Wordpress Contact Form Plugins

Looking for a robust contact form for your Wordpress blog?  Here are 3 of my favorites: Contact Form 7: A powerful plugin which allows you to manage multiple contact forms.  The form also supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering.  Available in over 40 languages. Enchanced WP Contact Form: This simple yet effective contact form features include excellent spam protection, displays referrer information for the person contacting you, and an option for users to send themselves a copy of the message. MM Forms: An easy form builder which is feature rich.  Includes...

Is your site “click” friendly?

Every person at one time or another has run into the “unnecessary click syndrome” when visiting a website.   Whether it’s a lack of common sense, developer apathy, or a simple oversight, superfluous clicking can have a negative impact on conversion rates and quite simply, irritate the heck out of the user.  Below are a few examples you want to avoid when creating your website:  Too many clicks:  This may seem obvious, but I have visited many websites where it takes 5 to 6 clicks just to set up a profile or fill out a simple form.   Usually the mantra is “No more than 2 clicks...

SEO Tips: Keyword Trends

If you want to get the full skinny on your keywords and improve your opportunities for SEO and promotion, check out these sources for investigating the latest trends on what people are searching for. 1. Google Trends Knowing when your queries are highest in demand can help provide insight into your market and may help you predict when to ramp up your SEO efforts 2. TWIST Want to know what people are “tweeting” about on a regular basis? Find out the latest trends and get more followers to improve your website’s popularity. 3. Google News Trends A great way to identify patterns...

SEO Tips: No Follow, No Good?

If you have been a devout user of the nofollow attribute to pass the link juice..guess what?  According to Matt Cutts, (aka Google god) this method hasn’t been working for quite some time.  He has indicated that for example, if you have 10 links on a page and no follow 5 of them, you will lose 50% of your page rank juice.  Yikes. But he also states there is no “stigma” using no-follow; Google just drops the no-follow links out of their link graph. “You can use it to eliminate links to sign-in pages and things like that, but it’s a far better use of your time...

CSS Gradient Text Effect

Want to create a fancy heading without creating an image in Photoshop?  Here is a simple CSS trick to create a gradient text effect with a PNG image (no javascript or Flash.)  It works on most browsers and it can save you some bandwidth. The trick is very simple.  Basically we are just adding a 1px gradient PNG (with alpha transparency) over the text.  This is only suitable for solid background color elements and your gradient color must be the same color as your background color. 1.    First, create your PNG image. It needs to be 1px wide and if your gradient image is taller than the...

5 Free Professional Fonts

Looking for some professional free fonts?  Here are some of my favorites: Engel Light A professional sans-serif font which is great for print design as well. Cardo Cardo is a large Unicode font which is nice for for high-quality typography.   Romeral A font with noticeable visual impact and straight geometric form    Diavlo A fun font that has 5 different weights:  Light, Book, Medium, Bold and Black     Lacuna A beautiful elegant font for print and web...

Three simple ways to improve your website

Looking for ways to improve your website?  Here are three common sense ideas to increase conversion opportunities: Use color – Find a professional color palette that works well with your brand, but always make sure text is readable and that color photos and images load quickly.  If you are stumped on what colors work well together, try www.colorcombos.com Don’t make users think – Your website shouldn’t make it hard for consumers to take action.  Provide a variety of ways for point of contact such as phone number, email and mailing address, and make sure these features are easy to...

Build Negative Keywords Lists

One way to connect with your best keywords is to figure out ways you DON’T want Google to associate with your brand or company. To expand your negative keywords list, use the Search Query report in Google Analytics.  This will give you insight into what queries your potential customers are using to find a product. For example, one of my clients does window and storefront glass, but does not do auto glass. Adding “auto glass” as one of their negative keywords will help to steer away customers who are only looking for that service. Or let’s say you are a premium...

Peeling corner on a webpage

Look at the top right corner of this page:  see that peeling corner?  Go ahead–peel it back.  This peeling corner effect is an interactive way of advertising that has become popular in recent years as popups have become a thing of the past.  You can easily add this effect to your website following these easy steps: 1.  Download the source files by clicking here.  (zip file) Extract the files and open up the peel.js file.  Now edit the file with your favorite programming editor.  Search for the following code line: jaaspeel.ad_url = escape('http://www.bcdesignsit.com/'); Change...

Types of Flash Templates

Flash is the technology introduced by Macromedia in the mid-90s, which is pointed at bringing interactivity to the Web. It is used for creating headers, banners and other web page elements which will make up an eye-catching live web presence. Flash allows web masters to establish advanced functional website without rich programming experience, with the help of specially designed flash templates. At present you can find flash templates of different types, each of which will be appropriate for a certain kind of project. We will consider the most common of them – Flash CMS and Flash Intro...

Web design Tips: Rounded Corners in Adobe Photoshop

Have you ever wondered how to get smooth rounded corners in Adobe Photoshop?  Here is a quick and simple way to give your photos a “rounded corner” look. 1.  Open up any picture in Adobe Photoshop.  Below I am using a free picture from stock.xcng. 2.   Choose the Shape tool and then the Rounded Rectangle tool from the toolbar. 3.  Decide what you want your radius to be for your rounded corners.  In this example I have chosen a radius of 15px. (the radius option is at the top of the page) Draw the rounded rectangle shape on top of your picture.  It doesn’t matter what color it...

SEO Tips: SEO for Firefox

Do you want an in-depth report on how Google and Yahoo are ranking pages?  If so, then SEO for Firefox is the plugin for you.  This plugin is a great way to find information on your competitor’s websites including PR, age of site, social bookmarks, internal and external links, traffic stats and more.  To download, click:  http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo4firefox.xpi SEO for...