being a part of the new advertising network, please contact AdBoomer representatives at the follwing address: “sales — at — adboomer — dot — com” (btw, if you’ll mention that you’ve been referred by TemplateMonster blog, you’ll receive a 20% discount on ads purchase). Good luck!
The eCommerce nugget created by French web developers has unleashed its latest version indexed 1.4. The long-awaited release has brought us many useful features and options that from now will be available to all PrestaShop fans. If you are not familiar with this excellent software you might be interested in reading the post that’s we’ve published some months ago called “A Deeper Look Into PrestaShop Shopping Cart” where you can find more precise information about what this eCommerce software basically is, its major features, advantages, as well as a short comparison with other popular eCommerce software. Also, we’ve added some most beautiful design solutions implemented for PrestaShop.
But today let’s take a closer look at this long-anticipated PrestaShop version 1.4. In general this release contains over 65 new features, according to the official sources. Along with a bunch of new modules you can enjoy some extremely efficient and well-timed features that are actually new (not just the updated old ones). We’ve tried to separate the options and improvements that are important for our audience from the web design point of view, and also have featured some fundamental functional changes to our list.
Web Design Features of PrestaShop 1.4
- live edit – you can edit your store’s design theme directly via Front-Office using “drag’n'drop” technology. This is very comfortable and user-friendly, it illustrates the customization process and simplifies the UI in general. Definitely a very good feature.
- fancybox – there is a new method has been used for the visualization window of product photos. The old ThickBox is replaced by FancyBox solution making this procedure more sophisticated.
- product page previews – you can use the opportunity to preview the CMS pages (product page) before actually posting them online and of course while editing them directly via Front-Office.
- three logos – interesting and useful feature that allows you to set different logos for your store’s emails, Front-Office and invoices.
- Back-Office themes – two new themes are added now so, you can enjoy new style of your Back-Office.
More than a week ago, TemplateMonster has arranged a fund raiser to help the disaster victims in Japan recover from the recent earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11. Now when the donation campaign is over, we’d like to inform you that with the help of our unanimous community we’ve collected $2,022 and transferred this money to a special fund on GlobalGiving.com – a famous worldwide donations and fundraising medium which is in our case responsible for the further transferring of the funds to the proper organizations in Japan.
The overall fundraising initiative implied that from every template sale, during a period from March 16th 2011 and until March 22nd 2011, TemplateMonster donated $1 to the Japan Tsunami fund, plus some of our customers optionally donated another $5 while buying any of our products.
Below, you can see a receipt that we’ve got from GlobalGiving.com upon money transfer. This is an official acknowledgment of all our donations being received and further transferred to the disaster relief in Japan.
Now we’d like to express our infinite gratitude for all of you who joined us in this fundraising for Japan. It’s very nice to know that people from all over the world are ready to support Japan and the Japanese people in need. The whole TemplateMonster team really appreciates being a part of the community that makes a difference.
In our previous blog series about free Tumblr themes we’ve already found out what Tumblr actually is and what it does. That it is quite flexible, powerful, and most importantly simple to work with blog platform which can be used to put categorized types of fully-variable information in a blog format. And today TemplateMonster is happy to announce the launch of our new product type – premium Tumblr themes. They’re all of premium design, which is pretty much a common thing for all TemplateMonster products, and they’re also coded by TemplateMonster’s best professionals. The rest is similar to other Tumblr themes you may have seen – our themes are extremely easy to customize and to install on Tumblr.
Many companies online are currently using Tumblr instead of setting up on their own weblogs, maybe because Tumblog is much easier to maintain compared to a full-fledged blog site. Overall Tumblr as a blog platform has lots of amenities. It’s very easy to get your own blog just by signing up for an account, plus it lets you fully customize and change just about every aspect of the appearance of your blog’s theme by editing its easy source code. And one of the best things about Tumblr medium is how easy it is to try out new styles on your enormously flexible Tumblog to give it a totally new look and functionality.
Please feel free to take a look at our first 5 premium Tumblr themes:
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This is it folks, we have witnessed another turn in this long war between well-known rivals – Flash and HTML5. Despite that entire buzz about the death of Flash, its main advocate – the world’s leading software vendor Adobe – is alive and kicking! Some days ago Adobe has released their interesting experimental software called Wallaby (in real life Wallaby is small kangaroo that lives in Australia). The main idea behind this software project is creating a tool for converting Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5. Pretty impressive, don’t you think so?
