Web Design

A publication about web design

Email Marketing with Constant Contact

Jan 7

Posted by El Jefe in Business | No Comments

Constant Contact is hands down the leader in email marketing for small businesses.  Let me just say this is a must have for building a loyal customer base and increasing revenue.

Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain

FREE 60-Day Trial. No risk. No obligation. No credit card required.

  • Affordable, priced for small business. Discounts for nonprofits. Start for FREE!
  • Facebook, Twitter links make it easy to add social media to your email marketing campaigns
  • Free personal coaching and support by phone, email, chat. and in person
  • Grow your email lists with our tools, secure email list storage
  • One-click editing — super easy to use, no tech skills required
  • Anti-Spam checker and high deliverability rates get your emails delivered
  • 400+ email templates, customize our HTML templates with your logo, colors, and photos
  • Track and see results, learn who opens and reads your emails, which links they click on

Creating an email newsletter just got super-easy — one-click editing tool!

  • Use the step-by-step Email Wizard to create your email newsletter
  • Create and send emails on your iPhone or iPod Touch with QuickView
  • Add your colors and logos to one of our 400+ email templates
  • Our editing tool makes customizing your newsletters a snap — one-click editing with aformatting toolbar that follows you down the page;click-n-drag image editing to move or resize pictures; more fonts and font sizes than ever before!
  • Bring your news and promotions to life with pictures– store 5 at a time for FREE
  • Promote your social media pages in your emails – insert links to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
  • Use the new Auto-Tweet feature to automatically post your emails to your Twitter feed
  • Share your message on social media sites with our new Social Share feature — and drive more business
  • Schedule welcome emails or commonly sent messages with an Email Autoresponder

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v8 JavaScript Engine, for the Core

Jan 1

Posted by El Jefe in JavaScript | No Comments

The V8 JavaScript engine is an open source JavaScript engine developed by Google in Denmark and shipping with the Google Chrome browser.

V8 increases performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code before executing it, rather than to a bytecode or interpreting it. Further performance increases were achieved by employing optimization techniques such as inline caching. With these features, JavaScript applications running within V8 have an effective speed comparable to a compiled binary.

The garbage collector of V8 is a generational stop-the-world collector. The V8 assembler is based on the Strongtalk assembler.

You can find more information here:

Check out node.js too… Node’s goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In the “hello world” web server example, many client connections can be handled concurrently. Node tells the operating system (through epoll, kqueue, /dev/poll, or select) that it should be notified when a new connection is made, and then it goes to sleep. If someone new connects, then it executes the callback. Each connection is only a small heap allocation.

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Learn CSS Online

Jun 29

Posted by El Jefe in Web Design | Comments off

Web design might not be the most accessible area to everyone, but CSS and HTML can be very useful, and these are two parts of coding which are really easy. I mean to change the color of your font you just need to type: “color:red”, does it get easier than that?

Well actually, it gets harder but it’s worth taking a look, since you can customize everything from your blog to your Google Docs documents with a tiny bit of CSS knowledge.  Let’s take a look at where you learn css online free and get CSS tutorials for beginners.

W3Schools

W3Schools is a great site. They have lots of tutorials from HTML to PHP and you can be sure that everything you read is up to standards since the site is maintained by the W3C, responsible for the web standards of today.

The CSS lessons are pretty detailed and will take you through most of what you need to know, but since this is more of a technical page you will see less examples than elsewhere and the examples they do have are a bit constrained.

If you already know some CSS though this is a great reference source.

Tizag

I come across this website a lot when looking up things and I had a look at their CSS tutorials, which I found slightly better structured than W3School’s. The basic information is the same, but if you are an absolute beginner you might want to start here.

Tizag in my eyes is a bit less formal. It seems to me that their examples are closer to real life and the tone is friendlier. There are also helpful tutorials on many other languages like HTML and MySQL, so if you liked the CSS bit you can stay on for the same quality in other languages.

CSS Zen Garden

This site is very different from the tutorial sites I mentioned before. On CSS Zen Garden you can put your knowledge to the test or learn from the code written by others. The whole idea is that there is one static and unchangeable HTML file and you have to create a separate look for it using only CSS.

You can upload your work and it will be showcased, and you can download others’ files to take a look at how they did this and that. This is really useful because I myself learned way more by example than by actually learning. The same goes for WordPress templates – if you like one, download it and take a peek in style.css to see how things are done.

CSS Play

CSS Play is a website in between Zen Garden and the tutorial sites because it shows off specific functionality in CSS and allows you to view the source code.

Instead of having a whole page or a whole site, you can take a look at examples of fly-out menus, opacity examples, IE specific workarounds and so on.

If you need a specific functionality and want to get in the know, this website might be the best place to start. It has a fair share of ads which can be a bit distracting, but the info there is solid, and a lot of times the code, or at least the method is very thoroughly explained.

Google

That’s right, plain old Google Search can be a great companion to learning CSS online and finding CSS tutorials for beginners. Aside from obviously being able to research things you need, you can also look at how specific CSS properties work. Don’t know what values “overflow” can have? Just type “css overflow” or “css overflow property” and the first result will tell you what you need to know.

The same goes for actually all programming languages, I use this for PHP and MySQL as well, and I don’t think the first result has ever failed me yet.

So there you are, no more excuses, it’s time to learn some CSS! You can add your own Google Docs templates, modify your WordPress templates, and do such a lot more, happy CSS-ing!

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