Quick Tip: Create a Simple Audio Player Bar in Adobe Illustrator
In this quick tip you will learn how to create a simple audio player bar. This is mostly about the basics of pixel perfect vector shape building techniques. We’ll start with a simple rectangles and the Rounded Corners effect. Next, we’ll use some Offset and Pathfinder techniques to create the highlights. Finally, some masking/blending techniques and the Drop Shadow effect will help us add the final touches.
Vintage Vector Design Workflow: Creating a Retro Flyer Design
This tutorial will cover the process of creating a vintage inspired retro flyer design. There are four main areas of concentration to achieve this look and feel: color, type, character and texture. We’ll review a complete vintage vector design workflow to create this retro flyer design. Let’s get started.
Laurie Rosenwald: How To Make Mistakes On Purpose
Just because you missed that awesome conference, doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! This weekend we’re sharing an inspiring talk by the creator of the Illustrator, Laurie Rosenwald at PSFK NYC 2012.
Study: 60% of Websites Missing Vital Contact Information
According to a recent study by SMB DigitalScape & BIA Kelsey almost two-thirds of websites are missing contact details.
This is a worrying figure – how are you supposed to get new customers if they have no way of contacting you?
The study surveyed 1 million SMB websites from the US and here’s what they found:
- 6 out of 10 SMB websites in the U.S. are missing either a local or toll-free telephone number on the home page to contact the business.
- 74.7% of SMB websites lack an email link on their home page for consumers to contact the business.
- 65.7% of SMB websites lack a form-fill option to enable consumers to request information.
And they fair even worse when it comes to social media:
- Only 19.5% of SMB websites have a link to a Facebook page
- Even fewer have links to Twitter and LinkedIn.
- 93.3% of SMB websites are not mobile compatible and will not render successfully on mobile devices or smartphones.
Gone are the days when a potential customer would open up their Yellow Pages to find your phone number, customers now turn to Google and more importantly your website. If they have no way of contacting you, then they will not hesitate to head straight to your competitor.
Charles Laughlin, Senior Vice President and Program Director at BIA/Kelsey, puts it quite bluntly:
Consumers are growing to expect certain levels of SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) functionality.
If SMBs don’t catch up with consumers, national players could gain a critical advantage over local independent providers.
Here’s my tip: every local business website should have a clear phone number and full address. Every online business should have a clear email address and / or a contact form.
If you’re website doesn’t include adequate contact details, then it might be time to get your phone number and email on there at the very least.
WordPress 3.3.2 (and WordPress 3.4 Beta 3)
WordPress 3.3.2 is available now and is a security update for all previous versions.
Three external libraries included in WordPress received security updates:
- Plupload (version 1.5.4), which WordPress uses for uploading media.
- SWFUpload, which WordPress previously used for uploading media, and may still be in use by plugins.
- SWFObject, which WordPress previously used to embed Flash content, and may still be in use by plugins and themes.
Thanks to Neal Poole and Nathan Partlan for responsibly disclosing the bugs in Plupload and SWFUpload, and Szymon Gruszecki for a separate bug in SWFUpload.
WordPress 3.3.2 also addresses:
- Limited privilege escalation where a site administrator could deactivate network-wide plugins when running a WordPress network under particular circumstances, disclosed by Jon Cave of our WordPress core security team, and Adam Backstrom.
- Cross-site scripting vulnerability when making URLs clickable, by Jon Cave.
- Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in redirects after posting comments in older browsers, and when filtering URLs. Thanks to Mauro Gentile for responsibly disclosing these issues to the security team.
These issues were fixed by the WordPress core security team. Five other bugs were also fixed in version 3.3.2. Consult the change log for more details.
Download WordPress 3.3.2 or update now from the Dashboard → Updates menu in your site’s admin area.
WordPress 3.4 Beta 3 also available
Our development of WordPress 3.4 development continues. Today we are proud to release Beta 3 for testing. Nearly 90 changes have been made since Beta 2, released 9 days ago. (We are aiming for a beta every week.)
This is still beta software, so we don’t recommend that you use it on production sites. But if you’re a plugin developer, a theme developer, or a site administrator, you should be running this on your test environments and reporting any bugs you find. (See the known issues here.) If you’re a WordPress user who wants to open your presents early, take advantage of WordPress’s famous 5-minute install and spin up a secondary test site. Let us know what you think!
Version 3.4 Beta 3 includes all of the fixes included in version 3.3.2. Download WordPress 3.4 Beta 3 or use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.
Google to Become an Answers Engine in the Long Run
The Google algorithm is reported to be undergoing another major overhaul that will transform Google search into more than just a conventional search engine.
Google is trying to fix its shortcoming in the modern day technology as well as continue its dominance in the search market.
Google’s top search executive Amit Singhal outlined the company’s vision for search that will soon take it beyond just keyword-search result. In other words, a search on Google will not only understand your question but also give you results with extra information relating to your query.
For example : If today you ask Google about “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” it will give you a very good result based on the keywords in the phrase and sites with significant authority on those words and even word groupings. However in the future you can expect Google to not only answer your lake question but also tell you that a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.
Over the next few months Google will be incorporating a technology called the semantic Web search (which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words such as differentiating between the car brand ‘Jaguar’ and the animal ‘jaguar) to enhance the quality of its search results by actually trying to understand the meaning of the search query. With Semantic search Google will be able to match associate different words/queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things.
While it is known that a Google user will soon see more relevant results to his search query, it is still not clear what impact would these changes have on website rankings. Google has not yet given any new advice to webmasters, I suspect they will have to wait until the changes are rolled out.
My guess is that webmasters can expect a significant change in the way Google examines their site before ranking it in search results.
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