Guided Creative

WordPress on A VPS

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WordPress on A VPS

I remember having to make a huge decision about my websites a few years ago. I was using a shared hosting account that supports multiple domain names to host a number of my blogs and websites.

The service was great, but the performance of a shared hosting service could no longer keep up with the traffic I was generating. Naturally, there were two options I could consider: a larger reseller hosting package or a virtual private server (VPS). I had no experience in running a server of my own at the time, so setting up a VPS hosting was a daunting task nonetheless. Fast forward a few years, and I now have several VPS hosting accounts running and supporting hundreds of WordPress blogs and websites without a glitch. If you are in the position I was in a few years ago, these next few tips will help you get started.

Reseller Hosting Vs VPS Hosting

Reseller hosting is great for hosting a large number of sites, but you still don’t have the full control offered by VPS hosting. The performance level of reseller hosting is also higher than the standard shared hosting services; again, you can squeeze more performance out of VPS hosting in most cases.

You can also go into several levels of VPS, such as managed/unmanaged/fully managed, like the options found here, which can be a godsend if you’d like more than your average WHM interface! So, which one should you go for? Based on my experience, VPS is still the better choice for several good reasons. First of all, there are managed VPS hosting services to choose from. Managed VPS allows you to have experienced server administrators set up and maintain the VPS while you focus on the more important matter: managing your websites.

They are more expensive than unmanaged VPS services, but you get so much more performance-wise. VPS is also much more scalable than reseller hosting. Similar to shared hosting, you can only upgrade a reseller hosting account so much before you hit the hosting company’s limits. With VPS, you can always add more processor cores, RAM and disk space at any point in time. You can even reduce the size of your VPS hosting to save money if you don’t need the extra resources. Lastly, even unmanaged VPS is not so difficult to manage now that there are a lot of tutorials, resources and pre-made server images to use.

This brings me to my next point….

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Old school print beats digital hands down

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Old school print beats digital hands down

Print has staying power.

Marketing professionals have always strived to create something tangible that will have staying power, and nothing else can rival print in this. It’s tangible, physical and real. What now seems like many moons ago, there was a trend around creating ‘sticky’ websites that increase the average time spent on a website. If a website reached the sticky heights of over 5 minutes on site, it had marketing teams jumping for joy*.

Surely this cannot compare with a brochure that can stay around audiences for a significantly longer span of time, often days, weeks or months?

In fact, new research conducted by the DMA into consumers’ attitudes to brands’ printed marketing, called ‘From letterbox to inbox 2013’, found that nearly half those surveyed said they had retained printed items, with 17% saying they did so regularly.

Print is more engaging

We’re all seeking to engage our audiences with our beautifully crafted adverts, blog posts, e-books, free downloads, free tutorials and videos. Print has the power to engage audiences for longer, and according to a Forbes article, “Consumers are more engaged when reading printed material, unlike websites, which are often skimmed in as little as a 15-second visit.”

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Tricks for better WordPress performance

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Tricks for better WordPress performance

WordPress is the favourite blogging platform of our time, which helps us, spread our opinion web-wide.

The success of our posts depends on the quality of their performance, but unfortunately, there are many occasions when users are not maximizing the potential of this platform to their advantage.
It may sound like a challenging task, but we assure you it is an easy operation. For this purpose, we gathered a list of 10 useful tricks that will boost WordPress performance, even when executed by novice and inexperienced bloggers.
Many would agree that the main problem of WordPress is that it is a dynamic script that requires page loading all the time. The execution of queries can slow down performance or even cause a server crash, assuming the site experiences high traffic.
The truth is that you have to keep an eye on the performance at every moment and adjust your blogging settings accordingly.
As complicated as it seems, WordPress performance can be tackled with many tools and methods, from cache paging, leeching prevention, or file compression, to database optimization. All you need is a bit of time; and eventually a piece of professional advice.

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Spicing up Twitter background – Online Tools

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Spicing up Twitter background - Online Tools

1.    Free Twitter Designer:

This tool is extremely useful in creating Twitter backgrounds for free, and they will make you look and feel the same as they have been designed by any professional graphic designer.

Visit Free Twitter Designer: http://freetwitterdesigner.com/

2.    Twitter Background Checker:

You can change your profile outlook with this background checker, no matter for smaller or superior resolutions.

Visit Twitter Background Checker: http://twtbg.me/

3.    Twitlay:

This tool is useful in generating customized Twitter backgrounds and layouts for free.

Visit Twitlay: http://twitlay.com/

4.    Twilk:

This application will be putting your friend’s face on the layout as a background of your Twitter page.

Visit Twilk: http://twilk.com/

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7 PSD Profile UI Templates

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7 PSD Profile UI Templates

Here you can find 7 free PSD profile UI with different styles to meet different users’ needs.

1# Designed with a score meter

2# You can show name, skills, description, followers, following, events, follow button and do not forget the small green badge

3# Featuring big image, name, following badge and big icons

4# Background image, profile avatar, views, comments, like statistics, hire button, social icons, location, name and description

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Color scheme designer – Online tool

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Color scheme designer - Online tool

You can choose between mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic and accented analogic colour combinations. After Colorschemedesigner gives you a scheme, you can adjust it.

Adjustment is available for saturation/brightness and contrast. You can do that manually or choose from the drop-down menu (more, less, min, max contrast, dark saturated, pastel, dark pastel, pale dark pastel, almost greys, almost greys with colour accents and a few more varieties).

