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5 Tips for Designing One-Page Websites That Work

Smart design choices can help reduce the fatigue and frustration people would otherwise feel when using the web.

There are a lot of ways web designers can minimize distractions, information overload, and analysis paralysis. For instance, designing with abundant white space, shorter snippets of text, and calming color palettes all work.

One-page websites might be another design choice worth exploring.

When done right, a single-page website could be very useful in creating a simpler and more welcoming environment for today’s overwhelmed consumers.

With its diminutive structure, it would leave a unique and memorable impression on visitors. What’s more, a well-crafted one-page website would provide visitors with a clean, narrow, and logical pathway to conversion.

For those of you who use BeTheme’s pre-built sites (or are thinking about adopting them for your next site), there’s good news. In addition to the great selection of traditionally structured sites available, Be also has single-page websites for you to work with.

So, the technical aspects you’d need to master to get the one-page formula right are already taken care of.

Let’s have a look at some of the features that make single-page websites shine and how you can design them:

1. Give Visitors a Succinct Journey Through the Website and Brand’s Story

The typical business websites you design include pages like Home, About, and Contact, as well as pages that explain the company’s services or sell their products. Unless you’re building really long sales landing pages, there’s usually about 400 to 600 words on each page.

That’s still a lot of content for your visitors to get through and it can make perusing a single website an overwhelming experience. Imagine how they feel about reading through all that content when they have to do it multiple times when comparing other websites and options.

In some cases, this multi-page website structure is overkill. The information you’d otherwise fill a full page with can easily be edited down to fit a single pane or block on a one-page website and still be as useful.

Like how design and development studio Pixel Lab does it:

Notice how all the key points are hit in a concise and visually attractive manner:

The Featured Work portfolio
The About Us introduction
The FAQs
The contact form

The BeCV pre-built site is built in a similar manner (and for a similar purpose, too):

Just remember to keep a sticky navigation bar present at all times so visitors know exactly how much content there is on the page.

2. Opt For a Non-Traditional Navigation for a Uniquely Memorable Experience

Typically, the rule is that website navigation should follow one of two patterns:

Logo on the left, navigation links on the right.
Logo on the left, hamburger menu storing the navigation on the right (for mobile or desktop).

There are a number of reasons why this layout is beneficial. Ultimately, it comes down to the predictability and comfort of having a navigation be right where visitors expect it, no matter where they end up on your website.

However, with a single-page website, this is one of those rules you can bend, so long as you have a way to keep the navigation ever-present and easy to use.

There are some great examples of one-page sites that have done this, usually opting for a stylized left-aligned sidebar that contains links to the various parts of the page. Purple Orange is just one of them:

And you can use a Be pre-built site like BeHairdresser to create a similar navigation for your website:

If you’re trying to make a bold brand stand out, this is a neat layout option to experiment with.

3. Tell a More Visually Striking Story

One of the problems with building a website with WordPress is that you always have to worry about how your design decisions affect speed. Even once the code is optimized, images are usually the low-hanging fruit that have to be dealt with.

But when your website only contains one page, this means images aren’t as much of a problem (so long as you compress and resize them). It’s only when you continue to add pages, products, and galleries that you have to scale back your visual content.

So, if your brand has a strong visual identity and you want the website to show that off through images, a one-page website is a great place to do it.

Just remember to keep a good balance between text and images as Vodka A does:

There’s no reason for a liquor distribution company to mince words when the elegant product photos effectively communicate to consumers what it’s all about.

In fact, this image-heavy, single-page style would work well for any vendor selling a small inventory of products: food, beverages, subscription boxes, health and beauty products, etc. And you can use the pre-built BeBistro to carefully craft it:

4. Turn a Complex Business Idea or Offering into Something Simple to Understand

When a company sells a technical or complex solution to consumers, it can be a real struggle to explain what it does and why they should buy it.

But here’s the thing: Consumers don’t really care about all that technical stuff. Even if you were to explain how an app worked or how you use a software like Sketch or WordPress to design a website, their eyes would glaze over.

What matters most to them is that you have an effective and affordable solution that they can trust. So, why bog them down with page after page of technical specs and sales jargon?

A one-page website enables you to simplify even the most complex of solutions.

Take Critical TechWorks, for instance. It offers an advanced technological solution for the automobile industry…and, yet, this is all it needs to explain the technology at work:

If your website’s visitors are more concerned with the outcomes rather than the “how”, you’d do well to make the website and content as easy to digest as possible. And you can use a pre-built site like BeCourse to do that:

Notice how both of these sites take visitors through a small handful of sections (pages) before delivering them to the main attraction: the contact or sign-up form.

5. Capture Leads and Sales at Different Stages of the Sales Funnel

Some of your visitors will be brand new to the site and need more information before they pull the trigger. Others will already have a good idea of what they’re getting into and just need one small push to get them to take action.

With a single-page website, you can design each section to cater to the different kinds of leads and prospects that arrive there.

The top sections should be introductory in nature, providing new visitors with information they need to decide if this is an option worth pursuing. The sections further below should drill down into the remaining questions or concerns that interested prospects have.

Regardless of which section they’re looking at, your one-page site will have CTA buttons built in along the way that drive them to conversion the second they’re ready.

This will enable your site to always be prepared to convert leads, whether visitors read the first two sections or make their way through all of them until they reach the conversion point (e.g. a contact form, a checkout page, etc.).

You’ll find a nice example of this on the Cycle website, with CTAs strategically placed along the single-page’s design:

BePersonalTrainer is a good pre-built site option if you want to ensure that you include a CTA button at the perfect stopping points throughout your page:

You won’t find them at the bottom of every section, but that’s okay. You just need them whenever your visitors are seriously thinking about taking action.

What Should You Build: A Multi-Page or One-Page Website?

Although a single-page website won’t work for larger websites (especially in ecommerce), it could work well for business websites that are on the smaller side to begin with.

By centralizing all of that information into a single page, you’ll create a fresh experience that wows visitors with how succinct yet powerful both the message and offering are.

Just be careful. Many single-page websites are poorly done (which is probably why they fell out of fashion for a while).

Remember: This is not your chance to throw web design rules out the window. In fact, this will be an opportunity to clear out the fluff and the clutter that’s accumulated over the years and to return to a more scaled-back and classic approach to design.

And with the help of Be’s pre-built one-page websites, it won’t require much work on your part to make that happen.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of BeTheme –]

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

15 septembre 2020/par Service comm.

Looping Measures of Effectiveness Back to the Creative Team

Actualités, Actualités

When analysts for professional sports teams noticed that marketing promotions that included the team’s logo vastly outperformed similar creative assets that featured player imagery — something which, to the casual observer, this may simply sound like good analyst work — it showed something significant: creatives rarely receive an analytical assessment of their work.

More than half of creatives say they rarely…get qualitative performance data about the creative content

Those analysts didn’t just stumble upon that insight. The feedback loop — where someone is dedicated to evaluating the creative used in marketing campaigns and feeding the data back to designers — was the result of a concentrated effort to improve the creative process, workflow and by extension, organizational culture.

