Benefits of Integrating social media on your website

Have you optimized the links between your website and your activity on social media? Your website should be at the heart of your web strategy. However, you should also take advantage of your activity on social platforms by integrating them into your website.

If you are currently thinking to develop your website, you should consider the possibility of using a content management platform like WordPress. This platform is user friendly and easy to use. In addition, it provides tools that allow you to create an integration with your social networking sites.Your website and your blog should be grouped under a single entity. Rather than having a URL that is called tecknonews.com blog / blog, include the space that allows you to interact with your customers and partners under your main domain name.

Because your site should be at the heart of the strategy and editorial content should be developed for this platform. It will then be adapted and grown on different social platforms.

I suggest you can create a very strong integration between your website and social media you use. This integration is by adding social networking buttons to your web space. For example, include the LinkedIn profile of the members of your organization and your business page to page bio and about your site. Add buttons to share content on social media. Use a feedback system that works with LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Create author attributes to your editors or, add features Twitter Cards to your site.

Here are some tips that will help you to integrate social platforms and functionality for your site:

• USE OF IMAGES AND PHOTOS

Using mages and pictures on the website is very important. When you publish your content, planning to post a relevant images to your post. They allow you to capture the attention of people who visit your site. In addition, images can be shared on social media.

More and more visitors are discovering websites  on social platforms or on Google images by searching images. Do not forget to add a description and keywords for each of your photos. They will be better referenced.

• LINKEDIN  ON YOUR WEBSITE!

Did you know that LinkedIn offers several tools that allow you to create a tight integration with your website?Obviously, you can add buttons that allow you to easily share your content on this site easily.
- Using LinkedIn as a manager of membership if your website has a members section.
- Get recommendations for your products and services.
You will find the tools and features that LinkedIn can be integrated on your website here .

• ADD MORE FEATURES TO YOUR WEBSITE FACEBOOK

Facebook is undoubtedly the social media with opportunities strongest integration with a website. If your company sells products and services for consumers, you can explore the possibilities of social integration with Facebook. Facebook allowing you to develop a stronger relationship between your site and Facebook page.

Beyond the like button, Facebook provides management capabilities of members and comments like LinkedIn.However, you can also grow much further the integration of this network on your website. Here are some examples of integration:
- Added a recommendation module content.
- Add the widget to your Facebook page.
- Evaluation, sharing and adding your products and services in lists with Open Graph .
You can find more details on the integration capabilities to your site that offers Facebook here and there

• LINK THE CONTENTS OF YOUR WEBSITE  TO TWITTER TO PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT AND YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Hostgator Massive May discount – 30% off on all hosting plans

You can get Hostgator web hosting for 30% off / discount for May 2013. Yes you head it right. The largest hosting company is offering new customers 30% on all hosting plans including reseller and dedicated hosting. Hostgator is the best web hosting platform for any form of web hosting plans. You can host a private to a business blog or website here. It is the most reliable hosting provider out there.

You can save as much as $53.46 on the simplest hosting plan and $139.86 discount on Business plans  with the new Hostgator Discount coupon. All you have to do is Hit this link and select a plan you want for yourself. Once you have done all that. It is time to go ahead and buy what all is in your cart with a Hostgator discount coupon. The coupon is

SPRING30

Do remember plus you have to hit the link above, else the coupon remains invalid. To choose a plan you have to hit view web hosting plans when you reach the website. Once you enter the code you will get a discount and you pay the discounted price and get started with your hosting package. Your account is activated in no time.

Hostgator Plans

Hostgator offer three normal or basic plans for new users who are new to the world of hosting and blogging. The details of the Hostgator plans where this discount applies are given below.

Hatchling plan

This is the starter hosting plan. Its rates start at $3.96 per month and supports single domain hosting and offers the following features.

• UNLIMITED storage space
• UNLIMITED bandwidth
• SINGLE domain
• 24/7 customer support
• Shared SSL Certificate

This is the way to go, if you want to start a single domain project or a blog project. With the Hostgator discount code we provided above you just have to $3.10 .

