Archive for year: 2018

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/T4g-mL7POWk/

Web design agencies are tasked with the tough assignment of producing a site design that communicates their skill levels through various visuals and elements. They are often judged as much on their website design as they are on their portfolio of work. It’s a critical aspect of generating work and conveying a high level of design skill.

As such, agency sites are often meticulously designed with even the very smallest of details being paid considerable attention to. This, in turn, means that the sites present some of the most forward-thinking and exciting designs in the web design industry.

In this article, we are going to round up ten of the most beautifully designed and polished web design agency sites around today.

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R&D

R&D’s agency website combines a spacious layout with a unique and vibrant green background. This contributes to the visual impact and makes for a memorable website design.

Mast

Mast’s website is very minimal but uses beautifully composed imagery and overlapping navigation elements.

A Day Out

This agency website by A Day Out is incredibly unique and impactful. It uses large cutouts with plenty of imagery and large capitalized typographic elements.

Lg2

Lg2’s website implements an unusual navigation layout which spans the border of the central content area. The animated visuals within the ‘2’ are an eye-catching addition.

Mathematic

Mathematic’s website is highly-focused on visuals. The slider spans the entirety of the hero section, creating an immersive experience perfect for showcasing their work.

Phoenix

This website from Phoenix offers one of the most unique layout directions of all. The typography is seemingly sporadic but provides great effect as it overlaps the rotating imagery.

2LG

2LG’s agency website uses an immersive loading graphic which consists of their logo overlaying a colorful image. The site then transitions seamlessly into a refined homepage with minimal graphics and typography.

Designgoat

This agency site design from Designgoat is similarly sporadic in the way it has approached its laying out of imagery. The result has a brutalist-style feel to it and offers a beautifully unique look when combined with the red highlights and text.

Gin Lane

Gin Lane’s simple website uses beautiful serif type against a muted gradient background. The hero leads perfectly into the rest of the homepage design.

P22

P22 has approached its agency web design with a combination of minimalism and brutalism. The bordered logo text is attractive and counters the filled typography used in the remainder of the monochrome design.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/fCGdl7qRszc/complete-facebook-ads-course

It seems like a new social media platform is being launched every year. Despite the competition, Facebook remains to be the world’s largest social media platform, with over 2 billion daily active users. Your customers, clients, and target audience are likely among them. If you are running a small business, you may not be able […]

The post 92% Off: Get the Complete Facebook Ads Course for Only $15 appeared first on designrfix.com.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/five-techniques-lazy-load-images-website-performance/

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

With images making up a whopping 65% of all web content, page load time on websites can easily become an issue.

Even when properly optimized, images can weigh quite a bit. This can have a negative impact on the time visitors have to wait before they can access content on your website. Chances are, they get impatient and navigate somewhere else, unless you come up with a solution to image loading that doesn’t interfere with the perception of speed.

In this article, you will learn about five approaches to lazy loading images that you can add to your web optimization toolkit to improve user experience on your website.

What Is Lazy Loading?

Lazy loading images consists in loading images on websites asynchronously, that is, after the above-the-fold content is fully loaded, or even conditionally, only when they appear in the browser’s viewport. This means that, if users don’t scroll all the way down, images placed at the bottom of the page won’t even be loaded.

A number of websites use this approach, but it’s especially noticeable on image-heavy sites. Try browsing your favorite online hunting ground for high-res photos, and you’ll soon realize how the website loads just a limited number of images. As you scroll down the page, you’ll see placeholder images quickly filling up with real images for preview. For instance, notice the loader on Unsplash.com: scrolling that portion of the page into view triggers the replacement of a placeholder with a full-res photo:

Why Should You Care About Lazy Loading Images?

There are at least a couple of excellent reasons why you should consider lazy loading images for your website:

If your website uses JavaScript to display content or provide some kind of functionality to users, loading the DOM quickly becomes critical. It’s in fact common for scripts to wait until the DOM has completely loaded before they start running. On a site with a significant number of images lazy loading, or loading images asynchronously, could make the difference between users staying or leaving your website

Since most lazy loading solutions consist in loading images only if the user has scrolled to the location where images would be visible inside the viewport, if users never get to that point, those images will never be loaded. This means considerable savings in bandwidth, for which most users, especially those accessing the web on mobile devices and slow-connections, will be thanking you.

Well, lazy loading images helps with website performance, but what’s the best way to go about it?

There is no perfect way.

If you live and breath JavaScript, implementing your own lazy loading solution shouldn’t be an issue. Nothing gives you more control than coding something yourself.

Alternatively, you can browse the web for viable approaches and start experimenting with them. I did just that and came across these five interesting techniques.

