Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/303181152;128762502;s

At its heart, Wufoo is a form builder. If you need any type of form, you can build it super quickly by selecting and customizing the fields you need in Wufoo’s fantastically easy to use form builder. I can hardly imagine a more useful web app for web designers and developers.

But what is a form, at its essence? Just a means to collect data. The important part is what you do with that data. You can do all the obvious stuff. You can have entries emailed to you. You can build reports from the data. You can explore the data inside Wufoo, or use the API to access the data outside of Wufoo.

Those things are just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with data you collect with your Wufoo forms. There are built-in integrations! For example, say you have a form that includes an email address field, and you’d like to ship that email address over to MailChimp or Campaign Monitor into a particular mailing list. That’s just a few clicks away. Or say the form has some element of lead generation and you want to send the details to Salesforce. Or you want to tweet data from the form upon submission. Same deal, just a few clicks.

One of my favorites is that Wufoo works tremendously well with Zapier. That’s the whole point of Zapier, you can use it to connect services together! For example, the Ask a Question form over on the ShopTalk website not only emails Dave and I but adds the question to a Trello board for us to organize into shows. We could easily have it integrate into Evernote, dump into Google Sheets, or work with any of hundreds of other services. Wufoo is such a great source of data for integrations, it begs for playing with.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Integrate Your Wufoo Forms Everywhere is a post from CSS-Tricks

Original Source: https://line25.com/articles/20-great-examples-of-the-flat-trend-in-web-design

The flat trend in web design has recently gained a lot of popularity and we started noticing lots of website and interface designs springing up with this design style.

Flat design is a label the community has adopted for designs leaving behind drop shadows, subtle textures, and gradients in favor of solid colors, clean layouts and sharp typography, somewhat similar to the design of Windows 8 and the Metro UI.

This post showcases 20 great website designs that all exhibit popular traits of the flat trend in web design.

Want more? Check out these flat design freebies you can download!

Hell’o Baby

This is an interactive cross-platform baby album with additional services such as measurements, stickers, video stories, printed albums, postcards. They use a dynamic, flat design on their website, which we love!

It’s a Shape Christmas

Shape Christmas is an Interactive Advent Calendar themed raising money for charity. They use a dynamic flat style design for their website, with lots of subtle animations and transitions.

Buffalo

Buffalo is a small web design & development agency based in Brighton, UK. They use flat design elements on their website and a beautiful color palette.

Lorenzo Verzini

Lorenzo Verzini is an Italian designer & art director living in London, working in the field for more than 9 years and this is his portfolio website.

oak.is

This is a studio that helps to build creative products, investing in new ideas, and helping companies grow. They use a bold color palette, nice typography effects, and almost no images!

SpellTower

This is the presentation website of a game that lets you find as many words as you can in a jumble of letters. It uses flat design elements and beautiful transitions.

The Gently Mad Podcast

The Gently Mad is a podcast about life, business & entrepreneurship. This monochromatic blog has a simple, minimalist, flat layout.

Brewery

This website combines illustrations with the flat design trend. It is beautifully created and will surely inspire you.

Lunar

This is another flat presentation website, this time for a digital-minded studio focused on designing high-end experiences. What we liked about this is the combo between the flat style and the dynamic video background.

Helbak Ceramics

This is the combined brand site and web shop for the Danish ceramist Malene Helbak. Bold, flat colors blend beautifully with high-quality images in this website design.

450 GSM

This website helps you print online 450gsm business cards, flyers, leaflets, greeting cards, stickers, postcards, pull-up banners, and posters. It is a perfect example of how flat style can be used in web design.

Crafting Type

Crafting Type workshops teach font design beginners how to create their own original typefaces. This is their presentation website.

Friends of the Web

Friends of The Web designs and develops custom web and mobile applications with Ruby on Rails, React, Solidus, and Swift. They use a simple, clean, minimalist flat design for their website.

Dropbox Guide

This website helps you learn how to sync, share, and manage your files with Dropbox Business. It uses a simple but effective flat design with beautiful illustrations.

Lab21

This website has a simple, responsive design with lots of flat design elements added to it.

MetroTwit

This is a made-for-Windows software to access Twitter with simple Metro-style design and features. While the software itself is no longer available, the website can still be used as flat design inspiration.

Semplicelabs

This website design combines large typography with flat colors and flat design elements. Check it out!

Etch

This is the website of a small team of Designers and Developers who help startups build new products.

R+Co

R+Co is a collective of some of the most forward-thinking, rule-bending hairstylists in the business and this is their awesome website.

Quincy Réquin & Associates, lawyers

This is the presentation website of an independent lawyers office based in Lyon and Paris.

