1. Stocksy

The post Google’s FLoC Promises a Radically Different Web first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

4 mars 2021/par Service comm.

8 Best Premium Stock Image Sites for 2021

Stock images are an essential tool for anyone working with clients who can’t afford to hire a photographer for a bespoke shoot, and with the cost of photography shoots running into thousands of dollars, that’s most clients.

Last month we looked at the 10 Best Free Stock Image Sites for 2021, and this month we’re focusing on the premium end of the market.

Paying for stock doesn’t guarantee that you’re getting a higher quality product than the free alternative, but the higher quality product is rarely free.

Ultimately, the right image is the right image, regardless of price. These are the best places to start your search in 2021.

1. Stocksy

Stocksy is a tremendous site with a slight edge to its imagery. There’s a certain cool vibe to the images featured on Stocksy. If you’re looking for a stock image that doesn’t look like a stock image, this is a great place to begin. Its prices range from around $15 for a small web image to $1000s for the image’s exclusive use.

2. EyeEm

EyeEm is a great source of editorial-style images. It has some excellent categories that are geared towards finding images instead of categorizing the collection. Pricing starts at $35 per image, with discounts for image packs. EyeEm has recently introduced the option to book a photoshoot — for clients ready to pay for custom images.

3. Getty Images

It’s impossible to make a list of stock image sites without including Getty Images. The stock behemoth not only has one of the largest collections of stock images but owns several subsidiaries. Loved by news media for its comprehensive coverage, if you’re looking for a particular stock image, try Getty. Getty’s a mid-price supplier with prices for small images starting at around $75.

4. Death to Stock

Death to Stock is all about leveraging the stock industry to fund photographers. These are photographs that photography professionals admire; there’s no filler whatsoever. Subscriptions for creative professionals start from $33/month. There are 100+ new images added to the collection monthly, meaning it’s still small, but if you want something truly authentic, consider Death to Stock.

5. Cavan Images

Cavan’s focus is on building a broad range of photographers, which has produced an outstanding set of diverse images. The curated collections, which are more editorial than commercial, are powerful. Cavan also offers a great support service in case you need help tracking down a particular image. Prices vary but start from $50.

6. Offset & Shutterstock

Shutterstock is one of the best-known stock collections on the web, with over 300 million images. Offset is a subsidiary of the much larger Shutterstock; it’s a high-end version of Shutterstock, with slightly elevated prices to reflect the higher quality. Shutterstock prices start around $2.50/image, Offset’s start around $300; that’s the price you pay for having someone pre-vet your options.

7. Westend61

Westend61 has a smaller collection, but its images are all consistently high quality. Westend61 is particularly useful for designing banner images because the images are very commercial, with authentic-looking people and lots of eye contact. Prices per image start at approximately $25.

8. iStock

iStock was originally independent but was bought by Getty. iStock offers both credit, and subscription options starting around $2.50/image. Although you won’t find everything you’ll find on the larger Getty site, it’s worth checking to see if the image you want is here.

The post 8 Best Premium Stock Image Sites for 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

3 mars 2021/par Service comm.

10 Best Alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021

When you think of installing analytics, you probably reach for Google Analytics. And you wouldn’t be alone. The platform’s tight integration with SEO and the implication that using Google products is beneficial to ranking means that Google Analytics is the most commonly installed analytics solution globally.

Google Analytics isn’t a bad choice: it’s free, it’s fairly comprehensive, and it does indeed tie most SEO efforts up with a nice bow.

But Google Analytics is also slow, extremely bad for privacy — both yours and your users’ — and for many people, it’s too unwieldy, having grown organically over the years into a relatively complex UI.

Some alternatives are fast, privacy-friendly, and geared towards different specialisms. Today we’re rounding up the best…

1. Heap

Heap is an event-based analytics platform. That means you can tell not just how many people visited your site but what actions they took when they were there. This isn’t a unique proposition, but Heap is one of the best implementations.

Heap offers an auto-track tool, which is ideal for new installations because you can get up and running immediately and fine-tune the details later. That makes it great for startups, although it’s also the choice of major corporations like Microsoft.

Heap’s free plan includes 60k sessions per year and 12 months of data history, but when you outgrow that, the business plans start at $12,000/year.

2 ChartMogul

ChartMogul is geared towards SaaS that offer subscription plans, staking a claim as the world’s first subscription data platform.

Services like Buffer and Webflow use ChartMogul to monitor their revenue and analyze the ROI of changes to their features, design, and user experience.

Ideally suited for startups, ChartMogul pricing is based on monthly recurring revenue; it has a free plan for up to $10,000 MMR; after that, pricing starts at $100/month.

3. Fathom

Fathom is an awesome, privacy-first analytics solution. It offers a simple dashboard and is ideal for anyone looking for simple analytics information to verify business decisions.

Fathom is ideally suited to freelancers, or entrepreneurs with multiple projects, as it allows you to run multiple domains from a single account. Fathom is entirely cookieless, meaning you can ditch that annoying cookie notice. It’s GDPR, ePrivacy, PECR, CCPA, and COPPA compliant.