Baby Plan

• UNLIMITED storage space
• UNLIMITED bandwidth
• UNLIMITED domains
• 24/7 customer support
• Shared SSL Certificate

This plan is for hosting multiple domains. It starts at $6.36 per month. If you are an established Website administrator or a blogger with multiple blogs who is looking for a better or the best hosting service in the world you should pick this plan. This plan comes down to $4 a month with the Hostgator discount.

Business Plan

• UNLIMITED storage space
• UNLIMITED bandwidth
• UNLIMITED domains
• 24/7 customer support
• FREE dedicated SSL Certificate
• FREE Toll free Number

This plan is for corporate and large websites. It starts from $10.36 per month. This is suitable for those organization who want the best customer support and reliability with no compromise. With a discount of 30% it will be $7 a month.

Why should you Choose Hostgator?

Hostgator is the largest web hosting service in the world. There are 8 million domains in the world that are hosted on it. Probably this is the highest number of domain a web hosting service is manage. It excels in customer support. Customer services can be contacted 24/7 around the year. You can be talking to them within minutes over phone or conduct a live chat from their own website.

Any problem is dealt with in a matter of minutes. They provide unique solution that no other Web Hosting service provide. I am an existing customer of Hostgator and I can tell you this I have never been disappointing or looked back after getting on board with them. So I would suggest to grab the discount coupon code and head down to Hostgator.

They provide Unlimited storage and bandwidth which is awesome. You can upload any amount of file you want and it can handle any amount of visitors and server stress due to the unlimited space and bandwidth policy. Your website or blog never runs out of juice at HG. You get unlimited sub domains and email service too. Your own email address, sounds cool doesn’t it.

You can install anything on your part of the server. Custom made CMS, online market tools, eCommerce interface and even make new forum websites. This is what you don’t get in other web hosting services. They provide you the newest edition of cPanel, which is the best web host and server manager in the world. So go ahead and get a plan from them and start your internet journey.

Top 5 Best Domain Name Search Tools

You are a blogger or a webmaster. Then, you will agree, that your domain name is your brand. It’s the thing, that makes you apart from others. Picking a  name is very tough and we need different tools to pick one. The names we think of are sometimes taken. So what do we do.

Maybe we could pick up alternative domain names to start-up our blog. Gone are the days when a domain name had search value. Today, a domain name is little or no SEO value and the game has totally changed. If you do become a professional blogger, make a name for yourself in the blogosphere  than people will come to know of you, only because of the name you have given to your blog or website, that is, your Domain names.

Before, we go ahead buy ourselves a domain, we want to make sure the name is available, or a name really close to it is available. The  name suggesting tools come to our aid, I did a long research on such tools and came out with 5 of the very best research tools ever.

The 5 Best Domain Name Search Tools

WHOIS Domain Search name Tool

WHOIS is the main directory of all the domain ever registered on the internet. It contains all the blogs listed over the internet. You can also search domain names on WHOIS. It shows all the availabledomain and alternative names and related domain names up for grab. It has non flashy basic structure, but it is totally reliable.

You can also look up the details about a registered domain. They also contain specific SEO tools that can help you increase and analyse your search engine ranks. These tools will help you get better Search engine ranks.

Click here, to go to Whois  tool.

Domains Bot Search Tool

Domains Bot, is the one I prefer when I search for specific name over the internet. The user interface of this searching tool is very impressive. It is like Google instant. You enter a word and it starts finding them. There is no need to click any button or hit return key.

You can search all kinds of domain extension, like .com, .net etc. It is very fast in searches and is totally reliable. You can even start registering a domain from there. Click here to go to the tool.

Register.com Tool

Register.com also has a name search plugin, which works great. It is fast and reliable. Apart from name Search, it also allows you host your domain on Linux or Windows-based host. It supports cPanel as well as Plesk.

It gives all the alternative names if your name is taken using synonyms of the name you are using. It is a very handy tool to use.

Click here to go to the tool.

CheckDomain Search tool

Whenever you Google “Domain search tool” on Google, this is the page which comes out on the top. There is a reason behind this. It is very trusted domain search tool. It is totally basic and is the fastest loading tool I have ever come across. It is very basic to use. There are not a lot of features on Check Domain, still its a worth trying. It will full fill all your expectations and slow connection people can rejoice.

Click here to visit the website.

