Info-marketing, or information marketing, is just that. It is “selling information.” It might be a basic explanation to you, but there it is. Have you ever asked how selling information fits into the scheme of the internet marketing world?

To begin our discussion, let’s look a little more closely at what exactly constitutes information when it comes to information marketing. It is information that will educate, even going so far as to making a person’s life better by getting rid of a pressing problem in their life.

Some examples of what we are talking about here:

• Design an app that simplifies the tasks of a web designer
• Showing a person with a busy lifestyle how they can lose unwanted weight
• Informing single moms how they can earn money from the internet
• Teaching a married couple how to stay married rather than to seek divorce

This kind of information is sent as a digital product through eBooks, or other means like apps, video and audio downloads, or membership sites. Believe it or not, information marketing brings in several billion dollars per year, again and again, creating millionaires out of the likes of Frank Kern, Yanik Silver and Dan Kennedy, just to name drop on a small handful of information marketing successes.

What makes the marketing of information so…sexy?

It’s appeal has been attributed to several things, namely the low cost to get started, the low overhead and therefore nearly pure profit model, managing from a distance, and short idea to product launch timeframe. It is not unheard of for an internet entrepreneur to think of an idea one day, create it and launch it the next, and begin receiving cash for that idea almost from minute one.

This makes becoming a peddler of information online a simple and easy thing to do, but don’t be misled. As with any legitimate business venture, information marketing can be done right, and it can also be done wrong. Many people, armed with high hopes and a desire for fame and fortune, jump in without doing any planning or preparation, and find that the riches they seek allude them at every turn.

What we will be discussing here is several of the reasons why riches allude capture by eager entrepreneurs, and what can be done to sidestep those bad habits to be listed among the success stories. The list of successes is a short one, because to truly become successful, a great deal of hard work will need to be undertaken.

The First Mistake: Being A Perfectionist

Let’s look a little more closely at a couple of highly successful entrepreneurs back in their day. To do that, we must travel back to 1903, December 17 to be exact, to when and where Wilbur and Orville Wright were not thinking of doing things to perfection, such as fantastic inflight service and movies, and complimentary peanuts and a beverage. Instead, they were just hoping that their dream would remain airborne for just a couple of moments.

Those moments, twelve of them, is as far as they got that day. But it was enough to land the two brothers from Ohio in the history books forever.

Take another look at that day. What if the Wright brothers had bothered to tinker with their idea more thoroughly, until they had thought of the perfect scenario for their flying machine? Imagine if they had concerned themselves with a perfect landing, or a longer flight, or a better looking flying machine. The event at Kitty Hawk might never have happened if they were worried about such details. They never would have left their bicycle shop, choosing to spend all of their time getting just the right wings or landing gear.

What these two inventors realized early on, something that anyone getting into the information marketing business should also realize, is that perfectionism is not what it is cracked up to be. To be realistic, there is no such thing as perfection. Therefore, if you are waiting to get your product to market only after it is perfect, what you are really saying is that your product will never make it to market, or you will sit on the idea so long that someone who doesn’t believe in being perfect will beat you to the bank.

If you are still feeling your skin crawl at the thought of launching a product that is not at 100%, then look at Microsoft, and any other software developer. Do they not release their product before it is perfect? Of course they do. They release it, then set about making it better. If Microsoft isn’t worried, why should you be?

Keep in mind, however, that we are not talking about letting junk loose on the marketplace. There is a huge difference between worthless drivel and something that is pretty good but needing a few tweaks to improve it. To work through this early rough draft of your idea, you’ll want a few people to take your product for a “test drive”. Let them try it out, and offer you feedback in return. You want to question them about their experience with your product. Some questions for them might be:

• What isn’t in the product that should be?
• Will this product increase your business or your life immediately upon using it?
• Rating it from one to ten, where would you place this product?
• What single feature of this product would you tweak if you were able to?

If the answers to your questions produce a great deal of good things and the rating question is at six or above, you are on the right track. If you get feedback to the tune of “I don’t get it,” and “How is this important to me?” and “your acne scars chapter needs a complete rewrite,” then you need to work on a few more details before opening day. Look again at your work, take all of the feedback into consideration and get it out there one more time.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to make it a trip around the world, you merely need to make the trip across the street.

The Second Mistake: Being A Copy Cat

You might notice information marketers raking in the dough selling a special report or eBook on the latest trend, like Facebook or Twitter marketing tactics. This might give you the bright idea to copy them and get an eBook on Facebook or Twitter marketing tactics out for sale right alongside them, hoping to copy their success also. It is the stuff that dreams are made of, but it isn’t a sure thing, or everyone would be doing it. It just won’t happen, that you will simply copy the blueprint of a successful product, sounding like the winning gig but not quite, and roll in the dough right alongside the original product. You won’t find anyone waiting in line with their credit cards stretched out toward you. All you might succeed in doing is angering the product creator.

