Archive for 'CMS'
Our latest template customization project – EliteScapesDesign
Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Dave.
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We’ve been a little slack posting examples of new work with the latest addition to the family, baby Austin, arriving on Oct the 8th, and all the changes at http://foamers.net but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy.
Our newest template customization is for http://www.elitescapesdesign.com/. This landscaping website has a very nice layout. It is simple yet dignified – very fitting for a company committed to quality craftsmanship landscaping. We are very happy with the way the template turned out, but they are still moving in so there are a few small things that still need to be tweaked.
In addition to the striking design the website uses the “lightbox” functionality and feature to let you preview and see image from the portfolio, that really helps distinguish their portfolio from the thousands of other landscapers because the functionality is very smooth and easy for visitors to use.
Does Your Landscaping Company need a website?
We offer template customization services to all landscaping companies and small landscapers at completely affordable prices and help you to display your portfolio effectively on the web.
Should you wish to give your landscaping business a prestigious and a more professional look , or if you would like to learn more about our services, please drop us line.
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Mobile Template For Handheld Devices
Posted on 11. May, 2009 by Dave.
Hello everyone! I’m writing today to announce the launch of Template Monster’s Mobile templates for handheld devices. This will enable you to properly present your website to billions of mobile Internet users world wide.
Similarly, the layout is very basic and arranged to look perfect, even on those tiny screens in handheld devices – so beautiful, so lightweight and so optimized for handheld devices!
Not convinced you should go mobile?
Did you know that the number of users accessing the Internet from their handheld devices has experienced a 107% growth during the period of January 2008 to January 2009? And, that the number of RIM’s BlackBerry users alone has reached 25 million with an additional 3.9 million in the last quarter of 2008. Aahhh! Bet you did not know that…
Similarly, Apple is expected to triple it’s sales on the IPhone 3G for 2009 and as if there weren’t enough, almost half of Earth’s population has access to some type of mobile device such as cell phones. That’s about 3 billion potential mobile Internet users.
First of all, test your site.
The first thing you should probably go do is test your website on a pocket device – maybe your own PDA or a Pocket PC layout simulator like the one found here at http://www.g-site.com/ppc/.
Are you going? You really should go… I don’t hear that mouse clicking!
What the PPC emulator does is simulates the approximate viewable area of a typical 240×320 PPC screen – the simulation is not 100% accurate of course, but does provide a general idea of what your site might look like on a Pocket PC Screen.
Does your website need to be adapted to the small screen?
If you want to discuss a mobile template, if you need a quote, or anything else, just drop us a line. Be as specific as possible, it will help us to understand your needs better so we are be able to give you our accurate price. Mobile Templates from foamers.net are optimized for being perfectly displayed with 98% mobile device platforms. Including these major ones:
What are you waiting for? Start browsing them now!
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Downloaded osCommerce, now what?
Posted on 24. Mar, 2008 by Dave.
Intro: Two of our most popular products are osCommerce templates and CRE Loaded templates. Both are actually a combination of osCommerce 2.2 (ready built online store) provided by osCommerce.com and a unique template design from Foamers.net. Likewise we also offer professional osCommerce, CRE Loaded and or ZenCart templates customizations at affordable prices. In this article Tan Thomas offers as tips on how to customize your shopping cart as well as market your product.
Article: When you decide to go with osCommerce for your e-commerce site, you can simply take their stock layout and insert your information and voila! you have a completely functional e-commerce site ready for customers and sales.
If you’re like most e-commerce sites, however, you’ll want to go a step further than that and customize your “storefront” to make it better fit your product. If you are savvy in both the technical and marketing fields, this will probably be a no-brainer. If, however, you are an expert in your product, but not necessarily how to sell your product, this article is for you. It’s filled with tips to help you both design your site and well as market your product.
Design Your Site
1.Change your colors. You can go into your stylesheet.css file (in your catalog root folder) and simply change the colors from the stock layout. It’s amazing what a difference something as simple as a custom color layout can do for your website!
