Continuing our exploration of the multi-model capabilities of SingleStore DB, we’ll discuss SingleStore DB’s support for Full-Text Index and Search in this article.
Using the example of medical journal articles from the SingleStore self-paced training course on Full-Text Index and Search, we’ll store the text from journal articles and then perform a variety of queries using the full-text capabilities of SingleStore DB.
Experienced web designers are always on the lookout for tools or resources that will (1) introduce them to the latest design trends, (2) enable them to incorporate features and functionalities that will make their products more competitive, (3) allow them to improve their workflows or all the above.
Apply one or more of these new design tools and resources. Then you could realize anything from incremental to game-changing improvements. The better the tool or resource, the more you are apt to realize your investment.
The 15 tools and website design resources selected for this article are the best in their respective categories. The degree of improvement you can realize when using one or more of them may depend on your own business needs. Or on the actual needs and wants of your clients as opposed to what you are currently able to deliver.
Browse the list, and you should be able to put your finger on one or more of these products or services. They could lead to improvement in one or more areas of your work. Look closer, and you might come across a genuine game-changer.
Happy shopping!
If your website design activities are proving to be exercises in tediousness, or you’re tired of working around a design tool’s limitations, you need BeTheme.
BeTheme can be a game-changer in that it gives you the flexibility to design what you want. Be makes building a complex high-performance website quick, smooth, and easy.
BeTheme is Elementor ready and is regularly updated. Click on the banner to find out more about Be’s 40+ powerful core features.
Put Total to work, and 2022 could be a very good year for your website design undertakings.
Total has it all insofar as design aids and options, website-building tools, and design flexibility are concerned regardless of the type or style of website you plan to build:
Click on the banner to discover everything Total can do for you.
What could LayerSlider do for you to help make 2022 a banner year? Look over any of your past website designs to see if any of them could profit from adding a little spice or pizzazz because that’s what LayerSlider does best.
LayerSlider is an animation and website-building tool that can be used on any website to transform its look & feel with modern graphics, eye-catching animations, and interactive features. LayerSlider is one of the most established and popular products with millions of active monthly users.
Click on the banner to see what LayerSlider could do for you.
Most table or chart building table plugins on the market either limit the amount of data that can easily be processed or the types of tables or charts that can be produced. wpDataTables has neither of these limitations.
With the wpDataTables premium WordPress plugin, you can –
Uncode is a top-selling pixel-perfect creative and WooCommerce theme. More than 80,000 sales have been made to date to freelancers, bloggers, agencies, and small businesses.
Uncode’s key features include –
With Trafft, you can schedule meetings, events, on-site and virtual appointments, manage staff schedules, send reminders, and accept payments — all from a single platform.
This game-changer integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, Google Meet, Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar, Zoom, and Mailchimp.
WHATFONTIS is a hidden gem in the world of font identifiers that allows you to find a font from your uploaded image in a matter of seconds.
Mobirise is fast, easy to use, and the best offline website builder on the market.
The Mobirise website builder is free for both personal and commercial use.
Downloads from this library of premium illustrations can change the way you go about designing your websites, apps, and presentations.
Illustrations you download come with a commercial license and are yours to keep without limitations.
If you have trouble bridging the gap between what your clients want and what you can provide, Slider Revolution could be exactly what you need to fix the problem.
Slider Revolution is THE cutting-edge WordPress plugin for addressing today’s over-the-top web designs. It features –
Amelia offers an automated, highly customizable solution to any business that relies on a manual or semi-automated operation for booking client appointments.
Many social media platforms allow you to include a link that allows followers to visit your website or an important landing page. With 8bio, you can create a link that a visitor can’t resist clicking on.
Your link can –
The premium Essential Grid WordPress gallery plugin developers assembled a collection of aesthetic, easy-to-customize plug-and-play templates that make creating a breathtaking portfolio gallery a fun and easy task.
Pixpa provides an all-in-one platform from which creatives can manage their online portfolios, blogs, galleries, and eCommerce sites.
XStore is a feature-packed Envato WooCommerce theme that is incredibly simple to work with has acquired more than 30,000 enthusiastic customers.
There are plenty of tools and resources for designers on the market. You could use them to create websites that are a little better than the ones you have already built or are using.
What you should really be looking for is a special design tool or resource. When using it for a small investment could markedly improve both your productivity and your design efforts to make 2022 by far your best year ever.
That’s the reasoning for publishing this selection of top 15 design tools and resources. Selecting one or more could make your day.
