WordPress is an ideal platform for building your own
portfolio, blog, or eCommerce site. It’s packed with all the basic tools you
need to build a professional-looking site. Plus, it has tools that can take
your web-building skills to an even higher level.
Get even more impressive results or add features to a
website that you might have thought could only be provided by extensive coding
or by a developer you can select among a large selection of WordPress plugins.
The only problem is this. When we speak of a large
selection, we’re not talking about a couple of hundred plugins. We’re talking
of more than 55,000.
Fortunately, you don’t need to look far to find the best
and most practical ones. Here are 8 of the very best for 2020, one or more of
which could resolve a nagging problem or put your websites on steroids.
A typical
plugin usually performs a specific task you need to have done, and if it’s a
premium plugin it usually does it well. If it’s free, it’s better yet.
The Brizy WordPress plugin does more than “a specific
taskâ€. You can use this flexible drag and drop builder to create a complete
website – at no cost to you.
Brizy is not intimidating to learn and it’s
intuitive and easy to work with.
You don’t need any coding skills. With Brizy
coding is not necessary.
You get 500+ design blocks, 40 popups and 150
layouts right out of the box to help you get things off to a quick start.
You can structure and build a page in minutes.
There’s plenty of helpful documentation and
video tutorials to help you if and when you should need it.
Download Brizy and get started today. Before you do, you
might want to scan the website to get a complete picture of what this premium
plugin can do for you.
Keeping up with the latest design trends is a challenge. It’s always been that way. But these days, changes come more frequently. This is thanks to the rapid pace of digital design technological advancements.
If it weren’t for the tools that allow us to keep pace, it would probably be a hopeless situation. The problem is, you still have to find those tools. The fact that they’re constantly flooding the market doesn’t make it easy. Most web designers don’t have the time or inclination to test out every new tool that appears over the horizon.
We’ve found 15 we consider the tops in their respective classes, and we’d like to share our findings with you. One or two of these top tools and resources should help you keep pace. You can also deliver better products than you ever thought possible.
Elementor is the industry’s best website builder. Simple, Powerful & Flexible. Now you can customize every detail without code. With over 2 million active installs and over 4,500 5-star reviews on WordPress, it is by far the most popular page editor out there. What Elementor does for you is to give you a solid website-building foundation on which you can create virtually anything, and do so  without complications, limitations, or constraints thanks to its super-clean code.
Elementor works with any theme and with any plugin. As such it gives you virtually unlimited design flexibility. It won’t slow down your site – a characteristic of all too many page builders. And, it’s powerful drag and drop editor enables you to quickly create pages and websites without ever having to resort to code.
You can dig into Elementor’s library of super useful widgets to build pages from scratch, or if you prefer, start with one of the 100+ pre-designed Elementor templates.
You’ll find a few nice surprises as well; like the Pop Up Builder, the Advanced Forms feature, and Scroll and Hover animations.
In short, with Elementor you can create pages and websites easily and in ways you never could before.
There are many software applications you can use for creating invoices, but few if any do as much of the work for you as AND CO from Fiverr. AND CO creates invoices for you automatically based on your project terms, contracts, and time tracking—all of which are available in the one app.
AND CO’s invoicing feature integrates perfectly with your project management workflow, enabling it to automatically create invoices when a project is completed or a milestone has been reached.
You’ll be alerted when clients view your invoices and when they’re paid, or when the system thinks it’s time for you to invoice again. Plus, you can set up an online ‘PayMe’ page to allow clients to pay you via credit card, ACH, and PayPal, and deposit the payments into your bank account. You can also set up recurring invoices so that clients who are on a subscription plan have their credit card charged automatically on a recurring basis.
AND CO is an invoicing software that lets you spend less time on invoicing and more time on doing the work you love. Read the rest of this entry »
WordPress plugins provide an ideal way to add and extend functionality to WordPress. There are thousands of free and premium plugins available from the WordPress directory. The website niche your website represents determines the plugins you want to use. There are some that every website or blog designer will need to have.
The premium plugins you pay for will generally come with greater support. They are much more likely to be compatible with other plugins.
The top tools and plugins like the ones we’ve listed here can take your website designs to the next level. They can translate into more satisfied users, more conversions, and less work for you.
If you own a business that relies heavily on a clientele that calls in for appointments and you want to streamline your booking process, give your business a boost, and realize an almost immediate ROI, Amelia appointment booking for WordPress is for you.