2.Choose a template. If you don’t want to start your website design from scratch, you can use a template that has everything you need for your site except the information.
3.Or, go even simpler. If you don’t want to change the complete template you can opt to change just one thing on the site. This could be the background, buttons or logo. Whatever you choose, just do something to make the site your own!
4. Improve your images. Spend some time learning image editing programs so that you can save your pictures in high quality with the smallest file size so that they both look great and load quickly. With the high speed of the Internet, most people don’t have the patience to wait for slow loading pictures and they may leave your site rather than waiting for the image to load completely.
5.Change the page titles. Make sure that you give each page a descriptive title so that when the page appears in the search engines it gives people enough information to get them to want to click on your link.
6.Put your self in your customer’s shoes. Customers do not like long drawn out checkouts. If you can get the information you need in two to three pages (including the confirmation of information page), your site will have an advantage over those sites that draw it out. The osCommerce forum has information on how to do this.
7. Get a design expert who is experienced with osCommerce. By installing STS Template system or some other equivalent, they can customize your shopping cart to anything. This website lists a series of osCommerce website which had gone through a serious make-over. http://www.efusiontech.com/E-Commerce-Projects.html
Market Your Product:
1.Make your site unique. This is a basic marketing technique and is sometimes referred to as creating a Unique Selling Proposition. Basically, this is a simple statement that tells people what makes your site and your business unique from other businesses, especially those in the same niche. Whether you always offer free shipping or guarantee the lowest prices, your unique selling proposition is what sets you apart from the rest.
2.Don’t forget to sell your product! Getting people to your site and getting them to stay on the site are important, but once they are there you need to SELL the product. You won’t be there to tell them about the items and they aren’t in a bricks and mortar store to examine the product themselves, so your descriptions need to do these jobs for you and the customer. Be detailed, be specific and be honest. Include who would likely enjoy the product and why they would need it. Instead of focusing on the details of the product or service, put some emphasis n the benefits.
3.Make your store more than an online entity. Give your customers a way to contact you. This includes a name, address, email and phone number. If they have no way to get into contact with you, your credibility with the customer declines.
4.Offer more than just the product or service. Don’t be afraid to add articles, tips and information related to your product for customers coming to your site. It will increase your credibility as well as give them reasons to return to your site even if they don’t have an immediate need for your product or service. Related to this is sending out a periodic newsletter that gives useful information, announces specials and sales and highlights specific products.
With just a few customizations your osCommerce store can be a unique site that fits your philosophy, product and needs. You can view samples of some oscommerce website from eFusiontech.com who has done over a hundred osCommerce implementation with customized skin and layout.
About the Author
The author is a designer working in Singapore
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How To Be A Successful Web 2.0 Puppetmaster
Posted on 14. Feb, 2008 by Dave.
One of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 is participation, collaboration and moderation through the use of web applications. Web 2.0 sites derive their power from the human connections and network effects from this characteristic that is made possible, and grow in effectiveness the more people use them.
The idea of “participation, collaboration and moderation” can take many forms. If you look back history, bulletin boards are one form, online forums are another, online multiplayer games, content management systems (e.g. Wikis, Joomla), dating sites and classifieds as well. If not for features that enable multiple users to create their own space within a website via registering accounts or at least leave a message (like a comment in a blog), the communication culture would have been one-way (from the webmaster to the visitors) and remain stuck in 1.0.
Why would a webmaster want to go Web 2.0? We learned that social networkers want to expand their personal network of online friends. On the other hand, the webmaster desires to build up a core group of active participants who unconsciously help to sustain the ‘liveliness’ and therefore the longevity of the website and its agenda or interests while the overall database of users expand. In this manner, a lot of the effort that goes into building the database (or list) becomes very much hands-off for the webmaster. There’s leverage. This is also where moderation comes in.
The role of the webmaster naturally becomes that of the moderator, whose job is to maintain some semblance of order (but not to the point of creating a restrictive environment) and general site maintenance. It gets better when the webmaster can promote participants into moderators themselves, and more and more s/he becomes the “silent puppetmaster” behind the scene without doing much. It may not be easy, but the whole mindset of being a moderator is to gain confidence in just “letting it be” and letting his/her site runs by itself.
