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Top 20 Project Management tools

2009-07-02T15:57:46Z

Most of these useful project management tools are complex solution with integrated time management, collaboration, version tracking, code repositories, bug and issue tracking, etc. Both free and commercial project management apps are included. I intentionally focused not on famous tools such as Microsoft Project or Basecamp but on less popular but sometimes more efficient and useful alternatives. Though you can spend some time learning these project management tools as well as teaching your team and clients, in the long term properly integrated project management tools lets you save your time and money, make your project and work of your team more efficient. Since managing multiple project without any kind of system to keep track of activities and team members can lead you to failure. So try yourself some of these project management tools and tell in the comments which one suites your needs best.

Redmine
Redmine is a free flexible cross-platform and cross-database project management web application. Redmine features include: multiple projects support, role based access control, issue tracking system, Gantt chart and calendar, news, documents & files management, feeds & email notifications, wiki, forums, time tracking.

Google Calendar
In Google Calendar you can have separate calendars with different color for everyone in your project team. You can assign activities through Google calendar and use simple notes such as priority <1>, done # or question? Google Calendar can be synchronized with your mobile phone which is a great advantage too.

Project Blogs
Team member can publish important information in the project blog. The rest of the team can discuss and express their opinions in the comments. Project blog can be based on Wordpress or any other blogging software.

Google Docs
Google Docs is a feature rich online office suite. It lets you to collaborate with multiple users. Google Docs only takes a minute to get all of your users editing the same document in realtime.

JIRA
JIRA is paid customizable issue- and bug-tracking software that includes advanced reporting features, workflow mapping as well as issue and project organizing. JIRA also offers a number of plug-ins to extend its functionality, including Bamboo integration, charting, time tracking, project management, a calendar and more.

Wiki
Wiki can be used for development process description, how to collection, minutes, links, contacts and other elements of shared knowledgebase. You can choose from free downloadable Mediawiki (which is used as engine for Wikipedia) and paid but easy PBwiki (featuring files sharing, access controls for pages and folders). Confluence is another wiki aimed for enterprise users with status updates and ability to follow users. It lets you use images, charts and videos as well as large number of plugins.

Board, Pen and Paper
Old school Board with sticky notes, calendar, personal organizer and Todo lists can be a good alternative to all web and computer based tools especially if all your small team members work in the same office.

Bugzilla
Bugzilla is a free Web-based general-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project. Bugzilla features include optimized database structure for increased performance and scalability, excellent security to protect confidentiality, editable user profiles and comprehensive email preferences, comprehensive permissions system.

ProjectPier
ProjectPier is a free easy-to-use, well designed, web based project management tool with the look and feel of Web 2.0. It features E-mail notification, tasks, milestones, files, unlimited projects and users and broad community to support its development.

Mantis
Mantis is a free popular web-based bugtracking and project management system. The main features include: Twitter Integration, support for mobile devices, simple/advanced Issue Pages, multiple Projects per instance, time tracking, different user access level per project, changelog support, roadmap, built-in reporting (reports / graphs), Email notifications, attachments, RSS Feeds, source Control, chat and wiki Integration.

Trac
Trac is a project management and bug/issue tracking system. It provides an interface to Subversion, an integrated wiki and convenient reporting. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. A timeline shows all current and past project events in order, making the acquisition of an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy. The roadmap shows the road ahead, listing the upcoming milestones.

Agilo
Agilo is a free project management tool (paid Pro version has extended support) built on top of Trac. Agilo supports Scrum, its roles, ceremonies and artifacts: burndown chart, product backlog, release management, individual reports, subversion integration. It also features wiki, bi-directional traceability and rich reporting.

activeCollab
activeCollab is a paid software for planning, progress tracking and communication. activeCollab features module system, email notifications, API, tools for collaboration and file sharing, milestones and tasks, role and permissions.

OpenGoo
OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office providing complex solution to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents. OpenGoo lets you and your team create and collaborate on: text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, task lists, E-mails, calendars, web links, contacts.

Assembla
Assembla is a paid online collaborative project management service. Assembla tools include task management, issue tracking, subversion repositories, scrum meetings, subversion, wikis and message boards.

Collabtive
Collabtive is free web-based project management software aimed to be an alternative to Basecamp and ActiveCollab. Collabtive supports Basecamp projects import, Role-based permission management, reports, RSS feeds, calendars synchronization, messaging and instant messaging. Collabtive allows to work with unlimited project, members, To-do lists, Milestones, Files, and to track the time worked on specific tasks.

ClockingIT
ClockingIT is a free hosted application keeping track of all you tasks and the time you spend on them. It also features Project Management and collaboration tools such as milestones, timeline, calendar, graphs, drag and drop organizing, notes, comments, reports.

Comindwork
Comindwork is paid online project management software that includes project tasks, schedule, Gantt charts, milestones, project risks, issues, collaboration tools such as blog and wiki.

LessProjects
LessProjects is a free web based project management tool focused on agile development methodology: iterations and spec items rather than simply tasks. It features drag&drop interface and innovative sticky notes.

Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects is a project management package with support of creating tasks, assigning ownership, setting deadlines and tracking milestones; working with calendars, Gantt charts, reports, share supporting files. The free version allows only a single project.

How to make Firefox addon work with Firefox 3.5

2009-06-29T19:39:51Z

So, you’d like to use Firefox 3.5 right after its release but some of your favorite addons are disabled because Firefox says they are not compatible (not updated by developers)? There’s very simple solution to this problem. Now most addons that aren’t yet officially Firefox 3.5 compatible will be enabled. Warning: you can meet some bugs as well as layout quirks in the addons.

Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar.

Right-click and choose New->Boolean. Put ‘extensions.checkCompatibility’ (without quotes) into the preference name box and set it to ‘false’.
Repeat previous step for another boolean ‘extensions.checkUpdateSecurity’.
Restart Firefox.

Top 30 Adobe AIR apps for web designers

2009-06-09T21:42:15Z

Here are top 30 handpicked Adobe AIR apps for designers and developers that can help you do everything from mockups and tracking your time to measuring pixels and cutting FLV video files. Besides popular Twitter applications, Adobe AIR has a lot of useful apps which can be of great help to web designers, developers, project managers. The main advantage of AIR apps is the fact that they are multiplatform so you can use them on every computer. What are some of your favorite AIR applications? Tell me what do you think in the comments!

Web development AIR applications

Boks
Boks is an AIR application that provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework. It handles grid configuration, baseline rhythm pimpin’, CSS (with or without compression) and grid.png export, HTML layout, visual feedback, PDF export and History management (Undo/Redo).

