Month: July 2009

With Divine Free Edition, you can convert ANY Photoshop design to a WordPress theme

E-commerce has its own dynamics when compared to the standard shopping experiences. It: * is faster * requires collection of data * includes shipping more frequently * has different ways of supporting users * & more.. E-Commerce Tips If the product sold is not something unique, then it probably exists in 100s of other e-commerce websites. So, to differentiate your stores from others, here are 13 tips for a better e-commerce website:

Here is a list of hidden applications which are quite useful… To run any of these applications go to Start > Run and type the executable name

Downtown Restaurant Week (DRW) returns the week of Monday, August 3 – Sunday, August 9. Now in its 5th year, DRW has grown to 25 diverse and delicious destinations. Last year’s event attracted over 15,000 diners, so make reservations early to secure a table for this fabulous food event. There are no passes to buy, coupons to carry or cards to punch – patrons simply attend the restaurant of their choice and select from a special 3-course dinner menu for $25 per person, plus tip, plus tax. Downtown St. Louis Restaurant Week is a splendid opportunity to rediscover a long time favorite or experience one of St. Louis’ hot new eateries. Reservations are highly recommended! Add An Extra Helping – $5.00 When paying your DRW check, please add an “Extra Helping” for Operation Food Search. OFS is the largest distributor of free food in St. Louis.

It's time we wrote about Star Wars Craze again (see our coverage in Part 1 and Part 2). Many utterly mind-boggling art pieces and original creations saw the light of day since our last round-up, and many devoted fans sent us great pieces of trivia and images that we simply can not ignore. Besides… the fundamental story of Good and Evil, questions of destiny and personal redemption remain strong in this "space opera" franchise, even though they were significantly diluted recently by light-weight and cheesy offerings. We'll start with the poster that is not that well-known: 1978 Japanese dub version, featuring the Millennium Falcon in all its glory –

One of the CSS3 properties designers have been longing the most for is undoubtedly the border-radius property. With CSS3 border-radius property it’s possible to create the so popular rectangles with rounded corners exclusively via CSS – no images needed. Cross-browser compatibility CSS3 aren’t supported by all browsers yet. The border-radius property is supported by Firefox (since version 3.0), Safari (since version 3.1) and Chrome (since the first version), but it’s not supported by Internet Explorer or Opera (it should be implemented in Opera 10). Since CSS3 aren’t standard yet, you must add prefixes to border-radius in order to work with the browsers that support it. If you want to work it with Firefox, you must write -moz-border-radius in the CSS; if you want it to work with Safari/Chrome, it’s -webkit-border-radius. Note that although Firefox, Safari and Chrome support this property, they do so in slightly different modalities.

George Lucas is an evil genius. There is simply no other reasonable explanation for what has just occurred in my formerly contentedly geeky family. I can barely bring myself to write this… Earlier this week, my kids decided that they think Jar Jar Binks is great. I’d tried to bring up my kids (who are eight and six) the right way, with regard to Star Wars. I showed them the first movie, which is to say Episode IV, first — followed, of course, by Episodes V and VI. They loved them, even going as Darth Vader and Princess Leia for Halloween last year, and my wife and I got them some toys, and all was going well. Then they started watching the “Clone Wars” TV show, which wasn’t so horrible even if it did have Ahsoka Tano and sometimes Jar Jar. Whenever there was an episode with Jar Jar, I would try to explain that he’s annoying and idiotic without actually saying so, and dissuade my kids from imitating his style of speech.

1 Sea mammal blowhole. Any animal that spends appreciable time in the ocean should be able to extract oxygen from water via gills. Enlarging the lungs and moving a nostril to the back of the head is a poor work-around. 2 Hyena clitoris. When engorged, this "pseudopenis," which doubles as the birth canal, becomes so hard it can crush babies to death during exit. 3 Kangaroo teat. In order to nurse, the just-born joey, a frail and squishy jellybean, must clamber up Mom's torso and into her pouch for a nipple. 4 Giraffe birth canal. Mama giraffes stand up while giving birth, so baby's entry into the world is a 5-foot drop. Wheeee! Crack. 5 Goliath bird-eating spider exoskeleton. This giant spider can climb trees to hunt very mobile prey. Yet it has a shell so fragile it practically explodes when it falls? Well, at least it can produce silk to make a sail. Oh, wait — it can't!

