Design Tools for Non Designers

I am not a designer by trade, but being in the online marketing business, design tasks and opportunities find their way to my desk often. For small design tasks it may not be critical to bog down the design team, but rather find ways to complete them yourself. A few of the following tools are some of the best ways I have found to complete said tasks.

DESIGNED ITEMS

Canva – A great online tool for easily creating professional looking designed social posts, blog headers, infographics, and more. With ready made templates, Canva makes design easy for everyone, with or without a good design eye.

BeFunky – This program is very similar to Canva. Prepare to get rid of confusing design software, BeFunky makes it simple and straightforward to make banners, cards, infographics, flyers, and more!

Snappa – Another program similar to both Canva and BeFunky is Snappa. This software provides templates with exact measurements for items like social posts, blog headers, and more. Customize templates until they are just how you want them. For access to limited templates and 5 downloads a month, Snappa is free. Purchase a monthly subscription to Snappa to unlock unlimited features.

Piktochart – With piktochart creating an infographic is really simple. Grab a template, make it unique, add your data, and you've got yourself an infographic.

Word Swag – In a hurry and need to create a nice looking social post from your phone? Add typography to your pictures with just a few simple taps by using the phone app Word Swag (IOS & Android).

Recommended for You

Webcast, January 17th: A Crash Course in Marketing Work Management

PicMonkey – Make cards, invitations, word quotes, picture quotes, and more with the plug and play software PicMonkey.

WORDS

Recite – Create fancy quotes super quick and super easy with Recite. Recite does not allow for any tweaking or editing of a template so it really is as simple as; fill in a quote, pick a template, and you are finished.

Wordle – Create your own word clouds by simply typing in all the words you want included.

FONTS

Font Combinations (by canva) – Not sure which fonts go best together? Canva has a page that will tell you! Start with a font you know you want to use and Font combinations will come up with a list of fonts that pair well with it.

What Font – Ever see a font on a website and fall in love? But then you can't figure out exactly what font it is? Get the What Font Chrome Extension and discover any font on any site with a simple click of the mouse.

LOGOS

Logo Garden – Design logos in minutes! Logo Garden has a quick step by step process that helps you create the logo of your dreams without a hefty design process.

Logogenie – Create a custom professional logo in minutes with Logogenie. Logogenie converts finished logos into any format; tiff, doc, jpg, png, pdf, and more.

COLORS/PALETTES

Coolors – Generate the perfect palette by just hitting the spacebar. Turn palette hunting into a game, and make finding the perfect match easier than ever with the awesome tool coolors.

MOCKUPS

Place It – Want to create digital mockups without the fuss? Place it does it for you! With hundreds of options, you are sure to find the electronic item you want to mockup.

Moqups – This online software brings together the ability to design, plan, prototype, and collaborate mockups. With wireframes, mockups, diagrams, and prototypes Moqups is a great way to plan design projects.

So try a few of those design projects yourself and discover just how far you can get with some of these helpful tools to guide you!

Source: Design Tools for Non Designers

2017 Best Online Web Design Courses

January 14, 2017.By Netta Siach LindenfeldinTechnology 2017 Best Online Web Design Courses

The digital world is heading in a certain direction for some time now, making good web designers a more and more in-demand commodity, which is why Online Web Design courses are something to seriously consider when thinking about advancing down that career path.

Ultimate Web Designer & Developer Course

A terrific course (4.5 out of 5 rating, 3086 raters) for those who wish to learn the ins and outs of web design and development, learning about everything from design to front and back end programming.

Companies are becoming more and more aware that quality UX makes a huge difference in revenue and in retaining their users. This UX Design course is fantastic for delivering the foundation necessary to become a successful UX designer.

While you can get some things done without knowing Photoshop, it's pretty much a mandatory requirement that you master this software to succeed in the design business, which is why this course is so important.

A terrific course that introduces and teaches 3D modelling to use in video games, 3D Printing, house design and more.

As someone once told me: Photoshop can do almost everything. For everything else, there's After Effects. 

One of those courses that teaches something that might not be mandatory, but could give the aspiring designer an edge that's impossible to ignore.

Source: 2017 Best Online Web Design Courses

SAP Hybris: Ecommerce Software that Grows your Business

SAP Hybris is a new-era e-commerce software that is engineered to rekindle new and existing online businesses by providing reliable and credible support. It offers a broad range of features that are tailored to streamline company operations.

Here are the benefits of incorporating this software in your business, as well as facts on how it can boost your business up to the next tier of success.

