For decades Artificial Intelligence has been a focus of best-selling science fiction authors and an antagonist for blockbuster Hollywood movies. But AI is no longer relegated to the realm of science fiction, it inhabits the world around us. From the biggest enterprise companies to plucky startups, businesses everywhere are building and deploying AI at incredible speed.
In fact, open source allows anyone with a laptop to build impressively good AI models in a day.
Creating and sending business proposals can be a lot of work. However, if you have the right tools and knowledge, you can quickly create and send high-converting proposals that your clients will love.
This article will explain how to create a fantastic business proposal that looks great and gets signed quickly. Although we’re focussed on design, our tips apply to every industry and type of business.
One of the most common mistakes people make is starting the proposal by talking about themselves.
You might be surprised to know that clients spend the most time on the introduction chapter, so it’s essential to use it right. You need to set the right tone by explaining to your clients how your solution will help them achieve their goals.
They want to hear the benefits and feel assured that you’re the best choice for them. If you start the proposal by talking about your company and the values you believe in, you’ll lose the attention of your clients.
In most cases, the clients have already researched you and know the points you make in your PR releases.
Once you explain your process and the time scales, you can introduce your team and talk about the company. Just make sure it’s short and sweet.
Sending a one-page proposal will only confuse your clients and won’t incentivize them to reach out. The best way to format your proposal is to create six sections.
This should include:
You need to showcase what their future could look like if they work with you, listing all the benefits as well as explaining the next steps. You need to write down what happens if they don’t agree with some parts of the proposal, what will happen when you reach an agreement, how much they have to pay, and more.
Be clear on your follow-up process to speed things up.
If you’re someone who fires up MS Word and hopes for the best, your proposals probably don’t get a lot of traction. That’s because you’re spending too much time reinventing the wheel. The best jumping-off point for your proposal strategy is choosing the right app. It will help you automate and speed up the whole process.
Different solutions suit different people, but some of the features you might want include:
The digital signature option helps you get your proposals signed faster and turns your proposals into legally binding documents. This significantly reduces the agreement time since your clients no longer have to print out your documents, scan them and send them back.
Speed up your payment process by choosing the proposal software that has a payment option that allows clients to pay as soon as they agree to your terms and conditions. It can significantly decrease the time it takes to get paid.
For an even more straightforward sales process, select a proposal tool that has native integrations with your sales CRM and other sales tools.
Proposal analytics can help you in the follow-up process. They show when your proposal was opened, on which device, and how much time the client spent on each of the sections.
The content library lets you save any part of the content (text, pictures, videos, terms and conditions, pricing table) for easier access in the future—no more copy and pasting huge chunks of text.
In order to be able to create any documents with your proposals software, their editor needs to be very easy to use. If the editor requires design experience, look for a better one.
When it comes to the price section, there are two significant things you need to look out for: the name of the section and the format of your price.
Naming your pricing section pricing, expenses, or something along those lines cheapens your proposals and makes it seem like a regular invoice. Try naming the section ROI or Investment. It will evoke positive feelings with your clients because if they think of working with you as an investment, they will know that a return on investment is a part of the deal.
The way you format your prices won’t make or break your deal but can help you speed up the proposal process. Firstly, you need to figure out if you’re going to charge by the hour, based on the value of the project, based on the commission, or something else.
Once you reach a decision, you have to format the prices in an easy-to-understand and short way. Many companies try to upsell their clients at the very start of their business relationship and create proposals with three different packages.
We believe that the way you present your prices should be the same as the way doctors prescribe medicine. You need to be the authority on your prices and tell the client what type of package fits their needs. If you leave it up to your client to pick the right package, it will just lead to confusion, and you’ll have to do the extra work to explain the difference to them.
Web-based business proposals speed up the signing process. If you make your proposals printable, it will lengthen the time your clients take to agree to your terms and sign them. Make sure your proposals are web-based and have a digital signature option.
