Webmasters Gallery

Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales. However, here are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.

The first method is to weave in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your sales letter, not to your whole audience.

The second method is to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects will be really convinced that these testimonials are real. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they will have the confidence to buy from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and buy too.

Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your product offers. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website.

Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that complement your product, your prospects will feel it’s a very good deal and it would be stupid to miss it. Be sure to state the monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more compelled to grab your good bargain.

Lastly, ask for the sale! Many people entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product.

Earlier today, Richard took a look at the state of e-learning 2.0, which got me to thinking about how school might be different if I were in college today because of the influx of new Web 2.0 apps aimed and students. I went to a school that utilized a Virtual Learning Environment called WebCT (since absorbed by the Blackboard company), and it really wasn’t very fun to use. Note taking meant writing on paper, study groups meant face-to-face meetings, and if you were struggling through Shakespeare, your best bet was to turn to the library, not the Internet.

When I was in college most of the tools in this round up didn’t exist. It was truly the dark ages of education! Well, okay, it was a just a few years ago, but just in this decade, and especially in the last few years, a handful of tools to make school life easier have appeared. What follows is the set of web tools I would put in my backpack were I headed back to school tomorrow.

Office Replacements

There’s no software package I used more in college (or today, for that matter) than Microsoft Office. But who wants to plunk down $150 on office software? You’re in college, after all, and I’m sure you can think of better uses for your cash. 5 years ago the alternative was Sun’s OpenOffice.org suite, Corel’s Wordperfect (still not free), or a handful of even less developed offline tools. But now there are a large number of impressive web apps that can handle your academic needs. The cream of the crop are below.

• Google Docs & Spreadsheets – One of the more developed online office tools, Google only offers a word processor and spreadsheet, though there have long been rumors of a presentation tool (and recent acquisitions by the company would suggest that they are likely true).
• Zoho Office Suite – Zoho is one of the most complete online office suites, offering more tools than you’ll even find in Microsoft Office’s student and teacher version.
• gOFFICE – No frills gOFFICE has a very familiar look and feel.
• ThinkFree – ThinkFree can replace Word, Excel, and Powerpoint with its suite of online apps, and they offer downloadable versions of their software as well.
• EditGrid – EditGrid only does spreadsheets, but does them very well.

Notetaking

More and more students are bringing laptops to class. Owning a laptop is a requirement for all first-year undergraduates at the University of Denver, for example. The proliferation of portable computers means that note taking doesn’t have to happen with a pad and pen. The following web apps will help you take and organize your notes.

• NoteMesh
• ShortText
• Yahoo! Notepad
• YourDraft
• Stickies
• NoteTango
• JotCloud
• NoteCentric

Mind Mapping

Now you have your notes, you need to put them together. The following mind mapping/flow charting tools will help you get your thoughts in order so you can go from raw notes to polished dissertation.

• Thinkature
• MindMeister
• Gliffy
• Kayuda
• Bubbl.us
• Mindomo
• Flowchart.com
• Comapping
• Mind42

Studying

So you’ve got your notes, and you have them all mapped out and organized, but you still need to fill in some blanks. There are a number of online study aids that exist to help you find the answers you need.

• Wikipedia – Wikipedia should probably never be used for serious academic research, but it is a great "jumping off point." I often use Wikipedia to get quick background info on unfamiliar subjects and point me in the right direction for more in depth study.
• Yahoo! Answers – When searching the web fails, someone on Yahoo! Answers may be able to show you were to find the information you’re after.
• AnswerU – AnswerU is like Yahoo! Answers for college, sadly not the most academic of sites, but you could certainly try your luck.
• SparkNotes – SparkNotes are (mostly) free, online CliffsNotes for a large number of books. They also do test prep, mathematics, science and a number of other subjects. Of course they can’t really substitute for actually reading a book, but they can help you if you’re having trouble figuring out Emily Bronte. (And it turns out that many CliffsNotes are now online for free as well!)
• Google News – Google News, especially with their new archive search, can be an invaluable research tool if you’re researching a recent historical or current event.
• College-Cram.com- Free online study guides for science, math, language, and business topics.
• Tutorlinker.com – When all else fails, hire a tutor.