Online Marketing Blog – An online marketing blog for small business

Hi. We’re the Web design and UI team for Network Solutions. We’ve been meaning to introduce ourselves for some time now, but have only just recently had the chance to get this site up and running. The group’s a pretty diverse bunch of folks with a wide array of experience both online and off. We’re parents, spouses, pet lovers, fine artists, daredevils and more. We have different accents, histories and futures, but one single, unified voice — sell, sell, sell… No, wait… That’s the business team. We are all totally devoted to making the experiences of our customers as enjoyable and as smooth as possible. So what can you expect from this site? Pretty much anything design and UI related. We’ll be commenting on news, trends, our projects and other Web goodness.

Our gruesome props are perfect to haunt your house. We offer the highest quality, most horrific Halloween props, Halloween masks and Halloween costumes so that you can strike terror into the hearts of trick-or-treaters everywhere! Whether you're looking for scary Halloween masks of your favorite movie character, such as Michael Myers, Jason, Freddy, Jigsaw, or Pinhead, or the most frightening zombie, witch, or scary clown costumes, or you need to decorate your entire house with with spooky Halloween props – we have what you need – all backed by our superb customer service!

We are your source for high quality, sexy costumes perfect for Halloween and all sexy dress up occasions. We have selected the best costumes we could find… if it doesn't "wow" us, we won't offer it on our site. We have selected merchandise from the top women's costume companies in the industry – Leg Avenue, Dreamgirl, Forplay, Mystery House, Delicious Sexywear, and more! We have all character costumes – sexy sailors, frenchmaids, sexy cops, nurse costumes… and then some! Not sure what you want to be? You can browse all sexy costumes. We stock all of the merchandise we sell, enabling us to offer immediate shipment. In fact, all orders placed by 1:00 PM eastern time Monday – Friday will ship out of our warehouse that same day! We also have customer service representatives available by phone M-F from 9:00 – 5:00 PM eastern time. Feel free to call 1-866-827-9586 with any questions, we are here to help. Thanks for visiting CostumeVixen.com!

Network Solutions, a provider of Web-related services for small and medium businesses, has started reaching out to customers about a data breach that was discovered in early June. Credit card information on 573,928 individual consumers may have been compromised in the breach, which Network Solutions publicly reported at the end of the day on July 24. Less than half of the company's 10,000-plus e-commerce services customers were affected in the breach, which occurred when hackers implanted a code on the system used to deliver e-commerce tools to clients. Over a three-month period — from March 12 to June 8 — the code diverted transaction and personal information from 4,343 merchant Web sites to a rogue server. Susan Wade, director of PR for Network Solutions, said that the unauthorized code was discovered on June 8 during routine procedures, and Network Solutions immediately called in a team of data breach forensics experts to analyze the leak and track it.

Knowledge Base Software Professional knowledge base script that allows you to create your own documentation. PHP Knowledge Base Script 68KB is an open source PHP MySQL driven knowledge base script. Built with you in mind to make it easy to configure and setup.

In this post I want to suggest you 10 useful code snippets for web developers based on some frequetly asked questions I received in the past months for my readers. This collection include several CSS, PHP, HTML, Ajax and jQuery snippets. Take a look!

This post is part of e-commerce week, which features e-commerce related content on DesignM.ag and the Vandelay Design blog, as well as e-commerce design inspiration at CartFrenzy. In this post we will provide links to more than 45 resources to help you in your work of designing and developing e-commerce websites. The resources found in this post include shopping cart options, tutorials, template resources, inspiration and more. Shopping Cart Options: Choosing the right shopping cart for your site is a critical decision. There are plenty of options to choose from and most designers prefer to get to know 1 or 2 of them very well, rather than having a little bit of experience with many of the options. Here you will find some of the most popular choices, but if you are looking for more, please see 37 Shopping Cart Options for Developers.