[- This is a sponsored post on behalf of Be -]
The post 15 Instantly Helpful Tools and Resources for Designers and Agencies (Updated for 2022 ) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
“Minimum Viable Product,” or “MVP,” is a concept of agile development and business growth. With a minimum viable product, you focus on creating the simplest, most basic version of your product, web application, or code possible.
Minimum viable products include just enough features to attract early adopters and validate your idea in the early stages of the development lifecycle. Choosing an MVP workflow can be particularly valuable in the software environment because it helps teams receive, learn from, and respond to feedback as quickly as possible.
The question is, how exactly do you define the “minimum” in MVP? How do you know if your MVP creation is basic enough while still being “viable”?
The concept of “Minimum Viable Product” comes from the Lean Start-up Methodology, introduced by Eric Ries. The purpose of MVP is to help companies quickly create versions of a product while collecting validated insights from customers for each iteration. Companies may choose to develop and release minimum viable products because they want to:
Aside from allowing your company to validate an idea for a product without building the entire concept from scratch, an MVP can also reduce the demand on a company’s time and resources. This is why so many smaller start-ups with limited budgets use the MVP and lean production strategy to keep costs as low as possible.
When you’re building a Minimum Viable Product, you’re concentrating on developing only the most “essential” features that need to be in that product. For instance, you might be building a shopping app for a website. For the app to be “viable,” it would need to allow customers to search through products and add them to a basket or shopping cart. The app would also need a checkout feature and security components.
However, additional functionality, like the ability to send questions about an item to a customer service team or features that allow clients to add products to a “wish list,” may not be necessary straight away. Part of defining a minimum viable product is understanding what it isn’t. For instance, an MVP is not:
When finding the “minimum” in a minimum viable product, the primary challenge is ensuring the right balance. Ideally, you need your MVP to be as essential, cost-effective, and straightforward as possible so that you can create several iterations in a short space of time. The simpler the product, the easier it is to adapt it, roll it out to your customers, and learn from their feedback.
However, developers and business leaders shouldn’t get so caught up focusing on the “Minimum” part of Minimum Viable Product that they forget the central segment: “Viable”; your product still needs to achieve a specific purpose.
So, how do you find the minimum in your MVP?
First, you’ll need to determine what your product needs to do to be deemed viable. What goal or target do you hope to achieve with your new product? For instance, in the example we mentioned above, where you’re creating an ecommerce shopping app, the most basic thing the app needs to do is allow customers to shop for and purchase items on a smartphone.
Consider the overall selling point of your product or service and decide what the “nice to haves” are, compared to the essential features. For instance, your AR app needs to allow people to interact with augmented digital content on a smartphone, but it may not need to work with all versions of the latest AR smart glasses.
Once you know the goal or purpose of your product, the next step is to make a list of features or capabilities you can rank according to importance. You can base your knowledge of what’s “most important” for your customers by looking at things like:
Once you’ve defined your most important features, the next stage is simply building the simplest version of your product. Build the item according to what you consider to be its most essential features and ask yourself whether it’s serving its purpose.
If your solution seems to be “viable,” you can roll it out to your target audience or a small group of beta testers to get their feedback and validate the offering. Use focus groups and market interviews to collect as much information as possible about what people like or dislike.
Using your feedback, you can begin to implement changes to your “minimum” viable product to add more essential features or functionality.
Minimum viable products are evident throughout multiple industries and markets today – particularly in the digitally transforming world. For instance, Amazon might be one of the world’s most popular online marketplaces today, but it didn’t start that way. Instead, Jeff Bezos began purchasing books from distributors and shipping them to customers every time his online store received an order to determine whether the book-selling landscape would work.
When Foursquare first began, it had only one feature. People could check-in at different locations and win badges. The gamification factor was what made people so excited about using the service. Other examples include:
Your definition of a “minimum viable product” may not be the same as the definition chosen by another developer or business leader. The key to success is finding the right balance between viability – and the purpose of your product, and simplicity – or minimizing your features.
Start by figuring out what your product simply can’t be without, and gradually add more features as you learn and gain feedback from your audience. While it can be challenging to produce something so “minimalistic” at first, you need to be willing to release those small and consistent iterations if you want to leverage all the benefits of an MVP.
Suppose you can successfully define the meaning of the words “Minimum” and “Viable” simultaneously with your new product creations. In that case, the result should be an agile business, lean workflows, and better development processes for your entire team.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post What is the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
WordPress is by far the world’s most popular CMS. Not only does it dominate the CMS market with a 64% market share, but it also powers 39.6% of all websites. It has taken the internet by storm by democratizing the web for all. Now, anyone can build, manage, and host a successful website without needing a college degree or coding expertise.