Bookmarking

With all that online studying you need a way to keep track of what you’ve read. Online bookmarking tools are a great way to do just that.

• del.icio.us – There are a large number of social bookmarking apps, but del.icio.us is king among them. If you don’t like it, try Furl, Ma.gnolia, or Blinklist.
• Clipmarks – Save just a selection of a site. Don’t like Clipmarks? Try Web-Chops (and read our reviews of both sites).
• Wizlite – Highlight text in online documents the way you would in a text book. Don’t like Wizlite? Try i-Lighter.

Collaboration

Why study alone when you can get help from a friend? There is power in numbers.

• Facebook – The quintessential college network can be used for more than just planning parties and dating. Facebook can be used to keep in touch with classmates, share and discuss notes, and create study groups.
• Stikipad – A collaborative wiki service that you can use to keep track of group notes on a project.
• Backpack – All your notes, lists, and ideas in one shared space.

Calendars

Juggling your class schedule, extra cirricular activities, study time, and social life can be a challenge. The calendar apps below might help.

• 30 Boxes
• CalendarHub
• HipCal
• Spongecell
• Yahoo! Calendar
• Google Calendar

Calculations

What college arsenal would be complete with out a calculator?

• Calcoolate
• Calcr
• E-Trutor Graphing Calculator
• CalcResult

Other Tools

• EasyBib – A tool to take the pain out creating a bibliography.
• OttoBib – Enter the ISBN of a book, and automatically have your bibliography entry created in MLA, APA, Chicago, BibTeX, or Wikipedia style.
• Zotero – A Firefox extension that lets you "collect, manage, and cite your research sources" from within your web browser.
• Google – Google really is the killer research app. You can do simple math, currency conversion, get answers to questions (like "what’s the population of albania?" — it’s 3.6 million), search the text of books, look at satellite maps of the place your studying, and of course, search the web. Just check out all the stuff it does. (And all the stuff it might do in the future.)

Conclusion

While I don’t think there’s really a substitute for face-to-face learning, the online classroom continues to evolve in amazing ways. Students today have a host of web apps at their finger tips that can truly facilitate a better learning environment.

Our new icon set is now available and we are giving away 10 sets free

We’ve been working hard to create these beautiful icons exclusively for Graphic River. They are a great addition if you already have our free icon set, they are done in a similar style and could be used together. The new icons are a lot more refined and clean, with a lot more new icons that may have been missing from the first set. Check them out and let us know what you think.

We’re also quite excited to announce that the latest marketplace from the wonderful Envato team is now up and running. It’s called Graphic River, and it is where we have put out latest icon set up for sale. Also, if you have a read through this post you will see that they will be giving away 10 free copies of our icon set… scroll down for details.

View The Complete Set

 

Icon Set Details

There are 148 icons in total, and they are ideal for use in your website, blog or application. We’ve seen or last set used in everything from top 25 iPhone applications, to web blogs and some really neat websites. We hope that this new set will be just as successful and useful to all of you out there.

Download Function Premium Icon Set | .zip Format | 2.5mb | 48×48px Icons

Win 1 of 10 Free Copies of the Icon Set

As part of their launch Graphic River have agreed to allow us to give away 10 free copies of the icon set. They launched their new marketplace today, and I really suggest you check it out. The Graphic River website allows you to buy & sell all sorts of graphic resourecs. Everything from icons and Vector illustrations, to Brushes and Shapes for various softwares.

How to Win a copy?

1. Sign up to Graphic River, if you haven’t already.
2. Leave a Comment Here telling us what you would use the icons for.
3. With your comment include your Graphic River username.
4. Make sure you fill out your email address on the comment form, so we can contact you if you win.

Winners will be chosen & announced on March 2nd. The winners are the people we judge to have some good solutions for how to use their icon set.