More than half (55%) of creatives say they “rarely” or “never” get qualitative performance data about the creative content they’ve produced. Less than one-in-five creatives (17%) receive such feedback “always” or “often.” That’s according to our research, as published in the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report, which was conducted in partnership with InSource, a professional association for in-house creatives.

Two Approaches to Measuring Creative Value

The 2020 In-House Creative Management Report revealed that 89% of respondents think creative work is important to meeting business objectives. Similarly, 87% said their organization is giving them the same or more credit for the business results their work delivers for the organization.

How can a creative team improve what it does for a business if they never see how their work influences market behavior?

Those statistics are encouraging since creative teams have been asked to do more and more — with the same or fewer resources — for years. However, to sustain this positive relationship with marketing and business leaders, creative teams will need to find quantitative ways to demonstrate their value. The feedback loop strengthens the strategic relationship creatives have with their business leaders.

So how can creative value be measured? Efficiency and effectiveness are the two primary approaches.

Efficiency

Measures of efficiency center on output. Efficiency aims to quantify requests, project by volume, type, requestor, and per designer, completion times, cycle times, cause of delays, and rounds of revision.

Such measures are essential for making a case for the resources the creative team needs to get the work done. In our research, most in-house creative teams are at least thinking about output metrics. This is a good start but it’s just the beginning.

Effectiveness

Measures of creative effectiveness are the next level in organizational sophistication. The creative process doesn’t end when a project has been approved. Instead, there’s a feedback loop that still needs to be completed – performance metrics must be shared with the creative team. How can a creative team improve what it does for a business if they never see how their work influences market behavior?

Importantly, the benefits of sharing performance data goes beyond process improvement. It spreads to the overall culture which strengthens the partnership between creatives and marketing.

As Brent Chiu-Watson, a product leader at Adobe, wrote, measures of efficacy lead to a “mutual interest in understanding creative effectiveness.” In turn, cross-functional collaboration improves and the whole team begins “to provide better insight through dialogue.”

3 Ideas for Looping Measures of Effectiveness Back to Creative

When marketing organizations are interested in measuring creative, there is often more emphasis on measures of output than there is effectiveness. Sometimes, what gets measured is what’s easy to measure. There are several reasons for this:

Creatives haven’t traditionally focused on metrics;
The trend of bringing creative in-house has been driven by efficiency;
Creatives don’t typically have access to performance metrics.

“There is an old adage that you can choose quality, speed or cost, but not all three. Sometimes two, but never all three,” says Adam Morgan, an executive creative director for Adobe, who contributed to the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report. “So, we say the most important thing is quality creative, but then we measure on speed and efficiency.”

Fortunately, Adam and several other big thinkers in the creative space offered some ideas for approaching this business problem.

1) Establish metrics and access in the beginning

“Two thoughts come to mind when you see creative teams not getting feedback on their work. First, does that data even exist? The marketing team might not be collecting it because they haven’t defined success metrics,” wrote Ilise Benun, a speaker, author and business coach for creative professionals at Marketing Mentor.

“Second, the marketing team has data, but they aren’t providing it. In that case, the creative team has to make it easy for the marketing team to pass that data over. Define what those metrics are at the beginning of the project, and then set up the project so that you can collect that information or have direct access to it at the end of the project.”

2) Pair creatives with analytics teams

“In general, teams that are earning their seat at the strategic table are probably also more connected to data. But I don’t think that the creative department should get swamped down in endless metrics,” says Adam.

“Use this as an opportunity to build a strategic partnership with even more departments within the organization who are already focused on measuring performance.”

3) Sharpen analytical skills of creatives

“It’s important to remember that operational metrics are key to showing the impact creative work has on the business,” says our very own Molly Clark, who heads our marketing team. “Creatives will strengthen their relationship with the business by becoming analytical creatives – the best combination of data-driven and creative.”

A Culture of Creative Feedback

The design team for the professional sports organization, at the beginning of this piece, were surprised by their analysts’ findings: most usually agreed that player imagery is visually more compelling. However, the organization built a feedback loop into the creative process that put combined analytics and creative to drive better business results.

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

9 septembre 2020/par Service comm.

3 Essential Design Trends, September 2020

Actualités, Actualités

A seasonal change is on the horizon and that always has me looking to refresh projects. This month’s design trends provide a few different ways to do that without ripping up your entire website.

Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

Animated Heroes (That Aren’t Video)

Hero headers and screens that feature video animation have been popular for a while, but more website designers are experimenting with other types of full-screen moving graphics.

What’s cool about this trend is that it can take on plenty of different forms and look a lot of different ways, meaning that no two websites are identical in this regard.

The other bonus to this trend is that you can add a full-screen animation to almost any style of design without a complete overhaul of the website. You may need a few small tweaks to create a seamless transition from one screen to the next, but it’s a quick, modern design element that you can deploy rather quickly.

Typozon uses a quick motion graphic with plenty of different brand marks to tell the story of their brand identity work. Admittedly, the animation can get a little dizzying if you look at it too long, but the bright colors on the olive background are attention-getting for sure.

Day 1 Club by Spotify opens with a lot of motion in the setup and then settles into subtle motion behind the primary call to action. Shades of black and soft movement bring everything together and help you focus on the bright red button and text overlay.

Kieran Baybutt uses multiple animations for this portfolio website. The most interesting might be on the “second screen.” A couple of things are happening here. The words change with mouse movements as does the background image. There’s also a cool hover pointer featuring portfolio elements that’s in constant motion. There’s a lot going on here, but it makes you want to click around.

Animated or Floating Circles

Circles might be one of the hottest design trends of 2020. They are in all kinds of projects and keep evolving in different ways.

Maybe part of the reason is because of the message that designers are trying to convey in these projects. Circles are associated with harmony and protection. They are used to represent unity, community, and commitment. In motion, circles can also spark feelings of motion or movement with speed determining how chaotic (or not) that movement may be.

This month’s iteration of circle trends is animated. Some circles animate in place, while others seem to float in space on the canvas.

The circles in each example have something in common though – they bring you into the design and encourage interaction with it. (That might be why this website design trend is increasing in popularity all the time.)

The circular motion for the UX+ logo actually helps draw the eye away from all the almost overwhelming animation on the left side of the split-screen design. With plenty of white space surrounding it, the constant movement is just enough to pull attention to the logo and then down the screen to important information about the event.

Katch Me uses circles that seem to float over the background video with a soft “bounce” in place. The animation changes when the mouse hovers over each circle with an expanded action and the ability to move the circle in a larger space. The circles here are actually the call-to-action buttons.

Visually, the circles for Anastasiia Afanasieva’s website look like a mashup of the above examples. There’s a rotating animation for circles that seem to float in space. You have to click through this design though to see the real brilliance in it. Each circle has a hover state that changes the background color of the website (and images in each box) to match the color displayed.

Bright Yellow Coloring

Another website design trend that might be a reflection of the state of the world is in the use of the color yellow. With a global health pandemic, design projects are leaning in to brighter, more cheerful tones to help offset the stress of the world.