You might be taking on the argument that brick and mortar businesses do it all the time: all the jewelry stores and bookstores in the mall that do essentially the same thing but are all successful.

This might be true, but not because they are copying a successful business model. They each have a unique take on that business model. One jewelry store might specialize in watches, while another one deals well in diamonds, and a third has taken on engagement rings successfully. Each deals with a particular problem in the marketplace that they solve rather well.

So, in using the jewelry store idea in an online marketplace, it isn’t wrong to create a product that is close to what the competition is putting out, just as long as you focus on a different set of problems within the same market, and add value to that niche above what everyone else is offering.

How can you do this? Try some of these concepts on for size:

* Solve A Problem Sooner. If your competitor claims results in a month, promise your results in two weeks. Just be sure you can deliver on that promise.

* Make The Problem Easier to Solve. If the first product can develop a skill in a dozen moves, then try to condense yours by a third or more.

* Make A Larger Version. If the competition jam packs a thousand software products in a bundled pack, then you go for five thousand. Or least two thousand. You get the idea.

* Make A Different Version. Your competitor might have an eBook on the market, so you can tackle the audiobok or the videos that will take it to the next level. Maybe the videos are already out there. So you go out with the eBook version. Having just a single platform will be leaving customers without their own preference. Cover what the competitors don’t.

* Make A Less Costly Version. If a successful marketer launches an expensive coaching and webinar series, enter the marketplace with a less expensive coaching service, perhaps with a series of videos or audio files as opposed to the webinar idea. And don’t charge nearly as much.

* Make A More Costly Version. That’s right, take the concept above and flip it around in the opposite direction. You might be surprised at the results. There are some customers in the world who live by the axiom that you get what you pay for, therefore they only seek out the greatest products in their market, and will only consider the high end items for sale. Just be sure that the value packed into your product matches or preferably exceeds the cost.

So, don’t just jump into copy cat mode. Create something uniquely yours, and clean up on the areas of the marketplace that the competition isn’t even thinking of pursuing.

The Third Mistake: Overselling

Recently, my young son talked me into getting this design art paint set that, according to the design on the box, promised this youngster to become the next Pixar artist able to produce stunning animation and artwork that would have the legendary animation studio pounding down our door to hire him on the spot.

I caved, paying over $15 for the paint set, and brought the product home from the store.

I am sure you can guess the conclusion to this story. The paint set did not instantly make a Pixar perfect artist out of my son. It took just ten minutes to have a highly disappointed child, on the verge of tears, and a paint set occupying the trash can outside in the driveway.

The moral of this story is that the paint set company fell into the trap of overselling their creation. Their promises couldn’t be met. This is an important point that every information marketer needs to learn.

Sure, it is doubtful that your customers will turn into teary-eyed children, but there are some lessons here that you as a marketer need to take home with you:

* Your sales information is read by real people, and more important, they believe what they are reading. You might be under the impression that people don’t read such things anymore, but guess again. More than that, they will take your message to heart and expect that what you are claiming will be met in reality, if not exceeded. If your promise is that they will lose twenty pounds in three days, then in that amount of time rest assured they are going to step up on the scale to look. Never offer things that you can’t fulfill.

* They will not be the least bit happy if you don’t follow through as expected with your promises. It won’t be all the junk food and sugar-filled desserts that they consumed every night at midnight that they feel will be the cause of your product failure. It will be you and your creation that will be at fault. Any shortcomings to your product, you’d do well to mention within the copy of your sales material.

* The worst that can happen — and it will happen — is that if your product doesn’t come through for them, your customer will broadcast it’s letdown to all of their social network. My son the consumer advocate didn’t hesitate for a moment in broadcasting his distaste to the kids at his elementary school. If he sees anyone going for the paint set at Walmart, you can be certain that he will speak out. It is a fact, as sure as the sun rises and sets everyday, that angry customers will not keep their mouths closed. They will go to the ends of the earth to speak out against bad products.

Even though you want to tell the world that your product is the top in the world, and want to have it viewed in the best possible way, there are limitations. One, you make sure that whatever you say your product can accomplish, it can. Two, if you overhype your product with unusual results, then you need to address the uniqueness of these results and not convey them as the norm. Anything less than this and you will have a riot of enraged customers to deal with.

The Fourth Mistake: Pricing Your Product Way Too Low

It is a common assumption that pricing your product on the low end will produce a higher volume of sales. Economics will tell you that low price equals greater demand.