Good luck to everyone, we hope you all enjoy the new icon set. Leave us some feedback and let us know what you think, and possibly give us some ideas for a few set. I think the next set will be free so it would be great for us to see what icons everyone would like to see.

Written by liam on February 24, 2009

 

WE ANNOUNCE THE LUCKY WINNERS & SHARE SOME OF OUR TOP Graphic River PICKS

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback on the icons, and ideas for future sets. We’re very happy with how things went. Right now we have the Highest Rated, and the Most Downloaded icon set on Graphic River, and the 3rd most popular file overall.

We chose the 10 winners based upon their uses for the icons, and I hope that the icons can make an impact on the designs that all of the winners use them in.

The Winners

 

We’re really happy that so many people took the time to give us some feedback, and here are the list of the lucky 10 winners:

01. DVQ / cosmokramer
02. Nick C
03. John / johnyboy
04. Cody / cosm44
05. Jordan / Cupcakes
06. BrandRob
07. Dan Cameron / sproutventure
08. boxcarracer
09. iPad
10. Design Studio 51 /  ToddyBoy

Some other Amazing Files to Check Out!

While I’m really happy with how well my icon set is doing on Graphic River, I’ve been really impressed with a lot of the items for sale on the site. So here’s a round up of a few of my favorite items currently available for download on Graphic River.

Commerce Theme Vector Icon Set

Very useful icons with a great style to them too.

Circularity – Circular Icons

A really nice icon set which I think has a really nice finish to it.

Colorful Abstract Circles

Very well made and beautiful looking abstract.

Graffiti Grunge Painting

Lovely work here, this pack could have a lot of uses for your grunge work.

So there we have it. Congratulations once again to the winners, and I hope you all enjoy exploring Graphic River. If there’s any items on the website which you think deserve a mention, do so in the comments section.

Not too long ago I held a giveaway on this website sponsored byF-Stop to give away a free courier bag.  I’ve always loved giving things away on this website and I was very excited to be giving away such a great item.  In the past, I’ve found contests or giveaways to be great ways to increase traffic and exposure for my site as well as the item that is being given away.  The problem with contests or giveaways is that it can be hard to spread the word about them.  In the world of social networking, it can be tough to ask others to help spread the word because after all, why would anyone want to hurt their own chances of winning a particular item by telling their friends about it?
This is the major impediment to any "comment-to-win" contests or giveaways that one might find on the web.  Unless your site has a huge following, the traffic and exposure as a result from the contest is likely to be minimal because people simply won’t want to help you promote it.  I spent a lot of time thinking about how to solve this problem.  The solution came to me while thinking about the terms for the F-Stop contest.  Why not allow people to enter the contest by Tweeting about it via Twitter?

I immediately saw the advantages a Twitter-based contest or giveaway would have over a standard "comment-to-win" giveaway.  By asking a person to simply Tweet a message containing some basic text and a specific shortened URL with a link back to my contest, my contest could literally become viral.  Every person who entered would send the link out to all their followers, those people would in turn visit my website and then send the link out to all their followers, and so on and so on.  I could then track the entries using Search.Twitter.com. The only drawback I could see from this sort of contest was the potential irritation that it could cause from people realizing that I was asking them to essentially sign up their competitors.

To off-set this irritation I decided to allow the entrant to enter more than once.  This would have a dual benefit.  The more they Tweeted, the better their chance to win and the more potential entrants my contest would receive.  I wasn’t exactly sure how well this contest would work but my gut was saying that it was going to do really well.
After about 2 hours, I knew I was right.  I published the contest about 5 a.m., by 7 a.m. the contest already had 200 entrants and by the end of the day my contest had received nearly 1,000 entries and the contest page had received about 3,500 page views.  On day 2 the contest page had received over 1,100 page views and the number of entries was still increasing.  At this point I knew that this contest method was a winner.
The response I received regarding this contest was very positive although I did receive some negative feedback from some of my readers who felt that it was irresponsible to allow people to enter as many times as they wanted, that spamming their friends with the contest details was annoying, and that the potential ramifications for Twitter were very bad if this method caught on.  For the most part, I do agree with some of the detractors of this method.  That’s why I believe that contests run in this matter should be done using some common sense and with some responsibility.  If you decide to run a contest like this on your site, here are a few suggestions:

1. Limit the number of times people can enter and tell them that if they violate the rules, their entries will not be counted.  
2. Don’t hold contests like this very often.  If you do this too much, people will catch on and stop participating.
3. Only give away big ticket items.  Do not try to sell your eBook this way.  If you do, you’re likely to face a lot of negative feedback.
4. Only run the contest for 1-3 days. After that, interest seems to run out.

Anyhow, I thought that I would share my thoughts regarding this very effective contest method with you guys and see what you think.  Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

This article actually should be considered as less is more. At first I thought I should create massive list full of newest WordPress themes, but then I thought again, how much actually of these themes I would want to use myself. Number was a lot lesser than I thought. So in this article I listed only very well designed,feature rich and truly impressive themes.

And with so much themes available for free, it’s really a hard task to find really good and not so overused theme, which could be right choice for Your own blog. I tried my best on this article, tell me how did I do!

1. Androida Professional WordPress Theme

Androida is a business template based on WordPress. It is based on Android phone niche. The theme also comes with an optional blog layout. Users are given the option to choose between business template layout and regular blog template layout. Theme is powered with featured content glider, featured posts, featured video, banner ads, widgetized sidebars, feedburner subscription form etc.

 

2. Magazeen Professional WordPress Theme

This bold magazine 2-col-theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. Really amazing theme designed by WeFunction for free, also there are several handy built-in jQuery features and a lot more. Read full documentation on their site by clicking image below.

 

3. TypeBased Professional WordPress Theme

Typebased is a free, personal blog design, with a very clean and elegant style. Along with the great design, there are also included all of the other Woo goodies in the backend i.e. custom widgets, integrated banner ad management etc.

 

4. Rusty Grunge Professional WordPress Theme

 

5. Elegant Grunge Professional WordPress Theme

Very elegant theme inspired by wefunction.com. It is full with many features, which You can check on their blog. Also their blog uses the same theme, so You can see it in the best way of action.

 

6. CryBook Professional WordPress Theme

CryBook is a 3 Column simple theme base with the popular Facebook. It contain 2 widget-ready sidebar, live theme switcher and Custom Admin Panel. It’s compatible with up to WordPress 2.6.2 and has been tested with in Firefox3, Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Opera, and Safari. This is a very simple theme, you may notice that it is only a few files included. The key is, it is not only tabless but also imageless! There is no a single image used in layout!

 

7. Max Professional WordPress Theme

WordPress Max theme is the true news theme for WordPress. Turn your personal blog with max into a real magazine / news site in minutes. It comes with advanced control panel to manage every aspect of your blog features. This theme comes with many features like ajax tabs, feedburner, media player, and so much more. If You were searching for really advanced theme, this could be it – theme really offers many features You could ever need in daily basis.

 

8. WP-Premium Professional WordPress Theme

Featured in Smashing Magazine, this famous free theme has been praised a lot by actual wordpress users for it’s elegance, usability, strategic layout and SEO friendy code. Now, this free theme is 2.7 ready with new useful features and code update.

With paid version, You get theme support and some exclusive features such as Theme control panel, more colorschemes and so on.. Also there are 3 different color schemes available for free. This 2 column theme should suit for classic user needs and You should be able to use it right away with little or even no customization. Perfectly suitable for users without coding skills.

 

9. BlogTheme Professional WordPress Theme

BlogTheme does the simple things well and therein lies to power of this personal blog theme: great structure, trendy style and some nifty jQuery effects in the sidebar. So what’s left for you to do? Well, you can start by adding content..

If Your don’t need anything powerful, this theme could work for Your blog with already structured content and subtle design, also notice Twitter header banner showing Your latest tweet – handy! Check out WooTheme site for more information.

