Website monitoring is a very routine thing and obviously you can’t handle it with bare hands because sitting and staring at your website 24/7 is quite uncomfortable. Fortunately there is a bunch of various tools and services that can go through that heavy cross for of you. Needless to say that any downtime issues may cause huge problems for your projects. Conversion rates, number of pageviews, reputation and other important factors and rankings which are vitally important directly depend on your uptime performance.
While stating the fact that your website is currently down is a of course a useful thing, but still it’s not enough because you have to know the exact reasons for that downtime and possible ways to solve this unpleasant situation. So, here are some tools that would immediately tell you when, for how long and why your website is down and would as well suggest you how to fix the downtime. Of course this list is not full and we are glad to receive any feedback from you concerning your personal experience of working with similar tools and services. By the way, most of these are paid tools but you can try out their free trial versions.
1. Host-Tracker
Monitoring period: every 1/5/15/30/60 minutes
Alert methods: HTTP
Error notifications via: e-mail address and SMS
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2. Uptime Robot
Monitoring period: every 5 minutes
Alert methods: HTTP/HTTPS-methods
Error notifications via: e-mail, SMS, RSS and Twitter.
This service will be free until 01 August 2011
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In the medium of online social activity, there’re few different services that allow web users to share web content the quickest manner possible. Now we’ll again bring into focus the fast-growing Tumblr platform for micro bloggers. And upon the foregoing blog entry about 40+ Free Tumblr Themes to jump on stylish blog appearance, we’ve kept on searching across numerous Tumblelogs and over the available free Tumblr themes to come up with a new compilation of what we consider to be the most attractive Tumblr themes for your projects.
TemplateMonster has also submitted some custom-made Tumblr themes to the templates repository on the official Tumblr website. So if you’re looking for some interesting solutions, the following list of free Tumblr themes is probably the most convenient way to choose your favorite skin, install it in a click, and start your own streamlined Tumblr-powered blog today. Once you’ve chosen to go with Tumblr platform, keep in mind also that when setting a tumblelog you can easily customize the theme and use it as your own unique identity and share multiple types of content. Use this chance and see the showcase rolling on!
Firsts
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Clarity
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Needless to say that a search box is a critical element in a website usability these days, especially if it’s a website with a lot of pages and elements that we’re talking about. Today these functional elements are implemented almost on every website, and there’s a reason for that. Most of the default search boxes are powered by some search engines like Bing or Google and you as a simple user think that it is more than enough for the visitors. Having a well-thought search with simple and rich interface is equal to having another main navigation menu on your website. Search box helps your visitors to find precisely what they are looking for and obviously it is very comfortable and influences a lot on your website’s UX as well as bounce rates and conversion rates.
Our today’s subject has two basic components that should be taken into consideration, these are the design attractiveness and the search functionality. Provide your visitors with visually attractive, simple and intuitive search box and you’ll see the positive results very soon. Before we start I would like you to pay attention to a number of things that you should consider before placing the search box at your website. So, here are the don’ts:
- don’t place your search box at the bottom of the page, the best place is in the top right corner;
- do not put advanced search in a first level;
- do not oversize (or undersize) the input box, it must have comfortable size so that the user could see at least 3-4 words of the query;
- give correct name and proper size to the submit button (words “Search” and “Find” are more comprehensible than “Submit” or “Go”);
- do not mix search field with other functional elements (putting in one block the “Search“, “Register” and “Subscribe” buttons can really irritate visitors)
Be like Google – Use Instant Search!
I’m sure that you are familiar with the “Instant Search” feature which was implemented by Google few months ago. It’s not that easy to implement from the technical point of view, but it is worth your efforts. There is no doubt that your visitors will love to use this feature at your website, it is extremely user-friendly and saves their precious time.
Let’s start out by featuring a collection of Photoshop brushes. We’re focusing on smoke brush sets to help you create a myriad of mysterious effects with shadows and glows to make the illusion of graphic smoke emulation. Get ready to light up your vector cigarettes – by playing with some of these smoke brushes and adjustment layers you can come up with truly realistic digital smoke that will enhance and add a whole new effect along with some awesome visual explosion to your design projects, wallpaper backgrounds or photo manipulations as fake smokes. The following volume includes thin smoke brushes as well as thicker varieties. And don’t forget to look for some original smoke images; that might help you in your project as well. Now feel free to download and use your favorite smoke brush sets, out of those mentioned here, as beautiful adding touches to your compositions. We also invite you to browse the arrangement of 50 free swirl & floral brushes for Photoshop, roundup of 40 free retro Photoshop brush sets and 45 free fractal Photoshop brush sets.