However, while WordPress is great at managing many technical aspects, it still can’t do everything for you. Built mostly on PHP, there are often concerns regarding how performant WordPress is. And, with performance impacting everything from bounce rates to SEO rankings to conversions, it’s something that should be on your radar too.
If you don’t know it yet, images are one of the main causes of slow-loading websites. In recent years, WordPress has stepped up its efforts to try and help users with image optimization out-of-the-box.
Still, as we’ll show, it’s not a total solution, and there is still plenty you can do to deliver better experiences on your WordPress website through image optimization.
Simply put, image optimization is anything you do to make images load faster on your website pages. Almost all websites that use images can benefit from some form of image optimization, even those using WordPress.
Well, performance is a hugely significant factor when it comes to the competitiveness of your website today.
Google has also made performance an increasingly important factor when it comes to SEO rankings. In fact, performance is a direct ranking signal that carries significant weight.
Google’s Page Experience Update that went live in 2021 has been the biggest move in that direction yet. Soon, Google might even use visual indicators in SERP results to distinguish high-performing websites from the rest.
In Google’s own words, “These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experiences from the web.”
According to Google, images are the largest contributor to page weight. Google has also singled out image optimization specifically as the factor with the most untapped potential for performance optimization.
This problem isn’t going away soon. According to data by the HTTP Archive, there are roughly 967.5 KB bytes of image data on desktop web pages and 866.3 KB of image data on mobile pages. This is an increase of 16.1% and 38.8%, respectively, over the last five years.
Thanks to popular e-commerce tools like Woocommerce, it’s estimated that up to 28% of all online sales happen on WordPress websites.
And don’t forget, images are both a key part of conveying information to the user and integral to the design of your website. If they take significantly longer to load than your text, for example, it will negatively impact the user experience in a variety of ways.
In summary, optimized images help your WordPress website by:
WordPress is so popular because it’s a CMS (content management system) that allows anyone to build, design, and manage a website without any coding or advanced technical experience. Advanced features can be installed with just a few clicks, thanks to plugins, and you rarely have to touch the code behind your website unless you want to make some unique modifications.
In short, using a CMS like WordPress shields you from many of the day-to-day technicalities of running a website.
As we mentioned, one of the main reasons WordPress is so popular is because it takes care of many of the technical aspects of running a website. With that in mind, many think that WordPress should also automatically take care of image optimization without them having to get involved at all.
Unfortunately, that’s not really the case.
True, WordPress does offer some built-in image optimization. Whenever you upload an image to WordPress, it currently compresses the quality to about 82% of the original (since v4.5).
In v4.4, WordPress also introduced responsive image syntax using the srcset attribute. This creates four breakpoints for each image you upload according to the default WordPress image sizes:
Here you can see an example of the actual responsive syntax code generated by WordPress:
<img loading="lazy" src="https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-9" width="610" height="406" srcset="https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-300x200.jpg 300w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-768x512.jpg 768w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1536x1024.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px">
Depending on the screen size of the device from which a user visits your webpage, WordPress will let the browser pick the most appropriately sized image. For example, the smallest version for mobile displays or the largest for 4K Retina screens, like those of a Mac.
While this may seem impressive, it’s only a fraction of what can be achieved using a proper image optimization solution, as we’ll show later.
Lastly, WordPress implemented HTML native default lazy loading for all images starting with version 5.5.
So, in short, WordPress offers the following image optimization capabilities baked-in:
There are other issues many have with both the implementation of image compression and responsive syntax as it’s used by WordPress. This leads to some users even purposefully deactivating WordPress’ built-in image optimization so they can fully take control of it themselves.
Here are some of the reasons why:
Another important optimization feature that WordPress does not have is auto-conversion to next-gen image file formats. Different image formats offer different performance benefits on different devices. Some formats also enable higher levels of compression while maintaining visual fidelity.
Next-gen formats like WebP, AVIF, and JPEG-2000 are considered to be the most optimal formats on compatible devices. For example, until recently, WebP would be the optimal choice on Chrome browsers, while JPEG-4000 would be optimal on Safari browsers.
However, WordPress will simply serve images in the same formats in which they were originally uploaded to all visitors.
As the undisputed king of search engines, we’ll base most of our performance metrics on guidelines established by Google.
Along with its various performance updates, Google has released a number of guidelines for developers as well as the tools to test and improve their websites according to said guidelines.
Google introduced Core Web Vitals as the primary metrics for measuring a web page’s performance and its effect on the user experience. Thus, Core Web Vitals are referred to as “user-centric performance metrics.” They are an attempt to give developers a testable and quantifiable way to measure an elusive and abstract concept such as “user experience.”