Someone recently asked me about this technique and my first reaction was that it was probably a little too mundane to cover as a tutorial. But then I got to thinking that there is actually a few interesting things happening here and the style is trendy enough people might be interested. The idea is just to overlay some text over an image, but as blocks that stick out from the left with an even amount of padding all the way around the variable-length text. Here is a screenshot example

Because the internet has become so hugely popular, every company needs to step up their game and create the best looking website possible. Today it would be difficult to keep a customer’s attention with a page of straight text. People need something interesting to look at like a logo and other visuals. But an interesting looking website is not enough. When a company decides to create a website, the owners need to keep in mind that this set of pages will act as a public face for the company. They will be a form of corporate branding. The pages can look good and give the correct information, but if they do not reflect the company’s style, they are not helping. You no doubt have an image in your mind of how your company is represented. This brand image is probably a product, a logo, or a set of colors. All these images are important factors in creating a public persona. Companies’ brand logos say a great deal about the company itself.

AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH by Stuart McMillen – May 2009

In the halcyon days when American newspapers were feared rather than pitied, I had the pleasure of reporting on crime in the prodigiously criminal environs of Baltimore. The city was a wonderland of chaos, dirt and miscalculation, and loyal adversaries were many. Among them, I could count police commanders who felt it was their duty to demonstrate that crime never occurred in their precincts, desk sergeants who believed that they had a right to arrest and detain citizens without reporting it and, of course, homicide detectives and patrolmen who, when it suited them, argued convincingly that to provide the basic details of any incident might lead to the escape of some heinous felon. Everyone had very good reasons for why nearly every fact about a crime should go unreported. In response to such flummery, I had in my wallet, next to my Baltimore Sun press pass, a business card for Chief Judge Robert F. Sweeney of the Maryland District Court, with his home phone number on the back. When c

Find more freelance work. Network Solutions has created a private group with our partner, oDesk, containing projects and contractor jobs only available to LinkTogether members.

People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence of links from page i to page j. In that case, PageRank corresponds to the principal eigenvector of that normalized link matrix. Disclaimer: Even when I joined the company in 2000, Google was doing more sophisticated link computation than you would observe from the classic PageRank papers. If you believe that Google stopped innovating in link analysis, that’s a flawed assumption. Although we still refer to it as PageRank, Google’s ability to compute reputation based on links has advanced considerably over the years. I’ll do the rest of my blog post in the framework of “classic PageRank” but bear in mind that it’s not a perfect analogy. Probably the most popular way to envision

Here at Cracked we don't hesitate to hold our leaders accountable for bad decisions. Even if those leaders are childhood heroes. And are entirely fictional. For instance, such decisions abound in the original Star Wars trilogy, to the point that the entire plot is basically driven by people using the worst judgment possible. How else can you explain…

I’ve been reading the latest “Is SEO copywriting dead” debate by Glenn Murray and Brian Clark. Considering that I’ve been talking about SEO copywriting for over 11 years – and I’m considered by some as the pioneer of SEO copywriting – reading the headline “Is SEO copywriting dead” is a little like hearing that your baby is ugly. My first response was not just “No,” but “Hell no.” SEO copywriting is alive and well. But then I got to thinking. You know what? I’m going to agree with them. Maybe, as it’s currently defined, SEO copywriting should be dead. And here’s why. SEO copywriting “techniques” – as they are commonly understood today – represent a bastardized version of copywriting that’s not good for customers, not good for users and serves up pure schlock. I am tired of seeing top-Tweeted posts that say you should “include your keyword at least 15 times in your copy,” or “put all the keywords at the top of the page so the search engines can see them.”

This is a world full of stories where YOU are the Storymaker and can choose all sorts of ways to tell your tale. Here you can create your own story, share it with friends and visit the gallery to see what other Storymakers have made.