Another tip is to send your proposal as quickly as possible. As soon as you meet with your client and hear them out, start working on your proposal.
Our last tip is to send your proposal at the beginning of the week. If you send it on a Friday, it will negatively impact the time it takes to get your proposal signed.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 4 Tips For Getting Design Proposals Signed Faster 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.
Yesterday’s creativity won’t keep pace with tomorrow’s requirements; businesses need speed and agility without sacrificing creative quality.
“The creativity that was needed in the past is not the creativity that is needed today,” according to Matthew Rayback, a creative director at Adobe. He’s not talking about the function of creativity but rather about the process of creative management in a marketing context.
What is needed today? Speed and agility without sacrificing quality.
Why? Because the pace of change has accelerated. As Rex Salisbury, a deal partner for the venture firm a16z noted early in the pandemic, “Businesses of all kinds are experiencing two years’ worth of digitization compressed into months.”
This accelerated digital transformation has put pressure on marketing teams to turn campaigns around faster. In turn, that places pressure on creative teams to generate the requisite creative for those campaigns. Leaders need to sharpen their awareness of the unfolding creative management trends to keep pace. To that end, below are five such trends to watch in 2022.
Companies have been building in-house creative teams for the better part of a decade. A 2018 study by Forrester Research and the In-House Agency Forum (IHAF) found the number of in-house teams has grown 22% in the last ten years or so. As The Wall Street Journal reported, more than half of advertisers (64%) have shifted their creative organizations to an in-house team.
According to a more recent version of that same study, the in-housing movement didn’t stop throughout the pandemic. It revealed, “80% of respondents said they have brought more marketing assignments in-house since the onset of the pandemic, with 50% saying the increase was directly triggered by the events of the past two years.”
Businesses seem well-satisfied with the results because the urge to in-house is poised to grow beyond creative teams. For example, a recent survey by the customer intelligence company Axciom found about 50% of respondents believe the “in-housing is currently a top marketing objective, and 40% expect it will remain a top priority in the coming years.”
Despite the in-housing trend, there is still opportunity for agencies, consultants, and freelancers, particularly those with specialized skills. Even the consumer-packaged goods giant Proctor & Gamble, a leading example of brands bringing marketing and creative teams in-house, still needs outside service providers.
Indeed, while in-house creative teams produce the lion’s share of creative work, the vast majority (86%) also continue to partner with agencies and freelancers; according to our own research, published in our 2021 Creative Management Report, which was facilitated by Lytho (formerly inMotionNow) and based on a survey of 400 creatives and marketers.
When the survey asked creatives why they hire outside resources, the top reason was access to specialized skills (60%). That was followed in a distant second by a need for increased capacity (44%), help with developing strategy (24%), and, lastly, to get work done faster (20%).
“It is very unusual for an in-house team to have no outside resources that they lean on,” wrote Alex Blum of Blum Consulting Partners, Inc. in a written assessment of the survey results.
He says there are two primary ways to partner with agencies. “First, for overflow capacity. There is always a need for more creative resources, and agencies can offer that flexibility without the cost of maintaining larger teams,” he wrote. “Second, in-house teams can divide areas of ownership with an agency based on the skill sets they have in-house.”
Marketing today is dominated by an insatiable thirst for fresh content, produced and polished by creative teams. The demand for that content continues to explode.
What does this portend for creative teams? Despite adding headcount, creative requests exceed the creative team’s capacity to produce it – even as lead times shrink. Matthew Rayback, the creative director at Adobe, suggested the creative process must evolve.
He likens creatives to an auto factory, where “creatives used to be the assembly line to make a single car.” However, today, creatives are tasked with creating more cars, each with unique adjustments such as personalization.
“The assembly line we built can’t accommodate that speed or volume,” he says. So the whole factory – the entire creative process – must be overhauled to adapt.
Current methods for measuring the value of creative teams center on outputs. That is to say, the metrics tracked tend to quantify the number of creative projects in progress, the rounds of review, and the number of projects completed over time.