This might seem to be a true axiom, and in some cases it is. But it doesn’t work that way everytime.

Usually, bringing your price way down will have the opposite effect that you intended. The reason for this is related to the perception that lower pricing means lower quality. You get what you pay for, in other words.

If you are shopping for the perfect gift for your spouse for your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, you won’t go for the cheap costume stuff, would you? Not if you want a joyful event. If you are presented with similar pieces of jewelry, but one costs twenty times as much as the other one, would you buy low?

Looking at an everyday object, like glassware, you might be tempted to buy low also. This would be reasonable and something you’d expect. Jewelry, or any other high ticket item, is something that you’d expect to shell out a few more dollars to buy. If they price started to be lowered, you as a consumer would begin to question the quality and craftmanship of the product the lower the price goes.

The stress involved just isn’t worth going low, so you suck it up and pay for the higher priced item, knowing that your spouse will not have a problem falling in love with you all over again.

Price, when you think about it, is a meter that tells us as consumers how good the quality or workmanship is on a product. A woman’s coat costing a grand will be perceived as being of better quality than the coat going for a hundred bucks. This may not be the case, but consumers will believe it to be true.

Information products are no different than jewelry and jackets. An eBook for cooking for diabetics running at two dollars will not be received as favorably as the same book selling for twenty or even one hundred dollars. To be sure, not everyone will be able to buy an internet marketing course costing two hundred dollars, but it would be perceived to have more value than the one selling for twenty.

Keep this in mind as you decide on how much to charge for your information creation. Don’t think that the lower the price the more people will come to buy it. Try raising your price. You will no doubt notice more interested buyers. These means more money without working harder for it. What have you got to risk in doing so?

Not certain yet what to charge for your information product?

Research should help you, by looking into what your competitors are selling their products for, so that you can come within a similar price range. If yours has the greater perceived value to theirs, then you might be justified in going higher in your pricing.

If your information product isn’t as full of content, or isn’t as valuable as the competition, then by all means, lower your price.

Experiment with a few price points and determine from this what price sells best. Keep in mind that a two hundred dollar single sale is the same as selling a hundred items for two bucks each. If the value is there, then the higher priced item might be easier to sell.

The Fifth Mistake: Treating Customers As If They Are A Dime A Dozen

An attractive draw to the internet for businesses is that they have more than one billion people potentially at their fingertips. You heard right: one billion, with a “b.” And in order for you to make any kind of decent living working through an online business, then you will realize that it doesn’t take a lot of people needed to convert to your advertising message.

This issue that arises when such great numbers of people are considered, you begin to lose sight of the fact that one person is just as important as a billion people. You start to imagine that it is okay if you lose one customer to bad service or similar negative event, because you have so many more people to take their place. Sure you have a sea of customers out there, but the loss of that one customer is just as important to your business.

As an informarketer, treating customers as if they were a dime a dozen takes something from you, and that is the trust you have gained along the way.

Regardless of how many people are online, when you narrow your field down to a particular niche or subniche, then it becomes a tiny place indeed. Unlike the good old days, when you lose the trust of your customers, they will tell countless people via social media like Facebook or Twitter, and all across the blogosphere, as well as in forums, all in a matter of moments, rather than the long, dragged out time it took in times past. In the blink of an eye you are done.

Would you rather tell the Twitterverse about everyday routines that you go through, such as ordering food at your favorite fast food joint, or would you be more apt to tell everyone following you about the wickedly nasty customer service agent who took you through your paces? Do you think dull and boring circumstances get the retweet action heard around the globe, or the customer service agent from hell?

This can easily happen in cyberspace with your information sales business. Treat people like expendable units and you could be expendable yourself. Give them the care that they need and deserve. Communicate with them. Answer whatever questions they throw at you, regardless of how redundant they are to you. Sure they can find the answers on your website, but don’t tell them that. They are the lifeblood of your business, act as if they are.

The Sixth Mistake: Technical Headaches

Horror stories abound about web sites going down, merchant processing going haywire, affiliate programs running amuck, and on and on. Most internet marketers are feeling that these things would only happen to other internet marketers.

Sure they could. And just as worse, they can happen to you, and most likely sooner than later.

In fact, technical problems more likely account for more lost money for online businesses than any other reason that can be named. When you include all of the time and stress involved in fixes these technical issues, then the real cost is unfathomable.

Let’s look at some of the technical issues that can arise, and how you can fix them with the least amount of problems:

* Websites going down. This happens when there are a lot of people going to a webpage all at the same time. This ideally is what every marketer dreams of, at least having a lot of customers arriving at your cyber door. What they don’t want, however, is what will happen when the rush to the cyber door happens — the website goes down. Not a good situation to be in. Nothing will bring the visitor back who tried to get on at the time your site was down.

