Open source tips. CRM, ERP, CMS and open source tutorials.

These are my useful and rather important tips for designing a professional and high quality web site:

1. Neat and Easy Navigation: Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your site (how long your visitor stays and explores your site). Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them.
A clean layout and neat navigation and using a lot of white space for your site enhances its looks. Try to keep the focus on your content. That is why we recommend using dream weaver templates for your site - all pages or a group of pages have one basic design and only the content varies - this way even if your site is a little distracting due to necessary effects, your design is noted once and then the visitor focused on the content automatically.

2. Clean Layout Design: A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site’s looks. Try to keep the focus on your content, use a template for this. Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.

3. Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low. For this you must:
Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size.
Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.

4. Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For site with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your site doesn’t look good for a particular resolution it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site.

5. Ensure Web site scalability: Make sure your code and design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.

6. Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers.

Tags: tips, web design, useful tips, web design tips

WordPress is a publishing platform with web standards, focus on aesthetics and usability. WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software.
These screenshots are just to give you an idea of how things look.

WordPress screenshots

WordPress Features:

- Full standards compliance ~ WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation.
- No rebuilding ~ Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
- WordPress Pages ~ Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress.
- WordPress Links ~ Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
- WordPress Themes ~ WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click.
- Cross-blog communication tools ~ WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards.
- Comments ~ Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
- Spam protection ~ Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
- Full user registration ~ WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
- Password Protected Posts ~ You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.

WordPress screenshots

- Easy installation and upgrades ~ Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and other software is very easy.
- Easy Importing ~ WordPress have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
- XML-RPC interface ~ WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
- Workflow ~ You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.
- Typographical niceties ~ WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands.
- Intelligent text formatting ~ If you’ve dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. WordPress function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
- Multiple authors ~ WordPress’ highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
- Bookmarklets ~ Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
- Ping away ~ WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

WordPress System Requirements:

* PHP version 4.1 or greater
* MySQL version 3.23.23 or greater

WordPress screenshot
Download

Tags: WordPress, review, web tips, software, free download, plugins, searc engines, screenshots

This applies to Kentico CMS 2.2 and the medium trust is not fully supported in pre- 2.2 versions. This is used, usually, for many shared hosting plans.
Medium trust level is used on shared servers by the providers to disallow the applications to access certain resources that may be bad to other web sites running on the server. To run the system with medium trust you need to follow certain rules and consider them with this trust level:
1. VirtualPathProvider, which provides the virtual objects (layouts, transformations) from the database. You can save all the virtual objects to the file system in CMS Site Manager -> Administration -> System -> Deployment interface by clicking the button “Save all virtual objects to disk”.
2. Content Staging, which ensures the synchronization of content between production and live site servers. Library Microsoft.Web.Services3.dll from the Web Services Extensions 3 (WSE) package, which is used by the Content staging module, requires Full trust permissions because of the low level operations related to the communication protocols.

If you manage the server, please follow these steps:
- Go to Control panel -> Administrative tools -> Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration
- Select the Assembly cache, click on Add an Assembly to the Assembly Cache and select the library file bin\Microsoft.Web.Services3.dll from your web project.
- Delete the file bin\Microsoft.Web.Services3.dll from your web project if it’s present.
- Make sure that your project web.config file contains the following item:

Now the system should work under medium trust level properly. Restart your IIS for configuration changes to take effect and run the web site.

Download

Tags: open source, CMS, Kentico CMS, Medium Trust Environment, hosting, open source CMS