Thank you to everyone who left a comment to participate in the e-commerce week giveaway. There were some great prizes that had been donated and here are the six winners:
Brooke – Shopp Plugin for WordPress
Juggles – Magento theme and widget from Silverthemes
Sonali Agrawal – Premium template from AlgoZone
Welshstew – Magento theme from MagThemes
Vincent – Shopify theme from ThemeForest
Jorde – Shopify theme from ThemeForest
Thank you to everyone who left a comment to participate in the e-commerce week giveaway. There were some great prizes that had been donated and here are the six winners:
Brooke – Shopp Plugin for WordPress
Juggles – Magento theme and widget from Silverthemes
Sonali Agrawal – Premium template from AlgoZone
Welshstew – Magento theme from MagThemes
Vincent – Shopify theme from ThemeForest
Jorde – Shopify theme from ThemeForest
A set of 14 riveted brushed steel icons that not only include the basics but DesignBump, DesignMoo, and DesignFloat as well! You’ll find 14 different 64px x 64px icons in this set in .jpg format.
Do you want a wider audience, more subscribers, better conversion to paying customers, fanatically loyal readers, and enviable word of mouth?
You can have all of them by keeping one simple piece of advice in mind:
Treat your readers like dogs.
If you want to teach your dog to sit, how do you go about it?
Any good trainer [...]
I haven’t posted anything about our Thesis Theme for Wordpress lately, which is criminally negligent on my part given that it’s one of the main ways that pays the bills around here.
But this time I wanted to do something a bit more than a product update.
So I was thinking… one of the big selling [...]
Zen Cart is an open-source e-commerce system that branched off of osCommerce. Like some of the other popular open-source options, Zen Cart has a large community of users, and plenty of premium templates are available for purchase. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 of the best templates for Zen Cart.
View Template – $140
WordPress have a very useful function that autosaves your posts while you’re typing them in the dashboard. Though, if for some reason you’d like to disable this function, it is very easy to do. Just read on!
Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it for free!
We just witnessed the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing recently. To stay in the spirit of space exploration, we’ve rounded up some stunning digital art illustrations of sunrises taken from space. Feast your eyes on these beauties from above.
A while ago I contacted Shopify to see if someone would be interested in doing an interview to talk about their hosted e-commerce system. Fortunately, Daniel Weinand (VP of Design) was happy to participate and share some insight that should be helpful to any designers/developers who work on e-commerce sites for clients. Throughout the interview you will see some screenshots of sites that are powered by Shopify, click the images to visit the sites.
Billy Mays, who sadly passed away this summer at age fifty, was a pot-bellied, black-bearded Atlantic City carnival barker in a blue long-sleeves over a white undershirt.
He had a loud, shrill, and annoyingly exuberant voice. And he seemed to lean forward, through the TV screen, and put his nose in your face, the way only [...]
osCommerce is a popular open-source e-commerce solution. osCommerce has been around since 2000 and is used to power thousands of online shops. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 of the best templates that can be purchased to use with osCommerce.
View Template – $140
In this step-by-step web development tutorial, you will learn how to convert a beautiful and eye-grabbing grunge theme web layout–created from Photoshop in a previous tutorial–into a working HTML and CSS template.
E-commerce web design and development presents some unique challenges that you won’t always face with other types of web design. For sites that exist primarily to sell products, it’s very easy to look at sales and have a measuring stick to use when evaluating the success of the website. However, there are any number of factors that can influence the success of an e-commerce site, and identifying areas of strength and weakness is not always so simple.
In this article we’ll look at nine specific factors that are generally present on well-designed e-commerce websites.
Since we’re focusing on e-commerce websites this week, I thought it would be good to do a tutorial for designing a layout for an online shop in Photoshop. At the end of the post you will be able to download the original PSD file in case it would be helpful. Throughout the post, the screenshots of the design in progress can be seen in full size by clicking on the image.
Here’s what we will be designing (click to see in full size):
CRE Loaded is a popular open-source option (built on osCommerce) for running an e-commerce website. You can use CRE Loaded to build a site that meets the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. If you’re interested in using CRE Loaded for your site, there are a number of premium templates available for purchase. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 of the best templates.
View Template – $145
This is the another installment of Web Design Resource Roundup #4. I’ll give you a list of many freebies which have been released during the past week. If you want to know about the latest Freebies, make sure you subscribe to the RSS Feed or simply follow me on Twitter.
One of WordPress 2.8 new features is Codepress, a syntax highlighted editor for WordPress files. While the idea was exiting, I must admit I didn’t enjoyed using this new editor. Here is how to remove it.
Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it for free!
If you haven’t heard the story yet, a Chicago real estate company called Horizon Realty Group filed a lawsuit against one of its tenants on Monday. She apparently made a snarky remark on Twitter, claiming that the company “didn’t care” about mold in her apartment.
Horizon is suing her for libel, looking for $50,000 in [...]