How to solve this: Don’t get started on any campaign or product launch until you have thoroughly checked out what your servers can do. Talk to your webhost and share with them your intentions and the traffic you hope to obtain. Ask them if they can handle it at your current account type, or would you need to get a better package. Do whatever you have to in order to keep that flow of traffic coming through.

* Merchant account problems. Nothing is worse than waiting in a long line to purchase something. Just as bad is buying something on a website and having the shopping cart crap out on you. The time when a customer has arrived at a buying decision is a precious moment not to be trifled with. What usually happens here is that the merchant account tied to the website just isn’t ready for a load of customers and therefore a line in cyberspace starts up.

How to solve this: Similar to the solution with the server troubles above, it is important to communicate your intentions with your site ahead of time so that they can be ready for the onslaught of orders. They can then make themselves ready for your business increase. You can also run tests on your site. Don’t just test one processor, like Paypal, but go through any and all payment means that you intend to include on your site. Hunt down and disable any technical issues you come across, and do all of this before opening day.

* Email trouble. How many times have you gotten a marketer’s email, a follow up to the previous email just sent, where that marketer apologizes for sending an incorrect or nonworing url. While some feel it might be a marketing strategy, and it very well could be, things like this do happen from time to time. You can easily add an incorrect url into the body of your email marketing message. You could also suffer through an email that doesn’t get delivered at the right time. Or you could realize too late that you have spelling errors throughout your email message.

How to solve this: Testing, of course. Test everything, from your autoresponder to how well you spell words. After you are done, do it all over again. Don’t stop there. Test again. And when all is said and done, you might want to test it again. Get the idea?

* Downloading issues. You can expect it with certainty that you will find yourself the recipient of numerous emails asking about downloading your digital product, that they are having trouble doing so. It could be something as small as a page not redirecting the right way, the right place, or at all. You can solve this quickly enough, but in the meantime you have customers waiting, and this can lead to loss of sales and therefore loss of money.

How to solve this: Take a look at the solution to the email problems above.

It isn’t possible for you, or any infomarketer, to solve all of your technical problems before they happen, but they will serve to lighten the fire load that you will have to spend putting out. This will let you keep you mind and your eyes on what really matters, which is the running of your business.

The Seventh Mistake: No Affiliate Program To Help You Sell Your Product

If you don’t know what affiliate marketing is, it is when you enlist the help of other people to get the word out about your product for you, in exchange for a piece of the profits, which could be anywhere from fifty to seventy-five percent for digital products. In some cases, the author of the product could offer a full 100% to affiliates.

There are two big reasons why information marketers don’t utilize affiliate programs:

The first is that they figure they can just sell their product themselves and pocket all of the money from sales.

The second is that they feel it is just not worth the time and expense involved in getting an affiliate network set up and running.

We’ll go through these one at a time.

False Belief #1: Having an affiliate network drains you of your cash.

Of course it feels that way when you are giving away half of your profit to these affiliates, but change your perspective a little and think in terms of this:

You make no sales because you are busy with other aspects of your online business, and you have gained nothing.

You give half of your profit to an affiliate network, because they are freeing you up from having to do the marketing yourself, which means you are GETTING half of something. Something is always better than nothing when it comes to profit.

Affiliates will bring you buyers, from places that you would never have thought to go looking. Affiliates add to your income stream, they don’t deplete it. All affiliate sales need to be seen for what they are, additional money in your pocket that, without those affiliates, you never would have made.

False Belief #2: Affiliate programs are a lot of time and effort to get going.

Sure they could be as complicated as a bowl of spaghetti. Or you can go to places like Shareasale or Clickbank and let them do all of the work in getting affiliates and maintaining all of the important details for you. Sure they dip into your pocket, but you are paying for the convenience of not having to do what they do for you. You can even go to places like eJunkie where, for the price of a cup of coffee from Starbucks each month you can get your own program going easily enough. The choice is yours.

You can think of putting marketing material together for your affiliates, and training them, as pure drudgery, but remember that this time and effort is increasing your cash flow and your bank account. Consider it an investment in your business rather than a big waste of your time.

The Eighth Mistake: Depending On Anyone But Yourself To Market Your Product

Having a good affiliate program up and running might appear to you to be the last thing you need to do, because you think that your army of sales affiliates will do all the promoting for you. Not so. Not even close.

Just ask anyone who has a book for sale online. Unless you are Stephen King or James Patterson, chances are slim that you can just sit back and wait for those checks to arrive. You will need to self-promote your book.