Instant Tool

Instant Domain Search tool is like Domains Bot. It’s name is inspired by Google Instant search. It searches the name in the same way that Google searches queries in. After a search there is also an option of buying the domain at a reasonable price. You can select which Domain Registrar to register domain with. By default it is Go Daddy.

Top 11 Web Design Tools & Resources Improves your design skills

Today there are tons of tools and resources are now available on internet for web designers. Most of the tools and resources are confusing and difficult to use.

1.Photoshop – Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop is developed and published by Adobe image editing program. It is useful for web designers to improve the efficiency of their work. It has unique features such as layerswith masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths and parameters . You can also apply multiple formats and color contrast.

2.Dream weaver -Dream weaver is a web development tool and HTML Editor originally developed by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe. It is ideal for web designers. It supports many web technologies such as PHP, Cold Fusion, CSS, Java Script and ASP.NET.

3.Flash-Flash is a popular method widely used for adding animation and advertising websites or web pages. Using Flash animation, you can attract your readers more eefectively. It helps to improve the visibility of your web page or web site.

4.Adobe Illustrator- Illustrator is vector graphic editor. It was developed and marketed by Adobe. It has some features that are useful for web designers for text settings, additional fonts settings, Cash bidirectional text dictionary and hyphenation module and characters import Options / export options.

5.Stats for XHTML- XHTML Extended Hyper Text Markup Language. This is the extended version of HTML and it also works with HTML and XML syntax. XHTML also provides extensive support other than XML – based language.

6.Firebug -Firebug is a Firefox Add on and is integrated into Firefox. With the help of Firebug you can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML and JavaScript in any web page.

7.Edit CSS- Edit  CSS editor is powerful style sheet. It has many features such as preview of anything faster.

8.Fireworks - Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editing tool. It has some extended features such as hierarchical levels, Smart Guides, Image optimization, the 9-slice scaling and states.

9.YSlow- YSlow for Firebug Firefox Add-on is integrated with the Firebug web development tool. It analyses the current statistics web page as it offers suggestions for improving the performance of web pages and also provides performance analysis.

10.Browser Shots-Browser Shot is the free online service and open source to generate screenshots of your web page or catch a website in different browsers. Its useful for checking the functionality of the browser.

11.ColorZilla- ColorZila is Firefox add-on that helps in the analysis of color DOMs Web page and creates the palette. It also supports in different languages like Indonesian, Korean and Norwegian.

I hope this article will help you to improve your efficiency and design skills with the Web site, tools and design resources.

Top 3 Web Hosting Service Provider In 2013

Top 3 Web Hosting Service Provider In 2013

1. HostGator
2. BlueHost
3. DreamHost

    1. Hostgator

•     Unlimited Disk Space
•     Unlimited Bandwidth
•     Free SiteBuilder
•     Easy Control Panel
•     1-Click Script Installs
•     4,500 Free Website Templates
•     99.9% Uptime Guarantee
•     45 Day Money Back Guarantee
•     24/7/365 Technical Support
•     $100 Google AdWords Offer

Also Get  Hostgator  Webs Hosting First Month @ $0.01 Use This Coupon Code"1CENT"

   2. Bluehost

•     Unlimited Domain Hosting
•     Unlimited GB Hosting Space
•     Unlimited GB File Transfer
•     Unlimited E-mail Accounts
•     Free Domain
•     Free Site Builder w/ templates
•     Secure Shell, SSL, FTP, Stats
•     CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
•     $100 Google Advertising Offer
•     24/7 Phone, Chat & Email Support

3. Dreamhost

•     Unlimited Domain Hosting
•     Unlimited GB Hosting Space
•     Unlimited GB File Transfer
•     Unlimited E-mail Accounts
•     Free Site Builder w/ templates
•     Secure Shell, SSL, FTP, Stats
•     CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
•     $100 Google Advertising Offer

Best Top Designed Websites of the Week

In the ‘Best designed websites of the week’ series, I list down the top five websites which amaze me with their design concepts. This week, I have selected ‘I Shot Him’, ‘Adam Hartwig’, ‘C-Roots’, ‘Axel Aubert’ and ‘Ishu Plus’. The web technology is changing everyday and so is the web design. It is better to keep yourself updated with the latest design trends and keep them implementing in your future projects. With this series, my endeavor is to provide you with the latest trends for your inspiration.