Combined with a number of other factors, Core Web Vitals constitute a major part of the overall page experience signal:
You can find a complete introduction to Core Web Vitals here. However, they currently consist of three main metrics:
Here is an illustration of how these metrics are scored:
While these are the three most important metrics to optimize, they are not the only ones. Google still measures other metrics like the FCP (First Contentful Paint), SI (Speed Index), as well as the TTFB (Time to First Byte), TBT (Total Blocking Time), and TTI (Time to Interactive).
A number of these metrics are directly affected by the images used on your web pages. For example, LCP, FCP, and SI are direct indicators of how fast the content of your web page loads and depends on the overall byte size of the page. However, it can also indirectly affect FID by keeping the main thread busy with rendering large amounts of image content or the perceived CLS by delaying the time it takes large images to load.
These metrics apply to all websites, whether they are custom-made or built using a CMS like WordPress.
When using tools like Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights, you’ll also get scored based on other flags Google deems important. Some of them are specific to images, such as properly sizing images and serving images in next-gen formats.
If you only use built-in WordPress image optimization, you’ll get flagged for the following opportunities for improvement:
Some of the audits it will pass, however, are deferring offscreen images (lazy loading) and efficiently coding images (due to compression):
Billions of websites are all vying for prime real estate on Google SERPs, as well as the attention of an increasingly fussy internet-using public. Every inch matters when it comes to giving your website a competitive advantage.
So, how can you eliminate those remaining performance flags and deliver highly optimized images that will keep both your visitors and Google happy?
Sure, you could manually optimize images using software like PhotoShop or GIMP. However, that will take you hours for each new batch of images. Plus, you still won’t benefit from any automated adaptive optimization.
A more reasonable solution in today’s fast-paced climate is to use a tool developed specifically for maximum image optimization: an image CDN like ImageEngine.
ImageEngine is an automated, cloud-based image optimization service using device detection as well as intelligent image compression using the power of AI and machine learning. It can reduce image payloads by up to 80% while maintaining visual quality and accelerating delivery around the world thanks to its CDN with geographically dispersed PoPs.
When making a head-to-head comparison, here are the reasons why ImageEngine can deliver better performance:
So, the key differentiator is that ImageEngine can tailor optimizing images for what’s optimal for each of your visitors. ImageEngine is particularly good at serving mobile visitors thanks to WURFL device detection, which can dynamically resize images according to most devices and screen sizes in use today. As of now, this is a completely unique capability that none of its competitors offer.
It allows for far better and more fine-tuned optimization than WordPress’ across-the-board approach to compression and responsive syntax.
If you want, you could turn off WordPress responsive syntax and compression, and you would still experience a performance increase using ImageEngine. However, ImageEngine also plays nice with responsive syntax, so it’s not completely necessary unless you want to serve the highest-fidelity/low-byte-size images possible.
The process ImageEngine uses to integrate with WordPress can be broken down into a few easy steps:
Now, all ImageEngine basically does is replace your WordPress website domain in image URLs with your new ImageEngine Delivery Address. This makes it a simple, lightweight, and non-interfering plugin that works great with most other plugins and themes. It also doesn’t add unnecessary complexity or weight to your WordPress website pages.
So, now let’s get down to business by testing the performance improvement you can expect from using ImageEngine to optimize your image assets.
To do this test, we set up a basic WordPress page containing a number of high-quality images. I then used PageSpeed Insights and the Lighthouse Performance Calculator to get the performance scores before and after using ImageEngine.
Importantly, we conducted this test from a mobile-first perspective. Not only has mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic globally, but Google themselves have committed to mobile-first indexing as a result.
Here is a PageSpeed score using the Lighthouse calculator for WordPress with no image optimization:
As we can see, both Core Web Vitals and other important metrics were flagged as “needs improvement.” Specifically, the LCP, FCP, and TBT. In this case, both the LCP and FCP were a high-res featured image at the top of the page.
If we go to the opportunities for improvement highlighted by PageSpeed, we see where the issues come from. We could still save as much as 4.2s of loading time by properly resizing images and a further 2.7s by serving them in next-gen formats:
So, now let’s see how much ImageEngine can improve on that.
The same test run on my WordPress website using ImageEngine got the following results:
As you can see, we now have a 100 PageSpeed score. I saved roughly 2.5s on the SI (~86%) as well as roughly 1.7s on the LCP (~60%). There was also a slight improvement in the FCP.