These metrics are important, but alone they are insufficient. A complementary way to prioritize large volumes of creative requests is focusing on those tasks most likely to move the business needle. The barrier to achieving this is that most creatives aren’t kept informed as to the outcomes of marketing campaigns fueled by their creative efforts. This must change.
With the growing demand for content, the margin of error for applying creative resources to projects that don’t correlate to business results shrinks. Marketing organizations must build a feedback loop that brings quantitative results back to the creative team. In turn, creative teams must learn to use the data to drive their work priorities in collaboration with marketing.
Resource management is both a leadership concept and technology (or a combination of technologies). It’s a means to plan, track, collaborate and measure creative operations, including people, processes, and budgets.
Traditionally, planning and tracking of all things creative and marketing occurred in a spreadsheet. It works well when the future is generally predictable – yet cliché as it may be to say it – we are living in a state of uncertainty.
Like many trends over the last 18-24 months, the global pandemic “forced virtual experiences, disrupted marketing channels and campaigns, and accelerated companies’ transition to digital marketing,” according to Forrester. The research firm calls resource management “essential” because it helps move “planning from static spreadsheets to a dynamic and real-time environment.”
Yogi Berra paraphrased an old Danish proverb when he said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Even so, the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already underway, and these five trends are good examples. More than just watching them, creative and marketing leaders should take steps now to get ahead of them.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 5 Creative Management Trends to Watch in 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
import this in a Python console, it will recite a little poem:
Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. The complex is better than complicated. The flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts…
N by N grid of point-masses, where adjacent points are linked by springs. The following image, provided by Matthew Fisher, illustrates this structure:
t = 0. Then, at each step of the simulation, it advances time by a small constant dt. The program estimates what happens to the system in this small period of time by evaluating the effect of each of the 4 factors above, and updates the position and velocity of each mass point at the end of the timestep. The updated positions of mass points are then used to update the image rendered on the screen.
pip install taichi.
ti:
import taichi as ti
ti.init(arch=ti.cuda)
If you don’t have a CUDA GPU, Taichi can still interact with your GPU via other graphics APIs, such as ti.metal, ti.vulkan, and ti.opengl. However, Taichi’s support for these APIs is not as complete as its CUDA support, so, for now, use the CPU backend: ti.init(arch=ti.cpu)And don’t worry, Taichi is blazing fast even if it only runs on the CPU. Having initialized Taichi, we can start declaring the data structures used to describe the mass-spring cloth. We add the following lines of code:
N = 128 x = ti.Vector.field(3, float, (N, N)) v = ti.Vector.field(3, float, (N, N))
Few things are more important to a web designer or developer’s chances of success than having the proper workflow. The term “workflow” applies to the set of standardized steps you or your company uses to create, test, and deploy designs or products.
Over the years, as development processes have evolved, so too have the workflows experts use to bring their ideas to life. The MVP workflow, or “Minimum Viable Product” strategy, is one of the most popular options in 2022.
Here’s what you need to know about the MVP workflow and how it differs from some of the other standard workflows developers may be used to.
As mentioned above, the designer/developer workflow is a series of steps used by experts in the web design world to achieve a creative goal. The process includes the steps taken to start a project, evolve it, and finish it. Since software is never developed without tools, the technology you’ll access throughout the development process is also considered in most workflows.
An example of a standard development workflow might look like this:
Now you know what a developer workflow looks like, you can begin to assess the concept of the “MVP” workflow. The term “MVP” stands for Minimum Viable Product.
The idea of “Minimum Viable Product” applies to a range of industries, from education to healthcare and government entities. This term comes from lean start-up practices and focuses heavily on the value of learning and changing during the development process.
When you adapt your workflow to focus on an MVP, you’re essentially adjusting your focus to a point where you can create a stripped-back version of something new – like an app or a website. The MVP is built just with the core features (the minimum), so you can bring the idea to market and test it as quickly as possible.