There’s a seven-day free trial; after that, Fathom starts at $14/month.

4. FullStory

FullStory is designed to help you develop engaging online products with an emphasis on user experience.

FullStory is a set of tools, making it ideal for large in-house teams or in-house teams working with outside agencies or freelancers. It pitches itself as a single source of truth from which everyone from the marketing department to the database engineers can draw their insights, helping digital teams rapidly iterate by keeping everyone in the same loop.

FullStory uses AI to track and interpret unexpected events, from rage clicks to traffic spikes, and breaks those events down to a dollar-cost, so you can instantly see where your interventions will have the most impact.

There’s a free plan for up to 1k sessions per month; once you outgrow that, you need to talk to the sales team for a quote.

5. Amplitude

Amplitude has one of the most user-friendly dashboards on this list, with tons of power behind it. For project managers trying to make science-based decisions about future development, it’s a godsend.

The downside with Amplitude is that to make the most of its powerful data connections, you need to pump a lot of data in. For that reason, Amplitude is best suited to sites that already have a substantial volume of traffic — among those customers are Cisco and PayPal.

Amplitude provides a free plan, with its core analytics and up to 10m tracked actions per month. For premium plans, you have to contact their sales team for a quote.

6. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a little bit more than an analytics program, aiming to be a whole suite of web tools it has ventured into split testing and notifications.

Mixpanel is laser-focused on maximizing your sales funnel. One look at the dashboard, and you can see that Mixpanel, while very well designed, has too many features to present them simply; Mixpanel is ideally suited to agencies and in-house development teams with time to invest — you probably want to keep the CEO away from this one.

Mixpanel has a generous free plan for up to 100k monthly users, with its business plans starting at $25/month.

7. Mode

Mode is a serious enterprise-level solution for product intelligence and decision making.

Ideally suited to in-house teams, Mode allows you to monitor financial flow and output the results in investor-friendly reports. You can monitor your entire tech stack and, of course, understand how users are interacting with your product. Wondering who handles the analytics for Shopify? That would be Mode.

Mode has a free plan aimed at individuals, but this tool’s scope is really beyond freelancers, and the free plan’s only likely to appeal to high-price consultants and tech trouble-shooters. For the full business plan, you need to contact Mode’s sales team for a quote.

8. Microanalytics

Microanalytics is a relatively new analytics program with a lightweight, privacy-focused approach.

Microanalytics provides a simple dashboard with acquisitions, user location, technology, and the all-important event tracking to monitor user behavior. Microanalytics is compliant with the web’s most stringent privacy laws, including GDPR, PECR, and CCPA. The tracking code is just 1kb in size, meaning that you’ll hardly notice its footprint in your stats.

Microanalytics is free for up to 10k pageviews/month; after that, the monthly plan starts at $9.

9. GoSquared

GoSquared is another suite of tools, this time aimed at SaaS. Its primary product is its analytics, but it also includes live chat, marketing tools, and a team inbox.

If you’re tired of comparing multiple tools to help make the most of your startup, GoSquared kills several birds with one stone. Perhaps most importantly, if you’re beginning to build a team and don’t have any engineers onboard yet, GoSquared has an award-winning support team and an idiot-proof setup process.

GoSquared has a free plan that’s fine for evaluating the suite and integrating data from day one. As you begin to grow, paid plans start at $40/month.

10. Segment

Segment is a little different from the other analytics tools on this list; Segment is a layer that sits between your site and your analytics. It integrates with many of the tools on this list.

There are several benefits to this approach. The main one is that different teams within your enterprise can access analytics data in a form that suits them — designers can access complex data, and management can stick to revenue flow. It also means that you can switch analytics programs with a single setting in Segment and even migrate historical data into new apps. If you’re an enterprise that wants to future-proof its customer intelligence gathering, Segment is worth considering.

Segment is trusted by some of the web’s best-known names, from IBM to Levis, and…ahem…Google.

Segment is free for up to 1k visitors per month, and after that, the team plan starts at $120/month.

The post 10 Best Alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

10 février 2021/par Service comm.

8 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website Typography in Under 30 Minutes

Typography is one of the most important elements of any site, having a measurably large impact on brand and experience.

So fundamental is it that making wholesale changes to your typography — opting for a new font, changing the measure, increasing leading — is complex and fraught with potential time-sinks.

But there are some simple changes that you can make to your typography that won’t break your grid and can be achieved in 30 minutes or less. Here are eight of the easiest.

1. Increase Color Contrast

When laying out text, it’s common for designers to see text as a block within a visual design. A designer’s relationship to text is very different from a user’s; a designer positions text as a shape, a user reads it line by line. Consequently, designers tend to underestimate the amount of contrast text requires.

Light grey text is aesthetically beautiful but functionally useless. Text is meant to be read and needs to meet WCAG AA standards on desktop and WCAG AAA standards on mobile — or in any situation with many ambient light sources. The larger the text is, the more leeway you have.