Snippely
Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize “snippets” in one convenient location. The snip will be syntax highlighted according to the language selected. Snippets are stored in groups for organization and quick retrieval.

iPlotz
iplotz allows anyone to create navigable mockups and wireframes to create prototypes of websites and software applications.

pixus
pixus is an pixel ruler application. It can measure the screen objects in pixels using both mouse and keyboard control and preview your design with skins and presets.

Em Calculator
The Em Calculator is a pain-free way of creating CSS code for typography set on a baseline style, allowing the design to maintain its typographic proportions (i.e. size, line height, margin, padding) when the web page is viewed at a different font sizes.

pixDIF
pixDIF AIR application helps developers and designers measure pixel distances on their screens. With it you can measure the pixel distance/size of something when you’re not in Photoshop, compare how close mockup is to working design.

Balsamiq Mockups
Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange 75 pre-built controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Product managers, designers, developers and even clients can now work together in the same tool to quickly iterate over software mockups, before writing code.

Project Management Adobe AIR applications

Focused
If you need to be concentrated on writing something, Focused is very helpful. as a full screen application, which shows you just a text box. This prevents you from having a look to other windows or tools that are potential distracters (notifications, post-its, reminders).

Agile Agenda
Agile Agenda is a very powerful tool for project managers. It will automatically set the start and end dates of each of your tasks based upon the available information such as task priority, resource availability and estimated durations. It will automatically move completed tasks up, extend the duration of late tasks, split partially completed tasks. Among Agile Agenda features: automatic milestones, dependencies, resource allocation and availability, filtered GANTT charts, task lists.

Klok
Klok is a simple work timer and visual display of how your days “fill up”. It is built for personal time tracking. Projects, sub-projects (tasks) can be defined and can be attached to a customer. You can even make a “start & stop” to calculate the time of the task you worked on and Klok automatically adds it to the timetable.

Dukt
Dukt lets you track the time you spend working on your projects. The application also shows you the time you spend and the money you earn for each task, live. It supports different currencies, organization by projects (folders) and pause when idle option.

Ora Time and Expense
Ora Time and Expense is a small easy-to-use application for tracking and generating timesheets, expense reports, and invoices. It features: task timer for tracking timesheet activities as you go, using your webcam to scan expense receipts for automatic inclusion in expense reports, mileage and hotel wizards for quick expense entries.

Timeloc
Timeloc is a Adobe AIR application that keeps track of the time you have spent working on a job or project. Features: add/Edit multiple clients/projects, editable billing period increments, charge out rate can be set on a per client basis, audible alerts and reminders, reports and graphing, pause recording for non chargeable activity, auto save option.

Adobe AIR image and multimedia applications

TiltShift
TiltShift Adobe AIR application gives your photos a tilt-shift photography effect that normally requires expensive special lenses or Photoshop chops.

Icon Generator
Icon Generator is a little application that lets you in 3 steps generate a CS3 or Web 2.0 style icon. Pick color, type characters, and save it. Application creates 4 different sizes of the icon.

ImageSizer
ImageSizer is an application built to resize, optimize and rename a batch of jpg images, outputting them as a single compressed zip file - perfect if you want to e-mail a load of images off your digital camera, or a folder of images. You can also crop or edit screenshot made with Printscreen key.

DestroyFlickr
DestroyFlickr provide the ability to look at a photo on a dark, neutral background. It features the support of both drag and drop uploading and downloading. Now you can download the highest resolution version of a photo without having to see it first—just drag a thumbnail to the download menu and the download begins.

Fractal4D
Fractal4D AIR app enables you to draw really cool detailed fractal swirls that can then be exported as a vector for use in Adobe Illustrator or as a plain PNG. There are a whole load of options that allow you to tweak the colors, blending, easing and blurring.

JustResizeIt!
JustResizeIt! is easy to use image resize application just drag and drop them, wait a few seconds, and drag and drop resized images into an e-mail, an office document, or a folder. You can create widgets that define how the images will be resized.

WebKut
WebKut is an Adobe AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection. You can choose upload the screenshots to your flickr account.

e2vector
e2vector is an illustration application with powerful features such as layers, masks, pen-tool, gradient, undo-redo, SVG import and export, path splicing, shape union and intersection, etc.

Splashup Light
Splashup Light is an i

RichFlv
RichFlv is AIR application for FLV video files which can read flv Metadata, read/edit/modify/delete cuepoints, cut flvs, convert the sound of the flv to mp3, convert flv to swf.

RelaxMyEyes
RelaxMyEyes runs in the background & warns you when it is time to relax your eyes. Very handy for designers & developers, people who are very concentrated & don’t realize how time goes by.

Adobe Fireworks Auto Backup
Auto Backup is an Adobe AIR application that helps you to automatically keep creating backups of all your .png files which are being modified. A copy of the working file is automatically saved at a user-specified interval.

Color & Pattern Tools AIR applications

Kuler Desktop
Kuler Adobe AIR application lets you import kuler themes directly into Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. You can look for color inspiration, browse and search color themes. You can also view RSS feeds of Highest Rated, Most Popular, Newest, and Randomly Selected themes.

COLOURlovers Desktop Color Finder
You can use the Desktop Color Finder to search the database of nearly 1 million named colors and more than 300,00 user created color palettes

Color Browser
Color Browser is a small application to handle a local set of your favorite color palettes for reference. It has the ability to open, or drag in ASE files.

Adobe AIR Font Management applications

.merlin - An AIR Font Organizer
merlin is an Adobe AIR based utility which extract the actual font name, and rename the file based off of that. Then put that font into a folder of the first letter. So Arial would go in the “a” folder. Some of the options you can configure for processing is to move, rename, or delete files. It reads OTF, TTF, Type1 (AFM, PFM, PFB, INF) font files.

Font Picker
Font Picker shows you all the fonts installed on your computer and helps you choose which one is most suitable for a particular project. It lets select favorites, get rid of fonts you don’t like.

Why NOT to use Lorem ipsum in design projects

2009-05-27T20:49:49Z

Have your clients ever asked what Lorem ipsum means, in what language it’s written, why it has been used instead of some real and readable text? Lorem ipsum is more than common in graphic and web design. It used as a placeholder text to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout and direct the focus to overall presentation instead of focusing on the textual content. Lorem ipsum is not intended to have meaning.

Why Lorem ipsum is bad?