Now that the webmaster’s motivation is addressed, s/he must find ways to avoid competition by finding new twists to contribute to the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Much as new sites keep popping up in recent months, somehow no 2 sites are made the same and they certainly enjoy a good amount of traffic anyway. It would be better when you can boil down social networking to the context of a specific niche, like a site to exchange Mexican recipes or talk about Ferrari car accessories or business opportunities in Central Asia. You can better target the type of people you are looking for and it also gives them a sharper sense of purpose to engage with and within your site.
At the end of the day, social networking is all about sharing valuable content and making friends. The successful Web 2.0 webmaster is one who knows how to tap on this human desire to the fullest and consistently encourages such a desire to grow within the culture of the social network he has created by offering further privileges for more prominent members. Really, there’s no better way for them to build up credibility and make their personalities known than to be consistently ‘alive’ and ‘happening’ on the Net. From the SEO standpoint of view, you can also accumulate more backlinks and subsequently more traffic to your social networking site.
About the Author
Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at Internet Mastery Center.
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How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
Posted on 05. Feb, 2008 by Dave.
In the last article (See Resources for details) we discussed several ways to enhance your users experience and how having a site that is user friendly is so conducive to having pages that are also easy to crawl and index. This time we’ll discuss the central elements of the ideal Web 2.0 ready site and they are collaboration and interactivity. I want you to really focus on these two key concepts in particular because they really are an essential must have in the Web. 2.0 era.
The phenomenal popularity of sites such as these has had more and more organizations that are doing business online reexamining the status quo. Consumers now simply expect more than just a one-way conversation or a static mandate. Think about it, why should anyone follow what your have to say if you are not willing to listen to what they have to say to you in return. Consumers prefer to interact; they want to know what other customers have to say about your product or service. That means you have to facilitate a place for your customers to express their point of view, start a conversation, comment on a particular topic or simply ask a question. With that in mind, you need to start thinking about your online presence as an outlet or podium that regularly encourages and endorses an entrenched sense of community among its users.
But how can interactivity increase conversions and make you money? If you read the last article you already know about the importance of having good content. Search engines love content. They want the foremost authority on any given subject. In other words, they want a site that knows the most and is the most reputable on a topic. Now we need to look instead at what we don’t know. We need to gain a better understanding of what our customer’s wants and needs are. That is where interaction and collaboration come in.
Tools like web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) which help you see what’s happening on your site by determining which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, what pages they looked at, visit durations, where they left from and who referred them, only tell you half the story. Web analytics tools are great for answering questions like when, where and how. But what they don’t tell you is the who and the why. Only by feeding and growing the interactivity of your online presence can you gain a better understanding of your customer’s wants and needs. Moreover, giving your customers a voice will you help you better tailor your product to suit them.
If for instance you are looking at launching a new promotional campaign you can use the feedback on your site from your prospects so as to test the idea before you launch. You can even find out how people currently perceive your small business. This type of research is invaluable in helping you improve and make the right decisions concerning your online business. As they say: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Having an interactive site does not have to cost you and arm and a leg either, there are plenty of low-cost solutions out there, one of which I will be telling you about in the upcoming weeks. However, the key here is you have to facilitate the means to carry that conversation. You need to open that dialogue to get insight into what’s really working or isn’t working on your site
In the upcoming weeks we’ll talk more about these new Web 2.0 trends and also show you the easiest way to launch your own ready-built web 2.0 site. As always please feel free to share your thoughts, comments, feedback and keep checking back for more updates.
Resources:
Is Your Site Search Engine and Users Friendly?
How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
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Is Your Site Search Engine and Users Friendly?
Posted on 30. Jan, 2008 by Dave.