Text should be thoroughly tested for contrast, but as a starting point, 18px text on a white background should never be lighter than #595959.

2. Tighten Heading Spacing

The vast majority of typefaces are designed for use as body text — large blocks of running text, multiple lines long. When the font was made, it was spaced for this use.

Unlike running text, headings tend to be short and are surrounded by more whitespace — especially above and below. Extra whitespace visually floods the negative space in the word shapes and forces letters apart.

To compensate, tighten the letter-spacing and word-spacing of headings by 1–5%.

3. Loosen Non-Word Spacing

When we read, our brain doesn’t spell out words letter by letter; it recognizes word shapes and even word groups’ shapes.

Most micro-typography is concerned with not disrupting those word shapes. However, there are times when you do want to prevent words from forming and allow individual characters.

Loosen the letter-spacing on any text intended to be read as a series of characters, such as serial numbers, tracking codes, and tabular data.

4. Use System Fonts for Inputs

Privacy is a big issue for users. Anything you can do as a designer to reassure users their data is safe will increase your site’s positive UX.

Style your HTML inputs to use system fonts — the default fonts set by the OS your user is accessing the site with. This creates a clear delineation between the brand data in the brand fonts and the user’s data in the user’s fonts.

Using system fonts in this way encourages the user to feel ownership of their data, builds trust, and increases conversions.

5. Mark Paragraphs Once

Paragraphs of text need a visual indication that they have begun. There are three ways in which this is normally conveyed: following a heading, with a vertical space before the paragraph, or indenting the first line.

Each paragraph should use one of these indicators and one only. Due to the nature of web content and the benefits headings have for quickly scan-reading content, for most sites, the best choice is a combination of following a heading and vertical spacing.

6. Use Genuine Styles

For various reasons ranging from the availability of fonts to aggressive optimization, it’s common for sites to fake alternative styles using CSS. Italics can be faked as obliques with a skew, bold weights can be faked by using the browser’s defaults, and small caps can be faked by setting text to uppercase and reducing the font-size.

These tricks do more harm than good, creating distorted word shapes that interrupt the natural flow of text.

If you cannot deploy genuine italic, bold, and small caps, then don’t fake them. Find alternative ways of creating emphasis, such as changing colors.

7. Use the Correct Quotes

Apostrophes, single, and double-quotes are specific characters. Most fonts provide a glyph for them that is distinct from the quick single or double-quote key on your keyboard.

These quote marks are most commonly referred to as “smart” quotes because word-processing apps usually have the option to be “smart” about which glyphs they use.

Using the correct quotes is one of the simplest ways to deliver a refined piece of text.

8. Hyphenate Text Properly

Hyphenation is the breaking of a word over two lines. It allows a less extreme ragged-right text, and it is vital on mobile devices where the available page width is relatively small compared with desktop.

The web has surprisingly poor support for correct hyphenation, but it is gradually improving, and it can be applied as a progressive enhancement.

CSS allows you to set hyphenation to none (no hyphens), auto (the browser inserts automatically), and manual (in which you specify where hyphens should appear using the soft hyphen character).

Typographically, a hyphen may be inserted in any word that is five characters or longer; there must be at least two characters preceding the hyphen and at least three following the hyphen.

You should never hyphenate three consecutive lines of text, but addressing this requires JavaScript. You can minimize this problem by increasing your measure.

Featured image via Unsplash

The post 8 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website Typography in Under 30 Minutes first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur sap.com

28 janvier 2021/par Service comm.

SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking : une nouvelle solution cloud pour simplifier les processus RH et améliorer l’expérience des salariés

Actualités, ERP & Applications, Ressources Humaines, SAP

WALLDORF, Allemagne – 18 décembre 2020 – SAP SE (NYSE : SAP) a dévoilé la solution SAP® SuccessFactors® Time Tracking. Cette nouvelle solution cloud offre aux entreprises des outils simples et innovants pour enregistrer, approuver et contrôler le temps de travail de leurs collaborateurs. Dotée d’une interface utilisateur intuitive, la solution SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking améliore l’expérience des collaborateurs et permet de s’assurer que les salariés sont payées avec précision, dans les délais et conformément aux réglementations locales.

Grâce à des fonctionnalités avancées de gestion du temps et des présences, SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking offre une vue en temps réel de la saisie des temps du personnel, ce qui permet une plus grande transparence des rémunérations et un meilleur contrôle des horaires et des heures supplémentaires. Les dirigeants peuvent suivre et minimiser les coûts de main-d’œuvre grâce à des informations et des tableaux de bord intégrés, ce qui contribue à améliorer la productivité de l’ensemble du personnel. La solution s’intègre aux solutions SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll ainsi qu’aux solutions de paie SAP classiques. La solution s’intègre également avec les badgeuses du marché. Les entreprises peuvent ainsi partager des données pertinentes entre plusieurs systèmes afin de garantir l’exactitude des paiements. En outre, la solution SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking est une solution internationale conçue pour prendre en charge les spécificités locales notamment les fuseaux horaires, les langues, les calendriers de vacances, les règlementaires de paie spécifiques à chaque pays.

