When designing with usability in mind you must make sure you test extensively, and consider the fact that what may be easy for you to interact with, may be difficult for others. It is about finding the right balance that will allow a wide variation of users to exit your website satisfied with the user experience.

Why and What to Ask?
We’ve put together several questions (you might not have heard of) that will help you enhance and assess the quality of your websites usability. Not every question may apply to your case, however, these questions are meant to help you to think a bit more from a users perspective.

How Can I Enhance the Usability of My Links?

I was a bit hesitant to start off with this very question, mostly because some believe that links don’t play any part in a websites usability factor. However, from previous testing and links being a definite part of user interaction, we know that we must find ways to make links as clear and concise as possible.

A user must clearly be able to point out a link within a sentence, paragraph, or anywhere else on the site for that matter. Many designers have solved this issue by adding small icons to links through CSS, and adding anchor text. Links that are associated with your websites navigation need to be given even more attention. A sites navigation can make or break the user experience. This is especially true with tweaking your website for maximum accessibility.

What is the Five Second Rule?

When you refer to a websites usability, you’ll sometimes come across the “five second” rule. Even though there may be several versions of the five second rule such as three or two seconds instead of five, the general idea is that a user should be able to digest or have a quick break down of what your website is all about, as well as what you have to offer within the first few seconds of their visit. Anything after that will more than likely result in disinterest and may eventually drive visitors away.

The homepage is key, since it is the first thing users will become acquainted with. What does this have to do with usability? Everything. If your website fails to catch the attention of the targeted user, then there simply will be seldom interest in using your website. The Five Second Test (usability testing tool) goes hand-in-hand with the five second rule.

Are the Titles and Headings Distinctive?

This benefits every site, however, if you run a blog/magazine then this will be one of the most important elements of your websites usability. You should make sure that your titles for sections and posts are easily distinguishable and clear. They must be easy to read, understand, and remember. When you style your headings it’s important that you don’t over-do-it and you take your time in selecting the right type of font. Bad titles and headings can make sure site look convoluted and somewhat distorted.

Is the Content on My Site Displayed in a Consistent Manner?

The information displayed on your website should be structured in such a way that it represents consistency. Content that isn’t structured will make your website look messy and unappealing.

For example, if your blog posts are all aligned to the left, you should make sure that every post is aligned to the left. It wouldn’t make much of any sense to have one post center aligned, the next to the left, and a few to the right. Users will be confused and their eyes will most likely end up hurting after trying to read the mess on your site.

Do Clickable Items Lure Me to Click Them?

Simply said, what’s the point of having an item you want users to click on if it doesn’t even seem clickable? For example, if you have image ads on your website you’d definitely want users to click on them. A simple and straightforward way to do this is to add a property such as a drop shadow to all of your image related ads through your CSS.

CSS-Tricks is a reasonable example of what we’re talking about. Check out the sidebar with the 125×125 ads, see how they interact and the size of the border around them. All of these factors contribute to luring you in to clicking on the ads. In such a way, elements you want users to click on should be undeniably clickable and are expected to contrast the rest of the content one way or another. Make it easy for your users, guide them a bit and you’ll see that they’ll respond much better to anything you “throw” at them.

Is the Entire Site as Functional as It Is Appealing?

What’s the point of having a website that has been aesthetically “perfected” if it isn’t nearly as functional as it looks? Your website should respond well to actions performed by the users. If the site can’t deliver quality functionality, then you’ve more than likely defeated the purpose of usability. True usability is more than just design, it’s function. We’re not inferring that you should place more emphasis on the back-end of your website, however, there should be a balance between the front/back end design. These two will always work together to ultimately create a much better user experience.

Does the Site Load Quickly?

Even though this question is obvious to some, it’s still something that should be included within this article. The speed of which your pages load can drastically contribute to the usability of your website. If your web pages fail to load quickly, then this can put a strain on the time users have to interact with your website. The faster your pages load, the better users are able to interact with your website, resulting in a much more appealing UX.