In the last article of this series (see Resources for links), I explained the importance of having regularly updated content on your site. In that same vain, we looked at how that content must be clear, authoritative and more importantly, relevant to your niche. Additionally, I talk about how crucial making your content available through RSS is become with the advance and development of the decentralized information movement. In this article, I’ll discuss two more fundamental characteristic of the ideal Web 2.0 site, and that is that your site must be search engine and user friendly.
As I’m sure you may have already heard, at the center of all this there’s a lot of technology: JavaScript, HTML and XHTML, a bit of dynamic HTML, Ajax, and even some XML (Extensible Markup Language). Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of this (or any of this for that matter) you don’t have to. What I’m about to teach you through this series of articles does not require any knowledge in programming. Anyone can do this and I don’t care if you are selling garbage bags, bartending, teaching disco dancing or working retail. These are all very easy and inexpensive techniques anyone can use to launch their very own Web 2.0 ready site and it can be done in a matter of just minutes.
Building a site with SEO in mind goes Hand-in-Hand with having a site that is user friendly too, in fact you can’t work towards the one without the other. Search engines love feeding web users lots of relevant content, so the more authoritative and relevant your content is, the more likely it will eventually be served. Consequently the better the users experience the better your Ranking. In other words, make pages for users, not for search engines. Hence, you need to figure out your niche and be carefully defined within that niche. In addition you must updated your content regularly and that content must be authoritative.
Now that we understand the significance of having the right content lets talk about the sites structure. First, you must take common-sense steps to ensure that your site helps users find their content easily. For example, is your content organized in an easy-to-read hierarchical layout? Are you using HTML links on every page, and does each page provide internal links in the text to help the search engine crawler find its way around? Does your site offer a site map and do you include a link to the site map somewhere on each page? And last but certainly not least. Do your pages contain relevant information that clearly and accurately describe your content and is that text clear, crisp and legible?
Remember, optimizing your site structure has to be an integral part of the design process and must enhance the overall user experience. Furthermore, pages that are simple to navigate and don’t require much thinking on the end users part, will also be pages that are easy to crawl and index. In reality, SEO is pretty simple, avoid using overzealous SEO practices and think about what’s best for the user. The ideal search engines and user friendly site is all about providing the user with content–rich relevant information and getting them to that information as soon and as easily as possible.
And there you have it. Two more fundamental ingredients of the ideal Web 2.0 ready site; is your site search engine and users friendly? In the upcoming weeks we will be continuing this discussion, as promised, and show you how you can launch your very own ready-built Web 2.0 site. If there’s anything you wish to add on the subject of search engine and users friendly websites please feel free to share your thoughts and comments and keep checking back for more updates.
Resources:
How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
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How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
Posted on 14. Jan, 2008 by Dave.
Recently I have been talking a lot about Web 2.0 and the far reaching effects it is had through the whole social media phenomenon. Hugely popular sites and services like (Digg, Blogger and YouTube) attract enormous amounts of audiences by delivering the once impossible, now inevitable opportunity to rant to anyone clear across the world or, discuss your special expertise in a particular niche with those who share a similar interests.
In this series of articles (See Resources for links) I will explain how to apply these new trends and new technologies using very inexpensive techniques and services that do not involve tinkering with the HTML code of your pages themselves so you too can be well informed and able to make every effort to take full advantage of the social media era.
First and foremost, stay fresh! Having just a simple digital brochure (e.g. an online bulletin board of your services, contact page etc) simply doesn’t work anymore. Your site has to have regularly updated content. Nobody likes stale news; similarly, your sites content needs to stay fresh in order to continually hook and delight your primary audience. Moreover as a publisher of information people will want to do business with you if they trust you and one of the best ways to build that trust is to provide the users with relevant clear authoritative content.This involves coming up with a strategy to keep people coming back for the latest and greatest. For example, you could plan to keep up with the latest trends in the home load industry, such as mortgage rate trends, refinancing etcetera. Or you could feature relevant news articles, special promos, tips or tutorials that draw attention to your particular niche. In addition, your plan should provide a checklist with specifics “to do” items essentially saying that you are going to do this many blogs this week, this many podcasts this month, this many videos and keep a regular publishing schedule (remember we’re talking long-term strategy here) so your subscribers will become used to hearing from you and, you’ll be able to gain their trust. So again, your site has to have regularly updated content.