In sitting down with Rose Byrne recently, the Australian star of Damages and Fox Searchlight’s Adam, we couldn’t resist asking about her involvement in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, in which she played Dormé — the only of Princess Amidala’s handmaidens who survives past the first scene. And having broken news about it before, we thought we’d press her a little further for details about the live-action Star Wars TV series that’s long been buried under a Jedi cloak of secrecy — and we’re glad we did! The conversation is after the jump: I read somewhere that most of your fan mail addresses a small part in a George Lucas movie? Yeah! It’s incredible. You get fan mail for Damages, but it’s almost all Star Wars people. It’s amazing. Just because my role is so small — I’m literally like an extra in that film. But the fanbase is just out of this world. No pun intended. But it’s mind-boggling, myself not knowing the feeling of having such a fanship of something, I suppose.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. In cinemas July 15 in the US and UK. Go to http://harrypotter.com and http://www.harrypotter.co.uk. Global release dates: http://harrypotter.warnerbros.co.uk/releasedates/

At Butterfly's Bakery we specialize in custom cakes for all kinds of occasions. You can select from one of our example cakes or bring us your unique design idea.

Much like the websites they support, not all Web hosting servers are created equal. Yet it's not a matter of separating the "good" from the "bad," but rather determining the right Web hosting solution for you – whether it's shared website hosting, dedicated Web hosting or virtual private server (VPS) hosting. While all types of Web hosting servers will act as a storage center for your website's content, they differ in the amount of space, control, and reliability they offer. Dedicated Web Hosting Services With dedicated Web hosting, you'll be the only website on the server – meaning that all the space, bandwidth and server access is "dedicated" to hosting your website alone. This exclusive relationship between the Web hosting server and your website makes dedicated Web hosting the most reliable of its kind. The problem for many is that it's also the most expensive. The space you rent on a server will function as your website's home, so it makes sense to think of dedicated Web

The amazing commercial success of Michael Moore's “Fahrenheit 9/11” (almost $120 million in domestic box office, unheard of for a documentary) made many people, mainly the right-wing elites, very uncomfortable. Until then, Michael Moore was easily dismissed as a rabble-rouser, a funny fat guy who liked to shake up the system a bit, but for the most part wasn't taken any more seriously than a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert-type. He was an entertainer who happened to make people think while they were laughing, nothing more, and Moore was kept safely tucked away in his little far-left-loon box. But then “Fahrenheit 9/11” came along and suddenly a lot of people were taking Michael Moore very, very seriously. On either side, whether you believed every frame of the film or whether you saw it as nothing more than a feature-length attack on everything Bush, people were talking. Yet the film, if box office numbers are the lead indicator of a movie's success,

Want to know whether your company's Web site is working hard or hardly working? A new Firefox extension can deliver the answer. Google developed its Page Speed tool to test and optimize the performance of its own Web pages. Now, Google has released Page Speed as an open-source Firefox extension that anyone can download and put to work. Page Speed works by testing a page against a set of rules based on Google's own site-development expertise: When you profile a web page with Page Speed, it evaluates the page's conformance to a number of different rules. These rules are general front-end best practices you can apply at any stage of web development. We provide documentation of each of the rules here, so whether or not you run the Page Speed tool — maybe you're just developing a brand new site and aren't ready to test it — you can refer to these pages at any time. We give you specific tips and suggestions for how you can best implement the rules and incorporate them into your developmen

As a follow up to our “Are You Using E-Commerce Yet?” post, we’d like to urge all of our readers to follow the SMART Ecommerce Blog at http://www.smartecommerceblog.com/. Once there, you’ll find a collection of ecommerce-specific blog posts that will prove to be a valuable resource for everyone who owns an online store. Setting up an online store is the easy part; attracting customers and making sales, however, is another story. The folks at SMART Ecommerce Blog have made it their mission to help all ecommerce users find solutions to their most demanding problems, and with the upcoming holiday season looming, we can use all the ecommerce advice we can get. During the holidays, many of us prefer to shop places where we can more than just one gift, and due to rising gas prices and crowded malls, Americans have been turning to the Internet as a time- and money-saving shopping option. To capitalize on this, online merchants can market their store as a ‘find something for everyone’ site. T

Now that it’s July, we’re in the 3rd quarter of the business year. So let’s talk about Q4! Now is the perfect time to start thinking about the holiday season. If you haven’t joined the ecommerce world yet, you need to read this article. In “Why Small Businesses Should Embrace E-Commerce,” Nisarat Sujatanond describes how an ecommerce website can help your business increase sales to both local and extended customers. In addition to widening your customer base, selling online can also help you gain valuable marketing insight. Thanks to web analytics, ecommerce merchants can get a grasp on who their customers are, what they’re looking for, and how they shop. Online stores can be easily marketed using this information, thanks to services like Twitter™, Facebook®, and PPC advertising. To read Sujatanond’s full article, visit http://www.mysolutionspot.com/ecommerce-101/why-small-businesses-should-embrace-e-commerce-1602/.