Infomarketing is no different. You need to be the biggest promoter of your product. You are the main course of profit in your business, whereas your affiliates are just the dessert, if you get my meaning. The more you can generate excitement for your product, the greater the excitement and desire to sell that will come from your affiliates.

The following are some ways that you can accomplish some successful self-promoting:

1. Have a sizzling sales page. Even with affiliates who should be preselling your product anyways, you need to prepare for the fact that their visitors will land on your site at some point. When they arrive, your sales material needs to be converting them to buyers at a decent rate. Remember, if your material or sales page is creating buyers out of visitors, then you will be recruiting more awesome affiliates just because of that.

2. Participate in social networking site. You know the sites we are talking about, as you probably already use many of them. These are sites like Twitter and Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Step up your game here.

3. Give bonuses on your site. You might have a fantastic information product, but it isn’t going to be sold just by itself, not at the level you want it to be sold. So add bonuses that visitors can’t say no to buying.

4. Don’t stop promoting your product. After launch day, you might feel that it is over for you until the next launch day for another product of yours. No, it is only beginning. You need to crank the gears of marketing every once in a while by getting back into the marketing game, rolling up your sleeves and doing a little more work. You might hold monthly webinars about the product, or post to your blog every couple of months, provide it as a bonus for another product, or better yet, add it into someone else’s sales funnel as an OTO or an upgrade product. If you don’t keep the machine cranking, people will quickly leave your product’s carcass on the vast landscape of the information superhighway.

The best thing about promoting your information product is that it follows the belief in “Field Of Dreams”, which is paraphrased as “promote it and affiliates will come to market with you.” Then you all make money, over and over again.

The Ninth Mistake: Having No Sales Funnel As Part Of Your Strategy

When an infomarketer starts his online business, they don’t see the big picture. They are too busy getting each sale that they don’t realize that getting that sale is just the beginning of a larger process.

In the offline world, businesses like Barnes & Noble and Starbucks are incredibly good at generating repeat business from their customers. And it isn’t really a secret formula for what they do. They simply follow one rule:

Develop a sales funnel and place customers into it from the beginning.

It is a lot less expensive selling products to a customer you already have than it is trying to acquire new customers each time. Businesses like Starbucks think of their customers in terms of how much value they bring to their business over the lifetime of that customer. They realize that this value is huge. In order to nurture that value, they know that a sales funnel must be in place and working right. If it means that much to Barnes & Noble and Starbucks, why would you ignore having a sales funnel? This is what a properly functioning sales funnel would look like to a successful information marketer, reduced to utter simplification:

* An opt-in list draws a customer into your offer of a free special report…
* This customer downloads your free special report, and while downloading it are brought to the attention of your offer, given as a one-time opportunity at this point, to buy a beginner’s product at quite a substantial discount. For instance, they can get an ecourse for $37 instead of $97.
* This customer takes advantage of that discount of $60 and buys that beginner’s product. Another week goes by and they are emailed an offer to join you in a webinar that will show them how to use their new beginner’s product, along with details of other’s successes in using the same product in their businesses. This is a free deal for your customer.
* During the webinar, another invitation goes out, this time it is a special coaching session, going for roughly $47.
* At the close of this special coaching session, yet another invitation is made to the customer, allowing them to become a member of a website you’ve set up that is all about the beginner’s product they first purchased, going into greater detail. Cost for this is only $27.
* Every year, each member of the site are sent an invitation to a real event, costing upwards of $199 or $299. At this event you can join them in a face to face get together, as all your site’s members mingle and mix and get to know each other.

This clearly illustrates a proper sales funnel in operation. You don’t just waste all of your marketing time and effort putting out a single product for $47 and end it with that. Instead, you put your customer into your sales funnel, and in a year, you have marketed well over $199 to them, with no end really in sight. This is something you can easily accomplish as well.

What you need is to lay the groundwork for your own sales funnel, getting to know where you fall short, so that you can begin the process of putting a proper one together. If you already have the product in place that would go for $47, then develop your special free report that will draw them into your funnel initially. If you have your major year-end live event, then go in reverse until you get to the beginning of your sales funnel with that special report.

Everything works in unison. All it takes is for you to begin where you are at and fill in the missing details. But it is critical that you begin immediately putting this in place. Unless you like leaving money lying around.

The Tenth Mistake: Ignoring Your Customers

There’s this guy I know, Bob, who only gets in contact with me two or three times per year, without fail.

I hear from him when a child reaches a milestone in their life, like graduation from school or a university.

I hear from him as he invites several of us to join him in his latest multilevel marketing opportunity.

I hear from him when he wants to borrow my vacation home at South Beach.

You get the idea. This makes me think Bob is a jerk. Why would I think that? When I only hear from Bob when he is in need of something, I can’t help but think that. To me, I am being used by Bob, even though he might just feel that he is staying in touch with me.