Not only will you enjoy a stronger page experience signal from Google, but this represents a tangible difference to visitors regarding the speed with which your website loads. That difference will lead to lower bounce rates, increased user satisfaction, and more conversions.
There was also a 53% overall reduction in the total image payload. This is impressive, considering that it’s on top of WordPress’ built-in compression and responsive syntax.
So, as someone with a WordPress website, what can you take away from this?
Well, first of all, WordPress does feature some basic image optimization. And while not perfect, it should help you offer reasonable levels of performance, even if you use a lot of image content.
However, the caveat is that WordPress applies aggressive, across-the-board compression, which will lead to a noticeable reduction in visual quality. If you use WordPress for any type of website where premium quality images are important, this is a concern — for example, as a photography portfolio, exhibition, or image marketplace like Shutterstock.
By using ImageEngine, you can reduce image payloads and accelerate delivery even further without compromising too harshly on visual quality. What’s more, ImageEngine’s adaptive image optimization technology will provide greater improvements to more of your visitors, regardless of what device(s) they use to browse the web.
Whether or not you still want to use WordPress’ built-in optimizations, ImageEngine will deliver significant improvements to your user experience, traffic metrics, and even conversions.
Plus, true to the spirit of WordPress, it’s extremely simple to set up without any advanced configuration. Just sign up for ImageEngine in 3 easy steps, install the plugin, integrate ImageEngine by copy/pasting your image domain, and you’re good to go.
[ This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine ]
The post WordPress Website Analysis: Before & After ImageEngine first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
What stands out as an incredible web design project for you? Do you count your creation as a success if it’s modern, minimal, and accessible? Maybe you’re the kind of designer that’s constantly experimenting with the latest dynamic design tools or state-of-the-art technology. Perhaps your websites are vivid, animated, and brimming with unique components?
Sometimes, creating the ideal design means thinking carefully about what you want to accomplish for your client. The purpose of your web creation has a significant impact on the components that you need to consider. For instance, if you’re hoping for a highly emotive and human design, it may be worth combining some of your sleek lines and graphics with hand-drawn elements.
Hand-drawn elements are just like the other components of web design; that way may use to express individuality in a cluttered digital environment. In a world where everyone focuses on futuristic and virtual creations, hand-drawn elements can pull attention back to the importance of humanity in your content.
As web designers, we know that visual components often impact people more than text-based content. Illustrations are highly engaging functional elements that capture audience attention and convey relevant information.
The main difference between hand-drawn elements and graphics built with vectors and other digital components is that one appears to be more influenced by the human hand than the other. Even if your illustrations are created on a screen, just like any other web design component, it pushes an audience to see something more straightforward, more natural, and authentic.
For a brand trying to convey innocence and humanity in its personality, hand-drawn design can speak to the part of the human psyche that’s often unappreciated by web design. Perhaps more than any other visual, the content reminds your audience that there’s a human behind the web page.
Any image can have a massive impact on the quality of your web design. Visuals deliver complex information in an easy-to-absorb format. In today’s world of fast-paced browsing, where distractions are everywhere, visuals are a method of capturing attention and delivering value fast.
However, with hand-drawn elements, you go beyond the basic functionality of images to embrace the emotional side of the content. Benefits include:
Hand-drawn components, just like any other element of visual web design, demand careful strategy. You don’t want to overwhelm your websites with these sketches, or you could end up damaging the user experience in the process.
As you work on your web designs, pulling hand-drawn elements into the mix, think about how you can use every illustration to accomplish a crucial goal. For instance:
Hand-drawn design components can mix and match with other visual elements on your website. They work perfectly alongside videos and photos and help to highlight critical points.
On the Lunchbox website, the company uses hand-drawn elements. This helps make the site stand out, and it provides additional context for customers scanning the website for crucial details.
Sometimes, hand-drawn elements are all about connecting with end-users on a deeper, more emotional level. One of the best ways to do this is to make your hand-drawn elements fun and interactive pieces in the design landscape.
One excellent example of this is in the Stained Glass music video here. This interactive game combines an exciting web design trend with creative interactive components so that users can transform the web experience into something unique to them.
Sometimes, the best hand-drawn elements aren’t full illustrations or images. Hand-drawn or doodle-like typography can also give depth to a brand image and website design.
Typography styles that mimic natural, genuine handwriting are excellent for capturing the audience’s attention. These captivating components remind the customer of the human being behind the brand while not detracting from the elegance of the website.
This example of hand-drawn typography from the Tradewinds hotel shows how designers can use script fonts to immediately capture customer attention. Notice that the font is still easy to read from a distance, so it’s not reducing clarity.