Colleen Padilla, a 33-year-old mother of two who lives in suburban Philadelphia, has reviewed nearly 1,500 products, including baby clothes, microwave dinners and the Nintendo Wii, on her popular Web site Classymommy.com. Her site attracts 60,000 unique visitors every month, and Ms. Padilla attracts something else: free items from companies eager to promote their products to her readers.

Harry Potter Years 1-5 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth movie in the series, opens in theaters tonight, and I'm embarking on the proverbial marathon to watch the first five so everything will be fresh in my mind for #6. I have to say, though, that the thought of sitting through the first one again (I've seen it a few times) is probably the least-appealing part of the journey. So that brings up the natural question: Which movies were the best? Unlike my colleague, Jordan, who will posting more on Potter soon, I don't live and breathe the books so I'm just ranking these on a sheer movie-entertainment scale. How would you rank them? (Beware of spoilers, obviously, and find all the movies and more in our Harry Potter store.) –David

Christian Gifts & Jewelry is a result of a call from our Lord to service the Christian community. This call started out with helping a friend publish his monthly Christian newsletter, The Independent Evangelist, on the internet. Once his newsletter was up and running, I felt that the Lord wanted yet more from me. After much prayer, discussion and thought, I discerned that His call could best be answered by starting this e-store. As I was beginning to work on Christian Gifts & Jewelry, I made a promise to the Lord that all of the profits would be tithed to serve the church and benefit charities. So with the Lord’s call and a sincere promise in my heart, I welcome you.

SlickMap CSS is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It’s suitable for most web sites – accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences. The general idea of SlickMap CSS is to streamline the web design process by automating the illustration of sitemaps while at the same time allowing for the predevelopment of functional HTML navigation. Features and Benefits * Eliminates the need for additional software * Easily revised with clients on-the-fly * Clickable anchors with visible URLs * Design process results in working HTML code

Lately I have been very interested in how far we can take Typography only using CSS. Sure you can use images or sIFR to produce some very beautiful typography, but there is something unique and special about using only CSS. It is incredibly useful too, if you know the extent you can take CSS you end up with much more flexible websites— especially ones driven by a CMS. Think about how difficult sIFR or images get when you want to replicate that typography or typeface over 100 pages powered by a CMS. If you can get beautiful type via CSS it makes this situation very easy and with out compromise. There are a lot of great sites out there that have beautiful Typography using only CSS, however simply looking at them is only half of the picture. We want to know what did they do, and how/why does it result in beautiful type?

Wow! Where did that come from? It sounds so dramatic. And, yet, it so well defines our relationship with heading elements. Of course not everyone will feel this way. I, for one, recall a time when headings where something I avoided using. I mean, really, they’re so big and black and ugly. That was early-on in my foray into the craft, though, when paragraphs — or pseudographs as I like to call them now — were made by placing two break elements between two blocks of text. I didn’t know better. I didn’t realize the power I had at hand via my style sheet. I learned. Selecting Headings Before we get high on Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) magic, we need to first figure out what headings to use. There are, after all, six to choose from: h1 through h6, largest through smallest, respectively — most to least important, consequently. Generally the h1 will be used once (that is my recommendation) and it will either define the site, the page content, or both.

Many of web standards rookies feel that passing validation is good enough to call their work web standards compliant. Those who are more involved in web standards know that there's more than that. Use of headings is a good example. While validator will not show any warnings or errors for headings, you can't say that your page is valid if your heading structure fails. Meaning of headings Some say that the largest role of headings are their SEO meaning. I am not going into that. They maybe right, but I say (since I am not a SEO expert but a web standards enthusiast) that their importance lies in semantics. What are headings anyway? Headings are elements that describe the content that follows and also define a document's structure. Similar to large headings and subheadings in printed newspapers, html headings should briefly describe what the page or sections are about, making it clear to the reader (human or non-human) what to expect if he continues to read.