Don’t treat your customers like this. Don’t send them an email only when you are selling a new product or service or you need something from them, like participation in some poll or similar activity. Don’t make contact to announce an upcoming launch either. Anyone will be able to quickly see through your shallowness.

Instead, you need to be building a relationship with your customer base. Whether you are just checking in or otherwise, have something to give them that won’t take anything away from them. As you increase your generosity, they will be more apt to do you special favors to help you out in return.

Below are just a couple of ideas to give you food for thought in how you can keep in touch without being like Bob:

* Take your FAQs and make a video presentation out of them, detailing how they can take the product they have purchased from you and put it to good use. Share this video with them by email, thanking them for being a customer and giving them a link to that video.
* Email them to share a success story, also known as a case study, where you tell them about how a fellow customer is going on to great things because of their use of your product.
* Drop in to say hello, and solicit questions from them. Take these questions and develop a free webinar where you answer everyone’s submitted questions. This webinar will be about the product they have already purchased, or it can be about anything you feel your customers collectively care about. Create a recording of the webinar and hand it out as a free bonus to everyone who purchased your product, whether they attended the webinar or not.
* Share funny stories, blog posts or videos, with your customers, that are in relation to your product’s industry. Everybody loves a good laugh.
* Send out tweets to related content that will enhance your products value at no cost to your customers.
* Wish your customers a Happy Birthday or similar well wishes on their Wall at Facebook. For just a few minutes of your time, the repercussions to your business will be phenomenal.

In summary, act like a friend would act, and be that friend.

Most important of all, if you run across Bob, tell him we no longer vacation in South Beach.

In Closing

As an information entrepreneur in the online world, the opportunities for your success are vast. You can create your own lifestyle, based upon your willingness to work at it. The degree of your success is tied directly to your efforts.

The downside to being your own boss is that you might not have proper direction laid out. You have no instructions that show you how to avoid the pitfalls and mistakes that can happen. It is hoped that this special report will give you those instructions, so that you can take care of your customers the right way, and in turn be taken care of yourself.

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Distance

The medium in which a font is going to be used has a lot to do with its value. Different considerations go into choosing a font for a billboard than for a mobile device. In this case, it’s matter of distance. Certain fonts work better from long distances, a prime example being Univers. Another thing to consider is x-height, which ensures that the bowl of the letter is at least 2/3rds the height of the stem. A higher x-height will make a font more readable from greater distances.

Size

Size matters. Gotham, for example, can also be read in small sizes. Georgia, because it works well in both small and large typefaces, is sometimes used to replaced Times New Roman. Verdana works well on websites because it has no serifs and its letter spacing is relatively loose. With regards to the size of screen, the main practical consideration is to be sure your font is web-safe. If readers can’t read your text, they’ll leave in a jiffy. Standard web-safe fonts are Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, and Tahoma.

Aesthetic

Some fonts are used to enhance the stylistic value of a composition. For example, the antiquated feel of Garamond worked well for the Harry Potter books. Or, if you’re looking to impart the aesthetic of a newspaper you might want to experiment with Franklin Gothic. Also consider that not all fonts are meant for long chunks of text. Sometimes you need a font that can spice up a header, such as Trebuchet MS, or the sans-serif calligraphic ease of Lucida Grande. Other examples include the slab serif style of Rockwell.

Utility

Some fonts are just standard for certain types of documents. For example, if you’re writing a screenplay, it’s almost universally agreed upon that you should use courier. In general, with font you want to be safe, not sorry. For other documents, it’s hard to go wrong with Helvetica or its cloned brother-in-law Arial.

Consistency

Don’t go changing your font on a regular basis and don’t use more than two. One font for your main text and one for titles, headlines, or subtitles. Any more than two fonts and you risk disorienting your readers. Don’t make these two fonts too much alike either—that can be disorienting as well.

Other general tips

• Avoid over-used fonts like Impact and Comic Sans.
• Make sure you’ve seen all the letters of a font. Your new typeface may work perfectly until you’re leafing through the printed memo that’s due in five minutes and discover the demented Q that could ruin your life.

Most people have come to appreciate the importance of font in all manners of design and business. It can critically impact how consumers react to your product. Web designers especially must grapple with typeface issues on a daily basis. Know the general rules, and mind your p’s and q’s.

• Convert Your HandWriting into a Font with FontCapture
• TypeSelect – Beautifully Rendered and Selectable Typefaces
• Easily view and organize your installed fonts with ‘my Fontbook’
• 20 Clean Modern Fonts
• How to Choose a Color Palette When Designing a Brand New Website

Technical engineers at Twitter have traditionally used just about any library these folks were experienced with in order to meet front-end requirements. Bootstrap started as a solution to the problems that presented. By making use of many great individuals, Bootstrap has grown significantly. This toolkit includes Javascript plugins, all original .less files, fully compiled and minified CSS, complete styleguide documentation, 3 example pages with different layouts.