However, in reality Lorem ipsum often stimulate curiosity due to its resemblance to classical Latin. Many clients don’t know what Lorem ipsum is and for them it’s the main distraction in the project. Using Lorem ipsum also reduces text-based content to a visual design element (a “shape” of text) instead of valuable information someone is going to have to enter and/or read.

What to use instead of Lorem ipsum?

The content that will as much as possible resemble content that will be placed in the final project. The goal here is to get as close to the real customer experience as possible. If your site or application requires data input, enter real and relevant words and type the text. You can use Creative commons search to find text and images on any topic for use in your projects. For sure, it takes more time than using Lorem ipsum but it allows you to make better projects and work in real word right from the start.

Top 10 free website uptime monitoring services

2009-05-06T20:10:49Z

It’s crucial for a website to experience minimal downtime (and for site owner to monitor uptime), otherwise visitors or customers won’t return again if the site is always offline and inaccessible. Sometimes it happens that websites are going down even if you have a very reliable hosting with 99% of uptime. The reasons could vary: problems with data center, network outages, server outages, server overload, DNS configuration, or SSL certificate problems. In this case the problem has to be solved as soon as possible.
Website uptime monitoring service will notify you whenever the website or server is down or having access problem. The basic idea of uptime monitoring services: they run in the background checking your website uptime through different ways, protocols and from different locations.

If something goes wrong and your site didn’t respond, you get notification by email or SMS. With the use of uptime monitoring services you can check claims of your hosing provider about 99.9% of uptime. Advanced monitoring services also lets you check content of you website in place (site isn’t hacked or domain stolen, etc.), SSL certificates and other useful features. If you know any good free uptime monitoring service not mentioned here, please add it in the comments.

Basic State
Basic State is a free web site uptime monitor service which checks your website every 15 minutes. You can get instant trouble alerts by email or SMS. It lets you check unlimited number of websites.The uptime checks are made by multiple ways: DNS, network and server response. Using Basic State, you can choose to receive additional server alerts for the external ecommerce services which might affect the speed, availability or performance of your web site. These include credit card payment processing gateways, affiliate networks and advertising networks.

mon.itor.us
mon.itor.us provides free network and website monitoring service with personalized interactive interface, where you can add server performance and availability tests, get uptime reports, add contacts to get the alert notifications. Tests will be performed from geographically distributed servers. mon.itor.us offers monitoring for different web protocols. It is very easy to set up; most of the services are free. It can send weekly reports or only notify you when there is a problem on your network.

InternetSeer
InternetSeer claims to be the world’s largest website monitoring service with over 1.3 million user base. InternetSeer monitoring systems remotely check your website from several geographic monitoring stations at selected intervals. If the monitoring system is unable to reach the site, an email, cell phone or pager alert is sent to notify you of the problem. Some of the key web site monitoring services available include: availability monitoring, performance monitoring, link and image checking, transaction monitoring, historical and detailed check and alert reporting.

Montastic
Montastic developers say that it is the “free website monitoring service that doesn’t suck”. With Montastic website monitoring tool you get an email when your site goes down, get an email when it goes back up. You can read statuses via RSS or Mac & PC widgets. You can monitor Up to 100 websites. Montastic has support for https and port number. This uptime monitoring tool checks your website at least every 10 minutes from 2 different locations.

Unialert
Unialert.com is a free (with no limitations) real-time website uptime monitoring service, providing alerts on service failure and detailed reports (as a HTML or PDF file) on server health and performance. The services include, but are not limited to; web servers, FTP servers, DNS server, SQL servers and many more services. All service checks are performed from 3 different locations and you select how often the checks are performed - down to 5 minute intervals. As soon as an unexpected condition for your service arises, unialert.com will send you an alert instantly via an email or a SMS message.

SiteUptime
SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that checks your website at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if more than one location detects a connection failure. In free version you can monitor only 1 website every 30 or 60 minutes. SiteUptime also sends you free uptime report monthly. Monitoring options include: HTTP, POP3, SMTP, FTP, SSL, DNS, custom TCP Ports, ping, HTTP Password Protection.

Are My Sites Up?
Are My Sites Up? free plan will check up to five of your sites at least 25 times per day. You get unlimited email and SMS notifications containing also the reason why your site was down (HTML status error code). Even if their website goes down, developers promise: “If you aren’t able to load the site, don’t worry! Your sites are still being checked in the background and you will still be notified.”

Uptime Dog
Uptime Dog is a free website monitoring service which will check availability of your website every 2 minutes from two different geographical locations to see if it is online and working, and notifies you to your email address if it is down. The only drawback of this service: you need to place HTML link to their site.

Root Internet
Root Internet offers multi-protocol support, uptime and performance of your website or server, downtime notifications via email and SMS, global monitoring locations. With “Live Status Report” widget you easily can display an uptime report on your website. You can define (one-time or recurring) maintenance windows so that Root Internet pauses monitoring during those periods or simply exclude them from uptime reporting. Root Internet can import the uptime history into your account for free, making the switch easy and painless.

LogicReach
LogicReach is another free web site monitoring service. In the case your site is running very slow or down they can send you an email or SMS. In addition to the monitoring, LogicReach also tests response time - page load time and offer extensive reporting facilities to allow you to monitor your site effectively.

How to make website with MODx CMS in 10 minutes

2009-04-29T18:10:31Z

In this MODx CMS tutorial, I will show you how to install MODx, find and install MODx template, add or modify your content. On the way you will explore the backend interface and a number of the standard MODx features. In the end you should get a MODx driven website with your own content. It’s just the beginner MODx guide, so don’t expect I’ll go too much into the details: the purpose is to quickstart your first MODx site as soon and as easy as possible. In the next MODx tutorials I’ll go deeper into building websites with this powerful CMS, so stay tuned.

What is MODx CMS?

MODx is a free opensource new generation CMS with PHP Application Framework functionality and extensive API. What stands it from the crowd of other CMS except Most Promising Open Source CMS award in 2007 by Packt Publishing? Why it can be better those CMS monsters like Joomla or Drupal?

MODx provides a flexible API and event model that allows you to override core behavior. You can build XHTML 1.0 Strict sites just as easily as a pie. Menus made from ULs (unordered lists) are ready to go out of the box. MODx is the dream CMS for CSS and Standards oriented designers.

Besides that, MODx is the first free PHP CMS to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology. MODx gives you the freedom to choose jQuery, Mootools, ExtJS, Prototype or any other library you choose. MODx can be deployed “to the cloud” via Amazon EC2 Complete. It features full control of all metadata and URL structure for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.

