This kind of scenario happens with every user in search of information on the Internet. After all, every user has several websites to browse through and choose. The need of the user is sadly not always the first thing that is taken into consideration whilst designing any website. Website owners and web designers then need to think and know whether the website performs as is expected for their business!

The most important thing for any website is interactivity. Why interactivity is what many would question! Well, the reason is that a website needs to capture attention and keep users on the page within the first few seconds. Yes, the first few seconds a user spends on the page is of utmost important. And whether people agree or not, the old saying where first impressions make the last impressions holds true! A website that can capture attention of the user to keep him/her on the page can be termed as truly successful!

Things to know for web design:

• Your website should be user-friendly
• The website should attract attention
• Study the target group for the design process
• The information should be presented appropriately
• It needs to highlight important points clearly
• Use of interactivity to keep users on page

Websites that engage with interactivity

Wrangler

We all know about the popularity of the brand Wrangler. This website displays the products in a very unique way. As seen in the image, a user has to unzip the jacket to browse the website further. The visuals then unfold in a very interesting manner. The collection can be viewed only after the user performs some action on the website!

Mnatwork

The design company, magneticNorth has used interactivity in a creative way. Their simple concept of drawing and discovering gives an exclusive touch to the website. At first instance, the website only has one statement in the beginning, which is ‘Draw and Discover’. As a user actually draws across the screen, various elements about the website are discovered. The display of their portfolio in this creative manner speaks volumes about the company!

Bebopjeans

Bebop, a lifestyle apparel company has displayed the required information in a creative way. The use of Flash with graphics and the entire presentation keeps users on the page. There is an interesting mix of elements. These creative web pages keep users interested for more!

Extre

This clothing store has made use of interactivity to displays details. This sure is attractive as compared to websites that place rows of photographs next to each other. Every bit of information is displayed through the circular forms of the plant. It engages users on the page whilst displaying information.

Apple Ipad

Also big images catch the users eys as Apple is used to do. This helps in presenting the information about the service in an engaging manner. Users need to perform some activity on the page to view more information. The design along with the content thus needs to be catchy!

All these examples of websites are uncommon although the topics can be termed as common. To put it across simply, there are so many websites related to clothing and accessories. Yet, it is not always the brand name that can cause users to browse through a website. An attractive website will do all that and much more for any web designer or web master.

So, do you have what it takes to make your website successful? Looking forward to your replies!

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About the author

Poonam Agarwal works as Program Manager at Harbinger Group and is looks after for Raptivity Web Expert, software to bring web pages alive through Interactivity. This software helps to add interactivity to websites without programming! She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and is an active blogger.

Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about design, coding, …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

Photo by Richard-G

1. WPCompressor - Increase loading time up tp 80%

We couldnt believe it! Just by this small plugin, which activates GZIP compression of your website without any changes to your server, you can reduce your site weight to 80%. It uses PHP to activate GZIP instead of .htaccess. wpCompressor automatically compresses the data output and boosts the speed performance of your blog. You can test your speed here.

2. Remove unnecessary Plugins & upgrade current ones

Remove all unused plugins wordpress site. Disable them and then physically remove from your web server. Plugins are disabled will affect the speed of a site for WordPress plugin will check whether activated or not. You also must keep up-to-date with the latest version of the plugin you use. Developer would have released a new version because they have modified the code in several ways to make this plugin work better.

3. Minimize PHP and database queries

I also have read great tip on Wpcandy’s simple ways to speed up WordPress. The article makes a lot of sense, cutting down on PHP and database queries.Jadi when the page loads on your site, and your browser must execute PHP query, it adds to the burden of time. If you change the query PHP with static HTML, every time the page is loaded, the browser you only read HTML.

4. Optimize and Repair your Database from myPhpAdmin

Every week or so you should login to your myPhpAdmin and optimize your db. Locate your Wordpress DatabaseTables, check all the tables in the Check Boxes, select the Optimise Tables Option and repair. You would be surprised how well this trick might work, it saved more than 10% of my current database size.

5. Use Reliable image hosting service

Try moving the common web images, CSS, JavaScript and other static files to Amazon S3 Storage service and you will notice the average CPU load / memory requirement of the web server will be reduced a lot. Read this step by step guide. Signing up for reseller hosting gives you more power for your own projects. You will have more control of system ressources.

You can also try WP-Offload . This plugin will boost the performance of your blog by seamlessly offloading static content like images, documents and movies. This will greatly reduce bandwidth consumption and the number of HTTP requests issued to your web server. Additional features such as remote image manipulation and thumbnail generation are provided.

6. Install WP Super Cache Plugin

This plugin will generate static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After the resulting html files, your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the relatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts and would not actually load content from a database at all, so the post will load faster with less stress on your server.