Have a look at these websites, get inspired and break the convention by coming out with a fresh new design for your upcoming websites.

The Best Designed Websites of the Week are:

I Shot Him

Adam Hartwig

C-ROOTS

Axel Aubert

ISHU

As always, if you want to include your website in the next ‘Best Designed Websites of the Week’ collection, please comment below with your website name.

10 Design Methods To Reduce Page Load Time Exponentially

photo credit: kaneda99

1. Reducing The Size Of Your Images On Your Site

Make sure where you can that your web images stay as small as they can be without losing to much quality. If your looking to improve your image load time and in hand your website load time, convert your images to .jpg or .gif images.

You can reduce the size of the images by lowering the number of colors in the image. There are many software tools that will let you optimize your images maximizing the load of those images.

Tinypng.org is the best online tool to reduce the size of any png image file by 70% without loosing the image quality.

2.Using Table The Right Way

If you don’t use tables in your website they you should be. They are a very light html code that the search engine have been and always will be able to read quickly and easily. You can use tables on any of your pages and once you learn how to work with them you’ll wonder why you weren’t using them sooner.

3. Reducing The Amount Of Images

We all know that making a website with more image then text will result in a page loading slower, so the key is to only use the images you have to, to convey a message.

Here are  some simple ideas to choose a better image for your blog/site

• The Simple is often better.
• Choose pretty girls face to convey your message
• Bright contrast colored images attract more visitors than black and white images.

So when picking images make sure you apply the first rule and never go over board with images, stay around 1-3 images per page.

4. Avoid Animated GIF’s

Animated GIFs are great but you can often distract your visitor and can take a while to load you other page elements are suffering from not being optimized yet. When it comes to animated gifs just remember less is better.

5. Backgrounds

Make sure you use images as background and not as a standalone image. If you are using large images to help with the flow of the website make sure you have them as background images, because otherwise they will take too much space and time, Loading them in the background you can reduce page load time.

Lazy Load jquery  can also help you to load all the images on the page as user scroll the webpage. Advance Lazy Load wordpress plugin is for wordpress users.

6. Fast Loading Flash

If you want to have a flash element on your site then you need to make sure that you keep it to only 1 per page maximum of 2 because normally you have a good amount of visual or informational content in these and visitors will not wait around for them to load. If you can get the rest of your site to load fast then the visitor might be a little bit more willing to stay around to view your flash.

7. Create Icons That Are Simple

Don’t use images for your icons that are big. Remember simple is better. Keep the size down and just use them to add a little color thereby grabbing the visitor’s attention.

Multiple images that appear on the same page can be combined and distributed through CSS sprites.  Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks  has already written a beautiful article on this topic

If you are not very comfortable with CSS sprite then you can take the advantage of this handy css sprite website.

8. Use HTML To Build Your Website

HTML loads really fast and you can create all kinds of great designs with HTML so build your site. if you are developing a site for a small business that does not run an e-commerce website or blog along with their signature site then it is always better to design their home page with html.

9. Use CSS Styles

CSS styles can be a lot of fun. You can get some really neat effects and yet they are made from HTML code so they load really fast.

To check the CSS style on your webpage , you can validate your CSS from w3 school link or you can use web developer firefox addons.

A valid markup and CSS can really enhance the loading time of your webpage otherwise your browser will fallback from that error mistakes and thus will take extra time to adjust all the settings, well known as quirk mode.

10. Check Your Page Load Times Often

Though your website page load time depends upon a lots of factors like webhost, coding, size of images,flash, audio and video, so you should check your load time often.

Tools.pingdom.com, gtmetix.com and google pagespeed are some very good resources to check the actual page loading time. Continuously check your page load time until you optimize the load time. Anytime you make changes you should repeat this process, and once in a while you should do it just to make sure your pages are still loading quickly

Image Shine & Glow Effect with Pure CSS Web Developers designing Tricks

Sometimes back, I have shown how to create some simple and neat image hover effects with CSS. Recently I was going through CSS3 Animated Hover effect at webdesignshock.com where a shine effect is applied on an image with the help of an additional background image. Enhancing this original work, today I am going to show you how to create Image Shine and Glow Effect with Pure CSS by providing an additional glow effect after shine, without using any image. This will provide the special look to your images and grab your visitor’s attention.