Amelia is designed for health and fitness clubs, gyms, beauty parlors, and spas and salons; or any other businesses where clients and customers call in to make bookings and appointments.
Managing a large number of bookings can be time-consuming and error-prone when done manually. With Amelia, reservations can be made 24/7 and made to fit your employee’s skills and schedules. Amelia takes care of cancellations and re-scheduling, sends out reminders of pending appointments, and customers are never placed on hold when making a booking.
This booking and appointment automation tool will save you a ton of time and is guaranteed to keep your clients and customers happy.
While a given website design may not involve data tables or charts, if you’re a professional web designer, or even fairly new at the game, you’ll eventually have to have a table/chart-building capability in your toolbox.
And, if large amounts of complex data are involved and you need to create a table or chart that is responsive, interactive, easily editable, accurate, and a definite attention-getter, a DIY approach probably won’t cut it, nor will most table-building tools currently on the market.
This is where wpDataTables shines – 20,000 happy customers can’t be wrong! This premier WordPress plugin is by far the best of its type as it provides you with an all-in-one solution for managing and presenting large amounts of data. wpDataTables fully supports MySQL, MS SQL, SQL database, and all other common data types and formats.
Insofar as presenting your data is concerned, you can fully customize a table’s design. Besides, wpDataTables’ conditional formatting features enable you to color code and highlight essential information at the columns, row, and individual cell level. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s that wonderful time of the year. We get together with family and we eat too much. We also come across some deals in WordPress space that are simply too good to pass up.
You don’t have to stand in line (did we mention it’s supposed to rain) for hours on end either. After this, you barely have energy enough to rush to the aisle with your Black Friday deal.
Are you looking for deals for designers and developers? You can get the deal you want from wherever you happen to be sitting. This is a deal that includes tools and discounted themes, classes, and more.
Any of the following could be just what you need to get you settled firmly into the holiday spirit!
Elementor’s plans are already a good deal. At 25% off, we’re talking about a very, very good deal when you take into account everything this web design tool has to offer. That’s your Black Friday bonus. There’s another bonus you get with Elementor that isn’t tied to any special promotion.
You’ll appreciate that extra bonus when you start creating websites with Elementor and find you can build what you want without getting “stuck†in a theme’s design. You’ll never have to write code either.
Elementor features crazy-fast performance, it works with any template, and you get all the benefits of live, frontend editing. Your workflow will speed up significantly, and even more so it you opt for the Pro version with its visual form builder, form integrations, menu builder, and custom CSS features. Elementor is developer friendly too!
The basic plan for this open source page builder is free, but this is a great time to take advantage of one of Elementor’s souped-up plans which you can get at a discount. Read the rest of this entry »
Taking appointments might seem like a minor task. After all, it’s simply a matter of picking up the phone or answering an email.
The reality is that doing so takes a lot of your available time. It also takes away your business’s money. In addition, managing those appointments can take up even more time and cost you more money.
Manually taking and managing appointments can also be a source of problems. Appointments can’t be made during non-business hours. If you happen to be away from the phone it could cause a potential client to lose patience and look elsewhere.
Another problem — people sometimes forget an appointment.
Put a flawless automated booking specialist like Amelia in place. Like that, you can avoid all these problems.
1. What is Amelia?
Once you install Amelia, you’ll wish you had something like it years ago. Amelia is the brainchild of Code Canyon’s best-selling wpDataTables’ Elite Author. The latter is credited with more than 17,000 licenses sold.
It was created with businesses in mind that depend on bookings and appointments. These are businesses like coaches, consulting firms, gyms and fitness clinics. Spas and beauty parlors are also in this list.
For it to be put to use in businesses like these the system must be easy to install and require no special training. That’s precisely the case with Amelia, and once set up, it’s 100% automated.
Clients can book appointments 24/7 from their computers and smartphones. They will be able to do so with just a few clicks. You will be in a position to view and manage your and your team’s appointments. You can set your own calendar from one impeccably organized place.Read the rest of this entry »
The only thing certain about technology is that it is constantly changing. The same is true with Internet design. The preferred way to present information has become through graphics. This trend is giving graphic designers a field day. However, at the same time, it requires them to constantly invest in new tools and resources. In the end, they have to keep up with the competition.
The good news is that most of these new tools are both easy to work with and affordable. So, this might be a perfect time to shed some old favorites that aren’t really getting the job done. See what 2018 has to offer.