« La solution SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking offre aux employés la personnalisation et la simplicité qu’ils sont en droit d’attendre d’une expérience de site internet grand public », a déclaré Amy Wilson, vice-présidente senior, HXM Product & Design, SAP SuccessFactors. « En même temps, elle apporte l’innovation dont nos clients ont besoin pour gérer des effectifs diversifiés et mondiaux et leur offre une plus grande flexibilité dans leur démarche vers le cloud ».

Les principaux avantages et caractéristiques prévus pour la solution SAP SuccessFactors sont les suivants :

Une plus grande flexibilité pour les employés : Pour aider les employés à gérer leur équilibre entre vie professionnelle et vie privée, les salariés éligibles peuvent choisir soit d’être payés pour leurs heures supplémentaires, soit de les utiliser pour prendre des congés supplémentaires. La gestion des horaires flexibles permet aux employés de déterminer le rythme de travail qui leur conviennent le mieux dans le respect des règles imposées par l’employeur.
Gestion simplifiée des horaires de travail : Le suivi intelligent des horaires permet aux collaborateurs de pointer à l’entrée et à la sortie et de suivre leur temps de travail au cours de la journée. Il permet aux RH de définir des alertes automatiques pour rappeler aux employés et aux responsables de remplir les feuilles de présence et les pointages de sortie. Les alertes de temps fournissent des avertissements et des messages d’erreur qui permettent aux administrateurs d’examiner et de corriger les problèmes de gestion et de pointage, tels que les heures supplémentaires excessives. En outre, la fonction de suivi de la valorisation des temps fournit des informations détaillées sur chaque étape de valorisation pour un employé, en montrant comment les saisies de temps spécifiques sont calculées. Cela permet aux RH de répondre rapidement et facilement aux questions des collaborateurs concernant leur rémunération.
Amélioration de la transparence des processus de rémunération : Grâce à des flux d’approbation intelligents, les RH peuvent définir des règles pour automatiser l’approbation des feuilles de temps par lots. Grâce à l’approbation d’un seul enregistrement, les gestionnaires peuvent pré-approuver des demandes spécifiques, telles que le temps de déplacement associé au temps de travail effectif.
Une visibilité accrue sur l’ensemble des effectifs : Les responsables disposent d’une parfaite visibilité sur les coûts salariaux, y compris les feuilles de temps planifiées et enregistrées, sur les heures de travail et les coûts associés. Cela permet de connaître les coûts de main-d’œuvre, le suivi des congés et de la productivité, et ainsi de prendre de meilleures décisions.

« La nouvelle solution SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking est un ajout important à la suite SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management« , a déclaré Steve Goldberg, vice-président et directeur de recherche de Ventana Research Inc. « L’automatisation et l’activation de ces processus peuvent être ardues, voire complexes, et les limites des solutions existantes sur le terrain n’ont pas aidé. Cette solution de gestion du temps basée sur le cloud offre un large éventail de fonctionnalités essentielles et innovantes, associées au type d’interface utilisateur moderne que les clients attendent des solutions SAP SuccessFactors ».

La disponibilité de la solution SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking est prévue pour janvier 2021. Pour en savoir plus sur la solution, consultez le site sap.com/time-tracking.

Visitez le SAP News Center. Suivez SAP sur Twitter @SAPNews.

The post SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking : une nouvelle solution cloud pour simplifier les processus RH et améliorer l’expérience des salariés appeared first on SAP France News.

18 décembre 2020/par Service comm.

Top New CMS Plugins, November 2020

Since there are so many CMS plugins out there, it can be overwhelming to choose the best ones for your website. We’ve done the research for you; this list contains the top new CMS plugins for November 2020. You’ll find useful plugins for WordPress, Craft, Shopify, and Joomla.

Let’s get started…

WordPress

404 Page Editor

404 Page Editor is a simple WordPress plugin that helps you add custom text to the default 404 page on your website. The plugin comes with seasonal and industry-related 404 templates. One useful feature of the plugin is that it backups your current 404 page before changing it. So you can restore the backup page anytime you choose. The plugin duplicates your current 404.php page to wp-content/uploads/404-page-editor/ so you can easily find it. You can also change the text on the plugin to fit your local dialect.

UnusedCSS Power-Up

Most WordPress themes and plugins load their CSS in the wrong areas of your website. This can slow down your site. A slow website will reduce user experience and lead to increased bounce rates.

UnusedCSS will help reduce the size of your website’s CSS files by up to 95%. The best part is that the plugin works automatically. It will remove any unused CSS when visitors view any page on your website. UnusedCSS will automatically reduce your website’s load times by reducing your CSS files and page size. The plugin also optimizes the performance of other WordPress plugins and extensions. UnusedCSS also works with WooCommerce themes and plugins.

Simple Redirects

Simple Redirects is a WordPress plugin that helps you to automatically redirect requests to another page on your site or any other place on the web. The plugin allows you to easily redirect users from your old web pages to new pages using 301 or 302 redirects. You don’t have to worry about losing backlinks or page rank. Any incoming links to the old web page will be automatically passed along to the new page. The page rank on the old page is also transferred to the new page. The plugin is useful when migrating a WordPress site when don’t want to retain the URL structure.