Twitter had announced that they will be re-designing the homepage for some time now, but it now real! Twitter have changed their homepage design in favor of a more search oriented one. Twitter now displays recent popular terms on the homepage instead of trying to introduce the new user to Twitter.
The new design, as you can see is blue, with the prominent searchbox and sign up button, along with the tag cloud of popular search terms. Then below, in the footer, you get links to the blog, API, Goodies (widgets), etc. What do you think of the new Twitter homepage? P.S. You need to sign out of your Twitter account to be able to see the new design by yourself!
This wasn’t going to be the subject for my post today, but a series of events have changed my mind. Here they are:
Yesterday on my blog, WPShout I published ‘10 Awesome Things to Do With WordPress’ Custom Fields‘. This morning I awoke to find not a single comment on the post. I was disappointed as [...]
Shopping carts are an integral part of the online shopping experience. E-commerce designers face challenges in creating an attractive, yet user-friendly, website that will provide customers with a pleasant purchasing experience.
In this post we will feature 35 online shops that have well-designed and appealing shopping cart pages. These pages are what visitors will see [...]
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.
WordPress is a popular blogging platform and content management system, but it can also be used for powering e-commerce websites. Although its primary purpose is not e-commerce, there are a number of plugins and themes available that will allow you to use WordPress for your online store (some are free and some are premium).
In this post we’ll take a look at some of the resources that can help you to set up your own e-commerce site on WordPress.
WordPress e-Commerce Plugin
An extremely popular plugin that offers a lot of options for setting up an online store with WordPress. WP e-Commerce integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net and more. Designers will have the flexibility to tweak and customize the appearance as well.
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.
Many e-commerce websites tend to get very cluttered and suffer from not being user friendly. In this post we’ll showcase 20 e-commerce sites that have taken a different approach. All of these sites have very clean designs, leaning more towards minimalism rather than clutter. While this style of design is common with other types of websites, it’s not that typical for e-commerce sites. These sites may help to show that e-commerce designs do not need to be cluttered use excessive design elements.
In this graphic design tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a stylish Old Western themed Wanted poster using some excellent Photoshop techniques such as how to weather paper, how to create realistic nail heads, and more.
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.
Magento is a popular open-source e-commerce platform. Although it is much younger than many of its competitors, Magento has a large community of users. In this post we’ll feature more than 40 of the best free and premium Magento themes.
If you didn’t know it already, Google provides an API which you can use to call Javascript libraries hosted on their server for you to use on your website. Google currently provides the following Javascript Libraries from their server:
Now, you might ask why would you want to let Google host your Javascript files instead of yourself. To let make you have a better idea of what Google’s AJAX Library API is about, you’re recommended to watch this video:
Let me provide you with some rock solid reasons why you need to let Google host your files.
No matter how good your web hosting package is, it just cannot beat Google’s CDN (Content Distribution Network). Google runs many servers and has servers in many countries which mirror data across the globe. When downloading static data from Google, the underlying architecture automatically detects the geographically closest server and download the files from there. This simple action drastically reduces the time needed for your files to download. Using a CDN is recommended by Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Rules.
According to the HTLM 1.1 specification, which most modern browsers obey, only two parallel downloads can be done from a single hostname. Therefore if you use Google for your hosting, you maximize your parallel download performance, since you will have another hostname (google.com) serving files.
Now, suppose many persons are using Google’s AJAX Library API to power their websites, and you are using it too. If your visitors come to visit your website after visiting another website using Google’s AJAX Library API, then the Javascript file will still be in your cache and if it has not been changed, your visitors’ browsers might not even need to download the file(s).
Finally, you also get to save some of your bandwidth, thus saving you money. If you are on a budget hosting plan, then this might be helpful in cutting down costs and relieving your server of stress.
To insert the AJAX Library in your website, you have 2 ways of calling it. Either you use the google.load() approach which goes this way:
Then you have the more direct way of calling the library, using the following piece of code:
Now, the above method, using the Google AJAX Library API, enables you call javascript libraries which are already present on Google servers. Now what do you to host custom code snippets for your website on Google? It’s equally as easy. Just get yourself a Google Code Account, by clicking the Create A New Project, link.
After that follow the instructions to create a new Google Code Project. You will have to fill in a form like this one:
Then you will be presented with your new project’s homepage, which will look like this:
Then you can upload any Javascript files by click the “Downloads” tab and clicking on the “New Downloads” link. You will be presented with a new screen from which you can upload your Javascript file:
After the upload is completed, you will be redirected to the project homepage, where you will see your newly uploaded file:
To use the file in your website development, just copy the link of the file by right-clicking on it and copying the link location. Then when including it in your webpage, the code will look similar to this:
If you view the source of this webpage, you will see the file in use there. You might ask where you would be using this. Let me give you an example. If you are on blogger and want to use some fancy javascript effect, then you can host the javascript file on Google Code and link to it from your blogger blog easily. This gives you a reliable and free hosting solution for your javascript files and other static files.
That’s it. If you like this article, feel free to share it and if you’ve got to say something, just drop a comment below!
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