For achieving this, I have used CSS3 properties like CSS gradient, box-shadow and transition which will work absolutely fine with all browsers except a few old ones like IE8, which do not support CSS3. But nothing to worry, the image will still be visible and it will degrade nicely.

 Before we start our tutorial, I am sure you would like to have a glance at it.

Liked it? With just CSS3, we are creating a shiny wave glass effect and after this an additional image glow effect appears. I have kept all the files to download at the end of this tutorial which you can grab and use whatever way you like (except providing the direct download link to the files from your blog or website).

HTML Markup

As with most of my tutorial, html code here is simple and straight forward. We have a parent div inside which we are keeping one image and one additional div.

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<div>             <img src="flower.jpg" alt="" />             <div />         </div>

The parent div with ‘demo’ class acts a container for image. The child div with ‘show-off’ class uses a gradient to produce a wavy shine effect.

CSS Codes

Let’s move on to the CSS codes.  We will start with the parent div class, i.e. ‘demo’.

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.demo {      width: 350px;     height: 400px;        margin: 30px auto;     padding: 5px;     background-color: #FFFFFF;     position: relative;     overflow: hidden;     border-radius: 5px;     transition: all 1000ms cubic-bezier(0.005, 1.650, 1.000, -0.600);     transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.005, 1.650, 1.000, -0.600); }

As you can see, we are defining the width and height properties here which are equal to the height and width of the image. The padding of 5px works as the white border as we are defining background color as white. A border radius of 5px makes it look smoother.

For shine effect to work properly, the position of child div with ‘show-off’ class must be absolute to the parent div. Thus, we have to define the position of parent div (demo class) as relative and child div (show-off class) as absolute. One more important CSS property isoverflow which we are defining as hidden. This is required to hide the part of child object which is outside the border of parent div.

For providing the glow effect after shine, we need to define the CSS3 transition property here. With transition, we are introducing a delay which lets the glow effect appear only after the shine effect. If you look at the CSS transition and transition-timing-function codes, these will look a little complex. In fact, I have used a wonderful tool for generating CSS transition –Ceaser. It alloys you to create CSS easing animation with a simple UI.

On mouse roll over on demo, we are just introducing a box-shadow for glow effect.

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.demo:hover {     box-shadow: 0px 0px 20px 5px #FFFFFF; }

The shine effect is created by the div with ‘show-off’ class. First of all, we are creating a gradient starting from fully transparent to 70% opaque in white color which acts as the shining cover. The transparency is achieved by defining the color in rgba, (a for alpha).

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.show-off {     width: 500px;     height: 500px;     position: absolute;     top: -180px;     left: -600px;     transition: 1s;     transform: rotate(30deg);     background: linear-gradient(0deg, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0)50%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7)100%); }

You can see that we have defined the width and height equal to 500px which is more than the width and height of the image. This is to make sure that it covers the image fully at the time of image shining. Normally, you should keep the height and width more than the diagonal length of image.

Initially, we want this div which acts as the shining cover out from the image. This is done by defining negative values for top and left. This takes the cover out from visible area.  Finally, we are tilting the cover initially by 30 degrees with CSS transform property. And for smooth animation in shine, we are defining CSS transition of 1 second.

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.demo:hover .show-off {     top: 0px;     left: 0px;     transform: rotate(0deg); }

Once you roll over your mouse to the picture (demo class); the top and left position of cover (show-off class) gets fixed at the top left corner. For doing this; we are defining the top and left properties to zero. At the same time, we are making this cover straight by defining the rotate angle to zero in CSS transform.

It is recommended that you set the overflow property of demo class to hidden only after you get your shine effect working correctly. This way you will see the initial and final position of the cover and make adjustments in height, width, left and right properties.

Conclusion and Download

With just a few lines of codes; we can easily achieve cool hover effects on image. Though it is not supported by a few older browsers like IE8, you can implement it without any worry because your image is still visible. Just make sure that you are using the vendor prefixes for better compatibility with all browsers (I have not included here for simplicity).

I have kept all the files in a zip folder for download.

Download Shine & Glow Effect Files

Go, grab it and let your images shine and glow with Pure CSS