How to install MODx?

Before installing MODx you need to create a MySQL database and write down the username and password. Make sure that the /assets/cache (and its files), /assets/export and /assets/images folders are world-writeable (777). You also may need to create an empty file in the manager/includes directory named config.inc.php and make it world-writable. After the installation is completed, change the permissions on that file to read-only.

1. Download MODx CMS and unzip the MODx zip file to a folder on your hard drive.

2. Copy or FTP the unzipped files and folders inside the new MODx directory into the root of your website (e.g. c:\mymodxsite\ or ftp.mymodxsite.com).

3. In your web browser run the index.php file located inside the install folder on your MODx website. For example, http://yoursite/install/index.php, where “yoursite” is the name of your website.

4. Then you will be provided with the simple on-screen instructions to complete the installation.

You need to choose a language (English is default), accept MODx license agreement, choose installation mode (it’s obviously new installation). In a next step you need to put in database user and password and password for admin user.

Don’t forget in the next step to check Install/Overwrite Sample Web Site checkbox, otherwise you will face just blank website without any data after the installation.

After clicking ‘Next’ and ‘Install’ a couple of times you will see Login screen.

How to find free MODx template and install it?

Before creating a custom template design for MODx or converting existing XTML template, it’s a great idea to play with existing ones. Let’s choose one template from official MODx repository.

1. After you download a MODx template in a zip archive you need to unpack it to your assets/templates folder.

2. Go to the MODx admin area which is called MODx Manager. Select ‘Resources -> Manage Resource’ in the upper menu. Clicks ‘Create a new template’. Set a name and a description for your template, and optionally add the template to a category to help keep your resources organized.

3. Copy/paste the content of the Yourtemplatename.template.html file (it’s located in the template folder, read Readme or Installation.txt file included) to the text field labeled ‘Template code (html)’ and click on ‘Save’.

4. Now go to the Home page of your test MODx site and click in the floating bar ‘Settings -> Template’ and choose the name of your template and click Apply. Now you should see the custom template design instead of the default one.

How to add and manage the content in MODx?

After you finish with the template installation, first thing you need to do is to change the site name which by default is ‘My MODx Site’. Go to MODx manager (Admin area), click Tools->Configuration, enter your site name and click Save icon.

To Add, Edit or Delete any pages of your website you need to use MODx site tree which is placed in the left sidebar of the admin area.

So choose Home in the site tree and click Edit icon. Now Edit document screen opens where you can edit the content of the page using WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE by default) or turn it off.

If you find this tutorial useful, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow me on Twitter and stay tuned for the more deep and detailed MODx tutorials.

How to get best quality video playback with madVR and MPC Home Cinema

2009-04-27T17:30:00Z

madVR is a new high quality GPU assisted video renderer. I’d say game changing video renderer if it will be developed actively. When I started to use madVR, I was amazed that video playback quality produced by madVR was different from other renderers (Haali, Enhanced Video Renderer, VMR-9) as night and day. Now I don’t need to adjust any contrast, saturation, sharpen or resize options because any video looks perfect right out the box. In addition to madVR, Media Player Classic Home Cinema is the only thing I need to play perfectly all my video files. I’m happy to forget about all these codec packs and mess with updating them.

So what makes madVR outstanding?

Developer of this GPU assisted renderer Madshi says that by developing madVR “highest quality has priority over anything else”. Among madVR unique features: high quality chroma upsampling and scaling (lanczos, spline, etc), high quality YCbCr -> RGB conversion, gamut & gamma correction for display calibration, full 16bit processing queue, final 16bit processing result is dithered down to RGB output bitdepth, bypasses graphics card’s video (damage) algorithms. In a nutshell, this video renderer tries to use all the quality which is present in video file and outputted by video decoders without damaging it on the way. All video resizing and transformation is done in the most efficient way as well.

How I can get best quality video playback using madVR?

Currently madVR is only supported in last builds of Media Player Classic Home Cinema. First of all, you need to download madVR, unpack and install it by clicking .bat file (check out Readme.txt included). Then download latest MPC Home Cinema build and go to View->Options->Output and put checkbox to madVR in Directshow settings column. Now open your favorite movie and enjoy!

Top 50 Professional looking free WordPress themes

2009-04-20T17:32:53Z

If you’re looking for professional looking free WordPress themes then this post is for you. High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for design inspiration or professional WordPress themes to customize them easily - you can learn a lot and you can build customized designs without reinventing the wheel.

There’re 50 professional looking free WordPress themes in this post. After scrolling through hundreds of themes across the Web, these themes have been manually selected since they are apart in terms of professional look and easy customization. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Tell me about your favorite WordPress themes in the comments.

Ipseity Personal Branding WordPress Theme
“Ipseity” means selfhood, or individual identity. It’s super light weight, around 150kb total file size (without background images), only 3 .php files, 1 .css file, and 2 essential .gifs (the arrow keys), and a js folder for the side-scrolling action. It’s also easily styled with H1/H2/H3 tags and you can add images, you could even make it a photo portfolio with style.

Life Collage WordPress Theme
Life Collage is a child theme of the Hybrid theme framework. This theme has lifestream page template that does some cool things: integrates with the FlickrRSS plugin and provides you with a lifestream widget area (show off Twitter and other feeds). It also has valid code and is SEO optimized.

Red Carpet Magazine
Inspired by People magazine, Red Capet is an entertainment magazine WordPress theme. You can post news, photos, or even videos. The theme supports tens of video sites, thumbnails generated on-the-fly, feedburner built-in, gravatars, custom photo and video templates, article sharing, and 4 widgetized sidebars. The theme has many professionally positioned advertisement spots.

Vexed Box WordPress Theme
Vexed Box is a clean WordPress theme capable of displaying large amounts of content without suffering aesthetically or functionally. Key features: valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS Level 2.1, post images to the index page dynamically, gravatar support, 2 Widget ready sidebars, trackbacks are separated from normal post comments and can be styled to your liking, 2 Functioning Headers for flexibility.

IsoTherm News Magazine WordPress Theme
IsoTherm News is a magazine styled theme with everything you need to start publishing your own web journal. Some key features: featured posts box (front page + archives), video widget, popular posts widget, RSS feeds for all blog areas.

