If you need to use a nifty image as the submit button for your site, here are two easy ways to accomplish the task. Method 1: Input Image Change your submit input code to this – be sure to replace the URL with your own image.
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Have you noticed how some people’s blog posts just seem to be more visually appealing than others? I know I do and that’s why I always try to add visual elements to emphasize my points, highlight key areas or just make it overall more readable and scan-able. There are several ways to do this. Shorter paragraphs, more white space and easier writing is a great start. Next, bullet points can be jazzed up a little with nice graphical bullets. If you use WordPress, most themes already have a bullet design coded in to work nicely with the rest of the theme and for the most part, common blog posts this will work. Sometimes, you may want to differentiate two lists on the same posts. That’s when two different graphical bullets can help clarify the differences visually. Another thing you can do is to add boxes. The most common boxes we see are testimonials but you can always use boxes or the illusion of boxes to highlight a quote or to feature clips of your content. Similar to boxes, shading or highlight parts of your content with color like alerts or notices commonly seen on may sites can help feature some
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When you have a presence online, you inevitably will run into the need for graphics. Depending what you do, graphics with transparent backgrounds are extremely versatile. To someone new to all this, it’s not always clear how to do that. First, you should know that transparent images can only be in GIF or PNG format. While the actual steps may be different, the process is more or less similar between different tools. You can either: Remove the background color or Tell the graphics software you are using to ignore the background color. You want to be careful when using this option though. If certain parts of the graphic has the same color as the background you want to be transparent, it will remove those also. Here’s a quick video we created to help you make images with transparent backgrounds using a free PhotoShop-like tool called Pixlr.
Do I have a goodie for you! During an Ask Armand session (part of AM2), Armand Morin was answering a question regarding tables in WordPress. What happened was, this person had created a table in Dreamweaver with styles they wanted then pasted the table into WordPress. Of course the results were not as expected. Those of us who are familiar with WordPress and in general web building completely understand the reason why. One thing Armand said struck me. That tables in WordPress are not always straightforward. He’s right but it need not be so at all. In our CSS Quickstart training, I recorded a small demo for students how the CSS hierarchy works and I thought, well this would be the ultimate demonstration. So I created a stylesheet just for tables and made it into a plugin. You install the plugin and with some very minor modifications to your table will now use these pretty styles instead of whatever the theme designer has set. This Pretty CSS Tables plugin pack includes 4 styles and you can download the plugin here More thoughts: Although the plugin is nice and convenient, it actually works out best if you could create the styles
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Undoubtedly the WordPress theme space is much larger now than it was when we started using it. When we began all themes have to be tweaked manually and many still do but now, they are all over the board. Some have features so you can make editing a few things easier others are chock full of options. And then there are frameworks and things like Builder. How Builder Is Different At its core, Builder is still a theme but it behaves a lot more like a theme builder. The package comes with a default basic, blank child theme. From there, you can construct your very own layouts and each layout can be attached to a specific page. For example I can create one layout to use for the Home page – which is what I’ve done on this site. And then I can create one layout for blogs, archives and categories. Then I can create yet another layout for squeeze pages and sales pages. Once these layouts are created, I can apply them to the posts, Pages and categories I want to use them on. These are called ‘Views’ in Builder. This on its own is powerful. As someone who
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You may know aMember as a great membership site management system. It is. But it can also be used for one-time access products. This makes it a great choice as a centralized online checkout system for many marketers. By the way, on the subject of centralized shopping cart, check out Delavo. It’s a lot more powerful and very stable. Back to the topic of aMember. As with any shopping cart or order system you really want to customize the design. You don’t always have to go all out and make it super fancy but sometimes just a little bit of header and footer matching will do wonders. The great part about aMember – you can theme it any way you want to. All the theme files are located in the aMember/templates folder. For simple header and footer customization, you’ll want to edit – the header and footer templates of course. If you are adventurous, you can even edit every single one of those template files. And if you really know your way around Smarty template system you can actually build a new theme from the ground up. It’s really not all that hard. Don’t let the Smarty code intimidate you.
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In his article ‘Top 10 Mistakes In Web Design‘, Jakob Nielsen the web usability guru wrote, “Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: When things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen” He goes on to add, “The more users’ expectation prove right, the more the will feel in control and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users’ expectations, the more they will feel insecure”. That’s why in e-commerce, you always see continuity in design from the product page, throughout the checkout process. This so basic that many including your customers expect you, an online marketer to know. Unfortunately, there are still many small online businesses who may not be quite aware of this. As a result, their membership signup process contains many stumbling blocks for the customer. The customer starts off on a well designed sales page. Once they are convinced and ready to order, they click through to a checkout page that is looks nothing like the one they just came from. If you are very lucky and the customer continues with their order, they could find themselves inside a members’ only area that
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Photo credit: MichalZacharzewski I asked a few people in the community how they dealt with spam that comes from forms on their web sites. These could be contact forms, forms to ask questions, forms you ask people to complete to request something from you. In case you don’t already know, there are robots that seek out such forms, use it to deliver spam to you. If your form is not secured, it could also use your form to deliver spam to other people which is worse. This time, I turned the question over to some of my friends so they can share how they handle this situation. Here’s what they said. Melody from The HomeMaker Helpers says: Since I installed my contact station on my sites I haven’t had any form spam. The script reduces Spam by preventing email harvesting and by using Captcha to block SpamBots from submitting the form. The basic version only costs $7.00 and it works with all sites including wp! The premium version is still cheap, it includes a CONTACT Us form, FEEDBACK form, TELL-A-FRIEND referral form and a form so they can sign up for your MAILING LIST and can be used on multiple
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Many of us have been told that you should leave links on your web site blue. Don’t go changing link colors around and for goodness sake, leave the underline alone too. You’ll confuse your visitors and people won’t click your links. I absolutely agree. Links should be blue and underlined. That was until I began a makeover of our forum over at Mommasterminds recently. Before I proceed further, allow me to frame this post a bit. It is about design and usability. Not SEO that’s just not my game. In fact, I hesitate to use the term usability too but I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the forum make over. One of the first things I did was change the links of the default design to blue and underlined. But once I did that, every single link turned blue underlined. Not all designs are like that, some are better thought out and you won’t have this problem. The trouble is, the more I looked at the pages, the more cluttered and confusing they became. All the links were fighting each other for my attention. So many links to click, so many places to go that I get lost on
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So… since this blog is all about marketing and technology you might have noticed that there has been no mention about Chrome for the first 2 weeks. What happened? Shouldn’t we be on the cutting edge? Well… maybe. People have accused me in the past of not being ‘up to date’ enough with technology. Let me assure you, just because I don’t blog about it, doesn’t mean I don’t keep up with things. But I don’t blog about every new software and tech because I’m not in the tech news business. I am in the business of helping other entrepreneurs like you, figure out which technologies are worth investing in and what technologies best to use for certain activities. This means I have to take time to evaluate them and ask the profound question. Is it really going to help your business or not? Now that we’ve got that out of the way, what about Google Chrome. I hesitate to say things that will be interpreted as a definite thumbs up or down forever and ever. Things change, and a year down the line I may be thinking differently. At this point in time, these are the questions/concerns: Do we
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