 

10. SohoMag Professional WordPress Theme

SohoMag is a free WordPress Theme. Although it is free, but the overall look is still very good. Unique to load should be less than the picture too much, could lead to slow access. However, the effect of picture display SohoMag Theme is also a major feature, if this part was removed, I am afraid, not the appearance. Unique theme on top bringing latest articles and popular posts as well as featured content.

 

11. Hybrid News Professional WordPress Theme

“Hybrid News comes with a total of 10 widget sections for your use, which will all integrate seamlessly within the theme. You have control of your content. You decide what goes where.

It also comes with an additional page template aptly titled Front Page, which has a featured post slider, excerpts section, and headlines section. You get to choose what posts are shown and how many posts are shown. Plus, no posts will repeat themselves, which has been a problem with some themes here before.

There’s also the sweet four-level drop-down menu, which can easily be modified to accommodate even more levels.”

This is definitely one of my favorite themes and the best thing is, it is very well supported with many vell explained tutorials. It’s unbelievable such theme can be free.

 

12. Epsilon Professional WordPress Theme

Eye catching, 3 column WordPress theme with tabbed sidebar, ajax/widgets support,drop-down menus and featured slideshow on top. If You have a lot of content, this could be right theme to put all that content into.

 

13. Maasahan Professional WordPress Theme

Maasahan is a premium quality WordPress theme with Featured Post Gallery, Feedburner Email Subscription, Twitter Account integration, Popular Posts, Tabbed Sidebar, Automatic Thumbnail Resizer, Adsense ready with advertising blocks easily customize via an Option Page. Theme includes many modern and popular features necessary in every blog.

 

14. Blue Blog Professional WordPress Theme

Blue Blog is a 3 Column themes that mostly for bloggers. It contain 2 widget-ready sidebar, custom templates, integrated pulgins and integrated digg, delicious and stumbleupon for every posts. It’s compatible with WordPress 2.6 and has been tested with in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Opera, and Safari.

 

15. Portfolio – WPESP Professional WordPress Theme

Portfolio – WPESP Theme is a “minimalist” Theme based on the idea of portfolio created by DAILYWP. The Theme is a starting point in the creation of portfolios, using WordPress as CMS. In this short tutorial are the guidelines of the design, the Codex de WordPress used, where are explained the Custom Write Panel created to edit the content, and the adaptation to the Coda Slider Effect script, create by jQuery for Designers, and can be modified depending on what the user needs.

Read more about theme on their homepage, but if You need highly customizable WordPress portfolio theme, this would be excellent choice.

 

16. Digital Statement Professional WordPress Theme

One more elegant theme with many useful built-in features and also You can read explanation how tu set up this theme for maximal effect. I enjoyed theme’s built-in featured slideshow and how all content is situated in very harmonic way.

 

17. FREEmium Professional WordPress Theme

Highly customizable WordPress theme with features like , jQuery menu, quick submitting to web2.0 websites support, flickrRSS plugin support, threaded comments support, feedBurner subscribe via email support, a lot of advertising spots (125×125, 120×600, 300×250), 2 widget ready sidebars. There are hundreds of premium wordpress themes on the web waiting to be paid for. Some of them are worth it, some are not. FREEmium wordpress theme is definitely worth paying for, but guys from FreebiesDock.com offers it for free!

 

18. TimeCafe Professional WordPress Theme

Premium theme with featured slideshow, built in newsletter, dropdown menu, included header and psd files, custom archive and search page, widget and gravatar ready and much much more. I consider this theme as good starting point, You should tweak it a little bit to get Your own unique look and design and use source full of good features.

 

19. News CMS Professional WordPress Theme

News CMS is – as the name implies – a news-slash-article-slash-cms WordPress Theme. The goal here was to provide a customizable theme that could be turned into any given news site with as little as a graphical face lift. The emphasis with News CMS is on customization rather than aesthetics. News CMS uses several plugins, but they are included in download file.

*note: You must register to download this theme.