Depending on the company that you’re designing for, your website creation choices can have a massive impact on the emotional resonance that the brand has with its audience. Hand-drawn elements allow websites to often take on a more playful tone. They can give any project a touch of innocence and friendliness that’s hard to accomplish elsewhere.
A child-like aesthetic with bright colors and bulky fonts combines with hand-drawn elements on the Le Puzz website. This is an excellent example of how web designers can use hand-drawn elements to convey a mood of creativity and fun.
Finally, if you want to combine the unique nuances of hand-drawn design with the modern components of what’s possible in the digital world today, why not add some animation. Animated elements combined with illustrations can help to bring a website to life.
In the Kinetic.com website, the animated illustrated components help to highlight the punk-rock nature of the fanzine. It’s essential to ensure that you don’t go too over-the-top with your animations here. Remember that too many animations can quickly slow down a website and harm user-friendliness.
Hand-drawn elements have a lot to offer to the web-design world.
Even if you’re not the best artist yourself, you can still simulate hand-drawn components in your web design by using the right tools and capabilities online.
Although these features won’t fit well into every environment, they can be perfect for businesses that want to show their human side in today’s highly digitized world. Hand-drawn components, perhaps more than any other web design feature, showcase the innocence and creativity of the artists that often exist behind portfolio pages and startup brands.
Could you experiment with hand-drawn design in your next project?
The post How to Use Hand-Drawn Elements in Web Design first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
If you’re looking for a WordPress theme for your 2022 projects, it never hurts to see what the experts consider to be the best of the bunch. That’s not to say that experts don’t have their favorites. They often do, and we are no different.
We’ve tried, successfully, we believe, to avoid any biases we may have in compiling what we believe to be the 10 top WordPress themes going into 2022.
Working with a WordPress theme has the advantage of giving you a great starting point. It makes it much easier to create an attractive website that will charm any visitors who stop by and convince them to linger awhile.
Another advantage of using a theme can be its cost-effectiveness. Most of the popular WordPress themes are reasonably priced, they save you time, and they can save you money as well.
The main problem you’re apt to encounter is finding the right one since many of them are out there. You could spend hours and hours making comparisons among a host of candidates that appear to be reliable and easily customizable. Or you could select from among the following 10 top WordPress themes, all of which are guaranteed to give you your money’s worth and more.
BeTheme justifiably lays claim to being the biggest WordPress and WooCommerce theme of all for several reasons.
It’s not just about size, of course. Performance is all-important, and BeTheme has it in spades thanks to:
Click on the banner. There’s much, much more to see.
Total is aptly named because of the tools it gives its users; tools that include a premium page builder, demo and template libraries, an assortment of design and layout options, and cool navigation features.
Total is easy to set up and work with, plus it is 100% responsive. Click on the banner to find out more.
WoodMart is a premium WordPress theme that has been designed from the ground up to enable its users to create superlative WooCommerce online stores. WoodMart doesn’t require the use of multiple plugins as the most important tools, and features users simply must have come right out of the box.
They include:
WoodMart-built websites are search engine friendly, multilanguage ready, 100% responsive, and RTL and retina ready, and GDPR compliant.
Click on the banner to see what your WooCommerce store could look like.
TheGem is the best-selling theme on ThemeForest, which isn’t surprising since its multiplicity of features has led to it being called the Swiss Army Knife of WordPress themes.
Key features include –
Uncode is a pixel-perfect theme packed with dozens of advanced and unique features designed to produce a pixel-perfect website.
These features include:
Uncode has sold more than 85,000 copies to date. It is the ideal WordPress theme for building an impressive blog, portfolio, eCommerce, and magazine sites.
eCommerce is said to rest on four pillars – filtering, search, navigation, and presentation. This WooCommerce-oriented WordPress theme fully addresses each one. Rey lets you experience design, innovation, and performance in ways you could only dream of before.
There’s:
Rey is multilanguage-ready, obviously responsive, SEO friendly, developer-friendly, and performance-oriented.
One easy way to know you’ve picked the right theme is to select Avada, the #1 best-selling theme of all time, a popular theme that is loved by 450,000+ happy users.
And that’s just the beginning.
This simply impeccable WordPress theme is filled with potential for the advanced user and, at the same time, easy for a beginner to use. Using Impeka simply involves:
Your website will be super-attractive, lightning-fast, fully responsive, and SEO perfected.
This popular multipurpose WordPress theme is built with Elementor, the world’s #1-page builder.
Litho-built websites are fast loading and deliver healthy SEO results.
