OpenCal – Impressive Online Appointment Scheduling App – 3 Accounts Giveaway

OpenCal LogoOpenCal, a powerful and shiny online appointment scheduling application, is giving away 3 Team Plan Accounts for 6 months ($39/month value) to WRD readers.

Details on joining the giveaway can be found at the bottom of this post. But before that:

What is OpenCal?

For many of us, appointments are a part of our business. Meeting with clients, partners, etc. And for some, appointments are the core of the business like consultants, professionals, health & beauty specialists, contractors, etc..

OpenCal is an impressive web application that makes booking appointments online (and offlline) easy and manageable.

Once you define your services and working hours, the application provides you a "Book Online Now" button which you can insert into your web pages, emails, craigslist listings, etc.

OpenCal - Online Appointment Scheduling

Users can click on that anytime, see the available + non-available spots, book an appointment themselves and cancel or re-schedule when needed (according to the rules you define).

The administrator is able to approve them automatically or manually, create and manage appointments via drag n' drop and export them to Outlook, iCal or other calendars if needed.

With the functionality offered, OpenCal ends up helping you keeping track of both your clients and staff. You can add notes to each client, get client-specific reports or export the full client list.

And for the staff, new ones can be added anytime and their bios + pictures can be uploaded for your clients to see.

OpenCal - Online Appointment Calendar

The service also has many upcoming improvements such as PayPal integration, Google calendar sync, business reports, and online marketing tools.

One last and handy feature is, if you don't have your own website, OpenCal provides you a customizable SEO friendly mini-website that includes the details of your business like your services, working hours, staff and the location (with Google Maps).

And, if you're a web designer, make sure to check out the OpenCal Partner Program for generating an extra revenue by integrating OpenCal into your client's websites

How to win the licenses?

In order to get a chance to win one of the 3 Team Plan Accounts for 6 months ($39/month value) from this online appointment scheduling software, just comment to this post and winners will be selected on 6th of October 2010 (1 week later) with the query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=1867 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck to everyone.

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The Importance Of Cross Browser Compatibility Of Your Website

When the internet was first introduced to us, we knew of only one type of web browser which was Internet Explorer. Website designing was much simpler during those days because you just had to ensure that the website worked perfectly with Internet Explorer. Today that is not the case, we have many website browsers such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Safari, NetScape, Google Chrome, etc. Each web browser has its own characteristic features. They respond to various website components and web design elements differently.

Unless you validate your website carefully with all the top browsers, your website visitors will have problems while visiting your website. Your visitors will be using different types of browsers and if your website does not work in one web browser or the other, then you will be losing a considerable amount of traffic depending on the popularity of web browser.

If you hire a professional website design company they will have cross browser compatibility test as one of the standard quality checks. They will ensure that your website is working fully in all the top browsers. Before hiring your website design company you will have to check whether your service provider will design a website that is cross browser compatible. Find a reliable website design company that will create a website with the highest usability index.

In case you are integrating a shopping cart in your website make sure that your shopping cart is tested in all the top browsers. Your website visitors should be able to complete the entire shopping cycle from all the top browsers without any problem. Every niche industry is saturated with competition and if your website or your shopping cart should have any problem, then customers have plenty of alternative options today. It is therefore important to ensure that your website visitors or your customers do not face any glitches in using your website or your shopping cart because they have used a different browser to access your website.

Unfortunately most website design customers are not aware of the importance of cross browser compatibility. Their ignorance costs them a great deal of money in the form of loss of customers. Before you set out to get your website design project, spend time learning about the basics pertaining to online marketing and online buying and selling. This will save you from lot of issues, frustration and loss. This will also help you choose the right service provider. Lack of attention to the above details will make you lose the race.

You may have the most expensive website and still you may not enjoy success with your online business despite all your expensive marketing efforts and strategies. If this has been your story, check whether your website is compatible with all the browsers because this could be one of the top reasons for your failure. Your website design company should not charge you any thing extra for creating a website that is cross browser compatible.

WordPress for iPhone/iPad v2.6 Released

Attention Apple-gadget-owning WordPress users! Have you been using the WordPress iOS app for iPhone and iPad? Or maybe you tried it a while back and thought it wasn’t for you? Either way, the new release — v2.6 — will knock your socks off. Why? A bunch of reasons:

  • Video. Record, upload, attach, and play videos within the app. Yay for being able to catch your friends’ and co-workers’ most embarrassing shenanigans creative moments with iPhone video and publish them immediately for all the world to see on your WordPress site.
  • A total rewrite of the way local drafts are handled, to prevent the unintentional loss of your pending posts.
  • Autosave/post revisions. Bam! One of the “oh, thank goodness” features of the web app makes it into the iOS version.
  • Easier setup. Faster and easier process for adding your sites to the app.
  • Media Library. We’re gradually getting closer to the media management you’re used to in the web app.