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Your online project plays a role when it goes about the delivering functional products or services to your customers. Its main objective is to push forward the interest to your business and bring you the desired attention of the visitors and, of course, new customers. The first step that should be done is finding the right direction of the design concept and choosing the best variant of it. This process is a little bit complicated, ‘cause it demands the efforts of several people who will work out the business strategy, the design concept and develop the functionality of the future site. Today we offer you the ready-made solution for your online project that deals with the business sphere – Free Business Website Template. That’s the idea that will help you to start the desired web presence in no time and make it successful. Try it yourself, and feel free to see a live demo of this free business website template!
Free Business Website Template:
As you remember, you can get this free website template in two ways: with PSD source files included and without them. If you need only HTML source files, download them from this post (just click on the image above and save the ZIP file). To get the full package with PSD source files included visit the TemplateMonster Free Business Website Template download page and type an email address that you want the free template package to be delivered to (make sure to uncheck the newsletter subscription checkbox in case you’re already subscribed). Feel free to use this template for your business, but you are not allowed to resell it.
Download Free Business Website Template with PSD files (18,2MB)
Download Free Business Website Template without PSD (506KB)
IMPORTANT NOTICE: TemplateMonster does not provide support services on free templates – including this one. We only provide support for the products that are being purchased from TemplateMonster. Our free templates are produced according to the latest web standards and we’ve been trying to make the process of working with them as easy as possible, so for people with minimum web development experience it should be easy to work with them. However, if you don’t have any experience, we recommend you to refer to the tutorials or community forums on how to work with platforms that each respective template is made with, or to hire someone to do the job for you.
Need professional solutions for your online business? Choose Business Web Templates and Business Flash Templates from TemplateMonster.com!
Being a real headache for the website developers, the cross browser testing is in fact not that much of a painful procedure nowadays because you can find a bunch of efficient and comfortable-to-use online tools to help you in that. Testing is vitally important for any website and you should never ignore it, especially if it’s a serious website you’re planning that will have a lot of traffic from different audience. Otherwise, for example if that’s a website for developers, you may be sure you won’t need your website to be very much compatible with IE6, while a news website does have to be compatible even with the oldest versions of crappiest browers.
Testing helps you to predict problems that might occur in the nearest future, if they do occur while your visitors are browsing the best case scenario is that the irritated users will assault your wishbox with angry complaints about bugs and broken codes, worst case is they’ll just quietly give it up and won’t come back to your website. So, you’ll agree that testing saves your time and even might save your website/business project from the fatal disaster. Below you’ll find some useful and advanced online tools that would ease the testing processes and will help you to be sure that your website is compatible with all popular web browsers.
1. Browsershots
This online tool provides you with screen shots of your web page from just about any browser from all of the common operating systems. You have to submit your URL and wait in the queue till you receive results. You can use paid option and skip the queue line for instant results.
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2. CrossBrowserTesting
Another awesome online tool that helps you to test your website. Just pick an OS, select browser and start testing. Free trial is available, also you can purchase a monthly subscription for this service.
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We’re happy to announce that TemplateMonster starts producing the brand new Dynamic Flash Photo Galleries 2.0 which are an updated version of a well-known and popular TemplateMonster product, which are now based on a totally new technology and come with an advanced power-packed set of options.
Being an easy and powerful tool for setting up and running a gallery of images on your Flash website, this new product line has resulted in much improved functionality and enhanced interface. Now we create more lightweight Dynamic Flash Photo Gallery 2.0 Templates using the newest Flash technologies of the industry. Our Flash photo galleries are coming with a full-fledge CMS inside basing on the powerful Flash content management system that we’re sure you know about by now – Moto CMS. So you don’t need any additional software to set up and run an awesome gallery of images on your Flash website.
Dynamic Flash Photo Galleries 2.0 are absolutely easy to configure and can be quickly customized for specific needs of any customer even by a non-tech person. Other awesome features of our new high-end Dynamic Flash Galleries 2.0 include:
- fully editable intuitive design;
- rich customization options;
- WISIWIG editor;
- professional image editor;
- the ability to create splendid slideshows;
- rich media library and preload option;
- custom fonts upload;
- powerful SEO tools;
- and a lot of other tasty features.
As every Dynamic Flash Gallery 2.0 focuses on the really impressive layout and usability, it is a perfect option for web design companies, art and photography web sources and all the image stores web projects. You just add your images and make further customization leaving out all the technical routine. Please feel free to browse our new collection of Dynamic Flash Photo Gallery 2.0 Templates, there’s a variety of styles and layouts that you’ll be happy to see. For more detailed information on our new product line, see Dynamic Flash Photo Galleries 2.0 presentation.
The “Call-to-action” buttons are one of the most essential designer’s tools in the tricky game of hunting for higher conversion rates. If you want to create a smart design, don’t forget to prioritize tasks that must compel your design. And one of the most important tasks will be soliciting your visitors to do something that you want them to do (whether it is buying something, adding a product to cart, signing up or learning more). Today we want to dig a little deeper into what the important factors and techniques are, to help you create attractive designs that would be powerful marketing tools at your website.