For instance, if your goal were to create an attractive new website for a client, an MVP would focus on implementing the crucial initial tools, and nothing else. While you may create checkout pages, product pages, and other aspects of the site, you wouldn’t populate it with content or start experimenting with bonus widgets and apps.
So, how does this offer a better alternative to the standard workflow?
Simply put, an MVP workflow is quick, agile, and easy. The idea is you can validate key concepts with speed, fail quickly, and learn just as fast. Rather than having to build an entire app and almost start over from scratch every time you find an error, you can race through the iteration and development process.
MVP workflows are also highly appealing to start-ups and entrepreneurs hoping to validate ideas without a massive amount of upfront investment.
Still confused? The easiest way to understand how an MVP workflow works is to look at an example.
Let’s start with a conceptual example. Say you were building a voice transcription service for businesses. The desired features of this product might include the ability to download transcription, translate them into different languages, and integrate them into AI analytics tools.
However, using the MVP approach, you wouldn’t try to accomplish all of your goals with your software at once. Instead, you’d focus on something simple first – like the ability to download the transcripts. Once you confirm you can do that, you can start a new workflow for the next most important feature for the app.
One excellent example of a company with an MVP approach is Airbnb. The entrepreneurs behind this unicorn company, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, didn’t have a lot of cash to build a business with at first. They had to use their own apartment to validate the idea of creating a website where people could share their available “space” in a home or apartment with the public.
To begin, Airbnb only created a very basic website, published photos of their property, and waited to see the results. After discovering people were genuinely interested in renting another person’s home, the company was able to begin experimenting with new ideas to make a site where people could list their properties for travelers.
There are a lot of benefits to the MVP workflow – particularly when it comes to gaining agility and developing new products quickly. However, there are downsides too.
Pros
Cons
If you believe an MVP workflow might be effective for you, the first step is defining your “Minimum Viable Product.” The app, website, or product you design needs to align with your team’s strategic goals, so think about what your company is trying to achieve at this moment – before you get started. If you have limited resources, or specific purposes, like improving your reputation as a reliable company, now might not be the right time to develop a new MVP.
Ask what purpose your minimum viable product will serve and what kind of market you’re going to be targeting. You’ll need to know your target customer to help you test the quality and performance of each iteration of your MVP. Once you know what your ideal “product” is, ask yourself what the most important features will be.
You can base these decisions on things like:
For example, if you’re producing an AI chatbot that helps companies to sort through customer inquiries, the most important “initial feature” may be the ability to integrate that bot into existing websites and apps owned by the company.
Once you have your hierarchy of most valuable features for your minimum viable product, you can translate this into an action plan for development. Remember, although you’re focusing on the “minimum” in development, your product still needs to be “viable.” In other words, it still needs to allow your customer to achieve a specific goal.
While the MVP workflow approach might not be the right solution for every development or design team, it can work very effectively in the right circumstances. The MVP approach doesn’t minimize the importance of understanding market problems and delivering value. Instead, the focus is on delivering quick value that gradually increases and evolves over time.
As many developers and designers know, the most useful form of product validation in most cases is real-world validation. When your customers have had an opportunity to use a product on a day-to-day basis, they can provide much more effective feedback.
Just keep in mind that committing to the MVP approach also means changing your workflow and committing to iterations – otherwise, other features may never be completed. You’ll need to be willing to work quickly and in small bursts without getting too heavily caught up in one feature or functionality.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post How to Get Started with the MVP Workflow 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.
Jamstack (JAMstack), is one of the most popular (and rapidly growing) tools for app and website creation. A unique ecosystem of functionality, Jamstack promises developers the support they need to create powerful websites and progressive applications.
For a while, Jamstack was mostly written off as just another buzzword in the developer space. However, today, it’s growing to become a powerful investment for many business leaders. Even big companies are getting involved, like Cloudflare, with Cloudflare pages, and Microsoft with Azure Static Web Apps. Elsewhere, we’ve seen brands like Shopify, PayPal, and Nike getting involved too.