How does it work?
This is an Adobe AIR application that has a simple user interface and can be easily installed to your computer. Wallaby for Macintosh will work on both OS 10.5 and 10.6. As for Wallaby for Windows it will work with Windows 7, Vista and XP (and it requires an installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package). According to the Adobe officials, Wallaby is aimed at enabling users to avoid the usage of complex JavaScript by replacing it with CSS3 animation and SVG graphics. It is important to understand that Wallaby’s aim is to convert animated graphical content into a more web friendly form – this tool gives you files that are ready to be edited by such tools as Adobe Dreamweaver and so on. The typical output from Wallaby has three files containing HTML, CSS and JavaScript and SVG asset.
Drawbacks
To tell you the truth, this software doesn’t impress much as a software with its functionality and multiplatform features. But as a project or a concept, it does make us believe that soon Wallaby will be improved and will amaze us with excellent performance. For now it has many serious flaws, such as:
- Wallaby supports only Web-kit browsers (Safari and Chrome) and does not support FireFox and IE9 for now;
- Doesn’t support any ActionScript
- Doesn’t support 3D transforms
- Doesn’t support video embedding
- Doesn’t support gradients
Also there are some raw solutions for text implementation, very limited for now though we hope that soon these drawbacks will be improved or even eliminated. It is hard to assess the Wallaby’s functionality, but here’s a little example for you – if you convert a 20 Kb Flash banner with Wallaby, you’ll receive an output of 240 Kb. Obviously that’s not a very good result.
There is a long road ahead
The use of Flash to create web interfaces has enabled designers to develop many new ways for browsing the information. Today we’ve decided to shift the focus on long scrolling Flash web designs that currently trend towards a new interesting deployment. Long Flash websites do not lay out all Flash content in a fullscreen web page filling the screen without scaling it, but allow the scrolling of the content when the browser window is smaller than the minimum area required to display it. In other words these web designs have a scrolling component, arrayed horizontally or vertically, and customize it to suit their interfaces. As you navigate through the following web designs you’ll get more familiar with this newer type of navigation solution. So enough of introduction – go get around these captivating designs and see how brilliantly they utilize the scrolling making it not just a functional tool for navigation but also a nice-looking design solution.
Adhemas.com
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Djeco.com
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Perhaps today you expected that TemplateMonster will launch some promo, or will unveil some new templates that you’re used to. With all due respect to all that, today we’d like you to stop for a minute and think about things that are more than just templates, more than a business and more than the money. You all have heard about the devastating 8,9-mangitude earthquake and a tsunami in Japan, and we’re pretty sure you know things out there in Japan are still pretty messed up even today, several days after the disaster.
At some point we at TemplateMonster began to realize that the community around us is big enough to actually make a difference. And even though the reason that made us think about it is very sad, we are still very much proud to be a part of a community making the world a better and a kinder place for living.
Today we are announcing the start of our donations campaign aimed at helping the victims of the disaster in Japan and the families that lost their homes. There are two parts of this campaign.
- TemplateMonster will donate $1 from every sale we make during a period starting today and until March 22nd 2011.
- In addition to that, every TemplateMonster customer will be able to donate another $5 while buying any of our products. On a shopping cart page there is an “Add to order” button that you have to click in order to donate $5. And after that we will charge the template price plus the $5 donation.
On March 22nd we will transfer the amount we’ll have collected by that time to the Japan Earthquake And Tsunami Relief Fund on GlobalGiving.com (GlobalGiving.com is a famous worldwide donations and fundraising medium – that in turn will transfer the funds to the proper organizations in Japan. Of course, we will publish a detailed report about how GlobalGiving.com does all that on our blog, and on our social network pages.
If you feel donating via TemplateMonster is not the most convenient way for you, or if you do want to donate but don’t want to make a template purchase for that, we strongly encourage you to make your donation through alternate ways – for example directly through GlobalGiving.com where you can choose the amount you want to donate. Plus, there are dozens of other projects accepting donations for Japan – whichever way is more convenient for you, luckily making a difference is a matter of several minutes these days.
To make it all as transparent as it can be, we’re adding a counter of the donations you’ve made in the header of all TemplateMonster pages. The amount collected is being displayed there, in real time. On that counter we display the combined amount consisting of the $1 donations from each template purchase and the $5 donations that our customers make.
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