HTML Validation

HTML Validation plugin helps you identify any HTML validation errors on your website. The plugin works automatically in the background of your website and will send you regular reports. There is a progress bar on the report screen to show you the progress of the scan. The plugin uses WordPress Cron to scan the content of your website. There is also an option for the plugin to automatically fix any HTML validation issues on your website. You can also choose to fix the issues manually.

Just Highlight

Just Highlight is a simple WordPress plugin that helps you highlight text in your posts or pages. You can use this plugin to highlight any portion of the page you want to draw the reader’s attention to. You can highlight the background of the page and also add animation to the highlighted text. In the WordPress admin area, you can change the speed and color of the animation. The plugin is compatible with Gutenberg, and the WordPress classic editor.

DeviantArt Embed

DeviantArt Embed is a simple plugin that helps you embed any work from Deviant Art into a post. The plugin provides a block for the WordPress block editor so you can easily embed the image. It uses a DeviantArt oEmbed API to pull the images and their descriptions, and creates an embedded image.

Static Optimizer

Static Optimizer is a static file optimization plugin that serves and optimizes static files on your website. The plugin will help you increase your website speed by automatically compressing your static files. It is easy to set up, you just need an API key to get started. Other useful features that the plugin offers include automatic JS and CSS minification, automatic image optimization, and processing of responsive images. You don’t have to worry about losing your files if their server is down. The plugin automatically backs up your files and will load your original files when their servers are down (either because of an upgrade, maintenance, or outage). By default, only images are compressed when you activate the plugin; you can also choose to optimize fonts, CSS, and JS files.

RankBear

RankBear is a keyword rank tracker plugin that helps you analyze your SEO efforts. With RankBear, you can track the keywords for each of the posts and pages on your site. While the plugin has a paid plan, you can track up to five keywords for free. On the free plan, you will receive weekly reports on each keyword you are tracking. You can search for the rank and volume of a keyword in every location supported by the Google search engine. RankBear is a lightweight software-as-a-service plugin hosted by Amazon Cloud Services. The plugin also offers the option to download the keyword reports to CSV.

Table of Contents Block

Table of Contents Block is a plugin that allows you to easily create a Table of Contents for your WordPress posts. The plugin is lightweight and will automatically add a Table of Content in your website’s posts and pages. You can select the heading tags you want to add to the Table of Content. It also has a dedicated support team to assist you. The plugin works fine with all standard WordPress themes.

Markease For WooCommerce

Markeaze is an all-in-one communication plugin that allows you to add live chat to your online stores. The plugin will help you improve your customer service by decreasing your response times. With the plugin, you can collect your visitor’s contact information via a widget. This feature is useful in building a subscriber database. You can also use the plugin to track customer behavior on your site, inform customers about new products, help customers with active orders, and collect customer feedback. You can also use the auto-reply function to answer commonly asked questions.

Craft CMS

Image Toolbox

Image Toolbox is a Craft CMS plugin that offers image-related tools for your templates. The plugin will automatically create a WebP variant of the images you upload. It also has a fallback for browsers that do not support WebP images. Other useful features the plugin offers include automatic creation of placeholder images and generation of responsive images with multiple variants. The plugin also supports Imager-X (or old Imager).

Element Panel

Element Panel plugin allows you to add elements and an eager-loading panel to the debug toolbar. This feature will help you benchmark your templates in Craft CMS. For elements, the panel has a dashboard that shows how many elements are populated. It also shows how many elements are duplicates. The plugin also shows you how many eager-loading elements are detected. Duplicate elements are grouped by field name.

Shopify

VStore Shoppable Videos

VStore Shoppable Videos is a Shopify plugin that allows your customers to shop directly from your videos. The plugin allows you to embed your products into any video. Since videos have a high engagement rate, this plugin will significantly improve your store’s conversion rates.

ProofMotion Video Testimonials

ProofMotion Video Testimonials plugin helps you to easily collect video testimonials. The plugin sends an automated email or SMS requests to customers asking for their satisfaction feedback after making a purchase. The responses are analyzed to determine whether the customer had a negative or positive experience. Customers that offer negative feedback are sent to customer care to help them with the problem they encountered. Happy customers are prompted to make video testimonials of their positive shopping experience. ProofMotion guides the customer through the interview so they can give the best testimonial. They also offer an on-site widget so you can easily share your testimonials.

Real ID

Real ID is a Shopify plugin that allows you to verify customers’ real identity using a photo ID and facial biometrics. The plugin is perfect for orders that have an age restriction, verifying flagged fraud goods, and selling expensive goods. Real ID will help you identify whether a government-issued-ID is fake during fulfilment. All the customer needs to do is take a selfie on their phone. This way, even if a customer has access to a stolen physical ID, they won’t still be able to make any purchase. The plugin can verify documents such as passports, visas, national IDs, driver licenses, and more. Real ID will help you handle GDPR compliance. The plugin is available in hundreds of countries around the world.