Boost Sales and Customer Loyalty

The 80/20 rule of sales states that 80% of an online business's revenue comes from 20% of its customers. Based on this fact, it is imperative to encourage customer loyalty that generates profits consistently in spite of the many challenges that a business faces. For example, a strong competitor in the marketplace. SAP Hybris offers many features that you can use to boost customer loyalty and generate more sales.

The Bundling Module is one of the advanced integration features that you can use to achieve these objectives. It gives product merchandisers the ability to come up with bundles of digital products using integrated administrator defined templates. This module also gives the merchandisers the ability to come up with rules that control which products can be bundled together to generate more sales. It also helps them to determine the most appropriate pricing and discounts to be applied to each bundle.

Commerce Search is another feature that is tailored to increase sales. According to a recent study that was done by Internet Retailer, 74% of B2B customers carry out product research before placing an order. Commerce Search is engineered to monitor customer search trends and display the results in a user-friendly interface. With this information, a digital marketer can position products that record a high number of searches strategically on top of the search results and design intuitive web pages. There are also control features that you can use to manage various search parameters, such as hero selections, search weights, search refinements, and much more.

SAP Hybris Cloud for Sales: Boost Sales Productivity

Foster Successful Relationships with Prospects

One of the main factors that set successful companies apart from their counterparts is the marketing strategies they use to sell to targeted customers. Using SAP Hybris, you will be able to come up with ingenious marketing strategies that will position your business for success. The software will also enable you to monitor the progress of each campaign so that you can see if you are delivering the expected results. These features will ensure that you do not spend money or time on strategies that do not produce results.

The accurate information SAP Hybris offers will help you track your contextual digital marketing campaigns in real time and without breaking a sweat. The information will also help you know which marketing strategies need to be revised or improved to achieve the expected results. The information allows you to make better decisions, such as whether to look for a better web hosting package if the current one is not delivering the sales that you want.  

More importantly, SAP Hybris software allows users to combine multiple business channels into one unified omnichannel marketing process that redefines how the clients engage with the business. This omnichannel aspect will boost sales, raise customer loyalty rates, and increase the company's competitive edge. Coupled with advanced SEO strategies, there is no limit on the benefits that you can accrue from this software. SAP Hybris can also help you come up with a graphic design that bests suits your company.

What You Need To Know About Omni-Channel Marketing

Streamline the Checkout Process

It is imperative for all e-commerce businesses to have a billing platform that allows customers to pay for goods and services efficiently. The SAP Hybris development team has worked to come up with a system that makes the billing process customer oriented, secure, accessible, and transparent. Implementing it will ensure that your business keeps track of all sales seamlessly. The platform is also secure, and so clients can shop with confidence knowing that their information will not be disclosed to unauthorized personnel without your consent.

So far, this software has helped thousands of businesses to scale up by improving their revenue management processes. It resolves most of the billing challenges that companies face by providing sustainable solutions that resonate with the vision and goals of the business. At the end of the month or week, you can retrieve and analyze the data to know which products generated the highest number of sales. This information will be instrumental in coming up with informed marketing and sales campaigns. You could also use the information to get insights on how to improve products that record low sales to generate more revenue.

7 Inspiring Examples of Omni-Channel User Experiences

Revamp your business by embracing SAP Hybris, a software that has been tested and proven to be effective in promoting sales, customer loyalty, streamlining the billing process, and most importantly, ensuring that businesses achieve their short and long-term goals by streamlining the brand design processes.

Source: SAP Hybris: Ecommerce Software that Grows your Business

Accessible Website Design and Application Development

Make Sure Your Websites and Applications are Accessible to All

Accessible website design and development, and accessible application design and development, both empower users with disabilities to independently navigate, browse, use, and otherwise interact with your digital content. Think of online accessibility for your website or app as you would accessibility in the physical world: Buildings, transit systems, and other physical accommodations follow specific guidelines so that everyone can navigate those environments and enjoy various services.

Online, well-implemented accessibility standards enable your digital environment to be usable, navigable, and understandable to a population where roughly 1 in 5 people have a disability. 

What Characterizes Accessibility?

Accessible development means building websites and apps that are usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. Disabilities may be

visual (blind or low vision)

auditory (Deaf or hearing impaired)

mobility related

cognitive

In part, accessible website design or application design

includes navigation that is efficient and meaningful

works well with assistive devices as well as standard browsers

enables all users to perceive the meaning behind images, text, files, and multimedia that you use to communicate about your products, services, and organization

communicates both content and context: users can tell how different portions of information relate to each other

Accessible websites and applications follow widely accepted accessibility standards . The most widely adopted standards in the U.S. are the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and the Federal government's Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Other guidelines may also apply to different industries or organizations.