For many, yellow can shine just a bit of hope and optimism into gloomier times.

While most of the projects using bright yellow as an eye-popping accent, others are going all in.

Next Big Thing AG uses yellow imagery inside of oversized cutout lettering (another website design trend this year) on a dark background. Even with the darker overall palette, the design feels bright and enticing. You almost want to dive deeper into the design to see what the image behind the letters is and what else the site contains.

Sonya Mudvex uses a full yellow background on her portfolio homepage to stop visitors in their tracks. The rest of the design features a soft gray background and plenty of yellow accents. In addition to great use of color here, there are plenty of other UX tricks in this design, including some geolocation tools if you interact with the ticket validation graphic on the screen.

Upqode uses yellow with a peachy color palette to stand out. The illustrated animations are much more lively thanks to bright coloring. The overall color palette is a bit unexpected, and that’s what makes it interesting.

Conclusion

If this month’s website design trends tell you anything, it’s that interactive elements and animation are a growing part of the conversation. Are you already using these techniques in projects? (If not, it is probably time to think about it.)

You can also see how the influence of what’s happening in the world around us impacts design as well. It can counter other emotions to create a better mental space or mirror what’s happening in the world around us.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

7 septembre 2020/par Service comm.

Real-Time Stock Data Using Marketplace’s API

Actualités, Actualités

In this time of global economic turmoil, it’s more important than it’s ever been that your financial decisions are based on accurate, up-to-date, market information.

In a world where stock price is a key confidence marker, the businesses that attract attention, secure investment, and grow, are the ones that can demonstrate their value in a wider market.

Up to now, displaying accurate market pricing has been prohibitively expensive, needing direct access to a huge dataset, and the code to mine it. So we’re delighted to introduce marketstack, a real-time market data API that’s reliable, simple to integrate with your site or app, is lightning fast, and includes a free-forever plan.

What is marketstack?

marketstack is a REST API that allows you to access stock data for public companies at 72 global exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange.

marketstack delivers real-time market data, accurate to a single minute, ensuring that the information you base your decisions on, and the information you pass on to your customers, is always up to date.

There are more than 125,000 stock tickers, from over 50 different countries; you can query stocks, or over 75 different market indices; intraday market data is included, meaning you can monitor trades that close at the end of the day; you can even retrieve data about time-zones and international currencies.

Why Choose marketstack

marketstack uses cutting-edge technology to deliver market data in an easy-to-integrate JSON format, which is lightweight and incredibly easy to dig into.

Requests are made via a simple HTTP GET call, and all requests are run through bank-quality 256-bit HTTPS encryption. Whatever code stack you’re using, whether it’s PHP, Python, Node, or plain old JavaScript, marketstack provides comprehensive documentation to get your team up to speed in mere minutes.

The highly reliable cloud infrastructure can handle anything from a few dozen requests per year, all the way up to millions of requests per day. Regardless of the scale of your project, marketstack is robust and flexible enough to handle it.

It’s Not Just About Money

marketstack isn’t just about the bulls and bears of markets, in the tech sector specifically, stock price is an indicator of wider business trends and performance.

When Apple became the first US company to reach a $2 trillion valuation, not only was its stock price central to the story, but it indicated a trend in the tech giant’s dominance that went beyond cold hard cash.

When an eccentric billionaire makes outrageous, and ill-judged comments, and tanks his company’s valuation, the fluctuations in stock price are a big part of the story.

Beyond the spin of politicians, the market index of different exchanges is an indication of what analysts with in-depth knowledge really think during an election campaign.

With over 30 years of historical data, marketstack is a history of business, particularly the burgeoning tech sector, and makes that history available with a simple to use API.

marketstack’s Rock Solid API

marketstack’s API is built on top of apilayer technology, one of the most respected, and trusted API providers in the world, with a huge amount of experience delivering data reliably. Millions of API requests can be run through the API hourly, and it still has almost 100% uptime.

Any API is only as good as the data it supplies, and marketstack’s data is supplied by numerous high-authority providers around the globe, resulting in unprecedented accuracy.

As a result, marketstack is trusted by over 30,000 companies — including Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and Credit Suisse — and 80+ universities.

Getting Started with marketstack

marketstack is entirely free for up to 1000 requests per month, with access to 1 year of historical data, as well as end-of-day data. No credit card is required to get started, and you’ll never be billed. This is the perfect option for simple integrations, or developers working on proof-of-concept builds. What we really like about marketstack is that the free package is genuinely usable. It’s not just a trial version that presses you into upgrading.

For anyone who needs more comprehensive data, packages that include market indices, technical support, and commercial use permissions, start at $9.99 per month, or just $7.99 per month when billed annually.

Head over the marketstack today to claim your free API key, and get started.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of marketstack –]

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

1 septembre 2020/par Service comm.

Top 10 Test Automation Frameworks in 2020

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

We are moving toward a future where everything is going to be autonomous, fast, and highly efficient. To match the pace of this fast-moving ecosystem, application delivery times will have to be accelerated, but not at the cost of quality. Achieving quality at speed is imperative and therefore quality assurance gets a lot of attention. To fulfill the demands for exceptional quality and faster time to market, automation testing will assume priority. It is becoming necessary for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to automate their testing processes. But the most crucial aspect is to choose the right test automation framework. So let’s understand what a test automation framework is.

What Is a Test Automation Framework?

A test automation framework is the scaffolding that is laid to provide an execution environment for the automation test scripts. The framework provides the user with various benefits that help them to develop, execute, and report the automation test scripts efficiently. It is more like a system that was created specifically to automate our tests. In a very simple language, we can say that a framework is a constructive blend of various guidelines, coding standards, concepts, processes, practices, project hierarchies, modularity, reporting mechanism, test data injections, etc. to pillar automation testing. Thus, the user can follow these guidelines while automating applications to take advantage of various productive results.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

31 août 2020/par Service comm.

Finding Your Way With Domain Mapping

Actualités, Actualités

It’s no secret that having a custom domain name is an essential piece of any company’s branding strategy. While there are a myriad of hosting plans available that offer domains like your company.webhost.com, making the shift from one of those to simply yourcompany.com is an important step.

However, your domain branding strategy need not end there. Domain mapping offers an opportunity for web developers and online business owners the ability to improve their marketing campaigns, protect their brands from competitors, cut down on costs, and develop a more efficient workflow.

What is Domain Mapping?

Domain mapping refers to how visitors to your website are directed to different domains and subdomains and what URLs will be displayed in the visitors’ browsers.

When you first set up your online business, one of the very first things that you do is register a domain name for your company website. But depending on the business, it could be wiser to actually register multiple domain names at once. This is because you will want to lease the primary domain name you plan on using in addition to all related TLDs. This way, cybersquatters will not be able to hold your domain name hostage, especially once you have grown into a more established brand.

For example, if you register the name yourcompany.com, you might also want to register yourcompany.net and yourcompany.org. Then you might set up a URL redirect so that visitors to the latter two sites will be redirected to yourcompany.com. However, with a domain redirect, visitors to yourcompany.net and yourcompany.org will be redirected to yourcompany.com, meaning the URL in their browser will appear as yourcompany.com no matter what they typed.