The post 20 Great Examples of the Flat Trend in Web Design appeared first on Line25.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Colorburned/~3/9Ye6cPeBBJs/

You may think of your website as something that’s a promotional tool and a representation of you or your business but might not have stopped to think about how it’s directly associated with customer service. Keep reading to learn about that important connection and why it matters when you’re building a well-designed website.

People Get Frustrated When They Can’t Find What They Need

Think back to the last time you were in a grocery store and had trouble finding a certain item you wanted to buy. That event caused you to waste time and may have even made you so fed up that you were close to deciding not to shop there again.

The same thing could happen if you build a website that’s poorly designed and badly organized. If people go to your website to fulfill a certain purpose and are not able to accomplish that task, they’re likely to leave quickly before ever giving your website a chance and may not return to it.

Word Spreads Quickly Online

People are usually quick to tell others about especially good or bad experiences they’ve had. For example, they might rave to friends about good movies, tasty restaurants, and skilled hairdressers. However, if they have experiences they’d rather forget, they’ll often warn others so they don’t make the same mistakes.

If your website has lots of errors or isn’t optimized for mobile devices, those are two things that could cause people to tell their friends it’s not worthwhile to spend any time at your website. If you upset the customers who do decide to visit your site, it’ll be a lot harder to get new traffic because a lot of potential visitors will have probably heard from others that their time is better spent elsewhere.

Bad Websites Make It Hard to Build Long-Term Relationships

If you’re lucky, you may be able to entice people to stay on your website long enough to do one thing, such as read a blog post, look at your online portfolio, or purchase something, despite having a poorly designed website. However, it’s too risky and foolish to assume those people will keep coming back even though your site isn’t serving them well.

However, once you depend on a professional website builder to craft a site that meets your ideas and is representative of your goals, it’ll be much easier to enjoy long-term relationships with site visitors. Before long, they might bookmark your page so they can come back to it quickly and may even sign up for your newsletter or another type of periodic correspondence.

When your website looks nice and is easy to navigate, people are much more likely to return to it because they actually enjoy spending time there. Another way you could make it easier to create long-term relationships with visitors is to ask for feedback and actually listen to it. That’ll make people feel they’re truly valued.

Hopefully, you now understand the strong links between a beautiful, highly functional website and favorable levels of customer satisfaction. Without your customers, it’d be hard to thrive, so make sure your website accounts for their needs.

The post 3 Reasons Why Customer Satisfaction and a Well Designed Website Are Related appeared first on Colorburned.

Original Source: https://webdesignledger.com/worst-websites-ever/

We may not judge a book by the cover, but we always judge a business by its website. This is the reality and we have to deal with it.

Back in time, in the early days of the Internet, creating a website was something that only IT guys were capable of making. With today’s advancement of technology and increasing interest for better and easier solutions when designing websites, almost anyone can design websites without much effort or any coding know-how.

However, this also brings some inconveniences since not everyone understands the concepts and principles of website-building. Therefore, sometimes the creativity goes too far away either due to lack of knowledge or experience or simply laziness.

In order to solve this problem, some companies have created website builder apps. Most of them have pretty nice templates, responsive designs, many options for customizing them, and can be used to create attractive websites with a few clicks of a button. But what most people tend to forget is that a website builder is merely a tool. If you don’t have the right vision and you don’t know the design principles, then you will most likely fail to make your site eye-catching, functional, and efficient.

Instead of having a website conveying the right message to your audience, you will get something that will either make people laugh or ask what was in the designer’s mind. Either way, your visitors will leave your web page without giving you any second chance.

Before listing the worst websites I have found on the Internet, let me be clear about some things:

– Firstly, I don’t mean to cause any trouble or pain to anyone, and I am certainly not making fun of web designers. Therefore, I beg the developers of the listed sites not to take offense at my remarks. I am quite sure some of these sites are designed by beginner designers. We all have to start somewhere. Besides, mistakes easily occur if you don’t have any experience.

– Secondly, I’m not talking about those websites that are just too old and haven’t been updated since their inception. Those sites may look unappealing to us now, but surely, they were created while considering the design principles of their time. But if it happens to display some old designs, it may also be because there is something in the design that’s plainly terrible and hideous.

I have listed these websites keeping in my mind several design principles:

Easy to understand navigation;
Proper use of color;
Right use of animation;
An easy-to-use layout;
An aesthetically-pleasing model;
Appropriate to the topic;
The design elements do not hinder content;
Great content that’s easy to find, navigate, consume, and share.

Simply put, the main idea is that I don’t want to shame anyone. Taking into consideration that we are all used to finding and appreciating the best website designs, I think we should also analyze awful designs and learn from such painstaking mistakes.