Joomla

Accessibility

Accessibility is a Joomla plugin that allows your website visitors to easily access your website content. The plugin will remove any barrier between the visitor and your Joomla site. There is no coding required and you can customize the plugin directly from the module manager. The plugin has a useful feature called Dyslexic Readability; this feature allows your visitors to set the entire document font to a dyslexic-friendly font. Visitors can also grayscale the page, resize the fonts, and resize the word space. From the backend module, you can add any custom CSS and JS. The plugin is also available in 12 different languages.

Reading Time

Reading Time is a simple plugin that will help you easily show the reading time of your Joomla articles. The plugin is easy to set up and does not require any coding. You can customize every parameter, including the text, in minutes. You can also choose to exclude categories, articles, and menu items. Reading Time also allows you to easily add custom CSS code from the plugin parameters.

Featured image via Pexels.

20 novembre 2020/par Service comm.

Top New CMS Plugins, October 2020

Plugins offer a ton of benefits to developers and website administrators; from flexibility, to saving time in development, the right plugin is priceless to a project.

In this article, we’ll cover a list of the best new plugins for October 2020. You’ll find useful plugins for WordPress, Craft, Shopify, and Joomla.

Let’s get started.

WordPress

Sticky Post Expire

Sticky Post Expire is a simple plugin for WordPress that allows you to add an expiration date to your sticky posts. When the expiration date you set on a post expires, the post will automatically no longer be sticky. All you need to do is install/enable the plugin and a meta checkbox will appear in your posts admin area. It’s in this checkbox you will set the post’s expiration date.

Product page shipping calculator for WooCommerce

The Product Page Shipping Calculator plugin allows your customers to calculate the cost of shipping before adding the product to their cart. The plugin also allows customers to see the available shipping methods for their area. If the product cannot be shipped to the customer’s location, the plugin will notify the customer. All calculations are done using Ajax, so you don’t have to worry about the plugin slowing down your site.

Payment Page

Payment Page makes it easy to collect payments on your WordPress website. The plugin allows you to connect to any payment gateway platform of choice. You can also receive one-time or recurring payments using Payment Page. The plugin comes with beautifully designed templates that you can customize to fit your brand and style. The form builder helps you increase your sales and conversions. You can collect payment in any currency. After payment, customers will also receive a confirmation message.

WP Roadmap

Wp Roadmap is a product feedback board for WordPress. The plugins allow you to display your company’s product roadmap on your WordPress website or blog. The plugin will display your new products, business developments, upcoming events, achievements, awards, and future projects on your site. WP Roadmap also gives you the option to collect and create feedback boards. The plugin comes with an intuitive interface and works with any WordPress theme.

LiveSession

LiveSession is a session replay plugin for WordPress. The plugin allows you to record everything happening on your site, including clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements. This plugin helps you understand how your visitors interact with your website. You can rewatch the videos as many times as you like. Instead of recording every single visitor on your site, LiveSession will record visitors with a high engagement score.

The plugin also comes with a feature called Rage Clicks. This feature helps you identify when visitors encounter Javascript errors. The plugin also has a beta feature called Clickmap. It helps you identify the specific elements on your site that visitors clicked and how many times. There is also a heatmap feature that identifies which pages on your site get the most interaction. The plugin is very useful in improving your user experience (UX) and conversion rates. It easily integrates with Google Analytics, Segment, Intercom, LiveChat, HelpScout, Olark, Wix, Shopify, and WooCommerce.

Auction Feed

Auction Feed makes it easy to display eBay items on your WordPress website. Visitors to your website will be able to search and buy products directly from your site. The plugin comes with a variety of styles to fit any WordPress theme. You can also add a product description above or below the product image. Customers won’t have to leave your website before making their purchases. The plugin is also free to use.

Floating Related Posts

Floating Related Posts is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display a banner with a list of related posts on your website. The banner can appear at the top or bottom of the web page. You can set the banner to pop up using a time filter or scroll trigger. The plugin is also compatible with Google Analytics. You can customize the banner background color, font size, button style, and text color. The plugin can be translated into any language.

Simple Restrict Content

The Simple Restrict Content plugin allows you to restrict the content that visitors can access on your WordPress site. You can choose who can access content on your website by setting up roles. The simple lightweight plugin restricts different content types, including, posts, web pages, and WooCommerce products. The plugin is available in Spanish and English.

Easy Video Publisher

Easy Video Publisher is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily publish YouTube videos on your website. You can import YouTube videos from multiple channels. You can also schedule the YouTube videos to automatically upload to your website. Note that a YouTube API key is needed to import multiple videos at a time from a specific channel. The plugin allows you to use multiple API keys.

Preloader Awesome

Preloader Awesome is a preloader plugin for WordPress that allows you to create a page preloader interface while the rest of the webpage is still loading. Preloaders are interface elements that notify visitors that your website hasn’t crashed, just processing before serving content. Some of the features of the plugin include 14 page transition styles, progress bar, GIF support, 10+ default CSS loader, progress status counter, unlimited color, and counter font size options. The plugin is responsive and works on all modern browsers.