With domain mapping, this isn’t the case. A visitor to yourcompany.net will still see that URL in their browser even if the content is actually being hosted on yourcompany.com.

Benefits of Domain Mapping

Although domain mapping may seem a bit esoteric and complex at first, it serves several purposes and offers many benefits:

1. Make Web Addresses Easier to Remember

Imagine that your restaurant chain, Larry’s Lunches, just opened a new chain on 116th Street in New York City. Your first instinct may be to direct customers to larryslunches.com/116thstnyc, but that domain is a bit long and hard to remember. Instead, you might want to register the domain larrys116th.com for customers for that specific store.

With domain mapping, you can serve up the content from your main domain, larryslunches.com, while still having your visitors see larrys116th.com. This makes it easier to brand your sites without having to manage several different sites.

2. Boost Your Web Development Career

If you are a web developer yourself but are not admittedly well-acquainted with domain mapping already, you would do well to change that.

One of the easiest ways would be to look at online web development programs that one can take to read through documentation to get caught up to speed on how domain mapping can help their efforts and how to implement it. These kinds of programs can be more comprehensive than university courses and offer an impressive 88% job success rate for those who successfully complete the programs.

3. Shield Your Brand from Competitors

Remember, it’s a good idea to purchase several different related domains in anticipation of competitors snatching them up from you. Choosing the right domain names is essential to protecting your brand.

For example, Larry’s Lunches might want to snag larrysnyclunches.com and larrysfamouslunches.com as well. However, simply leaving those domains parked can be a bit of a waste, and managing multiple domains can be a pain in and of itself.

But with domain mapping, you can manage those domains just as easily as if they were your primary site, so you no longer need to leave them empty.

4. Save Time and Lower Development Expenses

Development isn’t cheap, and time is money. While the maintenance costs for a website are already high enough, adding in separate domains can sometimes break the bank due to the increased complexity of managing so many different moving pieces.

Domain mapping can lower expenses and save time by keeping everything tidy and in one place. By managing everything from a single WordPress installation, for example, you can push updates to all your subdomains at once, saving you from the tedium of going through each domain and making the same updates.

5. Manage Client Sites from One Place

If you’re a freelance developer or run an agency, using domain mapping for some of your clients’ sites can save you time as well. For example, if several clients want blogs, and you use the same infrastructure for them, you can easily push updates and changes to all of them at the same time. In short, domain mapping can make maintaining sites much easier and quicker.

How to Implement Domain Mapping

If you’re sold on the benefits of domain mapping, here’s a quick primer on the steps you’ll need to take to get started:

Choose a domain registrar: The ideal registrar you choose should come with a number of important features including adequate hosting for keeping your website visitor friendly, SSL certification to ensure security, 24/7 customer support, comprehensive packages that make it easy to operate your online business.
Register the domains you’re interested in: These can either be domain misspells (otherwise known as typosquatting), like youcompany.com, yourcmpany.com, etc, or related domains like yournewproduct.com, yournewlocation.com, etc. Whatever you decide to go with, you’ll need to have it registered before you can get started.
Install WordPress Multisite: WordPress is one of the easiest ways to develop websites, and that holds true for domain mapped sites as well. Plus, considering WordPress sites account for over a third of the entire internet, you can’t go wrong with the famed CMS. All you need to do is install WordPress and, once that’s installed, open wp-config.php and add define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true) above the /*.
Configure your DNS settings: Next, you’ll need to point all your name servers to your hosting account. These changes can take up to 72 hours to go into effect.
Add domains to your hosting plan: From your hosting platform, you’ll need to link your custom domains. You can usually do this from your cPanel.
Map subsites to your custom domains: Once you have your domains set up, you’ll need to link them through WordPress. To do so, simply login and navigate to Sites -> Add New. After you assign them a subdomain or subdirectory name, you can click Edit and add your custom domain. Then just hit Save Changes, and you’re good to go.

Take note that domain mapping is not necessary for transferring a domain name. When you map a domain, you’re simply telling your domain where it can find your website on the internet through having your name servers updated. When you change your name, it only affects where the domain has been resolved.

The Bottom Line

While domain mapping isn’t necessary for all websites, it can still be a major timesaver. By utilizing it properly, you can greatly improve the standing of your online business by saving time and money, making website management easier, and improving the branding of your sites.

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

26 août 2020/par Service comm.

The Most Appreciated Web Solutions of 2020

Actualités, Actualités

In this article you will find the most appreciated web solutions of 2020.

To create this list we took into account the following considerations: The popularity of the product or the service; How many users it has; How many times it was downloaded or installed; The level of efficiency; What you get for your money.

You’ll find WordPress themes and plugins, an affordable logo design contest, logo creators, website builders, web development services, and even more. Let’s get started…

1. WooCommerce Support

WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, being used by all kind of merchants, both small and large companies.

WPcustomify is 100% focused on WooCommerce, having huge experience. They will help you with everything you need:

WooCommerce Plugin Integration
Configuration Support
Support Services

Get in touch with them and let the experts manage all the issues and errors of your WooCommerce. Make the best out of your store, and help it get more traffic and convert better, by using the experience of WPcustomify.

2. actiTIME

Design and development projects require a high degree of precision and organization. To meet desired goals on time and budget, teams should adhere to initial estimates and deadlines impeccably. Besides, to be efficient and productive, they need to manage tasks and monitor progress in a systematic way.

actiTIME can assist developers and their managers in attaining these objectives effortlessly. As a high-quality and user-friendly timesheet app, it allows users to keep a detailed record of hours spent on multiple tasks and, in this way, collect data for consequent client billing and invoicing, as well as performance and productivity analysis.

However, actiTIME is more than just another time tracker – it includes powerful project management functionality that can help you:

Manage project scope by adding new tasks and creating a detailed work breakdown;
Allocate tasks to different team members;
Set up estimates, deadlines and budgets;
Review current work progress and modify task statuses on the Kanban board or in a simple list format;
Receive notifications whenever the risk of cost and time overrun arises.

actiTIME’s flexibility makes it an excellent choice for both individuals and teams of any size. The tool can be configured to meet varying management needs and integrated with many other useful apps through Zapier or API. In addition, you can always use the actiTIME timer through the Chrome extension in Jira, Github and GitLab, which will allow you to track hours without any distractions from the primary work process. Sign up for a free actiTIME trial and bring your productivity to the next level.

3. Total

Total is one of the most complete WordPress theme that you can buy in 2020, being filled with 80+ builder modules, 40+ premade demos that you can install with 1-click, and over 500+ styling options.

This theme has over 43k happy users and it is used by some of the best websites in the world.

This theme is developed and maintained by WordPress experts that have been a part of the WP community for over 10 years.

4. Webdesign Toolbox

Webdesign Toolbox will become a web design tools encyclopedia, currently featuring 965 resources in 78 different categories. Everybody was waiting for such a place and now it is live and heavily updated each month.