Manifest
Manifest WordPress theme design concept is to create a clean and streamlined theme that focused on the content and not the distractions. This minimalistic theme utilizes a single column, 500 pixel wide layout. No sidebars. No widgets. Key features: microformat support, Google ads, IE6 unsupported (If a user attempts to view your site in IE6, they’ll be presented with an unstyled but perfectly functional site along with a friendly message suggesting they upgrade their browser.

Thematic WordPress Theme Framework
Thematic is a highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins. The main purpose is to use it as a blank WordPress Theme to build on. Thematic website features a number of professional, ready made Child Themes, an easy to follow Guide to Customization full of code snippets you can just cut and paste into your Child Theme.

Inuitypes WordPress Theme
Inuitypes is a very simple, super fast theme with numerous features: custom translations of all blog areas, relative Dates in Comments, option to choose Blog Title over Image logotype, multiple layouts to choose from, embedded AdSense Support, child Pages Ready (up to 4 level drop-downs), full support of WordPress 2.7 comments features: paginated Threaded (nested) comments, display older/newer comments first.

Titan WordPress theme
Titan is a refined, balanced, and exceptionally handsome WordPress theme with has a seriously robust feature set: flexible drop down navigation menu, dynamic h1 tags that automatically change depending on where you are, hand crafted icons, a completely customizable sidebox, professional blockquote.

Cordobo Green Park 2
Cordobo Green Park 2 is a simple & elegant light-weight theme for WordPress. 2nd version of very popular WordPress theme has been rebuild from scratch and supports WordPress 2.7 and up.
Key features: the minimum set of SQL queries, SEO optimizations for humans and search-engines, clean and structured code, typography for advanced readability, use of css sprites for images for less http-requests, built-in Twitter support.

Crimson Theme
Crimson Theme is a super simplistic yet elegant in design 3 columns, fixed WordPress theme. Key features: large content area for big photos or videos (700 pixels wide), focus on Typography, auto header image rotator, ads and widgets support.

WP Typography
WP Typography features a drop down menu, with a nice fading effect, theme options to chose type of logo you want, text or image, color schemes (blue, red, green, orange, pink), backgrounds, custom link for your RSS feed. Key features: valid XHTML/CSS code, widgets, adsense support, support of FlickrRSS and Twitter plugins, caption for images.

Simple Paper WordPress Theme
Simple Paper WordPress theme has a simplistic black & white design. It comes with a unique design (left-aligned), fixed menu, stylized comments, paginated posts and easily editable CSS.

iNove
iNove is very stylish, widget supported WordPress theme and it doesn’t require any plugin. Key features: valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS 3, two-columns, fixed-width, theme-options, right-sidebar.

Branford magazine
Branford Magazine is a magazine style WordPress theme tha has tabbed interface, featured posts, article grouping, integrated advertising styling and widget ready sidebar. This 3 column themes has ample room for any content rich site, the customizability and the simplicity of the style makes it perfect for any magazine style site or design project.

Copyblogger
With the Copyblogger Theme for WordPress, you’ll be able to modify colors, fonts, and even the tiniest details by utilizing the custom stylesheet solution that is included with the theme download.
You can take advantage of add-on styles that others release for use with the Copyblogger Theme.

The Morning After
The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress. Key features: clean grid-based design, detailed documentation regarding installation, usage and customization, three-column home page,
automatic thumbnail generation, threaded comments, print-friendly view.

MIMBO WordPress theme
MIMBO is a clean, customizable magazine-style theme for WordPress. It’s also a simple framework which can be modified with child themes. Key features: Multi-Level Dropdown Menus, automatic thumbnail generation,125×125 Ad Support, Gallery, Inline Image & Caption Styling, Featured Categories.

Small Magazine theme
Small Magazine ia magazine style WordPress theme with fixed width and right sidebar. Key features: 125×125 ad spots, 250×250 adsense spot, built in Flickr support, styled pagination.

Indomagz Blog WordPress Theme
This is the blog version of Indomagz Theme series. Key features: fully support WP 2.7, threaded comments and sticky posts, feature rich theme options in the Dashboard, simple breadcrumb, four level dropdown menu.

Fakeblog WordPress theme
Fakeblog is a stylish and modern magazine like 3 column WordPress theme. Key features: Adsense ready, Customized footer, Custom Field Values, Recent Comments, Related Posts, Random Posts widgets and Image Replacement.

Linoluna
Linoluna is a simple and neat theme for a magazine-styled blog. Linoluna best suits a multi-author WordPress blog. it is a grid-styled layout with green accents. The theme uses a tabbed navigation to show the most popular posts. There is a slideshow animation for the featured articles in the front page.

Personal
Personal is a blue, 3-column WordPress theme with two widget-ready sidebars, custom templates, a banner switcher, custom text styles, integrated plugins (Author Highlight, Comment License, WP-PageNavi, WP-PostRatings) and a unique way to display entry dates and comment-number links.

WP Premium Theme
WP Premium WordPress theme has been praised a lot for it’s elegance, usability, strategic layout and SEO friendly code. Key features: Strategic Layout, Twitter Ready, Razor sharp typography with proper use of h1 to h6, 3 color schemes is included with the theme.

The Unstandard WordPress theme
The Unstandard WordPress theme instead of reverse chronological text heavy front pages makes focus on visuals & imagery. This WordPress theme comprised of a - grid aligned - images for forward facing pages, and clean textual presentation on the inner pages.

Typebased
Typebased is a clean and elegant style WordPress theme. Key features: Integrated banner ad management, widgetized sidebar, with some Typebased-specific custom widgets to allow you full control of what happens in your sidebar, 5 different color schemes to choose from.

Magazeen WordPress theme
Magazeen is a 2-column theme that was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. Key features: Related Posts Drop Down, jQuery Latest Image Showcase

Newspaper style
Newspaper style WordPress Theme consists of a fluid four column outfit featuring a newspaper style, featuring three widgetized sidebars as well as the footer (five columns) with typical WordPress action like calendar, built in are recent comments, related post, flickr support.

Yashfa
Yashfa is 2 column WordPress theme with focus on simplicity and grid based design. Key features: Custom Image Header, Comment Threaded, Separate Comment & Trackbacks / Pingback, Author Information.

Indy Premium WordPress Theme
Indy Premium is a SEO-optimized, ad-ready, easily customizable WordPress theme. The Footers, Featured Posts section and Thumbnails can be easily disabled or enable through the Theme Options Page. Key features: Sliding Featured Posts Section, Multi level sliding menus, Automatic thumbnails, Social Media integration.

Zack 990 WordPress
Zack 990 is a WordPress theme is designed exclusively for photo and video bloggers. Zack 990 features four columns of widget-ready areas, totally customizable with widgets.