Menu Hover Effect

The Menu Hover Effect plugin allows you to add hover effects to the menu bar on your website. With this plugin, you don’t need to learn CSS. This plugin gives you 20 CSS menu hover options to choose from. It is a lightweight plugin and won’t affect your website speed.

Better Comments

The Better Comments plugin allows WordPress users to easily customize the comment section of their website. With the plugin, you can customize the look of your comment form fields, match the submit button with the colors of your site, and hide the comment’s date. The plugin also allows you to create a comment policy section. You can further customize the comment fields to highlight when they are selected and typed in. If you find rounded avatars common, the plugin also offers a hexagonal avatar option.

WP Pocket URLs

WP Pocket URLs is a handy WordPress Plugin that helps you manage your affiliate links. The plugin allows users to automatically shorten and track any affiliate link on their website. You can also manually shorten the links on your website. Each time a visitor clicks on a link you get access to information like click date/time, country, IP address, etc. You can also categorize your links and also create custom permalinks. There is also a dashboard widget that displays your top 10 links. On the “Reports” page, you can generate clicks reports. You can filter the reports by Month/Year, link category, country, and link title.

Craft CMS

Formie

Formie is a Craft CMS plugin that allows you to create user-friendly forms. The plugin comes with a drag and drop builder for creating forms. You can store user form submissions in your control panel in case you want to review them later. When a user submits a form, you will get an email notification. Formie also has an in-built keyword blocking feature to protect you from spam. The plugin has several integrationS: API for Elements, Address Providers, Captchas, CRM tools, Webhooks, and Email Marketing software. You can also create your custom integration. You can add over 25 fields to your forms using Formie.

Craftagram

Craftagram is a Craft CMS plugin for adding any Instagram feed to your website. Since the plugin uses the official Instagram API, you don’t have to worry about your website getting blacklisted. Craftagram also handles pagination for your Instagram feed.

Shopify

We’re Open

We’re Open is a handy plugin for Shopify users. The plugin lets your customers know when you are open to receive new orders. Once your business hours are close, customers won’t be able to make new orders. A message will be displayed in your store that you are closed. The plugin ensures that you only receive orders when you are open. It works in any time zone and the API easily integrates with mobile apps.

Punch Metrics

Punch Metrics is a Shopify Plugin that helps you track your store’s visitors and also analyze their behavior. The plugin offers real-time data on your site’s visitors, the pages that see the most engagement, and which devices are the most popular. You can also record and replay visitors’ sessions so you can know exactly what they did on your site. Punch Metrics also has a heatmap tracking feature to understand which elements on your site get the most clicks.

Joomla

Simple Sliders

Simple Sliders is a content plugin for Joomla. The plugin allows users to easily create accordion sliders in their articles. You can add the sliders to your Joomla articles by adding this code:

{slider title="Slider 1 Title" class="blue"}
Slider 1 content.
{slider title="Slider 2 Title" class="red"}
Slider 2 content.
{/sliders}

Jitsi Conferencing

Jitsi Conferencing is a video conferencing plugin for Joomla. The plugin will allow you to host meetings and easily connect with your clients. The module is simple and effective to use.

Featured image via Unsplash.

19 octobre 2020/par Service comm.

The Ultimate 10 UX Influencers to Follow

The digital world is a place of constant change. Just as you get used to a new design trend, another one appears, forcing you to rethink the way that you approach each client project.

As a web designer, it’s up to you to make sure that you have your finger on the pulse on the latest transformations in the industry. However, it can be challenging to know for sure which trends you should be taking seriously, and which you can simply ignore.

One option to refine and enhance your design journey is to pay attention to influencers.

Influencers aren’t just there to guide customers into making purchasing decisions. These people are thought-leaders in their field. They spend all of their time tracking down ideas and concepts that really work. That way, they can maintain a successful reputation online.

Sourcing information and motivation from the following UX influencers could help you to create some truly amazing websites in 2020:

1. Andrew Kucheriavy

Andrew Kucheriavy is the phenomenal co-founder and CEO of a company named Intechnic. Andrew was one of the first people in the world to be given the “Master in User Experience” award. This means that he’s an excellent person to pay attention to if you want help understanding the ins and outs of user experience design.

As one of the leading visionaries in UX, business strategy, and inbound marketing, Andrew has a lot of useful information to offer professionals and learners alike. Andrew is particularly active on Twitter, where he’s constantly sharing insights on design and marketing. You can also find input from Andrew on the Intechnic blog.

2. Jeff Veen

Another must-follow for designers who want to learn more about understanding their audience and their position in the marketplace, Jeff Veen is a leader in UX and product design. Veen got his start with the founding team for Wired, before he created the Adaptive Path company for UX consulting. Jeff Veen is also known for being responsible for various aspects of Google Analytics.