I just found out about this place and I can say that it is super. Having all the tools and services in a single place, very well categorized is super helpful. Now you don’t have to lose time on search engines and on ads (who pays more will get in front), you have everything at your disposal, in front of you.

Using Webdesign Toolbox is super simple to find the right web tools and services, just browse the website.

5. TestingBot

Trusted by some of the most innovative companies in the world (Microsoft, Disney, FOX, Grammarly, and many others), and with over 8 year’s experience in this market, TestingBot is a super solution that you can use for automated and manual testing.

It supports cross browser testing, live testing, real device testing, and tons of other things.

Start a free trial and see TestingBot in action.

6. Codester

Codester is a huge marketplace where designers and developers will find tens of thousands of premium PHP scripts, websites templates, apps, plugins, and much more.

Always check the flash sale section where hugely discounted items are being sold.

7. Taskade

Taskade is a super technologically advanced remote workspace (works from anywhere where there’s an internet connection) that you and your team can use for chatting, organizing, and getting things done.

You can build a workspace from scratch using the included editor, use a ready-made templates, or edit the one you want.

This collaboration platform is free to use for 10 projects.

8. Bonsai Invoice Templates

Bonsai is a the best suite of software for freelancers, being the top choice of tens of thousands of freelancers from all over the world.

They help you with everything you need, and they even provide invoice templates for freelance professionals – designer, developer, writer, marketer, contractor, consultant, photographer, etc.

9. Mobirise

Mobirise is the most powerful offline website builder in 2020, being loaded with 3500+ awesome website templates, with sliders, galleries, forms, popups, icons, and even more.

Use it to create a unique website, no coding or design skills needed.

10. Goodie

Goodie was created by a team of experts that have super experience in the web development world.

This service is used mostly by web designers that need a reliable web development partner, and by customers that need to amplify their online presence.

11. MailMunch

MailMunch helps you create eye-catching forms and landing pages in seconds – no coding or design skills required!

It is quick to set up, easy to learn, and packs a punch with built-in email marketing features and integrations with any email marketing service of your choice.

Boost conversions by up to 400% with this complete lead generation software.

12. Email Template Builder

You want to let your website visitors create awesome emails and pages directly on your website? With Unlayer it is possible and it is super simple to implement this feature on your website.

This plug and play email editor and page builder can be embedded it in 5 minutes on your website.

13. Rank Math SEO

Every WordPress website needs a powerful SEO plugin to take care of it. There is a huge difference between these plugins, some being extremely efficient.

One such efficient SEO plugin is Rank Math. This free WordPress plugin will make your website rank higher and get more traffic from your existing content.

Get it now, after a basic configuration the plugin runs autonomously.

14. Schema Pro

Schema markups will make your website rank higher and get more traffic. To quickly add them, use Schema Pro. You press 1 button, and you select all the pages on which you want the schema markups to be added. It is so simple.

15. Landingi

Landingi is a brilliant landing page builder that will help you create awesome designs with no experience, no coding skills and no design ideas.

Create a landing page that converts and which is engaging, with Landingi is a simple task for everybody.

16. CollectiveRay

CollectiveRay is specialized in providing super in-depth tutorials and articles for WordPress, hosting, themes, tools, and all kind of platforms.

You should always browse it whenever you are looking for detailed and accurate information about all kinds of stuff.

17. ContentSnare

ContentSnare is the smart way to collect content. Why is that? Because it is an automated service that will help you quickly gather content from your customers and partners, without losing time on this aspect of your business.

Configure it in a few minutes and right after ContentSnare will be on autopilot, collecting materials in your place.

18. XStore – The King-Size WooCommerce Theme

XSTORE is the most complete WooCommerce theme that you can get in 2020. It has included over 90 shop designs, and it also includes several plugins that are worth $407.

Get it now and build a high converting store.

19. FixRunner

FixRunner is your personal WordPress support team that will take care of your website 24/7.

They offer several services:

One-time fix – As the name says, they will fix a problem that you encounter on your WordPress website.
Several packages for WordPress support and maintenance
Speed optimization service
Custom development
Malware removal
Site upgrade
White label for agencies

Let the experts help you with everything you need so your WordPress website can get the best conversion rates.

20. Heroic Table of Contents Plugin

Heroic Table of Contents is the easiest way to add a table of contents to your WordPress website.

Are you using tables of contents? Everybody loves them, in articles and on websites.

Get your website to the next level with Heroic Table Of Contents, it’s free.

21. WrapPixel

WrapPixel is a popular name in the React templates world. They offer high-quality themes that look awesome and which are lightning fast.

Browse WrapPixel and pick what you need for your projects.

22. Pixpa

Pixpa is a professional website builder that people use to create all-in-one websites: a store, a blog, and a client gallery.

The editor is filled with tons of designs and elements, and it is super simple to use.

23. Astra

Astra is the fastest growing theme of all time, having almost 1 million users.

Why does everybody love Astra? Because it has pixel-perfect included designs, it is fast, SEO optimized, it is simple to use and configure, and it is optimized for conversions.

24. uKit

Meet a very affordable and convenient website builder uKit. It allows you to quickly kickstart your online presence. Prices start from 2.5 USD/month, you get a stable hosting, unlimited storage space, and a free technical domain. Lots of colorful up-to-date templates, responsive technical support, and the ability to connect your external domain. You can try it for free on a 14-day trial – no credit card required.

25. Fotor Online Photo Editor

Fotor is an online photo editor that is used by tens of thousands of web designers, online entrepreneurs, marketers, and people that have an online presence. Creating graphics and pictures that are engaging and converting is simple with Fotor, no need to have any design skills.

The interface will guide you every moment.

You can use Fotor also as a background remover.

26. stepFORM

stepFORM is a first-class freemium service for building forms, quizzes, and various online surveys. The whole process becomes seamless and takes a few minutes because due to the visual intuitive interface no programming skills are needed. With stepFORM, you can add a calc to your website, enable online payments, manage your orders with built-in CRM, and more. Try it out today! Free!

27. Opinion Stage Facebook Quiz

OpinionStage is a brilliant quiz maker that you can use with zero experience and zero design skills to create high-engaging quizzes.

Use the included editor and the beautiful elements to start designing your own content.

28. SuperbWebsiteBuilders.com

SuperbWebsiteBuilders.com focuses on reviewing and comparing website builders that refer to various business niches and make it possible to cover a broad spectrum of web design tasks. This information will be of great help to users looking for a professional web building platform to adhere to their needs. The resource also contains ratings and examples of websites created with popular website builders.

29. pCloudy

pCloudy is the right service to use for mobile app testing from anywhere and anytime. It has over 100k happy users and it is used by top companies like Philips, Honeywell and Jio.

Start a free trial to see pCloudy in action.

30. Bonsai Contract Templates

Bonsai is offering contract templates that will help you save time and look like a huge corporation.

You will find tons of templates to choose from, you will have the possibility to e-sign the contracts, and use automated reminders. It is super simple to use Bonsai for generating the right contracts for your projects.