Oulipo
Oulipo features simplicity and minimalism to focus on the content without distraction. Key features: A widget-enabled sidebar, Front page styling for sticky posts, threaded comments for WordPress 2.7.

Irresistible
Irresistible is a visually-rich personal blog WordPress theme, with a little bit of a multimedia focus. Key features: integrated banner ad management, seamlessly integrated video player, widgetized sidebar, 9 colour schemes.

Imprezz
Imprezz is a 3 column based design with a third dimension for the second column. This theme supports WordPress 2.7.1 and works well with the zdcomments widget (which is used to display the top commenters).The psd source file of the logo has also been included in the package.

Dark Classic theme
Dark Classic is an all black WordPress theme with green tinge and widget supported right sidebar with tag support. This WordPress theme emphasizes your blog’s description, has better-than-average code structure, comes very close to validating.

Rewire
Rewire is a 3 column SEO Optimized Wordpress theme with thumbnails on Posts, Gravatar on Comments. PSD Files are included.

Elegant Grunge WordPress theme
Elegant Grunge is an unwashed yet crisp WordPress theme. It features: automatic frame on images, a widget to display thumbnails from latest/random photoblog entries, highly configurable sidebar: choose from no sidebar, a right sidebar, or two right sidebars.

Remedy WordPress theme
Remedy is a 3 column, Adsense ready theme with fixed width and right sidebar. Key features: Magazine Style, Ajax/Widgets.

Grid Focus
Grid Focus is a three column widget enabled WordPress theme. Prominent navigation bar with room to share important pages. The latest update is completely optimized and stripped of any unnecessary code allowing for complete customizability.

Brilliance
Brilliance is a 3-column, widget ready theme with soothing colors and design. The theme also has provision for an Adsense block in the third column where you can put your Adsense code.

Compositio
Compositio is a two column theme, made to for those who want to put their content at the front with a unique light blue design. A special feature of this theme is the logo changer.

CorporateMag
CorporateMag is a 3 Column, magazine style Wordpress theme with fixed width and right sidebar.

Androida
Androida is a business template inspired by Android phone. 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.

BlakMagik WordPress theme
BlakMagik theme has 2 columns, is based on grungy wooden textures and has a cool top menu which includes RSS. The psd source file of the logo has also been included with the package.

Portfolio WordPress theme
Portfolio is a minimalist theme based on the idea of portfolio. This theme is a starting point in the creation of portfolios, using WordPress as CMS.

Simpl3 Theme
Simpl3 Theme features rotating Header Images (622×190 pixels, unlimited number), big Social Icons, 4 Squares of Advertising space, simple typography and Image placement.

Glassy Evolution
Glassy Evolution is a glassy looking WordPress theme which has five difference colors. The theme has two columns, fixed width and right sidebar.

Hybrid News
Hybrid News comes with a total of 10 widget sections for your use, which will all integrate seamlessly within the theme. It also comes with an additional page template aptly titled Front Page, which has a featured post slider, excerpts section, and headlines section. There’s also the sweet four-level drop-down menu, which can easily be modified to accommodate even more levels.

Majapahit
Majapahit is a WordPress theme with magazine style. It features 4 columns layout, feature section and 6 categories expandable newsbox.

CleanseDark Wordpress Theme
CleanseDark is a fixed width 2 column WordPress theme available in 3 colors. Key features: 125×125 and 468×60 banner placement ready, integrated feedburner email subscribe form. Option page available to set theme setting (theme color, feedburner settings, mybloglog widget setting, ads settings).

Swiss Mono
Swiss Mono WordPress theme is a minimalistic theme designed to strict horizontal grid and layout. It has widgetized sidebar, 125×125 sidebar advertisement support, theme options to add site stats code (like Analytics) without tampering with theme files.

The Buffet Framework
The Buffet Framework is a theme framework designed not only for the theme developers, but also for the end users who would be able to add and remove what they want. Key features: includes many SEO features such as breadcrumbs, headings, canonical URLs, support for Microformats, jQuery Powered - comments form validation, SuperSleight for IE6, Superfish menus, jBreadcrumb included, packaged with CSS Frameworks - comes with 960gs and Blueprint CSS.

Fotofolio Wordpress Theme
Fotofolio is a WordPress theme for photographer either any visual works portfolio (graphic designer, drawer, architect, etc). Key features: captivating design to display your works, automatically resize image for thumbnail and preview, JQuery Integrated for Featured Photos and Previews.

Carrington Text
Carrington Text is a clean, simple theme with only text and spacing used for layout and design. This theme has the AJAX content loading features for comments and archives.

Logo Design Evolution (video)

2009-04-06T17:28:00Z

You’ve seen these famous logos everywhere, but have you ever wondered how they came to be? I took some famous logos and made a morphing video. So you could have a look how Apple, Adidas, Google, Mazda, Walmart, Adobe, Microsoft, Nokia logos changed since their first logo appeared.

Have you ever wonder how’s the first Apple logo was looking 30 years ago? Did you know that Apple’s original logo was Isaac Newton under an apple tree? Or that Nokia’s original logo was a fish?

Let’s take a look at the origin of famous logos and how they evolved over time.

How to design perfect Twitter background Ultimate Guide

2009-03-24T21:56:55Z

My main advice: never use default blue Twitter background. If you’re not that into designing your Twitter background at least choose another Twitter template from 12 stock backgrounds available. Every non default Twitter background will stand out when the majority of Twitter profiles have the same look. If you like to get more followers and use Twitter as business card or promotion brochure for your service, you definitely need custom Twitter background. Besides great first impression, a professional looking Twitter background would let you stand out from the crowd and pick up followers.

While there’s no official guidelines how to make Twitter background, I put all major kinds of Twitter backgrounds into groups and explain why and how to use every one. Hint: you can browse through popular Twitter users’ profiles and then use what you like the most for inspiration. However respect the copyrights of photographers and designers and don’t copy anything word by word.