Accessible Design and Development Services

Our end-to-end accessibility services list includes designing and developing accessible websites and applications for government, higher education, corporations, and nonprofits. Our accessible website design, mobile application design, and software application design services include

Accessible Website Design and Development — Building accessible websites and creating or remediating supporting files and documents. We rely heavily on accessibility best practices and using  HTML5 and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) standards. Our teams are proficient in open source technologies such as WordPress, Drupal and Moodle, as well as custom frameworks in .NET, PHP, AngularJS, and other frameworks.

Mobile Application Design and Development — Developing accessible mobile apps for the Apple iOS and Android platforms. As people with assistive needs increase their reliance on mobile devices, accessible mobile app development is more crucial than ever.

Quality Assurance (QA) Assistance — Providing knowledge and resources for the quality assurance teams tasked with ensuring and maintaining accessible environments. Manual accessibility testing can be difficult for quality assurance teams unfamiliar with accessibility. Microassist can greatly reduce the learning curve by providing templates, processes, and tools specifically designed for quality assurance and later, quality control (QC) teams.

Document Remediation — Remediating PDF, Word documents, presentations, videos, and audio files. Addressing all supporting documents related to your website or app provides a consistently accessible experience for your new environment's visitors and users.

Design Review — Identifying accessibility issues in the conceptual phase of product development.

Accessible Design and Development Expertise

We are an industry leader in creating accessible WCAG 2.0 Level AA-compliant applications (See W3C's "Understanding levels of conformance" for more information on compliance levels). Our Microassist development teams have produced accessible products for state government since the early 90s, beginning with technical training and elearning. Our development teams are well-versed in various computer languages and standards (e.g., .NET, PHP, HTML4, XHTML4, HTML5,  WAI-ARIA), frameworks (Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, Ajax, Bootstrap, JQueryUI, Foundation), and open source (WordPress, Drupal, Moodle) packages.

We are also honored to be an award-winning provider of accessible solutions for web, training, and open source products, having most recently ranked as one of the top participants in the 2016 Open AIR (Accessibility Internet Rally) international web accessibility competition.

Take the Next Step in Building Your Accessible Website or Application

By incorporating accessibility at the creation stage, you showcase your commitment to fostering an inclusive experience for both current and potential site visitors and application users. In the end, users of all abilities benefit from a website or application that presents information in multiple formats, accommodates different technologies, and is intuitive to understand and use by everyone.

Contact us today to see how we can help you build your accessible website, mobile application, or software application.

Source: Accessible Website Design and Application Development

Web-Based Applets Allow Creating IoT Physical Devices Easily

Services are the software apps we use every day to connect with physical objects and obtain data from mobile devices. The gateway to managing these services for physical connectivity can be achieved by using applets with embedded hardware.

Services are the software apps we use every day to connect with physical objects and obtain data from mobile devices. The gateway to managing these services for physical connectivity can be achieved by using applets with embedded hardware. There's a website, called IFTTT (IF This Then That), which allows users to use services to build personal applications to monitor a variety of conditions and provide notifications on their smartphones and tablets. In this blog, I'll further explore services and applets along with details on building a simple IoT appliance device using an IFTTT applet, an Arduino, and a cloudBit.

Exploring IFTTT

IFTTT is a website that allows users to build applets which are operated (triggered) by physical or online services like microcontrollers, Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, and Twitter. The website is free and the applet uses conditional statements as the operational foundation for the target service. As an example, suppose a user is interested in tweeting a certain hashtag based on sending an email. An applet can be built using an IFTTT conditional statement service. Another example of using IFTTT is a photo will be stored in the cloud when someone on Facebook tags a user. IFTTT has gone through several design iterations of its website where a variety of applets have been built by an active developer community.

IFTTT Deep Dive

The applets provided by IFTTT use the following web-based development concepts:

The basic building blocks of IFTTT are services. Services, once known as channels, is a series data description from websites like Twitter or Instagram. With the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), a service can describe control actions like posting photos to a target website. To accomplish control actions requires an event or trigger to occur within the service.

Triggers are items that produce a physical action to occur in a service. Receiving notifications based on accelerometer data from a mobile device is an example of a trigger. Keywords or phrases can also be used as triggers.

Actions are the physical output of an applet. They occur based on a trigger operating within a service. Operating a Philips Hue LED light bulb when rain is forecasted by the weather service is an example of an Action.

Applets are based on triggers and actions. Applets were also called recipes in the initial development of IFTTT.

Ingredients allow the user to customize the body data within the applet. Examples of body data are subject, device name, attachment, received date, and the sender's address. The applet's ingredient is easily changed using

Source: Web-Based Applets Allow Creating IoT Physical Devices Easily