31. uSocial

uSocial is an elegant, lightweight social media icon design tool. Don’t waste time on manual assembling of icons or ordering them from freelancers – now you can design them yourself with uSocial. Make them float, follow the user as they scroll, or simply make them bigger and/or styled in the theme of your website.

32. Controlio

Controlio will help you monitor your employees’ PC activity from anywhere, being the first choice of both small companies and enterprises.

Improve your company security and productivity by using this technologically-advanced software.

Start a free 14-day trial to see Controlio in action.

33. Wix2WP.Pro

Wix2WP.Pro is the all-in-one website migration platform that makes it possible to successfully transfer Wix-powered websites to WordPress. The service is a perfect solution for newbies as well as for web design pros, who lack time to handle the migration process independently. They employ qualified pros, who are ready to tackle all the special nuances of the website transfer procedure with precise attention to details.

34. WhatFontIs

WhatFontIs is the best font finder that you can use in 2020 to identify fonts for free, from any picture and from any website (or email).

This is the only software that has a huge database (over 620k indexed fonts) and which can identify both free and paid fonts, including Google Fonts.

Identify fonts like pros with WhatFontIs.

35. FoxMetrics

FoxMetrics is a super smart cloud-based web analytics platform that empowers businesses to collect, enrich, transform, and explore their mobile, web, and offline customer journey data.

It is much better than everything else.

36. Creative Tim

Creative Tim creates some of the best React, Vuejs, Angular themes, UI Kits, and elements.

They offer both free and paid stuff, take a look on what they offer. Once you use a Creative Tim product, you never go elsewhere.

37. SiteBuilders.PRO

When it comes to moving your website from one website builder or CMS to another, hiring the best SiteBuilders.Pro specialists will surely be an advantage. The platform has rich experience in transferring websites between popular web design systems. What they offer is text and graphic content transfer, web store data import, manual design replication along with SEO, web design and copywriting services.

38. uCalc

uCalc is a real catch for those who don’t want to splash out on a developer or web designer to build a calculator or form for their website. The service provides you a library of attractive thematic templates and basic elements that you can add, delete, modify, and duplicate. Plus, you can connect the form/calculator with CRM systems. Try it out for yourself!

39. UPQODE

UPQODE is an eCommerce development agency based in the US. The company offers cost-effective services for all types of businesses. They use Shopify, WordPress and Woocommerce platforms to design user-friendly websites.

In addition to this, the agency offers digital marketing services. These include Google Ads setup, social media advertising, conversion optimization, online store optimization and eCommerce SEO solutions.

UPQODE comprises a team of experts who offer support services for eCommerce platforms with complex functionalities.

40. IP Geolocation API

Abstract is an online tool that will help you get the location of any IP with a word-class API serving city, region, country and lat/long data.

There are over 10,000 developers using Abstrat’s APIs because:

It is easy to implement and maintain
It has speed and it can scale
This tool has reliable uptime and great support

41. Moderated group chat for live Q&A and Web Events

RumbleTalk will help you add a moderated chat on your website for free, in no time. The platform is filled with tons of features that you will love.

42. WordPressToWix.PRO

WordPressToWix.PRO focuses on ensuring easy, convenient and fast website transfer from WordPress to Wix. The platform also offers quality project promotion and preservation of search engine positions upon the completion of the task. The team of proficient web designers will gladly assist you with all the steps of the procedure, ensuring a top notch result.

43. uCoz

Get your online presence started with uCoz – a time-tested website builder that already powers millions of websites worldwide. It gives you the complete control over the code, and yet simplicity of the visual editor and a solid pre-built base. It offers you full creative freedom. Create the website of your dreams now, and for free with uCoz!

44. HTMLtoWordPress.PRO

When it comes to reliable, safe and professional HTML to WordPress website migration, it makes sense to contact HTMLtoWordPress.PRO experts. This is a team of professionals, who possess niche-specific knowledge and can boast years of expertise. This guarantees a safe and quick result that matches up to client requirements.

45. Blabber

Downloading the Blabber WordPress theme, you get an all-inclusive pack of tools and designs apt for the launch of a blog, online magazine, newspaper, or any other content-rich online resource. This is an ever-growing WordPress theme. It features a collection of 20+ homepage demos, which a new design added to the collection every week. The theme is fully based on the Elementor page builder and features full compatibility with a variety of WordPress plugins. It’s easy to set up the Blabber theme even if you are not a design or coding expert. The theme offers a rich selection of ready-to-go page sand layout styles, which you may adjust according to your specific demands.

46. FC United

If you are looking for a ready-made WordPress theme that can become a rock-solid foundation for your sports-related website, then FC United will handle this job perfectly well. The theme is ready to be used for the launch of football and soccer clubs, as well as basketball and NFL web projects. The multi-functional layout of the theme includes all tools and features that you may need for the launch of a professional sports website. This includes match reports, league tables, team and player profiles with stats, outstanding galleries and shortcodes, and more. Whenever it’s needed, the theme can be enhanced with the eCommerce features owing to its full compatibility with WooCommerce.

47. Craftis

If you are looking forward to launching handcraft services and goods websites, then Craftis WordPress theme will perfectly suit for this purpose. This is a multi-functional ready-made design featuring a collection of 10+ homepage demos under the hood. The theme is compatible with the Elementor page builder, which lets you apply all the necessary changes to the pre-built page in the intuitive visual mode. The theme also features a selection of ready-made pages that are suited for many different purposes. Using the Craftis theme, you may start selling online without any difficulties. The theme is also compatible with the Elegro Crypto Payment plugin that is perfectly suited for the launch of web stores.

Conclusion

There are lots of super-efficient and easy to use tools in this article. Make a schedule starting with today and start testing them.

Many times, simple solutions like this ai logo maker can make wonders for your website. Take your time to see these solutions in action.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of Mekanism –]

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

21 août 2020/par Service comm.

How to Integrate AI Into Your Toolset

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Artificial Intelligence is the use of computers or machines that have been created to work and react like humans. Some of the computers that have AI, are designed to include speech recognition, and learn user behaviours so they can predict activities or decisions before they happen.

AI creates a bridge to a new kind of interface, making work processes easier for businesses and customers alike.

Why is AI Important?

There are constant AI technological advances being made, so why not make the most of them and start integrating them into your toolset today? Read on to find out just why AI is important and how you can benefit from it in your work too.

Lower Costs

By integrating Artificial Intelligence into your toolset, you can stand to both save and earn more money. AI will leave you spending less time on various aspects of website management and development, freeing some of your time up and allowing you to finish websites faster. It will also leverage your set of skills and allow you to build greater sites that people will be willing to pay more money for.

Improve Customer Experience

Artificial Intelligence can be used to analyse data in much more depth than the human eye, so will greatly improve the customer experience. It will allow a more personalised and streamlined experience that users will be grateful for. By integrating AI into your toolset, you will soon learn about certain trends and patterns that AI picks up and utilise this with future sites you build, as well as being able to make suggestions to improve the customer journey on the site.