Remember you can always post your usability related questions on Design Reviver Answers for accurate and informative responses.

Well, that’s what we have for you today, a collection of the most creative and in some ways strange social media icon-sets, which I am sure you will love.

Hand Drawn Social Media Icons

Social Network Icon Set

Free Furry Cushions Social Icons Set

Extreme Grunge Social Icons

108 Free Retro Grunge Stripes Social Media Icons

Grass Textured Social Bookmarking Icon Set

Vintage Postage Stamps Social Media Icon Pack

20 Amazing 3D social icons

Jeans Social Media Icon Pack

Glossy Waxed Wood Social Networking Icons

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

In this tutorial, we’re going to paint a cartoon version of the ‘near-iconic’ Stephen Fry. The cartoon is styled in a comic book fashion but however, there’s still some painting to be done and this in the end, will be make the final image quite detailed.

Step 1

Starting off with a sketch of a younger Stephen Fry, I sketched out his prominent features such as his hair, slightly narrowed nose, dreamy eyes and chubby cheeks.

Step 2

Select the Pen Tool (P) and make sure the “paths” is chosen.

Step 3

I dragged the Fry sketch into the the main document window and resized it before tracing the face out in a layer above it. By the way, the document size is 1100 by 1300 and this makes the document window a portrait by orientation.

Step 4

After filling the path with a #f3dec6 colour, name the the layer “face base.”

Step 5

Secondly, make a  pen selection for the neck. Note that I didnt select both the face and the neck at the same time in one layer. This was because, I wanted to have a clear outline of the jaw area when I start painting the face.

Step 6

Fill the selection with the same base colour as the face and name the layer “neck.”

Step 7

a Soft Round brush with a #bb856d colour and in between painting, switch its opacity back and forth between 20% to 30%. Name the layer “face shade.” Using the Sketch as reference, trace out the features of the face and neck as shown below. This would be called the “shade” layer.

Step 8

For another layer, “dark shade.” Change the brush colour to #050404 with its opacity reduced to 10%, add more shades to the face and neck. The features here are made more pronounced. Use the Blur Tool (R) to smooth out of the paintings of all the “shades” layers too.

Step 9

Over the “dark shade” layer, create another layer and call it “highlights.” Set brush colour to #fef4f0 and reduce its opacity to about 30%. Paint the around the areas of the forehead, nose, cheeks, necks and ears. The result is a splash of light over the face.We’ll now go on ahead to merge the “face shade” layers down to the “face base” layer by pressing Crtl+E. Also go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise and set the Ratio to give both the merged layers a slight grainy look.

Step 10

For the eyebrows we’ll go to the Brushes Palette and fade the brush with the Fade Size set at 50.

Step 11

Paint the eyebrows.

Step 12

Select the Burn Tool (O), and on the “face” layer (the previously merged layers), burn out the outlines of the face. That is, the wrinkles below the eyes, the outlines of the nose and so on. With a larger brush size, burn the ares of the cheeks, chin, jaw, neck etc. The Range of the brush must be set to Highlights and its exposure reduced to 20%.

Step 13

Now set the Burn Tool’s Range to Midtones (Exposure: 25%) and proceed to burn the same areas highlighted above. With the Burn brush size reduced to 1px to 2px, work on the outlines of the face and neck as well. Now the image is given more solidity.

Step 14

In a new layer, use the Pen Tool to trace out Fry’s hair.

Step 15

Fill the hair with a black colour.

Step 16

Still on the “hair” layer, select the Brush Tool (B) and set its colour to #53524f and paint strips of lines on the hair. Never mind exceeding the boundaries of the hair when painting over it.

Step 17

Now for the interesting part. Select the Smudge Tool (R) and set its Strength to 80% and smear the grey lines over the hair in the form of waves. On the edges of the hair, smudge inwards. It will take your intuition to get the desired look you prefer.