You can start with one of XStore’s more than 110 amazing pre-built shops, or start from scratch and let Elementor or WPBakery and more than 550 pre-built blocks help you along the way, together with:
You can get this complete and highly customizable WooCommerce theme for an amazing $39.
One of the benefits of using WordPress is the number of great WordPress themes you can work with. Whatever your niche, your target audience, or your skill level may be, there’s a premium WordPress theme out there that looks and feels as though it was made, especially with you in mind.
If you’re planning to create a fresh and beautiful website for 2022, or you want to completely rebuild an existing one, or simply make some design changes, this roundup of the most popular and the best WordPress themes in the market is meant for you. And we really mean it!
This is a sponsored post.
The post 10 Top WordPress Themes for 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
We utilize relational data models to improve database performance and allow users to recreate real-world relationships. The shipping and tracking app blueprint showcases these capabilities in action, with the help of custom codeless APIs.
App blueprints are more than just templates from which to build a specific type of application. We design all of our free App Blueprints to provide one or more key functions that a developer would want to add to their application, regardless of the app’s business use.
Websites as we know them are going to change very soon. The days of text, images, and basic interactions in a 2D browser window have served us well, but virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences are getting better all the time. Developers and designers need to think beyond the browser window and prepare for an immersive future.
Many have been very skeptical about VR and AR in the past because despite grand promises about what they would achieve, they’ve mostly failed to deliver on the scale that the industry hoped for.
But it’s different this time: industry leaders like Meta, Apple, and Microsoft are pursuing a range of different mixed reality projects; they see the opportunity and are dropping hints about what’s next.
In a survey from Perkins Coie LLP and the XR Association, nearly 9 in 10 respondents said that by the year 2025, immersive technologies—including augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality — will be as ubiquitous as mobile devices.
That’s a bold prediction, but it could be our new reality.
VR and AR aren’t a logical fit for every website, and that’s fine. There’s no need to force an immersive experience on something better suited to a standard viewing experience.
But when they’re done right, 3D experiences can add a lot to your website. Check out the demo experience from Mozilla, the 3D tours from Matterport, and the immersive storytelling from Within.
Here are a few areas where these technologies shine:
Adding immersive experiences to your website will require various skills based on what you’re trying to create. Whether you’re new to web development or are a seasoned developer with many years of experience, the main difference from classic web development is that you’re switching from a 2D to a 3D experience. Development in VR/AR is much closer to developing 3D video games than creating web applications.
First of all, you need to decide on the hardware that you’re building for. Are your viewers mainly using computers, smartphones, or a headset like the Oculus Quest? Each hardware category offers a different set of capabilities for what’s possible.
Next, when we look at 3D engines and frameworks on the market, some big names like Unity, Unreal Engine, and CRYENGINE stand out. Most of these engines were spun out of game development and are based on programming languages like C, C++, or C#. While very powerful, they’re overkill for anyone trying to create a basic immersive web experience.
The good news for web developers is that the WebXR Device API is an open standard specified by the W3C with a JavaScript API that makes immersive experiences possible in the browser. So if you already have a background in web development, you can use your knowledge of JavaScript to get started.
There are some useful frameworks and platforms that make working with WebXR more convenient:
No one wants to read long blocks of text in 3D. Since we’re talking about visual experiences, it’s logical that the emphasis should be on creating content that is pleasing to the eye and interesting to look at. What works on a normal website probably isn’t going to feel natural in a 3D environment, so you need to decide what visuals you should create to suit the format.
What high-resolution images and assets do you need? Can you add videos? How about 360-degree videos? Will viewers just be looking at something, or will they be able to interact with it?
You also can’t forget about sound because it’s a critical part of immersive experiences. What music and sounds should you create to make the content come alive?
Not everyone is going to have the latest and greatest device or 5G coverage. The requirements for bandwidth and transmission quality are much higher with 3D content. A few milliseconds of latency can go unnoticed on a typical website, but in a VR/AR setting, it can make the experience laggy or unusable.
Try to optimize your content to be the highest quality it can be within a reasonable file size. If the experience starts to suffer from too many assets downloading at the same time, it’s better to create a more streamlined experience that maintains a high performance rate.
It’s important to consider your hosting infrastructure, as well. This shouldn’t be a big problem, but it is worth mentioning that you need to add new content types to your configurations, and your CDN needs to support these new types, too.
When we’re talking about getting your website ready for immersive experiences, we’re not just talking about having people scroll through your regular website in VR. That isn’t compelling for your audience.
The idea is to take some content that’s already on your website and separate it from the presentation layer so you can use it in a 3D environment or any other platform that you want. Classic content management takes place in silos, which means you cannot easily reuse the content from your website.