7. PHP Speedy WP

PHP Speedy WP can quickly and easily speed up your WordPress site and increase your blog’s response without too much effort on your part. PHP Speedy WP also allows us to automatically combine all the JS and CSS files into only two files - which in turn helps the opening page of times. CSS Background Images are automatically converted to URI.Dan this data will be useful in reducing the number of HTTP requests even further. And, importantly, is compatible with Internet Explorer, although the data do not support URI

8. Speed up access to your favorite frameworks via the AJAX Libraries API

The AJAX Libraries API is an attempt to make Web applications faster for developers in simple ways by becoming a content distribution network and loading architecture for popular javascript libraries including:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

You can either link to the source code directly:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js"></script>

Or you can use Google’s API:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script> <script type="text/javascript">google.load("prototype", "1.6.0.2");</script>

By using the google.load() method, your application has high speed, globally available access to a growing list of the most popular, open source and up to date JavaScript libraries.

9. Optimize your images with this great tool

Shrink O’Matic AIR is a great application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. This will be able to handle JPGs, GIFs and PNGs. Simply drag and drop images and they will be resized as you wish! Options allow you to choose the output sizes, names and formats.

10. WP CSS

This plugin GZIP and strip whitespace from your CSS file. This plugin allows you to confidently use @ import in the CSS file and not have to worry about what happens at the end user. This can be seen through the style.css file and put all @ import files into it. You also can set the cache expiration time. In addition you can also add CSS files to a specific page or post and put them all into one file.

11. Display page loading time + number of queries

Here is a simple code that can be inserted in your template. This code is useful to know how long it takes to load your page, or how many sql query is executed.

<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds

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About the author

Yanuar Prisantoso is a 25 year old web developer in Onebitmedia, he has experience in the web design and web development industry and is very interested about jQuery and interactive on his blog, Denbagus. You can follow on Twitter or contact him through his website.

Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about design, coding, …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

Demo

Tagaroo is designed to make your WordPress blog better for you, better for your readers and more accessible to search engines. As you’re writing, Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about.

You can use these tags in your post - but even better - you can use these tags to automatically get great images from Flickr to include in your post.

Tagaroo works as a plugin by Calais and makes tagging fun and easy, makes your posts more visually compelling and helps search engines find your content.

What is so special about it?

Metadata in and of itself is not too interesting. Where things get more interesting is what you can do with it. For right now we’ll just provide a few examples of what publishers are doing and planning to do:

Tag your complete historical archives in hours

Perhaps you’re a complete convert to the value of tagging your content and are doing a great job with new material. But what about the tens of thousands to millions of pieces of historical content you have already produced? Several organizations are in the process of feeding their entire historical archives through Calais and automatically generating high-quality tags and metadata. Doing so, they translate a stale content asset into one that can be actively searched and integrated with other content assets.

Improve user search and content searchability

At best, keyword-based search solves a portion of your users’ search needs. Incorporate semantic metadata into your search solution and you can dramatically improve the user search experience – and this doesn’t need to be complicated. Simply process your content and append the resulting metadata to your search index. As a simple example, your users can now search for “IBM” and “Management Change” to receive a complete listing of IBM-related hirings, firings, promotions, transfers and new positions – something barely achievable with keyword-based search.

Improve syndication segmentation

If you syndicate your content to others, you can now offer syndication options based on the highly accurate information contained within your metadata. For example, a business-related feed limited to acquisitions and management changes can be automatically generated.

New information-driven products and services

You know what your clients need. Calais provides the framework for developing value-added products and service for your clients. Content-driven analytics, interactive segmentation, search engine optimization – you’re in the driver’s seat.

Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.

Features

• stripping meta data from JPEGs
• optimizing JPEG compression
• converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
• stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

How does it work?

Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different.

Installation and Use

Download the WP Smush.it plugin and extract in your wp-content/plugins directory. Activate the plugin and you’re done.

After creating the design follow part 2 of this walkthrough of coding up a graphical website layout into valid, standards compliant XHTML and CSS. Starting with the initial process of exporting the individual images from the Photoshop document through to building the complete page.

I know a lot of people using Mozilla Thunderbird because it is faster and working with IMAP easier, but there are also lacks when trying to synchronize the contact data or calender events with your mobile phone for example. Everybody who tried to look for an solution to export everything from Thunderbird to any other Email client like Outlook will love this free tool.

MailStore Home archives email from:

• Microsoft Outlook 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007
• Microsoft Outlook Express and Windows Mail
• Microsoft Exchange Server Mailboxes
• Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
• POP3 and IMAP (including webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo)
• .eml and other files

Benefits

• Archive and consolidate all email messages centrally, securely and permanently
• Search all your email within fractions of a second (incl. the contents of attached documents)
• Integrated CD/DVD burning utility to backup your archives with just one click
• To conserve disk space, MailStore Home saves only a single instance of each attachment and applies a smart compression algorithm
• Preview archived messages directly in MailStore and reopen them in your local mail client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook)
• In addition to backing up the entire archive, your messages can be exported to a variety of destinations
• Messages are stored MIME-compatible, and can be recovered at any time without information loss (e.g. to import them in other applications)