 

20. WP-Coda Professional WordPress Theme

This is very popular and elegant theme, but I couldn’t exclude it from this list. You can use it freely as Your portfolio page with more or less static content.

*note: You must register to download this theme.

 

21. Inasis Glass Professional WordPress Theme

This is very unique WordPress theme for 2.6+ version imitating Windows Vista design and look. If You want to stand out and grab other people attention, this could be the right theme for You. There are also built in features like: fixed w/right sidebar, widget & multi-language ready, 7 reader selectable themes saved by cookie,default sub-theme is admin selectable and admin selectable picture.

 

22. iNove Professional WordPress Theme

Very professional theme, very well designed and after studying it a little bit You’ll discover many handy built-in features in this theme. For example I enjoy handy Javascript feature “Go To top”, also theme is widget ready.

Unfortunately, I am not able to make it to SXSW this year, but to pay homage to Austin’s greatest music/film/interactive festival, this evening I created a site you can send to your friends who may seem a little down about missing the big show. For those who are lucky enough to be able to make it down, congratulations. For those of us who work for companies that think it’s one giant party instead of an educational and informational conference, we’re stuck in our tiny cubicles.

The site is VirtualSXSW.com and allows you to track the latest action from SXSW on Twitter. I might add some more cool stuff to the site… or I might not, it all depends on how much time I have to goof around with it.

Susumu Yoshida is a visual interface designer in Japan. He has created a set of iPhone style sidebar icons for us. They are 16px icons in PNG format. Of course, it is not restricted to use these icons on your sidebar. If you think it is suitable to use them on your blogs or web applications, you are free to do so as well.

James Graham of Opera has a post about how section is not just a semantic div that argues against the folks that think that we can get by with just div class="section" for example:

HTML 5 introduces new elements like <section>, <article> and <footer> for structuring the content in your webpages. They can be employed in many situations where <div> is used today and should help you make more readable, maintainable, HTML source. But if you just go through your document and blindly replace all the <div>s with <section>s you are doing it wrong.

This is not just semantic nit-picking, there is a practical reason to use these elements correctly.

In HTML 5, there is an algorithm for constructing an outline view of documents. This can be used, for example by AT, to help a user navigate through a document. And <section> and friends are an important part of this algorithm. Each time you nest a <section>, you increase the outline depth by 1 (in case you are wondering what the advantages of this model are compared to the traditional <h1>-<h6> model, consider a web based feedreader that wants to integrate the document structure of the syndicated content with that of the surrounding site. In HTML 4 this means parsing all the content and renumbering all the headings. In HTML5 the headings end up at the right depth for free).

You can also talk about other items such as the new menu tag that the browser can render with an interesting native menu item.

You may have noticed that day 2 at MIX was IE8 day (compared to the Silverlight 3 day one) in that the puppy launched!

This is good news in that IE 8 is better than IE 7, which is better than IE 6. Maybe, with 6 being two versions back, we have more weight to get rid of the chap. However, even though Microsoft has recently claimed that IE 8 is the fastest browser, its legacy weight still shows for now, and the other browsers are sprinting ahead.

I have a sneaky suspicion that IE 9 is going to be different and a lot better (new team? got the old greats back? or are they on Azure?), but that is wild speculation on my part.

We had a lot of comments on the news today, and one person who will rename anonymous purely because I don’t know if he would like to be attached or not said this:

When you do your IE8 post, don’t forget to toss out a line indicating the writing-mode bug was not fixed. Their only CSS3 feature and they’ve now effectively prevented the entire web for using it for the next x years. Hilariously, they also tried to cover up the bug by marking it fixed and forcing me to open a new one with the same description.

• OLD
• New

I also count two regressions in IE7 compatibility mode that make it different from IE7. Kind of a headache for those counting on sending that header.

So, thanks for the better browser guys, and we can’t wait to see what happens next. Shortly we will have IE 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, Opera 10, and others….. and the Web will have nicer cars to drive around on it. Let’s build applications that take these cars on a decent joy ride instead of boring them in the slow lane.