• Speed up the development process: Blueprint CSS Framework
• Change the way you Write and Manage your CSS using CSScaffold
• Changelogger: Find out why you should Update WordPress Plugins
• VanadiumJS: A Powerful, Simple, and Intuitive Client-Side Validator
• Welcome your WP Blog Visitors with Different Greeting Messages

Available options:

• autoPlay – Automatically plays the slidorion (boolean)
• easing – The easing of the animations (string)
• effect – The effect of the animation (string)
• first – The first slide to show (the rel of that slide) (string)
• hoverPause – The slidorion pauses when hovered over (boolean)
• interval – The time between each slide (number)
• speed – The speed of the animation (number)

• Image Slider with Unique Transition Effects: jQuery Coin Slider
• Free Stylish JQuery Image Slider Plugin: Nivo Slider
• Generate a jQuery UI Slider using Data from a Select Element
• Grid Accordion with jQuery: Pack lot of text into a small place
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Styles included are:

• Drop Shadow
• Inner Shadow
• Background
• Border
• Border Radius

Highlights:

• Colorpicker can pick any color of the element your working on
• Drag and Drop images onto the page to use them as a background or to pick their colors
• Color Swatches, Gradients and Styles are locally stored

• Create, Customize and Send Newsletters: MeeNews
• VanadiumJS: A Powerful, Simple, and Intuitive Client-Side Validator
• Introduction to HTML5: The New Hypertext Markup Language Format
• Create pretty graphs with jQuery TufteGraph Plugin
• Change the way you Write and Manage your CSS using CSScaffold

SIMPLEMODAL is not a lightbox although the possibility to hide parts of its layout may partially make it similar.

Content can also be retrieved via AJAX. Here’s an example below:

Snippet code Javascript:

#JS

$("myElement").addEvent("click", function(){
  var SM = new SimpleModal({"width":600});
      SM.addButton("Action button", "btn primary", function(){
          this.hide();
      });
      SM.addButton("Cancel", "btn");
      SM.show({
        "model":"modal-ajax",
        "title":"Title",
        "param":{
          "url":"file-content.php",
          "onRequestComplete": function(){ /* Action on request complete */ }
        }
      });
});

Snippet code HTML:

#HTML

Open Modal

• LeanModal: Super Simple Lightweight Modal Window Plugin
• WordPress Login Modal Box: SimpleModal Login
• Facebook-style Lightbox/Modalbox powered by jQuery and MooTools
• Creating an Exit Modal Box using the jQuery library
• How to Implement a jQuery AJAX Login Form into a Modal Box

Is there an automated solution involving WordPress and Photoshop?

There is, and it is called Divine Elemente, a brand new plugin for WP that is designed to take templates created in Photoshop and integrate them into themes made for WordPress, and in addition to this, these themes carry with them top performance. You’ll find that this is a modern trend in designing websites:

In WP and in Photoshop there isn’t a bit of coding: It is as simple as design a theme, grouping a set of graphics together for it, and publishing it. The theme can be downloaded in PSD, several alterations can be added, and be up and published in moments. With this plugin you can get a PSD template of around 200MB in size loaded up and published in under a minute. The typography is precise in its pixelation, the fonts are custom styled, the stretch is seamless, it has a 960 grid — all as part of its unique benefits and features.

Some examples of WP themes that have been published using the Divine Elemente plugin:

’2MuchWires’ WordPress template!	‘iPhone4 App’ WordPress template!

How the plugin works, in a few simple steps

Doing things this way makes sense if you are using an existing template in a PSD file, because you just need to re-work the rules in Divine Elemente.

Highlights of the features

Let us highlight a few of unique and useful plugin features:

A pre-existing Marketplace for themes and community

There is a tendency to create themes not just for one person, but for many. This is done by publishing it in the Marketplace. The marketplace for Divine Elemente is similar to the marketplace using Envato and Themefores. They flow the same way, using the same principles. Every transaction is partitioned a little and brought to both the author of the theme and the team at Divine Elemente.

Customized Fonts with Typography That Uses Advanced Pixel Precision

All the data that comes in text format originating in a browser is placed in the exact location using identical fonts as those used in Photoshop. Also, 95% of all settings, such as bold and italics, are converted into the CSS and HTML languages and files.

Divine Elemente is the only plugin that uses pixel precise positioning for texts. Other similar products usually place text formatting in as close a position as they can, but they are not using pixel precision technology.