There are also numerous bugfixes and performance enhancements in this release, so if you haven’t been using the app lately, you should consider giving it another try. I’m personally pretty excited to start using the iPhone version more often now that there are all these fixes and new features. Especially the video upload. You know, for those creative moments that make life fun. :)

You can read the full 2.6 release post on the WordPress for iOS blog, and can download v2.6 from iTunes/the app store. Happy mobile blogging!

* * *

Not an iPhone user? We’ve still got your on-the-go back! Check out the WordPress apps for Android, Blackberry, and Nokia (beta). They’re all 100% GPL, of course, and we’re always looking for contributors to the development projects, so check the blogs if you have mobile dev skills and want to get involved.

Lightweight JavaScript Slideshow – TinyFader

TinyFader is a slideshow script that auto-rotates any number of items inside an unordered list.

It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks and weights only 1.4kb.

TinyFader

The script can display not only images but any HTML content and can be browsed with prev-next buttons or with the help of pagination.

Using CSS, it is possible to change the look of the slideshow and there are several options for customizing how it functions like "whether the first slide will be displayed on load", "the slide will be resumed after being interrupted" and more.

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Pay Attention To Your Website Navigation

When you are designing your website or when you hire a website design company to get your website designed, make sure that your website has a well thought out navigation. Your website’s navigation plays a considerable role in the conversion rates. In a well designed website each page will have a definitive goal. Only when those goals are achieved you will be able to enjoy successful online presence. At times the goal of a certain page is to direct your visitors to a specific page for example order page or product information page because not all visitors from the search engines will land in the required page. Your website’s navigation plays vital role in achieving such goals.

You need to make sure that you spend enough time in developing your website’s navigation system. You will have to work closely with your website design company to come up with effective website navigation. Experienced web design companies will be able to give you valuable suggestions and recommendations. You must therefore choose experienced web design companies.

One of the easiest ways to create good website navigation is to look at your website layout from the perspective of the visitor. You must always remember that your website is for the visitors. Your website should be easy to use at all levels, in other words your website should be user friendly.  Check whether you are able to find the information that you need easily in your website without having to visit multiple pages. For this you need to first prioritize your web pages in terms of their importance level. All the most important pages should be accessible from the home page and from all the other pages as well. This way, you will be able to supply your website visitors with the information they need in single click.

You should also remember that your website visitors are highly impatient people and they will not have the time or patience to search for the information they need hopping from one page to the other. If the website navigation is not good, they will just leave your website in just few seconds. All of us know how difficult it is to drive traffic to one’s website and if you are going to squander away your visitors by poor website navigation, you cannot commit a bigger blunder than this.

Many websites lose highly prospective visitors on the way to the ordering page just because of the difficulty in finding the required information. Another important factor to remember is not to cram your web pages with too many details thinking that your website visitors should have access to all the information instantly without any difficulty. You can compromise on the aesthetic appeal of the website too. Here again the experience of the website design company plays a great role in structuring your website pages. If the web pages look too cluttered then too you will lose visitors as they will find the website too complicated for use.

PadiTrack – Free Conversion Funnel Tracking For Google Analytics

While using an analytics application, ability to analyze the funnel users go through to reach an event is a very valuable way for understanding users and improving leads.

Using Google Analytics, it is possible to get a report like:

  • users who browsed the product details page –>
  • downloaded the brochure –>
  • purchased the product –>
  • used PayPal.

by using many segments, filters and exporting data.

PadiTrack

PadiTrack, a totally free application that can do this very easily for you.

It connects to your Google Analytics account (no tracking code required) and pulls the data automatically + instantly.

The greatest part of it is that segments can be applied to the funnels so you get to see how people converted from different traffic sources

Special Downloads:
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Free Admin Template For Web Applications
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phpLD Giveaway – Winners Announced

phpLD LogoLast week, a post at WRD was announcing the giveaway of the popular directory-website application phpLD.

Winners are selected and can be found at the bottom of this post. But before that:

What is phpLD?

It is a PHP application, using MySQL for storing data, for creating any type of directories like "countries-cities-states.." or a categorized list of products.

The application fits to everything with the help of custom fields and ready-to-use widgets like site-translator, latest tweets picker, ad-rotator and more.

phpLD

Users are a part of the system as they can contribute to the content by submitting links or articles and commenting to them.

A feature-rich administrator panel helps managing the whole site (categories, users, content, etc.).