Mason allows you to build, edit, and manage your front-end experiences from a central platform—all without the need for code. It enables your team to do the same, thereby speeding up collaboration and making it more efficient.
Once you’ve incorporated a Mason feature into a website or app, downstream clients, developers, or marketers can edit it when needed, avoiding the need to initiate a new development cycle. Since these features, consisting of pre-coded blocks, are designed and developed with reusability in mind, you’ll never find yourself wasting time reinventing the wheel.
Mason offers solutions for experiences ranging from user login to password reset to social sign-in to content feeds and more—front-end experiences virtually every web product needs. And, they’re insanely secure: Data is sent directly from a client’s server to your own via encrypted transactions, so you and the client are the only ones that will see your data.
The pre-packaged solutions Mason provides address common product requirements and are completely customizable; create a fully branded login flow and deploy it, live inside your app, in literal minutes. In addition, this modular content will make page management much simpler for every page you create. Mason’s modular content is a win for you, for your team, and for your users. Try it free today!
Working from a single platform can have its advantages but doing so is not without limitations. Since Mobirise is an offline builder you’re not tied down to a platform, you have total control over your work, and you can host your site anywhere you choose to.
To see what Mobirise can do for you, simply visit the site and download your copy. It’s free for both personal and commercial use. Everything is drag and drop with no coding required, and since Mobirise is built around a Bootstrap 4 or Google AMP framework, your websites and apps will be lightning fast and 100% mobile friendly.
This is an ideal tool for creating small or medium-size websites, portfolios, landing pages, and promo sites. Since it’s so intuitive to use, it’s perfect for non-techies as well, for anyone who prefers a visual approach to design, and for fast prototyping. Read the rest of this entry »
Success breeds success. It’s an adage, but recent scientific studies have shown that once you achieve some success, more is apt to follow. That’s also true of WordPress, the premier website and blog creating platform.
WordPress’s popularity continues to grow. More web design entrepreneurs and companies are turning out more themes and plugins. WordPress happily supports these.
You might even be tempted to say that WordPress has become too successful. This can happen when you realize there are thousands of themes and plugins to choose from. Some are better suited to your needs than others, but you really don’t have the time or patience to try them all.
We’ve chosen 9 of the best on the market to help you out. Pick one, two, or all nine. Be prepared to be amazed at the design features you can easily incorporate into your website.
The data management tasks involved in building a well-structured, easy-to-comprehend table or chart can be formidable. This is especially so when you’re dealing with large amounts of complex data. You not only need to know what data to present, and how to present it, but how to come up with a result that is precisely what users need and are looking for.
wpDataTables is a best-selling WordPress plugin that does all the difficult work for you and does so in minutes instead of hours or even days. You should be prepared to be amazed at the power and flexibility this premier plugin brings to the table. wpDataTables accepts data from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats, and produces colorful, responsive, and easily maintainable tables and charts without any need for coding on your part.
This is a must-have plugin if you work with large amounts of statistical, scientific, or financial data, if you have a product inventory or catalog to manage, or if you simply have large amounts of data you need to keep organized.
LayerSlider is a premium multi-purpose animation platform that can do much more than simply add pleasing slider effects to your websites or blogs. With this versatile plugin, you cannot only create sliders from a variety of different layouts, but you can generate slideshows, animated popups and page blocks, image galleries, and even landing pages and complete websites.
LayerSlider is device friendly, so your image galleries, sliders, slideshows, etc., will be displayed correctly on desktops, tablets, and smartphones alike. Insofar as slide layouts are concerned, you can choose among full width, full size, hero scene, and OS native fullscreen.
Thanks to the visual drag and drop editor, neither coding nor special technical skills are needed to put into play everything LayerSlider offers. You can expect excellent support, extensively-detailed documentation, and regular updates over the product’s lifetime. Read the rest of this entry »
Beautiful web pages aren’t always enough to keep a visitor engaged. In fact, if a site’s UI and UX aren’t carefully designed, visitors aren’t apt to stay around for long.
Consequently, there’s a huge and ever-growing demand for UX designers. Salaries that are in keeping with the demand make the thought of diving into UX an attractive one.
If you’ve already gone this route, you need to understand the importance of having the proper UX tools. You need to know what they are, and what they do. These tools include support collaboration, prototyping, interactive design, and user testing.
User flow diagrams make up an important piece of the puzzle. So does the ability to tweak specific design elements. These can be changed during the design phase and after product deployment.
Here are 7Â top UX tools, any one of which can make your work life a lot easier.