Secondly your content should be made available through RSS (formally “RDF Site Summary”, commonly known as “Really Simple Syndication”) or RSS feed. You don’t need to understand the ins and outs of the RSS protocol (I promised you no tinkering, didn’t I? Though if you want to know more, here is a good place to start), all you need to know is why RSS is becoming so popular and how important it is to make your content available through RSS. Basically, what’s so attractive about RSS (versus bookmarks or even email) is it allows the subscriber to control the delivery of information. In other words, unlike with email, subscribers can limit what they receive to exactly what they want.
If you’ve ever opened your inbox and seen something that looked like spam, walked like spam or quacked like spam I think you can certainly appreciate this. Since users can be counted on to be a little lazy (or would most likely prefer avoiding going all over the place for new information), they’ll just use sites and services like myYahoo or Google Reader that can constantly checks their favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Consequently, as the web becomes more and more decentralized placing media control in users’ hands and allowing them to experience what they want, when they want, your site needs to adjust to this decentralize nature and be present wherever your target market is looking. So, whether you are posting up article regularly, video blogging or podcasting, whatever the case maybe, you need to be positioned to allow syndication on your site and that means making your content available through an RSS feed.
In the upcoming weeks I will be talking more about these new Web 2.0 trends and also show you the easiest way to launch your own ready-built web 2.0 site. Likewise, please feel free to share your thoughts and comments and make sure to check back for more updates.
Resources:
Is Your Site Search Engine & User Friendly?
How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
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Understanding Content Management Systems
Posted on 04. May, 2007 by Dave.
Intro: – This articles covers four major questions associated content management systems first we learn what actually is a content management system or (CMS), then we outline the differences between traditional web designs and content management system, finally we consider the major benefits of using and content management system and help you make the correct choice between going with a conventional web design or content management system based upon your site’s purpose, plans for growth, functionality etc..
Note: – We provide a number of professionally designed CMS web design templates that you can use for your web site. In addition we offer affordable CMS template customization packages to aid you through the entire process of transforming your old static web site and make it more dynamic and functional. We have hundreds of templates to choose from so you can be sure to find a template that you like that matches the category of your business. Among them you’ll find the following items of interest:
PHP-Nuke Templates – Type (CMS)
WordPress Templates – Type (CMS)
PHPBB Templates – Type (CMS)
Zen-Cart Templates – Type (CMS)
CRE-Loaded Templates – Type (CMS)
osCommerce Templates – Type (CMS)
Articles: – Web site design is not a one-size-fits-all practice. As web sites can serve a number of different purposes – supply information, attract new sales, create a community, etc – it only makes sense that web design possibilities be just as varied. One of the first considerations in creating a web design is whether a content management system, or CMS, makes sense. There are some situations when a CMS is clearly the best choice, while it may be an unnecessary collection of bells and whistles at other times.
What is a content management system?
In a nutshell, a CMS is software that organizes, powers and monitors a web site. It includes a “front end” viewable by any web user and a password-protected “back end” the general public does not see. Management of the site is centralized from this back end. Depending upon how the site is built, a content management system could include features for archiving older content, entering new content, accessing traffic metrics, managing navigation, banner rotation, polls, streaming media uploads and shopping carts, for example. The possibilities are limited only by the content management system’s configuration and capabilities.
How are traditional web designs and content management systems different?
Unlike a CMS, “traditional” or basic HTML-based web design does not include a front and back end. Effective management of these sites requires knowledge of good coding practice, the ability to create new or integrate pre-written scripts to add functionality as needed and the creation of an efficient file/directory structure to accommodate growth.
A content management system, on the other hand, does not require specialized technical skill to use. Managing or expanding the web site is a centralized process. More advanced coding knowledge would only be required should installation of additional functionality be desired.