So, what exactly is Jamstack, and is it time you transitioned over? Let’s find out…
Jamstack, otherwise known as “JAMstack,” is the name of a developer ecosystem made up of JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (hence: JAM). The solution is a web development architecture allowing developers to access static website benefits, such as higher security and better performance, while still unlocking dynamic database-oriented CMS.
The Jamstack solution allows companies and developers to build a dynamic website where real assets are pre-rendered static files in a CDN. The dynamic environment runs on JavaScript client-side, through serverless functions.
For a better insight, let’s compare Jamstack to the LAMP stack development strategy, which originated from the four open-source components many developers used to build sites: Linux, Apache HTTP, MySQL, and PHP.
With LAMP, each user request for a page forces the server to query a database — unless the page is cached — and combine the result with page markup data and plugins. Jamstack websites serve pre-built optimized assets and markup solutions quickly because the files are already compiled on a CDN. There’s no need to query the database.
Jamstack workflows dramatically reduce cumbersome issues with development and excess maintenance, making them highly appealing to developers.
Jamstack won’t be the ideal development tool for everyone, but it has a lot of benefits to offer. By fetching HTML from a CDN, the system doesn’t have to wait for HTML to be combined and returned to clients. The solution also provides an improved developer experience with static methods.
Using Jamstack, developers can build fantastic static files ready to serve by request, hosted on a global CDN. Some of the biggest benefits of Jamstack include:
In a lot of ways, Jamstack is an innovative and revolutionary solution for development. It can help you to create a far more engaging website and present your company in an incredible way. Of course, that doesn’t mean there are no limitations to be aware of.
Jamstack is developer-friendly, for instance, but it’s not beginner-friendly. You will need at least some knowledge of web development to start unlocking the benefits. You’ll need to understand things like Vue or React, but you should develop a tool anyone can use with a bit of work.
There’s also a handful of things you can’t pre-generate, like user-specific and real-time data. So, this means you may not be able to use Jamstack effectively on projects requiring these kinds of data. Building an analytics dashboard, for instance, probably isn’t a good idea with Jamstack. Other issues for some developers may include:
Now you know the basics of Jamstack, let’s look at some of the tools you can use to design an incredible website or application within the Jamstack environment.
There are tons of tools within the Git ecosystem common among Jamstack developers. Starting with Git itself. Git represents a powerful free, and open-sourced distributed version control system. With this solution, companies can handle everything from small to enterprise-level projects with efficiency and speed. The solution is extremely easy to use and learn, and outclasses a range of tools like Perforce, ClearCase and Subversion.
GitHub Pages and GitLab pages are two hosting services for Git repositories with built-in services to host static pages from out of your codebase. This makes the two solutions fantastic for when you’re building a Jamstack website. You can access the functionality for free too.
GitLab gives you a comprehensive DevOps platform to work with, where you can enjoy a comprehensive CI/CD toolchain out of the box. The comprehensive solution, delivered as a single application, changes the way security, development, and Ops teams integrate and collaborate. Gitlab helps to accelerate software delivery on a massive scale.
AWS Amplify, created by Amazon Web Services, is a development platform packed full of useful features for people in the Jamstack environment. The Amplify offering aims to reduce the complexities associated with Amazon Web Services for mobile and web deployment. You get 12 months of hosting for free with new accounts, and you get Storage with Amplify too.
The Amazon Amplify solution dramatically improves the regular AWS workflow, especially if you’re just a novice user. There’s a huge documentation hub to help you too, which is way more convenient than Amazon’s usual documentation solutions. Amplify is still accessed from a somewhat bloated console, however.
With AWS Amplify, companies can access features like a comprehensive data store to sync data between the cloud and websites. There’s also easy-to-use interface access across all different categories of cloud operations. The service works well with a range of JavaScript central tools.