Step 18

Reduce the size of the Smudge brush to 2px and create thin strains of hair. Also select the Dodge Tool (O) with an Exposure of 30% to lighten up certain parts of the hair.

Step 19

Create a new layer, “eyes” and use the Pen Tool trace out the eyes of Fry and fill with a white colour.

Step 20

Use the Burn Tool to darken to the corners of the eyes.

Step 21

Draw two circles with the Ellipse Tool (U) and fill with a dark blue colour.
Have the circles halved by using the Marquee Tool (M).

A.

With the Soft Round Brush’s colour set to #acbaef and paint the insides of the eyes – the pupils to be exact.

B.

Change the brush colour to a white one to add a reflection to the eyes.

Step 22

Create a “lips” layer to draw the lips with the Pen Tool.

Step 23

Fill with a the colour #d16159. This colour would be used as the base and so its by no means a lady’s red lipstick colour.

Step 24

Lighten up the lips with the Dodge Tool and with a white brush, paint the lips concentrating most particularly around the edges.

Step 25

For a dark shade, use a Soft Round brush with colour: #3e0f06 and opacity at 30%.

Step 26

With a little more retouching, use the Burn Tool to make the lines of the face more prominent (the insides of the cheeks as well). The face is now complete.

Step 27

For a muscular physique (something Fry doesn’t possess), use the Pen Tool to trace out his body. You may use the Add Anchor Point Tool to create more anchor points to enable more smoother curves.

Step 28

Still with the Pen Tool, right click and select Stroke Path for a lighter lines (I had the foreground colour as ash colour).

Step 29

The resulting Stroke makes the body outlines faint.

Step 30

We’ll now create a superhero logo with the Ellipse Tool and by pressing Crtl+T, rotate the obilque circle.

Step 31

Fill the circle with a yellow colour: #faf574. Draw another circle of the same size and fill with black.Dont forget to clear the outlines of each shape after its been filled with a colour.

Step 32

In another layer, draw a five rectangles (rotating each rectangle) for a question mark shape. Fill with the same yellow colour as above. Draw another square in a new layer and add a Stroke Layer Style and change its default color to black. I just made this question mark logo for humour.

Step 33

Draw the hands of our ‘hero’ with the Pen Tool and with the colour #f3dec6.

Step 34

Set the Burn Tool’s Range to Midtones and Exposure to 28%. Burn the around the edges of the hands.

Step 35

Switch the Burn Tool’s Range to Highlights. I also shaped knuckles with the Erazer Tool (E) thereby making them more defined. A noise Ratio of about 2.9% was added was added as well.

Step 36

For the superhero costume with a synthetic look, apply a Soft Round brush with a #e7e4e1 colour within the body’s shape. Paint out a arms, abdomen and chest. Along the way, reduce the brush’s opacity to about 30% for a lighter shade within the body.

Step 37

Select the Burn Tool (Range: Highlights and Exposure: 15%) to and apply at the base of the logo. A light blue line (#e1ecf5) was added to the left side of the body for effects.

Step 38

Select the “face” layer and go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and set the Brightness to 16. Do same for the hands. We now have a brighter and smooth looking face.

Step 39

Up in the sky. Its a bird, its a plane, its…just Mr. Fry. The comic book styled version of Stephen Fry’s completed and I had the time, I would have created a more elaborated costume for him with a cape and all.

This is the final image with an added background.

By David Ella Ella

Have you tried posting a jQuery question on Answers yet? All you have to do is post the question and when someone does answer your ‘jQuery query’ (I love the way that sounds!), you will receive an email notification, and hey presto your solution is there waiting for you!

Couldn’t be easier, could it?

It has been yet another good week on Answers, loads of great questions and lots of even better answers from our huge 450+ members. Thanks for all your support!

“Have you asked a question yet?“

What’s the best way to learn jquery?

This question was asked by Ralph.

