Tips & Tutorials

There was a time when houses had one computer, one phone line, 10 channels, and no Candy Crush Saga. When the Internet was but a little baby, the job of web designers was simple: develop a website for an Internet browser (probably Internet Explorer), and make it friendly to the keyboard and mouse interface. Bandwidth was low, so graphic assets were small and text design was about as simple as it could get.

Seemingly everyone has access to the Internet these days. What's in question is no longer the availability of a Wi-Fi connection, but how and why we're surfing the web. What do people want to see? How can we develop our website to best suit their needs and wants?

Navigating a small business is tricky, to say the least. The old adage "if it were easy, everyone would do it," comes to mind. Entrepreneurship is a challenge not only due to the investment of personal and professional resources but because of the fact that you, the business owner, are often the accountant, project manager, marketer, and web designer, all at the same time. Tough sledding for even the heartiest business-person.

As content floods the minds of casual and hardcore Internet users alike, competition for attention has become fierce. Google "productivity", "recipes", or "jewelry" and you will find literally thousands upon thousands of sites proffering their wares and wisdom, leading inevitably to the question of whom to trust.

If you haven't read our previous blogpost about the demo toolbars yet, you should take a look at the Demo toolbars - overview and tips to improve yours. It will give you an insight on the ongoing trends and deliberations on improving our demo toolbar.

Important changes we tried to incorporate in our new demo toolbar :

• Reverse listing pattern : Earlier we had template name with rollover thumbnail, now its thumbnails with rollover template info.
• User-friendly filters : Easy to filter based on categories, years or tags.
• RESPONSIVE : It had to be responsive.

Keeping the intro short, let me walk you through the upcoming demo toolbar :

As one of the top Joomla template providers in the industry for the last 7 years, JoomlArt.com has changed the demo site presentation at least 5 times: starting from a very simple demo toolbar without any fancy animations, graphics to an extreme sophisticated toolbar including cool animation, screenshots and intro texts.

From the recent experience, we have had the urge for a simple generic design, which would compliment with the rest of our current design and make it a global top bar across the site. We were actually inspired by the way Google updated its top bar and even Mashable had a similar simple one as well in which helped us to update our demo toolbar like what it is now.

As a JoomlArt Moderator and Support Team Member, I frequently see questions and issues within the Community Forum and Support Tickets from Members with regard to some having difficulty to successfully perform a QUICKSTART INSTALLATION. Many users simply want to either replicate a virtual clone of a template's demo showcase, or have just certain aspects of their site to look/function "just like the demo."

There are many available tools to help make web development projects – such as modifying and customizing your JoomlArt Template based websites - quicker and more productive. Aside from a handy text editor like Notepad++ or WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, you can find plenty of FREE tools and utilities that can greatly increase development speed, reduce testing time, and improve quality of the output.

The tools described below are a variety of utilities, optimizers, and testing tools aimed towards helping developers create websites more efficiently.

This is a real good freebie provided by our friends from OSTraining.com. They agreed to let us show you the following video tutorial which explains how to properly style modules. This video is just one unit belonging to the very comprehensive "Joomla Template Class" series accessible only for OSTraning members.

If you are interested we will show you the full section 5, which contains:

Section 5: Advanced Template Design Principles

• Module Styles
• Advanced Joomla CSS
• Template Parameters
• Template Overrides