With that being said, let’s take a look at some websites that are hilariously terrible:

1. Penny Juice (link to www.pennyjuice.com/htmlversion/whoispj.htm)

Penny Juice is a fruit juice concentrate that’s made specifically for childcare centers, preschools, etc. When you get to the website, the first thing you need to do is to choose which version you want to use: either HTML or Flash. Choose wisely!

Once you have chosen the version you want to use, you get to the next page with a simple menu structure and flashy colors that irreversibly hurt your retina. You will also find a copyright notice since 2001-2002. That should explain the horror, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

All of this looks pretty innocent until you click to visit a particular page on the site. That’s when your monitor bursts out. The color scheme is completely overwhelming and drowns the little information left about the product. It is also extremely challenging to navigate through this website, with small links hidden at the bottom of the page.

2. Yale University School Of Art (link to http://art.yale.edu/)

You would expect a college art school to have a lovely website that reflected the kind of education you could get from there. Therefore, you would assume Yale’s site was more appealing to your visual senses. Instead of this, the website leaves you wondering if you are really in the right place.

It uses Ruby on Rails, and it is updated by the faculty and students quite often. But the tiled images in the background and the horrible font choices are just inexcusable. The navigation is pretty user-friendly, but the ghastly use of animated backgrounds is enough to put you off.

3. Patimex (link to http://www.patimex.com/)

This website looks and sounds bad from the very beginning – starting with allowing running Adobe Flash player if you want to enter. OK, maybe if you take each element separately, that wouldn’t be too terrible. But if you put them all together and add the music, then YES – it’s THAT bad. If you go to their actual site (www.wegieldrzewny.pl), it looks quite normal. But this only makes you wonder: “Why is the devil grilling himself in a floating BBQ? What’s with that music? Why? Seriously… Why?”

4. Ling’s Cars (link to www.lingscars.com)

Ling Valentine, the owner of Ling’s Cars, first appeared on the BBC program Dragon’s Den in 2006. The Metro named Lingscars.com as “the worst and weirdest website on the internet” and taking a look at it, I can understand why. It’s filled with flashing graphics, gaudy patterns, and bubble writing.

5. ARNGREN (link to www.arngren.net)

OK, this is probably the ugliest and most confusing website I have ever seen. The enormous quantity of tiny pictures and links does not help us understand the purpose of this web page. When designing your site, remember that less is more. And this is the best example.

6. Uglytub (link to http://uglytub.com)

Are you thinking of replacing your old bath tub? Then you should do it because this website doesn’t really convince you to do otherwise. A combination of flashing poor quality imagery, tiny fonts, and garish colors in conjunction with the limiting frames minimizing the site to a small window in the center of the screen sure makes this the worst offenders on the web.

7. Jamilin (link to www.jamilin.com)

Jami Lin “Love Love, LOVES helping you to evolve” but maybe she could use a little of her own advice to revamp her website. Collages of images, videos, links, adverts, and copy are all crammed into the center of the site. This surplus of images and text is a little overwhelming and blocks the clear navigation

8. Gatesnfences (link to www.gatesnfences.com)

At first glance, this Florida-based company has a website that’s stuck in the past. And taking into consideration that you will find a copyright notice of 2004-2008, I think I’m right. At the same time, they’ve decided that the best way to increase the user engagement is to bombard them with A LOT (and I mean A LOT) of information straight on the homepage. Some small, low-quality images are scattered throughout the page, but nothing to break up the huge amount of text. It hurts. Badly. Maybe they should learn that sometimes less is more.

9. James Bond Museum (link to www.007museum.com)

For decades, James Bond has been gracing the silver screen as a charismatic, charming and ultra-slick secret agent. Yet, the website for the James Bond museum is SOOO FAR AWAY from the classy image of the secret agent that it’s offensive. Its stark background and Times New Roman typeface make it obnoxious. Barely expressing the character of Bond himself, the homepage is an overwhelming, sour and incomprehensible mix of menus, hyperlinks, and random imagery.

10. Rudgwick Steam & Country Show (link to www.rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk)

Although this may not be the worst website, it’s still terrible. I think the developers tried to have a responsive design, but they failed miserably. If you visit the website using a phone, it doesn’t look that bad, but if you use a laptop or a desktop, the website looks like an image placed in the center of the screen. What’s more, they’ve chosen a design packed with primary colors and a collage of random images. The relevant information is there, but it is confusing due to the busy layout.

11. Irishwrecksonline.net (link to www.rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk)

In contrast to many websites listed here, this one lacks not just a catchy title, but also text. Larger pictures, a new layout, and functional links would help make this website more inviting and visually-appealing.

