Envato, the company behind GraphicRiver, one of the top graphics marketplaces on the internet and ThemeForest, one of the largest websites templates and WordPress themes have just started a new project called PhotoDune.

What is PhotoDune ?

PhotoDune is an Envato Marketplace in which you can buy and sell royalty-free photographs and images starting at just $1. Items are priced on the size/megapixels of each file. The site is home to a bustling community of photographers and digital imaging experts.

PhotoDune's current homepage showing that it's now in Beta version

But, How can I subscribe?

Well, at the moment as you can see at the screenshot above, the website is still a beta version which means that it is restricted to Envato members only. Which also means you can still access it but first you need to create an account with either GraphicRiver, ThemeForest or any other Envato’s marketplaces.

What are you waiting for?

Since this is a relatively-new photographs marketplace, it means that you can get ahead of other people if you join them now and start adding/uploading your awesome pictures.  So, go ahead, roll up your sleeves, get your cameras ready,  start taking awesome pictures, and make some good money Do you think they will be a decent competitor to istockphoto or other leading royalty-free photographs marketplaces like fotolia? Tell us what you think at the comments below.

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You too can be featured here at Joptima. If you have any articles you wish to be published here feel free to send it to us but first visit the Contribute Page for more details on what we’re interested in, and the standards to submit your content.

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So you’ve decided to take the plunge and spend good money on a new website! How do you know your web designer is a winner?

1) Your Site Is Compatible With All Browsers

You may have seen the message “This site requires Internet Explorer” when visiting some web pages over the years. Did you know that a site built to require only Internet Explorer in order to function properly is alienating approximately 75% of the Internet community? According to statistics at w3schools.com, as of April 2011, web browsers have the following market share:

With so many choices it is essential that your site is designed to work properly will all of them.

2) Attractive & Readable Content

Design can be formal, exciting, fun, breathtaking and sometimes incredibly overwhelming. While a beautiful web site is a common goal, if the content is obscured by the design you will ultimately give an empty or frustrating site for your customers. While in the discovery and early phases of site design, stay focused on the goal to give clear and concise content that can be read clearly and easily by your customers. Avoid gloomy grey text on black backgrounds, tiny font sizes or excessively busy backgrounds behind your text.

3) Your Designer Isn’t TOO Cost-Efficient

For every world-class 5-figure web design project there are two dozen nephews and nieces of the guy working down the hall that can build your site for a fraction of the cost (and a fraction of the usability and marketability). Economic times may be tough, but always remember that the site you are creating will set an impression for the entire world to see. While you don’t need to empty the bank account to make the site happen, you should also look out for designers that may cut too many corners or else you may be paying more down the road to fix your site.

4) Knowledgeable In Areas of Marketing & Driving Traffic To Your Site

Ok, you’ve built your new website! Now what? More and more these days you don’t just need a web designer, but a design company that understands the goals behind your web design project. You desire visitors to your site, and your design company should know how to help you get those visitors. When looking for a designer make sure the person or firm has experience working with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google Ad Words and other marketing products. A good web strategy starts with SEO and marketing and builds that into the site design.

5) Consistent & Growing Client Roster

Don’t be afraid to ask your potential designer for a design portfolio or possibly a client roster. When spending a good amount of money on a website the last thing you want to do is write a check to a company that might not be there tomorrow. You need a design company that is growing and on top of emerging technologies when it comes to web and application design. This will ensure that you can stay ahead of the curve.

About the Author

MIKE BARBRE is a social media professional and technology enthusiast. When he’s not using Intermedia’s Exchange Hosting, he can be found following Intermedia on Twitter and as a fan of Intermedia on Facebook.

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• How to Output Custom Taxonomies with the Custom Posts Belonging to Each One

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I have a custom post type called: staff_members. I have also created Custom post types under that which included names of people with their biographies. In the mean time, I have a custom taxonomy called: departments (highlighted in bold below)

The problem was…

how do I output a list of all taxonomies attached to a the custom post type, with a list under each taxonomy of the custom posts under each one. In other words, how do I output the following?