It’s The Future

With so many devices in our everyday lives tuning in to AI, it’s important websites are no different. Just look around many homes and you will likely see a device such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home. Phone’s have Siri or Bixby and many laptops have AI systems such as Cortana. As our technology continues to develop, websites need to do this too. Soon we will expect everything to be integrated and be able to control websites in a similar way to our AI devices with voice control and recognition.

How To Integrate AI Into Your Toolset

Chat Bots

One popular example of AI that is integrated into many different websites now, is the chat bot. A feature on a number of major sites, chat bots allow customers to ask and receive answers to questions without an employee having to take time out of their day to answer menial questions that they get asked all the time. The use of AI cuts out the middleman and recognises certain phrases and words to give the most relevant and comprehensive answer.

The first chatbots used to rely on simple, pre-programmed conversational pathways, but these had disappointing and often irrelevant results. More recently they use sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) systems which are a lot more complex and don’t follow just a scripted path, but allow for more meaningful conversations.

Sketch to Code

If you’ve just started in web design, or there are certain elements you are still learning about, AI can help with “sketch to code”. This clever piece of AI can transform a handwritten note, sketch or diagram into a valid HTML mark-up code that maintains itself. This can work from something as simple as a new design for a quote system, to something more complex.

Background Systems

AI can work in the background of a site in the run up to events and collect key aspects such as website analytics. Once this data is complete, the AI can take final instructions from you such as the content, theme and color preference and create a design from scratch that it thinks will perform the best due to the intelligence and knowledge it has been gathering in the background.

Voice Recognition

Back in 2012, the W3C Community introduced the Web Speech API specification with the aim of enabling speech recognition and synthesis in modern browsers. At present, Google Chrome is the only browser that has introduced this, however there is a HTML5 Speech Recognition API will allows JavaScript to have access to a browser’s audio stream and to convert it into text.

It’s important to get up to speed with voice recognition API’s as it’s predicted voice control will be huge in the future. If populating websites, think about how people speak and be sure to include some long-tail keywords that sound more natural. This will help those sites to rank when voice control is adopted more widely.

Adobe Sensei

Adobe Sensei is an AI and machine learning framework that is powering Adobe tools. It is a handy option to add to your toolkit to manage and work on your files.

If you are sourcing images for a website in Adobe Stock, there are over 100 million assets to sift through. Adobe Sensei uses AI and deep learning to understand what exact objects are within an image as well as deeper components such as the aesthetic quality, composition, color palette and even the emotional concept behind the images. This means it can quickly find the image most matched to your needs, saving you hours of time you would have spent sorting through to find the image you want.

Yossarian

Yossarian is a great tool that allows you to craft mood boards. With an aim to generate new ideas faster, it cites itself as “discovery with a twist.” Yossarian uses AI when creating mood boards to return “diverse and unexpected concepts” that share loose associations with what you have searched for, allowing you to be more creative. It will source different ideas and inspiration around what you are searching for, including many you might not have thought of associating with your initial search term.

Brandmark

If you create logos and design templates within your work, Brandmark logo maker is a great AI tool to add to your library. They cite themselves as the most advanced AI logo design tool on the market at the moment. Whether logo creation is something you currently offer, or something you are looking to do, this AI tool can make it easier.

Autodraw

Autodraw is another useful tool you can use for design jobs, where you draw a rough sketch and it will turn it into a neat graphic. This is a handy one to use in association with the concept of sketch to code above. It pairs the magic of machine learning with drawings to help you create professional looking graphics and visuals, quickly.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

5 août 2020/par Service comm.

How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and SEO

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Contentful; Webster’s Dictionary defines “contentful” as… not found. Clearly someone made up this word, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

The world of user experience metrics is moving quickly, so new terminology is needed. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of a number of metrics measuring the render time of content on a web page.

What is Largest Contentful Paint?

Google defines LCP as “the render time of the largest content element visible within the viewport.” For what we are talking about in this blog, we will consider “content” to be an image, typically a JPEG or PNG file. In most cases, “largest” points to a hero image that is “above the fold” and is one of the first images people will notice when loading the page. Applying optimization to this largest content is critical to improving LCP.

It is probably more instructive to view LCP relative to other metrics. For example, First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Visually Complete book end LCP.

First Contentful Paint (FCP): measures the time from when the page starts loading to when any part of the page’s content is rendered on the screen. (lab, field)
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures the time from when the page starts loading to when the largest text block or image element is rendered on the screen. (lab, field)
Visually Complete: measures the time at which a customer will perceive the web page as looking complete.

Each metric has its pros and cons, but LCP is a happy medium. LCP marks when web page loading starts to have a substantial impact on user experience.

In Google’s opinion, to provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading. Poor values are anything greater than 4 seconds.

How Does Largest Contentful Paint Impact Lighthouse Scores and SEO?

LCP is now part of several “Core Web Vitals” scores that Google will measure in its ranking algorithm. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome.

In the case of the overall Google Lighthouse score, LCP represents 25% weighting on the performance score of Lighthouse version 6.0. This makes LCP the most important Core Web Vitals metric in determining the performance score.

While Google has indicated that content is still the most important factor in SEO ranking, a better user experience (as measured by Core Web Vitals) will generate higher rankings in a crowded field. If there are many websites competing for the top search engine spots, then Largest Contentful Paint will play a critical factor in rankings.

How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint

Now that you know that LCP is important, what can you do to improve it by making content load faster? Google provides a number of suggestions, but the most effective technique is to optimize content for the device requesting it.

For example, a website includes an 800kb JPEG image that is intended for high resolution desktops. On a smartphone, that would be optimized down to less than 100kb, with no perceptible impact on quality. LCP can improve by more than 60% — or several seconds — through this single optimization.

Find Savings in Largest Contentful Paint by using Image Speed Test

Image Speed Test is a great tool offered by ImageEngine.io that provides an analysis of LCP improvement opportunities. Just paste in the URL of the web page you are interested in optimizing, and the test will show you:

Image Payload Reduction
Speed Index
Largest Contentful Paint
Page Load Time (Visually Complete)

It also provides a video of the web page loading with and without optimizations. Finally, it analyses each image to provide an estimate of payload savings. In this case, the “largest content” on the page is this image. With optimizations, the image payload is reduced by 94%. That delivers a huge improvement in LCP.

How Does ImageEngine Improve LCP

ImageEngine is an image content delivery network (CDN) service that makes image optimization simple. Basically, for each image on the page, the image CDN will:

Detect the device model requesting the web page;
Optimize the image in terms of size, compression, image format;
Deliver via a CDN edge server that is geographically closest to the user.

ImageEngine improves web performance for every image on the page, including the largest. You can learn more about ImageEngine here, and also sign up for a free trial.

Best Practices: Preconnect

In addition to using an image CDN like ImageEngine, a few other best practices can improve LCP. Using the resource hints to provide a preconnect for your content can streamline the download process.

For example, putting the following link statement in the HTML will accelerate the download process. The link statement will make the browser connect to the third party as early as possible so that download can start sooner. ImageEngine’s optimizations make each image download smaller and faster, but preconnect save time in the connection phase.