1. Seamless pattern Twitter background

Using seamless pattern you get fast loading Twitter profile which still have specific look and feel. If you like abstract textures and don’t care much about putting additional information using your Twitter background this would be ideal for you.
Showcase: @KrisColvin @queenoftheclick

2. Tiled Twitter background

The repeating tiled background pattern is very common in web design. You need just to play with image file dimensions and upload the file to your account. The main advantage of this way to design Twitter background is that repeating pattern will work at any monitor resolution. And you can change it very often depending on your mood.
Showcase: @Scobleizer @BigRichB @brooksbayne @stephenkruiser

3. Single image fading to solid color

You can make stylish and good looking Twitter background using this technique. This type of Twitter backgrounds are fast loading and easy to scale because most space will be filled in with solid color. Make sure image you choose is perfectly faded and blends with a solid color, you specified as the background color.
Showcase: @BarackObama @TheBusyBrain @shannonseek @stanleytang

4. Large image as Twitter background

You just use one large image as your Twitter background, I’d choose at least file with 1600×1200 dimensions to scale it properly on large monitors. Make sure that Twitter content area hiding some part of background is not making your background look weird. Showcase: @zaibatsu @caseywright @MichaelMillman

5. Extended Twitter profile/background with sidebar

Many Twitter users prefer now to have an informative Twitter background and implement a sidebar. The sidebar is an area of Twitter background used to display additional information about the user, such as large profile image, bio and lists of websites and other social networks. For companies it would be a logo along with some promotion. Because there’s not much screen space on 1024×768 resolution monitors, profiles using the sidebar only usable starting from 1280×1024s, with anything less being hidden by the main Twitter website content.
Showcase: @perrybelcher @Jonathan360 @chrispirillo @unmarketing

Here’s information and scheme to help you design extended Twitter background with a sidebar.

File Dimensions: 1600×1200
Sidebar Dimensions: 235×450
Horizontal position: 20 px from the left
Vertical position: 95 px from the top

Top Twitter users background design statistics

As you can see on this pie chart which I made, most of Top Twitter users (according to Twitterholic) have default Twitter template or one of the 12 stock backgrounds available on Twitter. Please let them know, they should read this post!

Twittter background design resources

Extended Twitter Background screenshot Pool on Flickr
Twitterbacks Tag on Flickr
Pattern Cooler
500+ Free Seamless Patterns
Flickr’s Creative Commons pool
Stock.xchng
Image search bookmarkets

Twitter profile design tips

Besides background you can customize text, links, sidebar background and the sidebar border. Try to choose complimentary colors. Make sure that all information is easy to read.
Leave some free space to the left of the main content area since the content area shifts left and right depending on the browser’s window size.
Avoid using sidebar or put some information on the right side since larger monitor resolution will hide up graphics placed to the right side of the Twitter content area.
These two Firefox plugins are very useful to design an extended Twitter profile: MeasureIt is a handy Firefox plugin that allows you to measure elements and space between them on the screen. ColorZilla lets you determine colors used for Twitter background, links, text and sidebar border.
While Twitter allows you to go as high as 800kb for background image (using JPG and PNG as file types, try to keep it around 300kb or otherwise your Twitter background will take too long to load. Play with compression settings to achieve best look and minimal file size at the same time.

How to set up your Twitter background

Click Settings -> Design-> Change background image
If you will use Single image fading to solid color, Large image as background or Extended Twitter profile with sidebar uncheck Tile background radio button. Click Save changes. To set up other colors used in your profile (Text, Name, Link, Sidebar fill and Sidebar border) click Change design colors.

If you liked this post, please follow me on Twitter @garmahis

Cross browser testing and development will be easier with Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview

2009-03-19T18:16:51Z

Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview is intended to help you debug web pages without running multiple instances of different versions of Internet Explorer or had to wait for a web service to return renderings of your pages. It’s a challenge for every web developer to check website compatibility across a bunch of browsers and browser versions existing today. Until now, either you could install every browser, verify the website via a visual inspection and debug with tools specialized to that browser, or you could send a URL to a third-party screenshotting service like BrowserShots for an all-in-one visual inspection.

Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer is a stand-alone visual debugging tool that makes it faster and easier to prove your sites look and work the same in IE6, IE7, IE8 or other browsers you may have installed locally such as Firefox 3.5, Safari 3, Safari 4 and even a bitmap websites mockup. You can view the pages side by side or as an onion-skin overlay and use a standard set of modern HTML debugging tools like a DOM inspector, CSS inspector, element highlighting, pixel rulers and guides to precisely identify differences in layout. To help you quickly identify problem elements, DOM highlighting shows absolute positions of the rendered elements and HTML elements display CSS properties.

From Microsoft.com you can download the beta trial of Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview (250MB). For now it only supports renderings between IE6 and versions of IE already installed on your computer, but it should ease the pain of cross browser development and testing for IE6/7/8 compatibility. The full and final version of this product will be bundled together with Expression Web 3. It will be available later this year and will run as a separate standalone application.

How to fix Missed Schedule error in WordPress

2009-03-17T18:09:05Z

After upgrade to WordPress 2.7 I noticed that a Schedule Post option is not working anymore. I can still schedule a post for particular time, but when WordPress should publish the post it gave me just ‘Missed Schedule’ notification. WordPress 2.7.1 update has not fixed this error.

The problem occurred apparently because of changes in WordPress Cron, not giving sufficient time at certain servers in order to take out the publication of the post.

To fix Missed Schedule error you need to replace two files in WordPress installation folder wp-cron.php (located in the WordPress root) and cron.php (located in the ‘wp-includes’ folder) with older versions of these files from WordPress 2.6.5

After you overwrite these two files with older versions next scheduled post should be published by WordPress without any problem.

10 reasons why you lose customers on e-commerce site

2009-03-12T21:10:51Z

Why your e-commerce website visitors are leaving your site without making orders? Your e-commerce website brings in some profit but can it bring more money? Sure, if you don’t have the issues mentioned in this checklist. Even quite large e-commerce websites make childish mistakes. So read about 10 reasons why you lose customers on e-commerce site and learn how to fix these problems.

1. Main page design is flat and boring

Ask yourself: what the visitors see on the main page of your e-commerce site? Can the visitor be 100% sure that your website is selling something? Is it easy to identify what kind of products are you selling?

The typical mistake is the neglecting of commercial design rules: too small font and no description, no center of composition, no distinction between primary and secondary design elements. Now and then I find websites with hundreds links on main page. Your site visitor get lost and better leave your site than make an order. People don’t have too much time to research your site structure or to understand your unique design vision.

How to fix it: don’t save money on web design. Look and feel, usability and user interface is no less important that the products you sell or technologies used in the backend.

2. Not accessible contact information, poor about page

While some customers would like to serf your catalog and choose the right product themselves, other prefer interact with people (or at least your automated help system) and ask questions about quality, price, how to make a choice, etc. Do you have an obvious option to call your representative or send email quickly? How many options to connect with you do you have on your website?