You will get colour codes, and you can export the scheme as HTML+CSS, XML, Text, ACO (Photoshop palette) or GPL (GIMP palette).

In real-time, you have a scheme preview. You can also get a preview of the scheme in a dark or light website template to see the colour scheme you make in real action.

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Flowplayer – Flash Video Player

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Play Button Audio Video Media Technology Concept

Flowplayer is very convenient for streaming since it uses advanced streaming technologies such as clustering, bandwidth detection, and secure streaming.

Different servers and technologies are supported, such as HTTP streaming, RTMP streaming with Adobe Flash Media Server, Wowza and Red5, and pseudostreaming with Apache, ASP, .NET, Nginx and Lighttpd.

Installation, configuration and skinning processes are very well explained in textual and with codes and demo videos examples.

On their website, you will find several tutorials, too. There are tutorials for Encoding videos With Mencoder For Flowplayer, Generating thumbnails from video files with FFMPEG For Flowplayer, Encoding videos With FFMPEG For Flowplayer, Introduction To Streaming Servers, and Playing MPG, AVI and MOV files with Flowplayer.

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Browser Compatibility Checks – how to do it

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Browser Compatibility Checks- how to do it

This somehow leads to a straightforward, however critical query, which are the most frequently used browsers used by visitors. According to statistics, the most frequently used web browsers are Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, and now the graph for Google Chrome is picking up gradually. Nevertheless, the figures vary from website to website and are particularly dependent upon the niche as well.

Google Analytics can be used to get a better idea about the demographics from your website’s metrics.
Once you have figured out the most commonly used web browsers, you need to make sure that your website is displaying the contents properly while being compatible with all of them.

However, you cannot install all the commonly used browsers on your system, but you can always make use of such web tools and services that are useful in determining how your website looks with multiple browsers.

You can even run a compatibility test online, and for that, you can make use of numerous services; some of them have been highlighted as under;

Browsershots:

It is one of the most popular and freely available cross-platform for checking and testing the compatibility of browsers, particularly for web designers. You can have screenshots of your web design and how it will look with different browsers. This service has a database of the most commonly used browsers therefore, you can easily check for any of them along with Operating system platforms too.

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Spooner Free Graphics

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Spooner free graphics

On blog.spoongraphics.co.uk under the Freebies category,  Chris Spooner, freelance graphic designer presents Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop tutorials, articles around the subject of design and a bunch of free vector and resource giveaways.

Among Spooner’s freebies, you will find:

  • 270+ high-res rough and grungey Photoshop brushes,
  • free vector graphics pack – Doodles and Sketches,
  • five genuine carbon fiber textures for Photoshop,
  • free ninja monkey desktop calendar,
  • eight free cute and simple Twitter bird vector graphics,
  • free high-res watercolour Photoshop brushes sets,
  • free hand drawn doodle icon set for bloggers,
  • three free illustrated scary zombie vector graphics,
  • free high resolution brown paper textures in 300 dpi quality,
  • and lots of more free graphics for your websites and blogs.

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Bittbox Free Graphic Resource

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Bittbox free graphic resource

Jay Hilgert’s bittbox.com is a great resource to designers, particular to web designers. Jay give away the best quality stuff on bittbox to help designers everywhere.

There are Adobe Photoshop free textures, brushes, Photoshop and Illustrator patterns, backgrounds, vector images, packs.

Jay also posts workflow tips about Photoshop and Illustrator to help designers work faster. You can learn Saving Patterns in Illy, Pixelated Fonts, about Dynamic Burberry Text in Illustrator, there is Photoshop tip for the layers palette for rasterizing shape layers combining layer effects at the same time, find out why your brushes look pixelated, and much more.

On Bittbox you will find 35 Free Abstract Illustrator Brushes, Grunge music, Fur, Tree bark, Rainy day, Light grunge, Concrete and lots of more different textures.

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Doc to PDF – Online Tool

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Doc to PDF - Online tool

With free tool you can convert max 2MB Word, PowerPoint , Excell or Publisher document to PDF file. It will compress bitmap images in document to 85% jpg.

Use common fonts in documents you want to convert because Pdfonline does not embed the fonts used in original document in the PDF file. PDFonline will just include descriptions of the Fonts into the PDF output.

Fonts will display well only on computers that have particular fonts installed. If user doesn’t have the right font, the PDF reader software will automatically select the closest font types to use.

Web to PDF part of website is a free service that allows your website visitors to quickly save your webpage as PDF files.

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The best sites to search free pictures and icons

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The best sites to search free pictures and icons

Everystockphoto:

This website offers a combination of free images plus licensed one. It takes images from different images sources. So, if you are planning to use images, you have to check whether the publisher has given you the license to use it free or not.

Visit: http://www.everystockphoto.com/

Ginipic:

Ginipic is a new player and this has taken the image searching to the new level. This not only searches for the images but also different search engines and websites which can offer pictures collection.

Visit: http://www.ginipic.com/

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20 Must-Have Massive GUI kits

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20 Must-Have Massive GUI kits

1. Impressionist UI

offers you an opportunity to download not only valuable web elements but also set of 25 icons

2. Media Black UI Kit

satisfies every needs for creating dark website design.

3.  Balio Web UI Kit.

Vivid color palette and bunch of elements make it suitable for any sort of web design projects.

4. Futurico

is a massive giveaway of graphic components with the predominant green color.

5.  Apollo GUI set

is claimed to be the biggest GUI ever, but do not be fooled, free version of the set allows you to use only 70 elements.

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