There is a built-in PayPal-based payment system for the ability to offer "featured links".

phpLD has various templates and a new template can be created from scratch pretty quickly as it uses the Smarty templating engine.

And, the winners!

Here are the 3 winners of the phpLD Unbranded Licenses:

  • Osvaldo (comment #205586)
  • sid (comment #209677)
  • Academia (comment #211923)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining the giveaway.

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Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
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Native-Like Apps For Mobile & Desktop – Unify

Unify is a software, powered by Deutsche Telekom, which provides a common API developing cross-platform applications that will look and feel like native ones.

It makes use of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and other resources like qooxdoo, PhoneGap, Adobe AIR and Sass.

Unify

The code can be re-used between platforms and supported ones are iOS, Android, WebOS, Windows and Mac OS.

Unify also eliminates the traditional limitations of the web browser and can detect the current geo location, access the file system, etc.

Special Downloads:
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Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Online Business Vs. Offline Business

Are you planning to start your own business? The recent economic recession has forced many of us to start looking for some secondary source of income. If we want to stay out of debt and want to achieve our financial goals faster During these tough times, it is important that we come up with creative business ideas to earn more money in our free time. One of the dilemmas that we come across in such a scenario is whether to go for online business or offline business. There is so much of talk about the money making potential of online business. You should certainly weigh the pros and cons of online business and compare online business opportunities and offline business opportunities.

One of the greatest advantages of starting your online business is that you will not require a huge investment capital, which is not the case with offline business. You need a considerable amount of money to invest. You may have to hire commercial space, set up a store or office and probably even hire store assistants. All these will add up to a huge amount. You should also be present at your office or store for a considerable amount of time to manage the store and to meet your customers. On the other hand, with online business, you will just need a website to showcase your service. Today you can get cheap website design services easily. As there is lot of competition in the website design industry, the cost of website design services have come down drastically. You can find good quality website design services at an affordable price.

When you start an online business you will be able to manage your business right from your home. You can choose to work at your own convenient hours of the day or night. Moreover, you can automate most areas of your business. So those who are looking for low investment business opportunities with lot of room for flexibility of working hours go for online business. You will just need to make sure that you find a reliable website design company that can set up a cheap website for your online business. When we mean cheap website, we do not mean cheap quality website. The quality of your website design can never be compromised as you need to project a highly professional image to impress your customers.

Another advantage of starting your online business is that you can start your business within a very short time. You will just need time to create your website. Your website will work for you even while you are sleeping and selling your products and services without any need for your presence. All these make online business opportunities more preferable to offline business.

As a first step to start your online business, start looking for a cheap website design company which has vast experience in designing websites for start-up businesses. You should also ensure that your website design company enjoys positive reputation in the website design industry.

Qualities Of Good Website Design

Not every website that you see online is of good quality. Today everyone understands the importance of good quality website design. Without having good website design you will not be able to impress your customers. So before you design your website to take your business online you should know the qualities of good website design.

Here are some of the qualities of good website design:

Good layout is the most essential aspects of good website design. Your website layout is nothing but the basic structure of your website. Every website will have various components, all these components should be carefully structured to ensure a clean and professional look. It is important that your website does not have too many components cluttering the page.

Secondly, your website should use good colour scheme. It should look aesthetically appealing to the visitor.

Thirdly, your website should have a good navigation system. All the important pages should be easily accessible. Your website users should not find it difficult to access the information they need in your website.

The next important factor is that your website should not have too many graphical elements that will make the website heavy and slow. All the web pages should be optimised for fast loading. If your website should take a long time to load then you will lose a considerable amount of visitors as no one likes to wait for too long waiting for the web pages to load.

Your website design should comply with W3C standards. Your website should be easily accessible without any problem from all the top web browser. Web browser cross compatibility is another important aspect of good website design.

The entire website should be fully functional without any glitches. All the pages should work without any problem.

Above all your website should be search engine friendly. If the website design is not search engine friendly, you will not be able to get good ranking in the search engine. Without good search engine ranking your website will not get enough traffic. So it is vital that your website is highly search engine friendly.

These are just some of the basic elements of good website design. There are many other finer details that are important for a good website design. You should make certain that at least the above basic factors are taken care while getting your website designed.

If you want to have a website with all the above qualities designed hire companies with vast experience in the website design industry. Website design companies that lack experience can produce poor quality websites, which will affect your bottom line very badly. When you are investing money on your website, it is important that you get the best value for your money.

You have to make sure that you become a well informed web design customer. Only when you know the qualities of good website design you will be able to hire the right website design company and pay the right price for your website design.