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Choosing a Content Management System by Diona Kidd
Posted on 23. Apr, 2007 by Dave.
Choosing a Content management system remains to be an issue for site maintainers and web site owners. The first issue seems to be “Do we need a CMS?”. The second issue is, of course, cost.
A common misconception is that there requirement of size before an organization can benefit from a Content Management System. Even small websites can gain valuable benefit from CMS solutions. The key is to pick the CMS that best fits your organizations needs and growth expectations.
And don’t be fooled into thinking you have to sell your first born child or a year’s wages to get a CMS. There are many different levels of CMS applications and different levels of implementation, both of which effect price.
Let’s discuss some of the details of Content Management Systems… What is CMS? CMS stands for Content Management System. A CMS is a software system that helps in maintaining and expanding website, often with no knowledge of web languages. The goal to make content and structure expansion easier. A CMS can also help by making maintenance by multiple parties in your organization possible.
CMS applications store their information in a database and generate pages as needed. Many Content Management Systems also cache pages to optimize a website’s performance. This means that once a page is requested, it is created and stored on the system until it changes so the page does not have to be created upon every request. This eases the load on your server and makes lessens the expense of hardware requirements. What does CMS do?Well, what exactly do you need? A CMS generally manages text articles and templates for a website. Template is just another term for a layout of a page. Generally, a layout is reused multiple times on one website and you can assign a layout to a page in a CMS. You might have a home page layout and another layout for the interior of the website. It is easy to assign the interior template to newly created pages.
Certain CMS systems may also have Permission-based Publishing or Workflow tasks. These features allow customization of the publishing process. Permission-based publishing allows certain roles or people to publish while others can only submit articles for review.
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Web Based Content management system by Shakir Hussein
Posted on 03. Apr, 2007 by Dave.
A web based content management system (CMS) is used for web design so that the php, asp or jsp scripts call in the data from the mysql or sql database to create the content on a page. You would enter the content of a website in a database using a user friendly Admin Panel and this would update itself on the actual website. CMS is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet.
The need
Static websites are easy to design but hard to maintain. You have created a static website with desired content and you put in efforts to promote that site. As a result, the website grows organically over time, and while it is very useful, it is far from perfect. The search engines give more importance to the websites, which are updated regularly. To update the site content on regular basis, you would require the web professional company to give you continuous support. Now this dependency leads to either continuous expenses or poorly update site.
Thankfully, this dependency is what a content management system is specifically designed to solve. A web based content management system (CMS) helps you manage the content data on the website. The management includes creation, updating, distribution, publishing, and discovery of content. And it is not the only thing that the CMS can do for you. The CMS now helps to generate new pages, categorize the content, manage the layout and presentation of the site, manage users and permissions for the site, manage other dynamic modules on the site and many other things using a very user-friendly Admin Panel which requires minimal or no technical expertise.
Features and Benefits
There are a wide range of features and benefits that can be achieved by implementing a CMS, including: * Create and Manage New Pages * Manage site navigation and meta content * Assign users to manage the content in decentralized way. * Manage site layout and presentation by editing the HTML. * Manage other modules on the site. Like if you have forum installed on the site, you can manage the forum preferences, settings, categories, forums, users from the Admin panel * Better consistency * Increased security * Reduced duplication of information * Reduced site maintenance costs Out of all the features, content management remains the mainstay of the CMS sites.
Content management.
The CMS based sites have a front end which the site for public, a database which stores the vital data of your site and a Admin Panel to manage the site. Through the Admin Panel, you can create content pages like you are creating a document in MS Word. This is a completely non-technical interface to create new pages or update existing pages without any knowledge of HMTL, javascript or programming language. You can simply click create pages and a page opens which asks you to define the attributes of the page like Title of the page, Link Title for the frontend navigation menu and page content. The page content box uses a WYSIWYG editor which helps you to improve the presentation of the page like making any text bold, colored or creating hyperlinks. You can also upload images with your content. You can also define the meta tags for the page, publish and expiry date, author information etc to make the page more meaningful.
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