This separation can be achieved by using a classic database, but if you want developers and content teams to collaborate, a headless CMS is front-end agnostic and more user friendly.
Building 3D content experiences may seem intimidating, but as we’ve seen, you likely already have the web development skills necessary to get started and try out some different ideas.
What you build today will prepare you for the 3D future of tomorrow.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post How to Prepare for the Immersive Web first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
It’s that time again. Black Friday. November 26, to be exact. And the many enticing deals you’ve been looking forward to at this time of the year are here as well.
There are three types of Black Friday shoppers. Those who are successful because they have prepared. Those who are successful because they got lucky. And, those who let some good deals simply slip away.
Your best bet, of course, is to be prepared, which is the purpose of this guide.
As you go down this list, you’ll find discounts, some pretty amazing offers, a few surprises perhaps – and plenty of inspiration.
We’ve been keeping close tabs on the various Black Friday discounts and promotions, and we’ve corralled the best of the bunch for you.
Starting with:
Brizy is a fast and easy-to-use website builder for designers and agencies. Take advantage of Brizy’s Black Friday special and tap into the skills of a team that has been creating website-building tools for over 11 years.
This premier website builder gets better with each update.
Black Friday is a time to take advantage of great deals, and this year is no different.
Design or coding experience is not a requirement to use Brizy’s drag and drop visual builder.
Click on the banner to take advantage of these great Black Friday specials.
A 50% discount on any portfolio website builder would seem like a good deal. On the other hand, getting one at 50% off that enables you to quickly create a portfolio website that reflects your creative personality and will truly set you apart from the crowd is definitely worth taking advantage of.
Portfoliobox offers:
Click on the banner to find out more about this fast, affordable, and easy to work with a portfolio website builder for creatives.
wpDataTables is a popular, power-packed plugin that can manage vast amounts of data in seconds and organize it to build a table or chart the way you want.
wpDataTables features Elementor and Gutenberg integration, provides the ability to connect WordPress tables with Google API, allows cascade data filtering, and much more.
Click on the banner to take advantage of the 30% off Black Friday special.
Amelia can be a genuine time and money saver for a variety of business types. Amelia automates and streamlines a business’s booking process.
Annual and lifetime subscriptions are available.
As it is an offline builder, Mobirise does not tie you to any platform, you can host it anywhere, and you have total control over creating the website you have in mind.
Mobirise:
Mobirise is free for both personal and commercial use.
There is a difference between an “interesting” website and one whose WOW effects cause it to stand far above the competition.
Slider Revolution specializes in WOW effects that can take any website to the next level, and it can be yours on Black Friday at a 33% discount on all licenses.
The Slider Revolution package includes:
Grab the Black Friday offer now.
Digital illustrations help attract attention to and pique interest in your website.
Getillustrations.com features a package of more than 9000 commercial web and app illustrations in a wide range of topics.
The package is available at a 25% discount. Use coupon code EliteDesingers25.
Litho is a creative, modern, and highly customizable theme that can be used for any type of business niche as well as for creating eCommerce, blog, and portfolio websites.
This multipurpose Elementor WordPress theme’s features include –
Litho also features detailed online documentation and top-of-the-line customer support.
Instagram and TikTok enthusiasts, take note!
With the 8bio tool at your fingertips, you can add a clickable URL to your social media platform profiles so visitors can visit your website, product page, or any other important page.
8bio offers:
The 8bio tool can also be used for your Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube posts.
XStore is designed to work with the best page builders on the market and is fully compatible with the Elementor and WPBakery builders.
The XStore package includes
Become one of XStore’s more than 60,000+ happy customers by taking advantage of the Black Friday special.
Knowing that it’s the early bird that gets the worm, we’ve worked hard to place before you and your fellow website designers and agencies this enticing selection of the best Black Friday offers.
You will no doubt find some of the products familiar. A few might not be. In either case, the opportunities are here for you to get some great deals on some premier products.
Happy shopping!
The post Live Now: Top 10 Black Friday 2021 Deals for Designers and Agencies first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
The recent pandemic has emphasized the need for remote work. Especially for businesses that did not have remote capabilities, the need arose for reliable SaaS-based solutions to meet immediate demand. Migration to the Cloud and SaaS-based solutions has been pivotal to remote working capabilities, which is why significant IT expenditure is driven towards it.
According to Gartner, the worldwide spending on cloud-based SaaS applications was $120,686 in 2020 and will rise to $171,915 in 2022. However, integrating SaaS-based solutions into your existing system is not that easy, and several repetitive tasks increase the cost.