Answer from Paul Andrew:

Downloading plugins and following tutorials will only take you so far – what if you need something that simply hasn’t been done before? You would have to develop it yourself, you would have to learn jQuery from the begining and start with the basics.

In the Woods offers a video series (15 videos) that will teach you PRECISELY how to use the jQuery library in your own projects:
jQuery for absolute beginners.

Spyre Studios has written an article about how to how to get started with jQuery, and actually writing your first script: Simple Guide: How To Get Started With jQuery (Part One) …

… As has Six Revisions: Getting Started with jQuery …

… There is also
Learning jQuery, a multi-author blog offering jQuery tutorials and demos. They have tutorials for all skill levels, and each entry is categorized by level of difficulty…

… And finally
jQuery for Designers is another cool resource for learning jQuery.

Can libraries like Jquery replace everything you can do with Flash?

This question was asked by Rjene.

Answer from Prajwal:

Definitely not everything, especially when it comes to advanced motion effects, manipulation of images (beyond a certain extent), even user input to a certain extent..
jQuery definitely cannot replace flash…

Answer from Michael Mior :

However, for the practical purposes of most websites, you can usually get away with using jQuery over Flash.

Animations on the web – Flash or jQuery? Pros & cons?

This question was asked by Filip Biel.

Answer from Alessio:

Well, Flash is becoming less and less popular among web designers because Flash movies are so heavy and because not everybody has Flash (or the latest version of Flash) installed. Similarly, not everybody has Java enabled on their browser, but it’s default so more people would see a jQuery animation than a Flash one. So, I’d say going with jQuery would be the stronger choice. JQuery tends to be lighter and thus loads faster and easier on bandwidth as well.

How Can I Validate My Forms (strictly) Using jQuery?

This question was asked by Pablo G.

Answer from Alessio:

Have you tried the jQuery form validation plugin?

How can i create a nice javascript calender?

This question was asked by Vanart.

Answer from Nikowillson:

With the following code you’ll be able to create a JS powered calander that will shift to the relevant month when you click on the buttons…good luck

function writeCalendar(){
var calString = '';
calString += '';
// calString += '' + months[this.month] + ', ' + this.year + '';
calString += '<';
calString += '<';
// calString += ' ';
calString += '' + months[this.month] + ', ' + this.year + '';
calString += '>';
calString += '>';
calString += '';
calString += '';
calString += '';

return calString;
}

Unanswered Questions

There is only one question that has been left unanswered this week which is just amazing!
So, can you help poor Melissa Davis Nichols with her unanswered question:

1. I’m looking for an easy Flash Loader tutorial?

Thanks again, firstly to everyone who asked a question, but most importantly thanks to everyone that took the time to offer always helpful and useful answers.

For today’s news we have a great collection of useful Photography cheat-sheets, visit the resources for the full articles and download pages.

Helpful Photography Cheat Sheets to Make Your Life Easier

Here is a list of all the cheat sheets available from this resource: Portrait Lighting Cheat Sheet Card; The Photographic Cheat Sheet by Gordon McKinney; 49 Photo Tips Cheat Sheet; Light Falloff Cheat Sheet Card; Photography Cheat sheet; PhotoBert Cheatsheets; Reflector Card Cheat Sheet.

You can download the all of the photography cheat sheets from here: Helpful Photography Cheat Sheets to Make Your Life Easier.

12 Extremely Helpful Photo Editing App Cheat Sheets

Here is a list of all the cheat sheets available from this resource: Adobe Photoshop CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts; Photoshop Lasso, Brush and Pen Tool Cheatsheets; Photoshop Elements 7 For Dummies Cheet Sheet; Photoshop Toolbox Reference; Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Cheat Sheets.

You can download the all of the photo editing cheat sheets from here: 12 Extremely Helpful Photo Editing App Cheat Sheets.