12. Constellation 7 (link to www.constellation7.org/Constellation-Seven/Josiah/Index.htm)

OK, I think this is one of the ugliest websites I have ever seen. I’m not kidding. They use a blend of conspicuously bright colors throughout the entire site, bold and colorful typography, and some animations that are making you run as far as you can. Fortunately, they don’t have any music.

13. Mojo Yogurt (link to http://mojoyogurt.com/#/home)

Again, this is a website built using Flash. The whole design wouldn’t be that terrible, had it not been for that horrible, annoying background music, and sound effect that you can’t pause. Just to let you know, dearest Mojo Yogurt, people who visit your website are trying to look for your product, not listen to that awful music.

14. Industrial Painter (link to http://industrialpainter.com)

This company has chosen to have irritating music in the background with no option for you to turn it off. Along with Flash-based, horrible design and low-quality images you get the idea of a terrible-terrible site. I really don’t know how they plan on attracting customers with such a website.1

15. Superior Web Solutions (link to http://industrialpainter.com)

This is the company’s website that built Industrial painter. Taking into consideration that it’s a web design company, I can say it’s even worse than Industrial Painter. That’s mainly because you expect a web design company to know about the latest trends and design. Instead, we find annoying music, along with a non-responsive, flash based, and horrible homepage design. I cannot overstate how horrific this website looks.

Read More at The Worst Websites On The Internet. Ever.

Original Source: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/learn-kotlin-java

With Android officially adopting Kotlin as a supported language, there’s one question that every new Android developer should be asking themselves: should I learn Kotlin or Java?

Rather than burying the answer all the way at the bottom… in my mind, it’s definitely Kotlin.

Kotlin was introduced in 2011 by JetBrains (maker of IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and many other top IDEs) who at the time were using almost entirely Java. They created Kotlin because, “First and foremost, it’s about our own productivity”.

*Kotlin is named after Kotlin Island in St. Petersburg, Russia

So Kotlin was created explicitly to be better than Java, but JetBrains wasn’t about to rewrite their IDEs from scratch in a new language. Which is why they made Kotlin 100% interoperable with Java. Kotlin runs on the JVM and compiles down to Java bytecode; you can start tinkering with Kotlin in an existing Java or Android project and everything will work just fine.

That said, there aren’t yet many Android tutorials using Kotlin; most beginner stuff is in Java along with the Android docs (though we’re working on our first beginner-focused Kotlin for Android course, and it should be out before too long). So to figure out how the Android system works and what it looks like behind the scenes, you’ll have to spend some time with Java.

Now let’s get back to that productivity part. There are plenty of articles out there showcasing what Kotlin can do, and there’s even a really good Java/Kotlin comparison on the Kotlin website (which has excellent documentation). So rather than creating an exhaustive list of what makes Kotlin so awesome, I’m going to show you my favorite example of Kotlin superiority which I borrow from our Kotlin for Java Developers course.

Creating a Card Class

Let’s say we need a class to represent the state of a playing card. It would need 3 properties: the value of the card, the suit of the card, and whether or not the card is face up. Also, since we usually deal cards face down the ‘faceUp’ property will typically be false, so we shouldn’t need to specify it every time.

Here’s what that looks like in Java. We need three fields as well as associated getters/setters, along with two constructors.

Here’s what it looks like in Kotlin:

class Card(val value: Int, val suit: String, var faceUp: Boolean = false)

33 lines down to 1! Not bad, right? But it gets better. In Java (and Kotlin), if you try to print out an object, instead of seeing the properties of the object you see the object reference:

And if you try to compare these two cards, you’ll end up comparing object references, and it’ll be false:

println(card1 == card2); // false
println(card1.equals(card2)); // false

In Java, if you want to test for equality between objects you need to override the ‘equals’ method:

And if you want to see something useful when you print the object, you need to override the ‘toString’ method:

But in Kotlin, all you have to do is add the word ‘data’ in front of your class:

data class Card(val value: Int, val suit: String, var faceUp: Boolean = false)

Here it is in action:

We’ve now got 51 lines of Java, and still just 1 line of Kotlin!

In summary, learn Kotlin. But if you’re completely new to programming, start with Java first. Most Android code is still written in Java, and at the least, understanding Java will be a boon for understanding the docs. Once you’ve got the basics of Java, you’ll be able to pick up Kotlin that much faster and will have a greater appreciation for the benefits that Kotlin brings. On the other hand, if you’re an experienced developer check out our Kotlin for Java Developers course. It teaches you everything you need to know about Kotlin by building a headless solitaire app!

Ps. If you’re looking for a list of reasons Kotlin is better than Java, Magnus Vinther does a great job of breaking it down in this medium post. 

The post Should I Learn Kotlin or Java? appeared first on Treehouse Blog.