Quality Control Department

• John Smith
• David Feldman

Financial Department

• Mark Robinson
• Richard Carpenter
• Sarah Fisherman

Media Department

• James Shelver
• Alfred Kane

After a bit of research I found this excellent code at WordPress Help which I thought I should share with everyone having the same problem.

I wish I remembered to bookmark the post but extortionately I didn’t

Code snippet to list custom taxonomies with the custom posts under each one:

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//for a given post type, return all taxonomies attached to it
$post_type = 'staff_members';
$tax = 'departments';
$tax_terms = get_terms($tax);
if ($tax_terms) {
  foreach ($tax_terms  as $tax_term) {
    $args=array(
      'post_type' => $post_type,
      "$tax" => $tax_term->slug,
      'post_status' => 'publish',
      'posts_per_page' => -1,
      'caller_get_posts'=> 1
    );
 
    $my_query = null;
    $my_query = new WP_Query($args);
    if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
      echo '
<h3>'.$tax_term-&gt;name.'</h3>
';
      while ($my_query-&gt;have_posts()) : $my_query-&gt;the_post(); ?&gt;
        <a href="&lt;?php the_permalink();?&gt;"><!--?php the_title();?--></a>
        <!--?php       endwhile;     }     wp_reset_query();   } } ?-->

So go ahead, and try it out and if you have any questions, kindly leave them at the comments below

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RTLer Plugin for WordPress

“RTLer, is just a simple plugin that generates the RTL stylesheet rtl.css for you from your theme’s style.css file. It automatically scans your file, reads values and adds its own if needed, you’ll never need to rtl anymore.”

Screenshot of RTLer WordPress Right to Left plugin

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Building websites using WordPress is becoming more popular by the day. More people are entering the WordPress arena but some just don’t know yet how to create some specialized custom websites. Sometimes you need to install this plugin to give you one option that’s not natively available. And some other times you go for that theme because it has everything you need to build that website in your mind. Basically we have 3 situations:

To build this awesome website you can…

1. Install free Plugins to give you new features
2. Install a free Theme to give you new features
3. Tweak or even creat your own WordPress Themes and Plugins

How can Joptima Blog help?

In this series, I will try to suggest several means to create almost any kind of websites WordPress is able to produce. For instance, if we’d like to create a real estate website, how do we get going? Do we need to create custom post types for properties? Do we need a special plugin? Can we create the entire website ourselves? Do we just grab one premium commercial theme that has it all?

In the coming few posts, I will try to show you the means and different ways you can follow to create those stunning rich interactive websites using WordPress. So, if you have an idea of a website and you’re not sure how to start building it in WordPress? Leave a comment on this page mentioning the following:

Website Overview in your comment should include:

• Suggested Website Type (i.e. A Resturant, Real Estate Agent…etc.)
• Suggested Sitemap (i.e. Home, Services, Food Menu, Location, Contact Us)
• Special Features (i.e. Contact Us Form, Slider, Facebook Widget, Google Maps to show the location on the Contact Us page…etc.)
• Similar website(s) (i.e. a website you’ve seen somewhere and wanted to know how to do the same thing)

What I will do, is I will try to search for the means and different solutions you can go through to build this website using mostly free stuff from the internet. I hope this will help some people out there who are noticing the growing demand for WordPress powered websites these days.

So go ahead and post your comment below with your request.

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WordPress 3.1 is about to be released in the next few weeks. Yesterday, It was announced that WordPress 3.1 RC was released which is a sign that the final release is just around the corner. It’s worth mentioning that RC refers to Release Candidate as

An RC comes after the beta period and before final release.

So if this is the release candidate, what will the final release have?