Best Practices: Minimize Blocking JavaScript and CSS

When JavaScript or CSS is “blocking” it means that the browser needs to parse and execute CSS and JavaScript in order to paint the final state of the page in the viewport.

Any website today relies heavily on both JavaScript and CSS, which means that it is almost impossible to avoid some render blocking resources. On a general note: be careful with what kind of CSS and JavaScript is referenced inside the <head> element. Make sure that only the strictly necessary resources are loaded in <head>. The rest can be deferred or loaded asynchronously.

When looking to improve the LCP specifically, there are some practices worth looking into more deeply.

Inline Critical CSS

It is not an easy task, but if the browser can avoid making a request to get the CSS needed to render the critical part of the page – usually the “above the fold” part – the LCP is likely to occur earlier. Also you will avoid content shifting around and maybe even a Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC).

The critical CSS — the CSS needed by the browser to set up the structure and important styles of the part of the page shown above the fold — should in-inlined. This inlined CSS may also refer to background images, which of course should also be served by an Image CDN.

Do Not Use JavaScript to (lazy) Load Images

Many modern browsers natively support lazy loading, without the use of JavaScript. Because images usually are heavily involved in the performance of LCP, it is best practice to leave image loading to the browser and avoid adding JavaScript in order to lazy load images.

Lazy loading driven by JavaScript will add additional latency if the browser first has to load and parse JavaScript, then wait for it to execute, and then render images. This practice will also break the pre-parser in the browser.

If an image CDN is used to optimize images, then the benefits of lazy loading become much smaller. Especially large hero images that are above the fold have a large impact on LCP and will not benefit from being lazy loaded with JavaScript. It is best not to make JavaScript a blocking issue for rendering images, but rather rely on the browser’s own ability to select which images should be lazy loaded.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine –]

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

21 juillet 2020/par Service comm.

Grab Free SSL Certificates From ZeroSSL

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Like it or not, we’re slowly edging towards a two-tier web: those sites that are secure, and…everything else.

There was a time on the web, when we didn’t have SSL certificates, and lots of people’s data got stolen. To address the problem, and regain users’ trust SSL certificates were introduced to secure sites handling sensitive data. And because they were initially a niche technology, you paid through the nose for them.

(An SSL certificate, for those that don’t know, is the difference between http:// and https://)

Then, thanks in part to privacy initiatives, and in part to high-profile data breaches, a few big players decided that all data should be protected. And the next thing you know, Google’s using SSL certificates as a ranking factor. And then suddenly browsers are warning people that non-SSL certified sites are insecure and they should “Get Out of Here!” And before long your hobby blog about cat-friendly board games is being billed hundreds of dollars a year just to be seen on the web.

Choosing whether to jump on the SSL bandwagon is simple: you have to have one. Finding an affordable SSL certificate, now that’s a challenge.

Most hosting companies will provide you with an SSL certificate as an add-on, and they’ll charge you anything up to $200 per year for it.

That’s why we’re blown away by ZeroSSL, because ZeroSSL is the first practical opportunity to grab an SSL certificate for your site, for free!

Get an SSL Certificate for Free

Now, it must be said that ZeroSSL isn’t the first place to offer a free SSL certificate. Plenty of hosts offer a “free” SSL certificate for the first year, when you pay for premium hosting. And there’s Let’s Encrypt which offers free certificates if you can work out how to access them.

ZeroSSL is just the first place to offer a genuinely free SSL certificate that you don’t need a post-grad degree in server engineering in order to use.

Get a Free SSL Certificate from ZeroSSL

Using ZeroSSL’s free-forever plan you can register three 90-day certificates entirely free. You’ll never need to pay for them, just renew every few months.

ZeroSSL also offers a variety of packages for simplifying your SSL management. The Basic package for example starts at $8/month and offers unlimited 90-day certificates, and even three 1-year certificates so you can renew annually and forget about them the rest of the time.

ZeroSSL also scales; if you need unlimited 1-year certificates — because you have, erm, unlimited websites? — that’s possible too.

Where ZeroSSL Excels

ZeroSSL offers a number of benefits over its competitors.

Firstly there’s the full-featured management console, that makes SSL management transparent. It sounds like a little thing, but with many other suppliers the first thing you know about your SSL certificate expiring is your site breaking.

ZeroSSL…makes managing your certificates…insanely easy.

ZeroSSL has an easy-to-use REST API, which can be used with the language of choice: PHP, Ruby, ASP, anything. It makes managing your certificates for multiple sites insanely easy.

Verifying SSL certificates can be confusing, and technically difficult. But ZeroSSL streamlines the process with automatic CSRs and one-step email validation (even for multiple domains) — considerably faster and easier than industry standard DNS validation. There’s even a one-click check to make sure your certificate is installed correctly.

Most importantly, ZeroSSL offers superb technical support on all of its paid plans. So if you’re one of the many people who started reading this post without fully understanding what an SSL certificate is, you can be confident that if you run into difficulties getting set up, there’s someone available 24/7 to dig you out of the hole.

Getting Started with ZeroSSL

If by now you’re planning to try ZeroSSL, the best place to start is the free-forever plan. ZeroSSL allows you to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time, so it makes sense to start with the no-credit-card option and upscale if you need it.

Using ZeroSSL’s dashboard you can create a free 90-day SSL certificate in minutes, and the step-by-step installation instructions will guide you all the way through.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection

ZeroSSL auto-generates certificates in different formats depending on your choice of platform, to speed up installation.

You can register certificates for multiple domains — you will have to verify each domain individually, but it’s simple to setup. Premium plan users can even use wildcards, allowing you to secure a site with multiple sub-domains, from a single certificate.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection and are the option that most site owners will come to rely on.

If you’re running an agency and you’re responsible for maintaining multiple client sites, ZeroSSL is made for you. ZeroSSL’s dashboard gives you one central location to monitor the status of all of your SSL certificates, and you can set expiry reminders to notify you by email when a certificate is about to expire.

Automated SSL Renewal with ZeroSSL

If that sounds too much work, and you’d like to automate your SSL certificates, ZeroSSL has you covered.

ZeroSSL works with both its own dedicated ACME Certbot, and more than ten other third-party ACME clients to fully automate your SSL certificates absolutely free, on a rolling 90-day schedule.

If you really know what you’re doing, you might even consider the ZeroSSL’s REST API. It enables certificate creation, validation, renewal, and management using HTTPS Get calls and JSON responses. The API handles millions of requests per month using 256-bit bank-level HTTPS encryption. You can access the API for free, and the Pro plan offers unlimited access.

Go Get Certified

There are millions of sites that drop traffic every month because they lack an SSL certificate.

Whatever your site, it’s not a question of whether you need an SSL certificate, it’s how you can affordably manage to create, install, and monitor a certificate.

ZeroSSL solves all of the problems of SSL certificate management, and for the majority of users, its free-forever plan is all you’ll ever need.

Head over to zerossl.com today to boost your traffic with a free SSL certificate.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ZeroSSL –]

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

14 juillet 2020/par Service comm.