#1 David Walsh’s Simple Image Lazy Load and Fade

David Walsh has proposed his own custom script for lazy loading images. Here’s a simplified version:

The src attribute of the img tag is replaced with a data-src attribute in the markup:

[code language=”html”]
<img data-src=”image.jpg” alt=”test image”>
[/code]

In the CSS, img elements with a data-src attribute are hidden. Once loaded, images will appear with a nice fade-in effect using CSS transitions:

[code language=”css”]
img {
opacity: 1;
transition: opacity 0.3s;
}

img[data-src] {
opacity: 0;
}
[/code]

JavaScript then adds the src attribute to each img element and gives it the value of their respective data-src attributes. Once images have finished loading, the script removes the data-src attribute from img elements altogether:

[code language=”js”]
[].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll(‘img[data-src]’), function(img) {
img.setAttribute(‘src’, img.getAttribute(‘data-src’));
img.onload = function() {
img.removeAttribute(‘data-src’);
};
});
[/code]

David Walsh also offers a fallback solution to cover cases where JavaScript fails, which you can find out more about on his blog.

The merit of this solution: it’s a breeze to implement and it’s effective.

On the flip side, this method doesn’t include loading on scroll functionality. In other words, all images are loaded by the browser, whether users have scrolled them into view or not. Therefore, you get the advantage of a fast loading page because images are loaded after the HTML content. However, you don’t get the saving on bandwidth that comes with preventing unnecessary image data from being loaded when visitors don’t view the entire page content.

#2 Robin Osborne’s Progressively Enhanced Lazy Loading

The post Five Techniques to Lazy Load Images for Website Performance appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-deploy-and-host-a-joomla-website-on-alibaba-cloud-ecs/

This article was originally published on Alibaba Cloud. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Joomla! is a free and open source content management system (CMS), and is one of the most popular among them. According to the official website, Joomla! is built on a model-view-controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS, allowing you to build powerful online applications.

One of my personal favorite features of Joomla! is the multi-language support with its large library of language packs. You can also translate the website admin backend with language extensions, helping you to easily localize your website.

This step-by-step guide will walk you through setting up and deploying a Joomla! website on an Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance with Ubuntu 16.04.

Requirements and Prerequisites

Before we deploy our Joomla! instance, we need to fulfill the following requirements. We need to set up an Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) Linux server (Ubuntu 16.04) with basic configurations. You should also allocate administrator (sudo) privileges to a non-root user.

You can refer to this guide for setting up your Alibaba Cloud ECS instance. If you don't have an Alibaba Cloud account, you can sign up for free and enjoy $300 of Free Trial credit.

Installing Joomla on an Ubuntu 16.04 ECS Instance

To install Joomla on our server, we need to first install a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.

Step 1: Connect to Your Server

There are many ways to connect to your server, but I will be using the Alibaba Cloud console for simplicity. To do this, go to your instance section and click connect from your created instance. You will be redirected to the Terminal.

Enter username as Root and the password you created. If you didn't create a password, just continue by hitting enter. You are logged in to your server as system administrator.

All the commands in the following sections should be typed in this terminal.

Step 2: Install Apache

To install Apache, update your server repository list by typing command below.

sudo apt-get update

Then install the Apache web server.

sudo apt-get install apache2

Step 3: Install MySQL

Joomla, like most other content management systems, requires MySQL for its backend. So we need to install MySQL and link it to PHP.

To do this, add the following command.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server php7.0-mysql

You'll be asked to enter a MySQL password. Keep the password secure because you will need it later.

Complete the installation process of MySQL with the command below.

/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

You'll be asked to enter the MySQL password you just created. Continue with the installation process by making the following selections.

Would you like to setup VALIDATE password plugin ? [Y/N] N
Change the root password ? [ Y/N ] N
Remove anonymous users ? [Y/N] Y
Disallow root login remotely ? [Y/N] Y
Remove test database and access to it ? [Y/N] Y
Reload privilege tables now ? [Y/N] Y

Step 4: Install PHP

Joomla! requires PHP to be installed. Execute the following command to install PHP 7.0 and other required PHP modules.

sudo apt-get install php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-xml php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi

Step 5: Confirm LAMP Installation

To confirm LAMP stack has been installed on your Ubuntu 16.04 server, follow the procedures below.

Open the web browser and navigate to your server's IP address. You'll see the Apache2 Ubuntu Default page.

Note: To check your server’s public IP address, check your ECS Instance dashboard. You'll see both private and public IP addresses. Use the public IP address to access your website. If you don't see the public IP address consider setting up an Elastic IP address.

In order to confirm the PHP installation on your server, remove the default page and replace it with the PHP code below. To do this use the commands below.

rm /var/www/html/index.html

Replace with a new file:

touch /var/www/html/index.php
nano /var/www/html/index.php

Enter a sample PHP code below:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

To check your page, navigate to your web browser and enter the public IP address. You should see information about PHP installation if the LAMP stack is correctly installed on your server.

The post How to Deploy and Host a Joomla Website on Alibaba Cloud ECS appeared first on SitePoint.