Netlify is a pioneering solution in the Jamstack environment, allowing users to go dynamic with their websites and applications on their own terms. You can access a range of add-ons and integration, access your favorite tools, and make your own. The flexible environment enables developers to run websites on a multi-cloud infrastructure designed for speed and scale automation.
Built to be entirely secure from the ground up, Netlify makes it easy to build a site that’s custom-made for performance and deployed directly. You don’t need to worry about managing, scaling and patching web services, which means you can more quickly implement your Jamstack architecture.
Unlike other large legacy apps, Jamstack projects are neatly separate from your front-end pages and UI from the backend databases and apps with Netlify. Using this service, the entire front-end can be pre-built with highly optimized static assets and pages, and developers can deliver new web projects faster than ever before.
Inspired by the functionality of PHP, Next.JS is a solution for pre-rendered JavaScript modules. The solution allows developers to easily export the components of their apps and perform individual tests to determine how each element works. You can also access a wide range of components and modules from NPM. The Next offering allows developers to save time, removing the need to use webpack bundles and transform with compilers.
The full solution is extremely intuitive, ensuring developers can create solutions quickly. What’s more, the technology you build will allow you to load only the bundle needed from your JavaScript workflow, rather than all the JavaScript at once. Pre-fetching, one of the features of Next.JS, also picks up where standard code-splitting leaves off, allowing for optimized bundles of code to load seamlessly.
Next.JS also supports hot-module replacement. This means instead of reloading an entire application when you change the code, you only recreate the modules you’ve altered.
Probably the most widely-recognized of all the JavaScript frameworks, Angular, designed by Google engineers, appeared first in 2012, offering developers a new way to create dynamic pages. Before this technology, there were other opportunities for creating dynamic pages, but they were nowhere near as convenient or speedy.
Angular is probably one of the most essential tools companies can use when building a Jamstack website or environment. The front-end web development tool attracts developers from all over the world. Every version is packed with features and constantly upgraded to ensure you can generate the best results.
Angular extends HTML file functionality with powerful directives, and it requires very little effort to enable these directives too. All you do is add the ng- prefix to your HTML attributes and you’re ready to go. Angular also allows developers to create widgets leveraging editable data with two-way binding. This means developers don’t have to write code that syncs constantly between the model and view.
With Angular, developers also get access to things like virtual scrolling, which can help with displaying large lists of elements performantly, rendering on the items that fit on the screen to reduce loading times.
Another must-have tool in the JavaScript world for Jamstack, the React solution was launched first in 2013, and has won thousands of customers across the globe thanks to fantastic functionality. Today, the full landscape is maintained by Facebook, along with all the members of the standard developer community. The solution is used by some of the biggest giants in the tech industry, like Netflix, PayPal, and Apple.
React is a true pioneer in the Jamstack ecosystem, with its sensational approach to simple and straightforward solutions for JavaScript management. You’ll be able to access batched and virtual DOM updates, which makes it easier to unlock components quickly, and write your components the way you see them. There’s also the added benefit that React is compatible with a lot of tools.
You can build a comprehensive app or website with the help of React, and you’ll have no trouble accessing some of the top features, particularly with plenty of support available from the React community.
Created from the ground up to improve user experience on a comprehensive level, Gatsby is a static site generator with heavy focus on things like SEO, performance, and accessibility. The solution offers plenty of out-of-the-box features to help developers deliver the most immersive solution for their users, without unnecessary complexity.
Gatsby users pre-configuration to develop static websites giving developers faster loading pages, stronger code splitting, and server-side rendering. You can also access features like data prefetching, asset optimization, and quick image loading. Gatsby boasts excellent documentation and starter packs to help you get your site up and running more quickly.
The GraphQL data layer of Gatsby also means the system can collect your data from anywhere, including your CMS, JSON, Markdown, and APIs. More than just your standard site generator, this is a tool built specifically with performance in mind.