Make ‘About’ page as trustful and informative as possible. Customers pay a lot of attention to credibility of e-commerce site. As Google Analytics shows this page could get to the top of most popular pages for a small or even medium site.

How to fix it: Ideally your visitors don’t have to look up for contact information it should be always accessible. Don’t forget to put in the ‘About’ page everything that will give you more credibility: seller’s guarantee, address, map, stuff photos, company history.

3. Not visible payment or shipping options/not enough of them

Will visitor search through your FAQ and site map for payment and shipping information? If he or she can’t find all information related to payment and shipping on most visible position of your e-commerce website, visitor will leave it disappointed. Learn the needs of your customer and what kind of payment and shipping ways they want to use.

How to fix it: put payment and shipping information close to contact options on most visible place. Make sure that you provided enough payment and shipping options not only easy for you but for your customer.

4. It’s hard to find a product

Very often customers browse through catalog and don’t see products they need. Except catalog you need easy to use advanced search form. It’s better to integrate auto suggest feature and provide search results in the way search engines do it.

How to fix it: figure out and implement every single feature which could make product search easier for your customers.

5. Product page doesn’t sell

Product page is one of the most important parts of e-commerce website. On the product page customer decide either to buy your product or not. The design and usability of product page are as important as design and usability of main page.

Do you have descriptions detailed enough? Is the price tag easy to see? Are the product images of high quality? Is it obvious what to do to buy the product?

How to fix it: don’t save on copywriting; make clear the product price and actions to buy it. Make visible ‘Order’ or ‘Buy’ button.

6. Product availability is unknown

If you respect your customers you need to save their time. Tell them about product availability at once. Make sure that availability information is up to date and product available on the website is ready to be shipped.

How to fix it: make availability information real time and automate the process. If the product is unavailable or the visitor can’t find it, provide an option to subscribe for updates by email.

7. Shopping cart is hard to find

Shopping cart should be always with customer as it is in a real supermarket. But now and then there’re sites where you should make efforts to find shopping cart after you put some product there.

How to fix it: Do care about usability not less than about other things. Make the shopping process as easy and pleasant as possible.

8. Customers didn’t get response

Are you answering contact form requests within one business day? Do you have other communication options such as IM or phone? Is it easy to get through and speak with your representative? Does your system send confirmation of orders to customer? It’s hard to believe but I know many quite popular online shops which don’t bother answering customer’s emails.

How to fix it: check regularly all your communication channels and make sure they are working efficiently.

9. You’re not giving customer anything except order

Many e-commerce websites don’t give anything to customer after he or she made on order. Even if you’ll attach your advertising flyer or business card you’ll get advantage over competitors.

Hot to fix it: leave something to your customer.

10. You are silent both on positive and negative reviews

Do you check replies to your remarks on forums, comments on blogs? Do you use any reputation tracking tools? Reviews about your online business are conversations with your customers. Many of them will check up reviews and feedback before buying anything from you. Information about your e-commerce site based outside of your website has no less meaning.

Hot to fix it: Some people spend huge amount of money just to get some feedback. So don’t ignore it. And be thankful for negative reviews as well.

Follow Me on Twitter!

2009-03-09T00:36:16Z

There are a million ways to waste time on Twitter but used properly it is a brilliant networking and communications tool and fun at the same time. Twitter is basically the place to let the World know what you’re doing, in 140 characters or less but Twitter has become my favorite social media website, as well.

Now you can follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/garmahis. Check me out and stay tuned! Your feedback, questions, comments and post suggestions for Design Live blog are appreciated. So, I invite you to follow me on Twitter if you enjoy this blog, and are craving for more information and interaction.

You will receive ‘tweets’ when I post new information to the Design Live blog. On Twitter I am participating in discussions, ask and answer questions, make comments, post links and express my opinion on different topics. And if you’re not spammer and using Twitter to bring in some value I’m sure to follow you back.

I’m sure many of you have Twitter accounts and I’d love to keep up with what my readers are doing. If you are on Twitter and want to connect with other readers of this blog, leave your handle below in the comments so we can all connect. Let’s build community!

Why email is still the best way for communication with clients

2009-03-09T00:34:02Z

Business communication can take too much time and efforts, especially if you or your clients choose not right tools to do it. One phone call or IM make you lose concentration on work issues for an hour or so. What are the advantages of email over phone, fax, and modern communication ways such as Skype, IM and social networks? Why email is still preferred by many people as most efficient communication tool? I am going to share my thoughts in this post.

Phone, Skype and VoIP

The real time communication by phone or Skype works best if you ready to answer questions immediately. If I need to look through some documents, make a research or calculations I’m feeling not so comfortable. That’s terrible if I’m getting a call on my way, talking to other person and can’t even write down notes and questions.

Sometimes people even don’t know why they are calling. They find a note in a notebook, make a call and only after that trying hard to remember what they wanted to talk about. So I need to remind my clients why he or she is calling me. And I’m feeling very confused when I need to write down addresses of internal site pages 100 characters’ length relying on spelling talent of other person.

Phone calls don’t leave anything afterwards: no logs, no summary of conversations to look through after and in worse cases to have proof of decisions/mistakes made. All you can use is the number, time of the call and its duration.

How phone users justify themselves

I need to solve a problem in a real time
Well, it still is faster if you send me email. If you can write email and there’s no emergency, write email. You don’t want to waste my time and yours, do you?

Sometimes email gets lost and I don’t know if you replied to me
It could be a lame excuse. If someone would like something to get lost it will. Use your mobile phone to check email, get notifications by SMS if your phone can’t check email.

I don’t have time to write you email (I’m too lazy)
Time spend to type email would help you to express your thoughts more precisely. You don’t need to write novels by emails.

Instant Messengers and Social networks

People are using dozens of different IM messengers, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk. Not every IM saves history of your conversations (logs) on server. As a rule it is a headache to search through IM messages. If you forget to turn off IM and it could turn out as a disaster. Someone would ask urgent questions but get no feedback. You could realize it only an hour later.

Some clients try to use Facebook private message or Twitter DM as a way of business communication. Isn’t it easier to send an email?

Fax

Fax is still preferred way of ‘official’ communication by some clients. I don’t have fax and don’t use it. Why to not scan a document and send it by email?

How to manage communication in your way

Let’s your clients leave voicemail messages every time you can’t answer phone. In your voicemail greeting specify that you prefer email for business communication. It’s better to set the rules from the start: you’re using email as the primary way of communication and private meetings to discuss important issues.