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

So How Do We Choose the Right One?
The first step you need to take is to make sure you decide upon a framework that has an established and accurate representation of detailed documentation. This is vital to the steps you’ll take in implementing and utilizing your framework the way it was intended. Next, you should analyze what problems the specified frameworks of your choice will solve. As you come across frameworks that you believe might “fit the bill” for the project(s) at hand, then it would be wise to compare each of them and elaborate on which framework addresses which concerns and satisfies your needs.

Also, don’t hesitate to ask other developers and colleagues which framework has worked best for them and why? This will help you gain valuable insight based on the experience of others, something that can’t be bought. Another point I would like to make is the role your chosen framework’s community plays. How big is it? Are the members helpful? Does it provide invaluable resources? Every one of these questions help you determine if your framework’s community is going to be of use. The logical point of view is, the larger and more involved the community is, the better your chances are at finding the right type of help when you need it.

Below we will take a look at 8 of the best frameworks we found to be useful for both developers and designers.

Blueprint CSS

The Blueprint CSS framework uses a grid-system that has pre-built typography and includes various plugins, built-in form styles and more. With BP you’ll also find good stable documentation, a wiki, an active discussion group, and examples of sites built on the Blueprint system.

Elements CSS Framework

Overall, the Elements framework makes it much easier and efficient to write CSS code. It’s a way to keep your files organized, benefit from a collection of present classes that can make your development process much friendlier, and it’ll automatically add respective icons for external links so that users will be able to quickly find and access them as well.

Content with Style

Content with Style is a CSS framework that helps you style and structure your website with amazing design and typographical elements. With six different layouts to choose from that include vertical navigation, two content columns, horizontal navigation with two columns of content and useful one content columns. Content with Style is an efficient way to “prioritize” the content on your site and focus on areas such as the header, main content, sub content, and more.

Emastic

This lightweight CSS framework uses PX, EM, or % widths for the process of signaling a page width, and it is also based on an elastic layout. Emastic comes with various pre-defined styles for your typography and much more. Predominantly, the grid is made up of blocks that are sized from 5 to 75em units. The default sizes can be changed at any time and the frameworks design options depend on the grid layout.

960 Grid System

The 960 grid system is a powerful CSS framework that lets us develop and prototype websites rapidly. The layouts are based on 12-16 columns and the layout templates are for Illustrator, Photoshop, Expression Design, Fireworks and more. You can also print a variety of templates for use with pen and paper if that’s what suits you best.

Yui Grids

The foundational YUI Grids CSS offers four preset page widths, six preset templates, and the ability to stack and nest subdivided regions of two, three, or four columns. The 4kb file provides over 1000 page layout combinations. Features included are support for fluid-width, easy customization, flexible template columns, and more.

Yaml

“Yet Another Multicolumn Layout” (YAML) is an (X)HTML/CSS framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts. The structure is extremely versatile in its programming and absolutely accessible for end users. YAML is focussed on web standards and accessibility, slim framework core with numerous extensions, complete multilingual documentation, and robust, flexible layout concept (columns & grids).

SenCSs

SenCSs stands for Sensible Standards CSS baseline, (pronounced “sense”). It supplies sensible styling for all repetitive parts of your CSS, and doesn’t force a lay-out system on you. This allows you to focus on actually developing your website’s style. SenCSs isn’t a framework like other CSS frameworks, it doesn’t include a layout system littered with silly classes and pre-set grids, so what does SenCSs do? SenCSs does everything else: baseline, fonts, paddings, margins, tables, lists, headers, blockquotes, forms and more.

Who wouldn’t want these on their bookshelf. Read further on in this post to find out how to enter and, hopefully, win these fantastic books.

Here is an overview of the books you can win:

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

jQuery: Novice To Ninja

jQuery: Novice to Ninja, from sitepoint.com, will show you how to unleash the amazing power of jQuery. In this easy-to-follow guide, you’ll master all the major tricks and techniques that jQuery offers—within hours.

jQuery has quickly become the JavaScript library of choice, and it’s easy to see why. This JavaScript framework dramatically improves how you add interactivity and animation to your website.

Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog

Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility.

Inside, WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the blog and shows you how WordPress can serve as a CMS, a photo gallery, an e-commerce site, and more.

Digging into Wordpress

There is much to learn about the World’s most popular publishing platform. From your first steps of learning about WordPress all the way through maintaining a site throughout the years, this book is packed with truly practical information.

Rocket Surgery

Rocket Surgery, written by Steve Krug, it’s a how-to book that explains exactly how to do your own web site usability testing.

The following tools manage and monitor various levels of quality relating to the uptime and security of your servers. These tools will help you identify any problems so that you’re able to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Take a look at the ones we’ve compiled below, and then test whichever ones appeal to you the most in terms of functionality and reliability.

Webmetrics GlobalWatch

GlobalWatch is an interactive tool that allows you to monitor a variety of web applications and sites. It digs deep into the root of the problem and quickly identifies and diagnoses any downtime errors, and poor performance levels in detail reports and customizable alerts. With this tool you’ll always be informed of any of your websites irregular performance.

Pingdom

Pingdom ensures that your website is accessible and responds accordingly consistently. It’s able to monitor uptime, various levels of performance, multiple applications, FTP servers, email servers and any application that’s accessible from the Internet. Pingdom provides you with detailed email and SMS alerts if anything is wrong. It also lets you read results in the form of charts and tables that are extremely legible. This tool is also available as an iPhone application.

McAfee Secure

McAfee Secure strategically monitors any and all of your severs that may be at a potential security risk. This powerful tool will protect your servers against security breaches, the end-users from being subject to identity theft, credit card frauds, viruses, scams, and your dose of annoying spam. Your site will be in good hands since McAfee will test it and certify it on a daily basis. McAfee currently monitors and certifies over 80,000 websites ranging from a wide scope of business sizes and structures.

Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions (NMS)

NMS actively monitors your servers and any applications found on the servers. Everything from CPU to memory, server resources, even logs and more are accurately monitored and recorded. Being quick and easy to install is just the beginning, NMS is also a lightweight application that has the power to monitor thousands of servers at a time. NMS is also very easy to use, alerts and details are always clear, and it also visually shows you your servers interconnected, color-coded indicators, and the response times from server-to-server. It’s a great choice no matter the size of your servers.

Simple Server Monitor

Simple Server seems to understand the importance of having a valuable application that can effectively monitor your servers. It’s designed for those on a small budget and offers a free 30-day trial. Useful features such as the monitoring of uptimes, performance levels, and FTP/HTTP/POP/IMAP servers (to name a few) are included. It’s ideal for those who wish to receive updates and alerts within their desktop in the form of pop-up messages, SMS format, and charts.

Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Orion’s NPM tool monitors all of your servers and ensures that their running without any problems every minute of the day. It also monitors all of your routers, switches and wireless access points within your network as well. It comes with a fairly easy set-up and the support of 100’s of expert network engineers. It’s extremely easy to use and Orion can be up and running in less than an hour right after it’s been downloaded!

ENVIROMUX Server Environment Monitoring System

Nagios hit the ball out of the park when they developed powerful tool that monitors your servers temperature, humidity, liquid presence, motion, intrusion and vibration all to ensure that your server’s in tip-top operating capacity. You’re able to create custom alarm signals, monitor and manage security conditions over IP, monitor/ping up to 64 IP network devices, and manage your servers using a single attractive web interface for all systems connected.

SiteUptime

SiteUptime works like clock-work by monitoring your website 24/7 365 days a year. SU provides free and advanced remote monitoring services that notifies you when your servers are down via email and or SMS text messaging. This will ensure that the errors are sent to you with priority and speed so that you’re able to quickly fix any problems with your connections. SU allows you to view detailed statistics about your website’s availability and server response times anytime you’d like. Overall, it’s a very useful multiple monitoring tool for servers that runs tests on specific intervals (every couple seconds).