Developing an effective Jamstack website means having access to the right CMS technology. Agility CMS wasn’t the first CMS solution to support Jamstack, but it is one of the better-known options. As one of the first headless CMS solutions to hit the market, the company has quickly captured the attention of a huge range of developers worldwide.
Agility CMS is a Jamstack pioneer, capable of helping developers to build a foundation for any online ecosystem. The technology is an API-first CMS with support for REST APIs, so developers can connect all the third-party apps and front-end frameworks they like.
The technology also gives developers the freedom to code their solutions their way. You don’t have to follow a specific set of guidelines for how content is created, but templates are available to fast-track development. Agility CMS also hosts and abstracts your database, so you don’t have to worry about connection strings, backups, and maintenance.
With a strong content architecture to help companies manage digital content and a partnership with Gatsby, Agility is ideal for Jamstack development strategies.
The Jamstack solution is more than just a buzzword in today’s development world. This unique approach to building incredible development experiences delivers an excellent advantage to both developers and their end-users. Fast, scalable, and full of solutions for customization, Jamstack is a powerful way to bring websites to life with simplicity and speed.
Every day, more companies take advantage of the Jamstack environment, and we’re constantly seeing a wide selection of new tools, APIs and offerings emerging to help enhance the Jamstack landscape too. This environment is definitely worth consideration for any developer looking to significantly speed up their development strategy.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post Is it Time to Transition to JAMStack? 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.
Many websites today use some type of traditional Content Delivery Network (CDN), which means improvements in website load times, decreases in bandwidth, and better redundancy and security. But not everything is optimized, specifically when it comes to images, and image CDNs can help with that!
A traditional CDN treats images as static. If you want to tailor images to better match various mobile device types, then you need to create many variants of each image and upload them to your web server. It also means you must develop responsive code that will tell the server and CDN which image variant to deliver. This is clunky, time-consuming, and inefficient. For a large website, the amount of code needed can be astronomical. Using this static image model, there’s just no realistic way for each image to be effectively sized and compressed for every possible device model – at this point, there are thousands of them. The combination of these two unfortunate factors leads to potentially slow load times and poor UX caused by oversized images delivered to mobile devices.
So what is an image CDN? An image CDN builds on the traditional CDN model with the addition of device detection and image optimization. Instant detection of the device model and browser requesting the images is done right at the device-aware edge server (true edge computing!) Additional information, including screen resolution and dimension, pixels per inch, and support for next-gen image formats (such as WebP, JPEG 2000/JP2, and AVIF), provides even more details crucial for superior image optimization. Using this information derived from device-aware edge servers, the image CDN optimizes each image and serves the perfect version for each device and resolution, meaning users get the finest webpage experience faster.
With a single server website, a web request would have to travel from the requestor, back to the origin server (wherever that was geographically located), be processed, and then travel back to the requestor. Depending on the physical distance between the requestor and the origin server, this could introduce a great deal of latency, which means lag time on page loads.
A traditional content delivery network (CDN) is a global network of servers that optimizes web performance by using the node geographically closest to the user for faster delivery of assets. It takes static content like images and stores them on the edge. But usually, these edge servers are relatively simple in terms of their role in business processes. They mostly index, cache, and deliver content. And traditional CDNs like to keep edge servers simple because of concerns over CPU usage, storage, and scalability.
But what if these edge servers could also provide computing power that enhances performance and business processes? This is called edge computing. Slowly, CDNs are starting to open their edge servers to allow enterprises to deploy apps/services on the edge. Likewise, Cloud computing networks (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) provide virtualized server capacity around the world for those who want to use geographically distributed servers. In a sense, Edge Computing is a marriage of the CDN (where edge servers synchronize/work with each other) and Cloud computing (where servers are open to applications).
Edge computing is a fascinating concept, but what is the killer app that will enhance business processes and improve website performance? The addition of device detection to edge computing provides the ability to transform from delivery of static images to a new model where images are dynamic and tailored exactly to devices.