Billboard

These days it is the tendency of graphic designers to use slides that change, like a slide show, for their themes. For instance, within the Header section, for portfolios, three to five images are shown, or in the case of a personal blog, the creator might want to display a few endearing photos of family or experiences. The Billboard function allows this to happen, using superior animation using JS.

Editable Content

This is a great feature. Using it, the designer can make simple adjustments with ease to any elements on their pages, and place objects such as widgets for Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on them. They can use a WP CMS to directly edit PSD content.

Creating Multiple Pages

You can choose to develop multiple pages in Divine Elemente using just one template. It lets you bring together navigation items using either new pages or ones you are already using. You can bring custom content into each page you create, or pages defined by the theme already in place.

Stretch for a Seamless Background.

This is technology that is uniquely offered through Divine Elemente and nowhere else. What it does is allow the creator to apply background images and textures in a seamless manner, so that no signs of imperfection are showing. This is most useful for paper, wood and leather simulation.

960 Grid Tool

This tool allows the designer to create a professional look and feel to the theme of their web pages. This grid keeps things in line and lets the layout be organized in the best way possible.

SEO friendly, W3C valid and semantic code

Summing up assure HTML & CSS code is very readable and hasn’t any quality issues recognized.

In conclusion, the Divine Elemente plugin is synergy at its best, bringing together both potential and technology, letting a designer or even a blogger produce themes for blogs and websites that can be published in mere minutes.

Divine Elemente is available for $199.99 and comes with a 30-day trial. downloaded or Order Divine Elemente.

• Convert Photoshop PSDs to WordPress Themes: Divine Free Edition
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The three major things Adobe needs to do to keep their market relevance is to create a relevant Cloud Computing network, create open sourced development software that supports HTML5 and develop software that gives tablet users the ability to create away from their desktops.

Cloud Computing Software

Adobe hopes to make their Creative Cloud software a fully integrated experience for designers and developers. Users will be able to create content on the iPads with the many Adobe touch applications which will soon to be released and then use the Creative Suite programs to add finishing touches and make their work professional.

According to Mac World, the Creative Cloud will come with 20GB of space and be released in early 2012.

Open Sourced HTML5

For the next couple of years, Adobe will stay above water because Google’s Android operating system is still allowing Flash based applications to run on. HTML5 is the only thing used on the iPad because of its open source availability and its quick load time compared to Adobe’s Flash Player.

It is possible to create open sourced .swf documents through other applications, but Adobe’s Flash CS5 is the only viable standard for the programing platform. There are better programs which allow developers to create beautiful designs on open sourced standards. Adobe will have to use its large market share and stock options in order to develop a program that delivers the goods.

Tablet Applications

With the predominance of Apple’s mobile iOS and Google’s Android based services, Microsoft has been kicked down a couple of notches on their monopoly on operating systems because of their failure to create popular mobile software. While Adobe is still used on desktop computers, more designers will turn to the iPad in order to create.

According to Thomas Claburn of Information Week, Adobe has taken proactive steps in procuring tablet software. They have bought TypeKit, a font provider, and Nitobi, the creators of a popular open sourced HTML5 development platform. Ideas, Muse, and Edge will all be featured in the Adobe Creative Cloud when it becomes available.

It looks as if Adobe has taken the proper steps in order to thrive in the cloud computing generation. The only disappointing thing is that they were not at the forefront of the advances, like the aggressive and innovative company we know them to be.

• All-in-one Media Player for the web: OSM Player
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• The new HTML 5 logo is now revealed by W3C
• Build Applications for Mobile and Touch Devices: DHTMLX Touch
• Adapt.js: Adaptive CSS based on Browser Window’s Width

CSS load – first online CSS spinners and bars code generator with the given features and variety of templates. The aim of the project is to provide developers and designers with animations that indicate loading of AJAX and JQuery requests made with the means pure CSS (CSS3) and HTML. Right now there are 8 templates of different animation templates available, but there will be more in the nearest future.

The concept of generating the animations is very simple and alike with the Preloaders project. Just select your template in the left column, then set the coloring scheme, size and the speed of animation. All animations previews are generated automatically each time you change any parameter. Having acquired a desired preloader, click on the “Get code” button and you will be provided the code to copy.

The project right now is an alpha version with some little modifications pending. The main problem is that CSS3 animations are not yet supported by Internet Explorer and Opera web-browsers, but the project developers hope that very soon it will not be a problem anymore.

• Generate & Download Free Icons: Iconizer
• Create Super Awesome Buttons using CSS3 and RGBA
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• IE 5-8 CSS3 pseudo-class selector emulation: ie-css3.js