Over the years, Jeff has expanded his knowledge in the design space, and mentored various companies, from WordPress to Medium. He also has a fantastic podcast that you can listen to for guidance when you’re on the go.

3. Jared Spool

Jared Spool has been tackling the most common issues of user experience since before the term “UX” was even a thing. Excelling in the design world since 1978, Jared has become one of the biggest and most recognizable names in the user experience environment. He’s the founder of the User Interface Engineering consulting firm. The company concentrates on helping companies to improve their site and product usability.

Jared offers plenty of handy information to stock up on in his Twitter feed. Additionally, you can find plenty of helpful links to blogs and articles that he has published around the web on Twitter too. He’s followed by Hubgets, PICUS, and many other leading brands. Make sure that you check out his collection of industry-leading talks on UIE.

4. Jen Romano Bergstrom

An experimental psychologist, User Experience Research coach, and UX specialist, Jen is one of the most impressive women in the web design world. She helped to create the unique experiences that customers can access on Instagram and Facebook. Additionally, she has a specialist knowledge of eye-tracking on the web. You can even check out Jen’s books on eye-tracking and usability testing.

When she’s not writing books or researching user experience, Jen is blogging and tweeting about usability and researching new strategies in the web design space. It’s definitely worth keeping up with Jen on Twitter, particularly if you want to be the first to know about her upcoming seminars and learning sessions.

5. Katie Dill

Katie Dill is the former Director of Experience for Airbnb, so you know that she knows her way around some unique experiences. With an expertise in working with companies that harness new technologies and UX design, Katie Dill is at the forefront of the user experience landscape. Dill attends various UX conferences throughout the year, and publishes a range of fantastic videos on YouTube.

You can find blogs and articles from Katie published on the web; however, you’ll be able to get the most input from her by following Katie on her Twitter account.

6. Khoi Vinh

Khoi Vinh is one of the most friendly and unique UX bloggers and influencers on the market today. He knows how to talk to people in a way that’s interesting and engaging – even about more complicated topics in UX design. Vinh is a principle designer at Adobe, and he has his own podcast called Wireframe. However, he still finds time to keep his followers engaged on Twitter.

Over the years, Khoi has worked as a Design Director for Etsy and the New York Times. Vinh also wrote a book called “Ordering Disorder” which examines grid principles in web design. According to Fast Company, he’s one of the most influential designers in America. Additionally, Khoi has a brilliant blog where you can check out all of his latest insights into UX design.

7. Cory Lebson

Cory Lebson is a veteran in the world of web design and user experience. With more than 2 decades of experience in the landscape, Cory has his own dedicated UX consulting firm named Lebsontech. Lebson and his company concentrate on offering UX training, mentoring, and user experience strategy support to customers. Cory also regularly speaks on topics regarding UX career development, user experience, information architecture and more.

Cory is an excellent influencer to follow on Twitter, where you’ll find him sharing various UX tricks and tips. You can also check out Cory’s handbook on UX careers, or find him publishing content on the Lebsontech blog too.

8. Lizzie Dyson

Another amazing woman in the industry of UX, Lizzie Dyson is changing the experience landscape as we know it. Although she’s a relatively new figure in the web design world, she’s recognized world-wide for her amazing insights into the world of web development. Lizzie also helped to create a new group specifically for women that want to get involved in web design.

The Ladies that UX monthly meet-up welcomes a community of women into the digital landscape, helping them to learn and expand their skills. Lizzie regularly publishes content online as part of Ladies that UX. Additionally, she appears on the Talk UX feed – an annual design and tech conference held for women around the world.

9. Chris Messina

Chris Messina is a product designer and a technical master who understands what it takes to avoid disappointing your users. With more than a decade of experience in the UX design landscape, Messina has worked for a variety of big-name brands, including Google and Uber. He is best known as the inventor of the hashtag!

Chris is a highly skilled individual who understands the unique elements that engage customers and keep people coming back for more on a website. You can see Chris speaking at a selection of leading conferences around the world. Check out some of his talks on YouTube or track down his schedule of upcoming talks here. Chris also has a variety of fantastic articles on Medium to read too.

10. Elizabeth Churchill

Last, but definitely not least, Elizabeth Churchill is a UX leader with an outstanding background in psychology, research science, psychology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, human interaction with computers and more. She knows her way around everything from cognitive economics, to everyday web design. Churchill also acts as the director of UX for Google Material Design.

A powerhouse of innovation and information, Churchill has more than 50 patents to her name. She’s also the vice president of the Association for Computing Machinery too. When she’s not sharing information on Twitter, Elizabeth also has a regular column that you can tune into on the ACM Interactions magazine.

Who Are You Following in 2020?

Whether you’re looking for inspiration, guidance, or information, the right influencers can deliver some excellent insights into the world of web design. There are plenty of thought leaders out there in the realm of user experience that can transform the way that you approach your client projects. You might even discover a new favourite podcast to listen to, or an amazing series of videos that help you to harness new talents.

Influencers are more than just tools for digital marketing; they’re an excellent source of guidance for growing UX designers too.

Featured image via Pexels.