Further Resources

• How to Easily Monitor your Web Server Using PHP
• Setp-by-Step: Monitoring and tuning your IIS Web servers
• Optimizing Apache Server Performance
• How to Monitor Server Availability

It has been yet another good week on Answers, thanks for your support!

“Have you asked a question yet?“

Can anyone recommend a free wordpress shopping cart plugin?

This question was asked by Ajay.

Answer from Kopanomedia:

Take a look at this Simple WP Shopping Cart app:SimpleCart(js) is a simple, attractive, and flexible WordPress theme that taps into the power of both Thematic and WP E-commerce. Features include AJAX cart functionality, a grid layout for products, and a flexible color scheme, easy to swap out images and completely customize the theme to your needs.

Answer from Jacob Mcdaniel:

The WP E-commerce plugin rocks (bit.ly, very customizable, and you can get extra add-ons for a price.

Answer from Ejaz:

WP E-commerce is a great shopping cart plugin for Wordpress. But you should have good shopping cart themes (e.g. www.shopperpress.com as well so that it can be integrated properly.
There are other good options as well e.g. eShop wordpress.org and shopplugin.net.
Also see 10 Powerful Shopping/Ecommerce Plugin Solutions For Wordpress for in depth review on speckyboy.com.

What’s your choice for wordpress security techniques to protect against attacks?

This question was asked by Autobots.

Answer from Joel Reyes :

That’s easy, stay up-to-date with your WordPress plugins, database, widgets, and versions. As newer versions come along, the old ones become easier to hack. The newer ones of course, are a bit harder since they haven’t been out long. So make sure you stay-to-date and you should be good.

How can i display more than one twitter feed on my wordpress blog?

This question was asked by Rollback999.

Answer from Autobots:

We do this by accessing the persons Twitter account RSS feed, then fetching it and embedding it on your site.
Replace the example RSS’s with the ones you’d like.

get_item_quantity(3);
$rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
?>

<?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo '
• No items.

';
else
// Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
Foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>

• <a href='get_permalink(); ?>'>
  get_title(); ?>
  

I have multiple authors on my site, how can i display their info?

This question was asked by Themans.

Answer from Joel Reyes :

If you want to display their info at the bottom or beginning of the post, then use this and place it in the corresponding area of your WordPress files. (i.e. Single.PHP or Comments.PHP)

Edit the author box as necessary.

Unanswered Questions

As per usual we need a little help with some of this weeks unanswered questions, can you help?

1. What’s the Easiest Way To Create a Countdown Widget?
2. How Can I Make Images Completely Remove Themeselves When They Failed to Load Properly?
3. What is the Best WordPress Plugin to Display Code?
4. How Do I Change/Add a Different Color to a Place Holder for My Search Box?

Thanks again, firstly to everyone who asked a question, but most importantly thanks to everyone that took the time to offer always helpful and useful answers.

For today’s news we showcase the best in web design navigation and menus for your inspiration.

40 Creative Navigation Menus

In this article from ProBlogDesign they have pulled together some of the best designed navigation bars (both horizontal and vertical) to help give you some ideas to enhance your own navigation.

40 Creative Navigation Menus

25 Mega Menus for Your Design Inspiration

Mega menus are a current popular web design trend that take drop down menus a bigger step forward in an attempt to make it easier for visitors to navigate through a larger site.

25 Mega Menus for Your Design Inspiration

A Showcase of Website Navigations with Serious Click Appeal

In this article you will find a showcase of websites that successfully achieve "Navigations with Serious Click Appeal" in a very stylish way.

A Showcase of Website Navigations with Serious Click Appeal

CSS Menu Samples

With over 100+ menus on display in this showcase, in every possible conceivable format (CSS, Javascript, Flash…), in almost every possible style (vertical, horizontal…), you are practically guaranteed to find inspiration.

CSS Menu Samples