Archive for December, 2010

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25 Extremely Useful WordPress Plugins for use in 2011

Monday, December 27th, 2010

WordPress plugins are what make WordPress one of the best CMS around. Plugins can extend your site to do anything you can think of.  There are over 12,000 plugins to do all sorts of things. These plugins can greatly enhance your site.They are all made to fulfill certain tasks and make it easy for the website admin to implement new stuff. It would take a lot of coding by yourself to complete these task which is why plugins are so helpful.  Here is a list of some of the best wordpress plugins around in their category. These plugins are from a variety of categories to meet different needs, not just one or two groups.  This plugins can be used in 2011 and you can start your year with using these plugins. So, here they are.

WassUp

WassUp is a new WordPress plugin to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits.

Mass Page Maker

From a simple admin panel, Mass Page Maker makes it easy to create multiple pages or posts. This is dramatically faster than doing it manually. Options are available to customize every aspect of the page — from the date to page excerpt.

SexyBookmarks

SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog.

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Contact Form 7

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

HeadSpace2 SEO

HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

W3 Total Cache

The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin.

Google XML Sitemap

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress is a Backup & Recovery Suite for your WordPress website. This Plugin allows you to backup database as well as files and comes with a rich set of options.

wp-Typography

Improve your web typography with hyphenations, space control, character replacement, CSS hooks and much more.

SecurePress

SecurePress is a “Live” patent pending security system for WordPress.

BuddyPress

Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is a wordpress 2.7++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks.

GZIP Enable

Speed Up Your WordPress with GZIP Comppression.

WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting.

Theme Test Drive

Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one.

WP-Print

Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

WP e-Commerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

WP125

The WP125 plugin can help you manage your ads more efficiently, leaving you with more time to write new posts. The plugin adds a new “Ads” menu to the WordPress admin, featuring submenus for tweaking display settings and adding and removing ads.

WP Greet-Box

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url.

Conclusion

As you can see, these list has a compilation of very versatile plugins. These plugins are from different areas and can greatly enhance your site. I hope that you can find some of these plugins worth implementing in your site. Even in 2011, these plugins are still some of the great plugins yet. Hope everyone has a wonderful 2011. Please feel free to share your favorite ones in the comments below.

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Posted in Resources | No Comments »

Well Designed Interfaces From Financial Businesses

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Financial businesses that provides services like Online Banking, Insurances, Savings, Investments, Online trading etc. have been hit hard the last few years, some of them didn’t make it through the crisis and the ones that did make it had a difficult time, Yeah i know, it’s their own fault but that doesn’t mean they’re all the blame of this.

To have a website with a trustworthy, user friendly interface and appealing design is now a days more important then ever. While more people are getting known on the world wide web they need to know what the company stands for, when they visit there site. A potential customer also needs to see the most important things in a easy and understandable way without any distractions.

It was a tough job finding great and usable designs in the financial industry, 80% of the financial related services which have a website should think twice before they continue with there outdated, not-usable and terrible looking designs.

Today we’ve selected a few of these interfaces from financial related businesses. You will notice that a lot of Dutch businesses are shown, this is because they’re some of the best in this field. (more…)

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Posted in Inspiration | 2 Comments »

26 Useful Textures and Texture Packs for Better Designs

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

A texture is usually a high-quality background image that is used in a lot of different ways: from website layouts to icons and high-quality tutorials. The usual aim of the texture is to improve the design with a new, fresh look. In the careful gathered collection below, we have compiled 26 textures and texture pack that can be very useful when you’re in the moment of design process.

Apply these texture inspiration to make creative  UPrinting Flyer Printing designs.

Blue Texture Tiles

(more…)

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Posted in Resources | 4 Comments »

The Ultimate Background Removal Guide with PhotoShop

Monday, December 13th, 2010

A picture is worth 1000 words. But what if I wanna “cut” some of those words and create my own message? GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and Adobe Photoshop are two of the most popular image editing tools out there. In this article, we will look at Photoshop’s capabilities. Photoshop offers us the possibility to remove a subject from a photo, but how to do that? Which tool will do the best job?

Getting started!

Photoshop offers us a bunch of tools for background removing, but lets take a closer look at this. To actually remove the background or a subject from a picture, first thing you have to do is to select it. Because of this, I have split up this process in two parts:

The selector tools offer us the power to delimit the subject, so in later actions we can copy or remove it. The tools are:

The eraser tools remove the pixels from inside the selection, or outside the selection.
This tools are:

Note: even if every tool has a different objective they will not always give the best results, that is why a combination of them all will create the perfect selection/background removal. (more…)

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Posted in Tutorials | 15 Comments »