Color
It is vitally important to highlight your buttons by using bright colors and contrast. It would be better to use really deep and rich colors that would dazzle your visitors with their shine. Contrast will help you separate your button from other elements on the page, so you shouldn’t share your button’s design with something else on the page.
Plus, you may want to check out a little colors in eCommerce research done by our good friends from Templates.com blog, it will help you choose proper colors based on what particular action you want a user to take.
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Size
Proportion and balance are the keys to your success because your button must be visible on the page, though you should be aware of over sizing. You should know that the button’s size depends on its importance over all other elements on the page. Usually buttons have the highest priority over other functional elements.
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As you might be aware of, Joomla has released a new version of its popular content management software – this dynamic portal engine has been finally advanced to Joomla 1.6, on January 11th 2011. From the official Joomla 1.6 release announcement the company has unveiled the range of new functions and features the new version delivers to designers, developers, admins and webmasters, as well as about manifold style improvements Joomla has undergone.
So what’s new in Joomla 1.6?
- new admin, template choices: Joomla 1.6 offers a whole new look at the Administrator Interface with some new templates that extend the Joomla! system;
- template styles: Joomla 1.6 offers a whole new world of versatility by allowing webmasters to create template styles. Basically, you can easily clone your template to apply custom changes or edits to it, and then assign it to specific menu items to create unique pages;
- core layout files are tableless: new for Joomla 1.6, all core output files are written in XHTML 1.0 Strict. HTML 5 is also supported in Joomla 1.6;
- codemirror editor: finally, there’s a color-coded editor for easier HTML and CSS editing in Joomla;
- media manager improvements: the Flash-based media uploader brings the ability for users to upload multiple files at one time. You can also upload multiple images at once to the Media Manager.
- SEO features: meta-keywords and meta-descriptions can be assigned to articles, categories, and menu items, and you can easily add a site name to the HTML page title;
- new package installation capability: developers can now pack their components allowing users to install one file and include multiple extensions all at the same time;
- easily included language capabilities: with Joomla 1.6′s new language structure, developers are allowed to include additional language packages right with their extensions;
- integrated ACL capability: the development team has made it very easy to include advanced ACL features inside of any 3rd party component. With just a few code changes your component can allow your users to take advantage of the revolutionary ACL structure for their users;
- upgraded system requirements: the new operating requirements for Joomla 1.6 (particularly PHP 5.2) offers developers a great advantage by allowing them to take advantage of object-oriented programming and functionality;
- nested categories: with infinite layers of categories, creating a representation of your site map in Joomla! is a breeze;
- easy extension updates: you can easily update those extensions from within Joomla, without visiting dozens of extension developer’s websites, in Joomla 1.6;
- new plugin format: with the release of Joomla 1.6, plugins now have the same common structure as components and modules;
- consistent component programming: Joomla 1.6 provides a new and cohesive method for building components;
- for more principal changes introduced in Joomla 1.6, you may read the information offered by the Joomla Documentation.
Guidelines in upgrading your Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.6
It is a notorious fact that effective ready-made solutions for your online project are not easy to find. It takes your time and, unfortunately, it is not usually rewarding. You can also face the problem that the solution that you have found doesn’t correspond to your needs or doesn’t support the main idea of your online business. The main goal of our weekly series is to share with you the professionally done freebies which you will hopefully find useful and valuable. Today it is Free Science Website Template created by our team of creative designers. It suits perfectly for any kind of a science project website, a lab website, or even a high school project report website. We hope that this free website template will help you to solve the design problems and start the effective online project.
Free Science Website Template:
As you remember, you can get this free website template in two ways: with PSD source files included and without them. If you need only HTML source files, download them from this post (just click on the image above and save the ZIP file). To get the full package with PSD source files included visit the TemplateMonster Free Science Website Template download page and type an email address that you want the free template package to be delivered to (make sure to uncheck the newsletter subscription checkbox in case you’re already subscribed). Feel free to use this template for your business, but you are not allowed to resell it as a template.
Download Free Science Website Template with PSD files (6,43MB)
Download Free Science Website Template without PSD (470KB)
IMPORTANT NOTICE: TemplateMonster does not provide support services on free templates – including this one. We only provide support for the products that are being purchased from TemplateMonster. Our free templates are produced according to the latest web standards and we’ve been trying to make the process of working with them as easy as possible, so for people with minimum web development experience it should be easy to work with them. However, if you don’t have any experience, we recommend you to refer to the tutorials or community forums on how to work with platforms that each respective template is made with, or to hire someone to do the job for you.
More Science Web Templates and Science Flash Templates find at TemplateMonster.com!
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