Features of WordPress 3.1

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The developers and designers at DBS Interactive have created this awesome interactive WordPress 3.0 template tags reference guide for all WordPress lovers out there. The guide covers many (if not all!) template tags including:

• Attachment Tags
• Author Tags
• Blog Info Tags
• Category Tags
• Comment Tags
• Date & Time Tags
• Edit Link Tags
• Include Tags
• Links Manager Tags
• Lists & Dropdown Tags
• Login/Logout Tags
• Navigation Menu Tags
• Permalink Tags
• Post Thumbnail Tags
• Query Tags
• Shortlink Tags
• Tag Tags
• Title Tags

The reference is built using jQuery, which makes it even easier to navigate. Maybe someone else could turn the whole WordPress codex to a similar (if not better!) reference for all WordPress tags and functions one day.

What do you think? have you seen it before? do you have a similar or better WordPress reference website?

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The movie itself is brilliant and worth watching.

Apple of My Eye from Michael Koerbel on Vimeo.

What do you think?

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Are you a web designer? Then most probably you have once encountered a client who on reviewing the website proposal say something like “Wow, that looks fantastic. Could you please rewrite this text for the website?” Or something like “Ok, that looks great, but this text file includes the About Us page, put it online please.” These situations sometimes happen even if you’re only passionate about web design. You might not be too fond of writing or arranging some lines of text. But I tell you what, you might be overlooking a huge opportunity of work beyond web design and layouts. You, the web designer are the best person to for this job. You know the internet, you know the tools (HTML tags, CSS…etc.). Basically you have all the necessary skills to write credible eye-catching web copy. Read on and find out why and how you should embrace writing for the internet as a web designer.

People’s reading behavior on any web pages is different than that of traditional printed copy such as newspapers and books. First of all, obviously web pages are delivered on screens (computer screens, mobile phones, even TVs) while traditional copy is usually delivered on a printed paper. But when it comes to web pages, people usually skim or scan through the text. They don’t really read word for word. They simply jump around to different areas of a web page. Take a look at the following example:

ٍٍ

Sample Eye Tracking Video on: Squidoo.com

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilq9qeyVjT0

This video was published through YouTube on May 30, 2006. You can read more about this it on an article named: What I learned from eye tracking

As you can see in this example, the user jumps from one place to another. They don’t stick to one spot for an extended period. Try to analyze your own behavior on this website. You’ll notice that your eyes always jump between various spots on Joptima.com. Did you notice that?

Now, let’s consider why should not turn down a request to write or rewrite the copy on websites follow this simple process:

How to write effective copy for a website

1- Write short, straight to the point text.

Because people won’t read each and every word on a web page, focus your text, cut your paragraphs in half, and then after reviewing try halving the remaining text again. Always try to leave only what you think people really need to know. One other interesting point to note is that people usually read the first paragraph and then scan through the rest. So ensure that all the important points are covered on the very first paragraph.

2- Use HTML and CSS standards

As a web designer, this part is more relevant to you as you deal with Headings, Links and all sorts of HTML and CSS tags on daily basis. So this is really so familiar to you. As a web designer you know that search engines play an important role in todays web sphere, so always keep in mind that not only you are writing for humans, but also for robots! Yes, GoogleBot is one of them. GoogleBot is a search “bot” software used by Google, that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. So while keeping robots in mind and not writing for them solely, you are giving your website a higher ranking position in a Google search result page. Isn’t that what everybody wants?

The following list shows you some of the HTML standards you should use and how.

3- Use images, diagrams and charts

Text, on its own, is boring. The use of images or diagrams to present information will always help in keeping people interested. Only make sure that when including images for example you are not violating any copy rights and that you are allowed from the photographer or the owner of the artwork to use it in your copy.

4- Review your copy twice, at least

Finally, after applying all these points, make sure that you re-read the entire copy more than once. This is an exercise many copywriters use. In fact everyone should do that just to fix any “leaking holes” in your copy. Sometimes you write something but when you set back and look at the text as a whole, you find something which you wish you’d changed before hitting the “Publish” or “Save” buttons.

So, after performing those previous tasks, writing copy for a website should be easier by now. I strongly recommend a book entitled: How to Write Great Copy for the Web by Donna Spencer which has inspired me greatly while writing this article. (Note: This is not an affiliated link nor a paid article by any mean)

Share your experience with us if you ever had an enquiry to do a similar thing. What did you do? Were there any obstacles you had to solve?

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