Mason’s simple visual interface enables you to design real digital and software features without having to resort to building mockups or prototypes, and the overhead expenses they sometimes entail when handed over to engineering for comments and feedback.
Mason allows you implement your design exactly as you built it, all without a single line of code. The QA process involved in ensuring that the final product matches the design is eliminated, and you can make edits and changes immediately via the Mason platform, and watch them go live in real-time.
This is a radically different way to build, modify, deploy, and maintain desktop and mobile features. Radically doesn’t mean complex or difficult either. Mason’s creators have followed the best design practices and solutions. Mason’s feature-building process is straightforward, and you’ll realize significant savings in time and overhead expenses, and the team collaboration process will be smoother and more efficient and effective.
Another of Mason’s benefits is that it doesn’t lock you into specific platforms or hosting environments. You can simply work with a tech stack that makes the most sense to you.
Most of you would agree that designers find it difficult to tell a story with their designs, and to communicate their design thinking process to convey the message they want. Not anymore. Overflow is the first-ever user flow diagramming tool created specifically for designers.
It gives designers and product managers the flexibility to present their ideas in an impactful way, by navigating between their screen designs comfortably and focusing on the details when needed. Overflow is a cross-platform tool that integrates seamlessly with the most popular design tools, allowing designers to design, present, share & print their user flows, all in one place.
So in other words, Overflow makes designers look good and keeps their audience captivated so that they can follow the story throughout the entire user journey.
Overflow is currently available in private beta. Check out the above link for early access. Read the rest of this entry »
Whenever one needs to spend excessive time juggling tasks, deadlines, etc., it’s time wasted. This is irrespective of the professional activity. The same goes for any team leader or a freelance designer.
There are better ways to go about managing these tasks. These ways that are faster, more efficient, and far less prone to error.
Project management and team collaboration areas have seen technology come to the rescue. The help comes in time and task tracking, reminders, or to-do list management. This is beside numerous other tools.
You can always hire someone to help you stay organized, meet deadlines, and track expenses. Thereby, you can free up more design time and free time for you.
But, that comes at a significant cost.
A better approach is to invest in a tool that automates everything for a very affordable price. Just like one or more of the following.
monday.com is a team management tool that initially targeted startups and tech companies and was designed to accommodate teams of any size from a pair of freelancers collaborating with one another to thousands collaborating around the globe.
Because of its reputation for ease of use, transparency, and communication and collaborative features, it was quickly discovered by non-tech companies. Today this team management tool, which was until recently marketed under the dapulse brand, serves more than 22,000 teams across 200 different verticals, of which 70% lie outside the tech sector.
monday.com makes it easy to build and manage workflows that are customized to fit your exact needs; so, you’ll never have to adjust your workflows to satisfy the tool. It’s “cheetah fast†so you never have to wait no matter how complex the project or how many projects you are tracking, and if you and your team like colorful visuals that make it ever so easy to understand what’s happening, what has happened, and what’s in store, monday.com is spot on. Read the rest of this entry »
Creating a website that gives its visitors exactly what they are looking for is not that easy. It often involves a certain amount of trial and error, the use of analytics, and other approaches.
Sometimes, the difficulties you experience in your work to please visitors are not what you think. It happens that they are not based on the website’s content and functionality. These difficulties might be based on content and/or functionality that isn’t there.
That’s where these 10 Top WordPress Plugins come in. As far as adding important information or functionality is concerned, they deliver. They make the “difficult or nearly impossible†easy. They enable you to provide an outstanding UX, as opposed to a UX that is just “OKâ€. Moreover, they can save you hours of head-scratching, coding, and trial and error as well.
Picking one or more will be money well spent (some are free, others offer free trial periods). This is a win-win situation for you and your website visitors.
There are more than a few things to like about wpDataTables, but they can be summed up in a few words. This WordPress plugin makes it possible to create charts and tables from large amounts of complex data in a short period of time. The charts and tables are easy to understand, easy to update and maintain, responsive, and colorful when color can serve a useful and practical purpose.
wpDataTables has become so widely used, and so popular, that web designers have been known to make the switch to WordPress just so they can use this plugin in their design work.
You can of course, create simple charts and tables based on small amounts of data as well since wpDataTables is meant for anyone who is looking for a better way to create this content. You will find this plugin particularly useful when you have a need to build a chart or table based on volumes of statistical, financial, or scientific data, or data related to large parts inventories or product catalogs. Read the rest of this entry »