Edge computing is computing that is done in a geographically distributed space, with many servers located at or near the source of the web request. This reduction in bandwidth and latency leads to fast processing times, increased site speed, and improved customer experience. And edge computing doesn’t require new infrastructure — it leverages the networks of existing providers to create Points of Presence (POP) around the globe.
Device-aware edge servers, like those used by the ImageEngine image CDN, take edge computing to a new level. Device detection is actually one of the use cases where edge computing really shines. Normally, the edge server would have to send a Javascript query to the device to figure out any information about a requesting device’s model, browser, operating system. But with a device-aware edge server, the User Agent string is captured and decoded. This contains all of the information necessary for device detection without the need for any back and forth – a definite speed improvement. So you’re starting ahead of the game!
Each time a new request comes to the device-aware edge server, the image is processed by that server (meaning optimized for that specific device parameters) and stored right there in cache, primed for future use. This is done in three stages: changing image size based on device resolution, compressing the image using an image optimization tool, and selecting the most efficient file format for the device.
If the device-aware edge server has already processed a request from a similar device model before, then it can serve the device-optimized image from its edge cache, leading to a lightning-fast server response — and ImageEngine’s device-aware edge servers can serve up cached images 98% of the time! Not only is there geographical proximity because of the distributed global POP network, but the smaller size of the optimized image compared to the full-sized original cuts up to 80% off the image payload. This can cut up to several seconds off page load times. When almost 70% of people say that page speed influences their likelihood of making a purchase, every single second counts!
Some image CDNs detect the device information and group the devices into “buckets” of similar types and serve an image based on that type. While this is certainly an advancement over a traditional CDN, and works passably well for some common devices, it still isn’t a truly optimal solution. There are so many variants of browser, screen size, resolution, etc., even among very similar devices, that images are still often oversized (too large payloads) and lead to poor load speed. A true image CDN, such as ImageEngine, serves the perfect image for every device, every time.
One of the best things about the ImageEngine image CDN is the ease of integration – and it can integrate into any platform that supports a 3rd-party CDN. All you need is to sign up for an account and receive a delivery address during your two (yes, 2!) minute signup process. This delivery address is used to redirect image traffic for optimization and superior delivery performance. Next, you’ll have to make some slight adjustments to img tags on your website, but that’s really all the work you’ll need to do. There are no DNS changes during a standard (generic delivery address) integration. You read that right, none at all. Contrast that to a traditional CDN integration, where there is just no way around some messing around in the DNS – in fact, usually some fairly extensive DNS changes.
This low-code, virtually no code, integration saves you time. It saves you money. It saves you the hassle of putting multiple team members on a new project. And it means that you can be up and running in about 15 minutes with a standard install. You can be serving optimized images to your site visitors at blazing fast speeds before lunch! And don’t worry, ImageEngine has an experienced integration support team available to answer any questions you might have.
There’s also no issue with adding the ImageEngine image CDN on top of an existing CDN. Traditional CDNs may have security features that you may prefer to keep for your site. It requires slightly more integration but provides the same benefits of a solo ImageEngine implementation — screaming fast image load times and perfectly optimized images from device-aware edge servers. All that is recommended is that the ImageEngine image CDN actually serve the images directly, not simply process them, to get maximum benefits.
We’ve learned that image CDNs bring numerous benefits to your site AND your business. Using device-aware edge servers, image CDNs provide measurably better UX to your visitors. Pages load potentially seconds faster with perfectly optimized images, meaning your customers get to the heart of your message right away, and you don’t lose potential sales.
Image CDNs are actually 30%+ faster than most traditional CDNs, improving site speed accordingly. From an SEO perspective, that’s huge! And your SEO gets an additional boost from the improvement to your Largest Contentful Paint scores (which can help you gain valuable rank on Google’s SERPs). Implementation is simple and fast. You get all this, plus cost savings: since you have smaller payloads because of the fully optimized images, you’re delivering fewer gigabytes of data.
The post Image CDNs: How Edge Computing Provides a Faster Low Code Image Solution first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
