If you want a comprehensive listing of top software just head over to Softsia. Its huge, easy to access and a doddle to use.

Their most popular download listing includes..WinZip 15.5.9468, ArkFinder 1.0, Photo Calendar Maker 1.75, Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus 10.0.0.567, WinRAR 3.93, iMesh 5.2, Download Accelerator Plus 9.6.0.7, CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2010SE, AmigoAlex iPod Video Converter 1.0, Avant Browser 2011 beta 11.

Just a quick glance at their directory listings shows how much effort has gone into collating the best of the software downloads. Just have a look through the categories of business software on offer: Business: Accounting & Finance, Calculators & Converters, Databases & Tools, Helpdesk & Remote PC, Inventory & Barcoding, Investment Tools, Math & Scientific Tools, Office Suites & Tools, Other, PIMS & Calendars, Project Management, Vertical Market Apps

Anyway here’s the link. www.softsia.com
Sorry about the ads – er.. wolf from door. Thanks

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Virgin Media is cranking up the TV dial and taking entertainment to the next level with Virgin Media TV powered by TiVo.

Virgin’s TiVo service lets you find the television you actually want to watch. Viewers can search by theme or genre, as well as browse by programme or actor . You can backwards search because your TiVo box will save a pick of the week’s TV shows for you.

TiVo helps you to find new things that you might want to see. It makes suggestions and recommendations, based on the TV you already like. So you’ve got somewhere to keep it all, your TiVo box comes with a terabyte of memory. Or enough space to store up to 500 hours of TV.

read more about TiVo and Virgin

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Here’s a great chance to see the great and the good of the e-commerce world in the most famous football stadium of them all.. Old Trafford (err..that’s home to Manchester United).

The one day exhibition ‘eCommerce Expo Manchester’  will deliver a great overview of the ecommerce industry and provide valuable information to get your online business soaring. eCommerce Expo 2011 shares Old Trafford  with TFM&A Manchester so you get two exhibitions and educational programmes to assist with  marketing and online solutions for your business.

Programme includes Keynote Speakers:

M-Retailing: Selling in the age of the multi-channel customer
Ian Jindal

Think Mobile! How mobile impacts consumers and clients, and why we’ve entered the decade of mobile
Nic Cumisky, Senior Industry Manager

State of the Nation: Current Online Market Figures & Industry Trends
David Smith, Managing Director

What factors do you need to consider when adopting an international payment strategy?
Lefras Coetzee, Head of eCommerce Proposition

Register for eCommerce Expo for free now!

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It is possible to promote the new keyword phrase – I’ll call it ‘tooth black’ – err.. the anarchist version of ’tooth whitener’ – by building a key word related site in WordPress, SEO tuning it and supporting it with SEM – except that Adwords thinks it is such a low volume search term that it fails to return it because no-one is searching for it.

So its a tough one to crack. You want the world to know about your product  but the least cost method of internet marketing is blanking you.

Here’s a few ideas to get round the problem.

Borrow interest from something associated with your product. Lets say.. Teeth Blackening is a fashion statement that came from a craze to dress as pirates and middle age peasants and it appeals to 13-19 year old party people. Which is hardly a mainstream product and tough to get going. But say ..Pirates of Penzance  was a great pirate film and Jack Sparrow was the star and Jack Sparrow had blackened teeth. So you write a lot of posts in the blog section of your site linking everything to do with the famous film and the characters and add links to more Tooth Black information. And then spin this into more articles and posts about other characters in other films with blackened teeth, black teeth, tooth that is black.. etc etc.

Write some Adwords ads to see what sort of traffic a given keyword is getting and the cost per click. For example write an ad for ‘teeth whitening’ and check out the cost per click – you can always take it down before you spend too much. Then if it is reasonable,  make it an active keyword in your site landing page and in the ad but write the ad heavily towards tooth black and tooth blackening ie keep the traffic attracting term in the ad but make sure there is no mistaking the actual product on offer.

Photos and Video.  Build a Tumblr site and fill it with pictures of friends and family with their teeth blacked and encourage posts from other people in love with the fashion (I know this is getting a bit far fetched but it’s just an illustration). Don’t rip off other peoples’ web shots because copyright really is an issue. Many copyright holders will give permission, be glad to hear from you and may even link to your new site.

Obviously build a YouTube page and upload videos on how to apply the black; how to look good with black teeth, what jewellery to wear etc etc and take the posted comments and reproduce them in your blog post linking back to the video – etc etc. Then there is Facebook and Twitter – to get the most out of these you need a mate who has a reasonable following to give you a push. Starting from scratch is tough, but do-able. That’s a whole different subject.

Use Directories. Directories get weak press because they seem very benign and cost money but they are very well supported by the information hungry Google. So free list manually on a few big ones because at the end of the day if you want to sell Tooth Black the buyers need to be able to find you and you can promote within a directory for not too much cash. Don’t miss out Alibaba from your list – its probably the world’s most valuable directory.

Use eBay and Amazon. You can’t link directly back from your eBay account because they will not be happy but you can add the product in several categories,  talk about the product and add images - the product will be found and faster than most other reselling platforms. And provided the home page of your site is ‘alluded to’  rather than explicitly published the visitors will check if you have a web site via search and your keywords are starting to be searched.

Press Releases. Online mags are information hungry too and will reproduce stuff if it is relevant to their readers. There are dozens of sites that can be approached and not just in your local country – the press release will need to be very carefully written and tight to about 150 words with a couple of links. You can use a professional service like Submit your Article – they have some great functions built into their service and they are helpful and don’t cost too much.

Build your Shop on current open source platform. Use Presta or Magento because they both offer an open source version that works very well and there is a host of support in the form of templates and forum strings. These platforms are valuable because a lot o the SEO is built in and if you write your content carefully with an eye for both the key words and the sales copy, Google will return the pages.

There are a few ideas – there are many more. The facts are that it will take about 3-6 months to get a some or reasonable presence – not because of Google failing to index you but because no-one knows  to search for your key words or phrases. In the example above, the best model would be an orchestrated social network campaign as a few of days of interest from  fashion mad networked young mobile phone users is often enough to establish a brand, the product and the web site overnight. Who needs Google if you can whip up that sort of froth overnight? Err.. Rebecca Black .. need I say more?

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Recently out of beta stages, PrestaShop is a piece of ecommerce software that I discovered a couple of years ago while looking for a free, open source, capable and customisable e-commerce software package that I could use to create an online store for my father’s family-run sports shop in the UK.

I came across and tried a number of popular packages such as ZenCart and osCommerce, but found them to be clunky, unsupported or dated.

Enter, PrestaShop!

What is PrestaShop?

PrestaShop is a new, free, open-source, scalable, modular, light, fast, modern, sleek, and intuitive piece of ecommerce software.

A bunch of reasons to use PrestaShop…

Its completely free and open-source

• All it costs is time – and with a growing community for 50,000+ users providing themes and advice, this time can be significantly shortened.
• Open-source means you can edit and customise to your hearts content. Something you don’t like? Change it! You’re not locked into the ‘rules’ and limitations of commercial software.
• You don’t even have to mention your store is powered by PrestaShop, if you wish. (Though more exposure means a growing community, which is good news for everyone!)

Lightweight and speedy

• At around 6mb in total, PrestaShop is very lightweight making it fast to download, install and update!
• Efficient and clean code structure mean that stores run quickly, and don’t needlessly tie down your database or abuse your bandwidth.

Modern, Sleek and Intuitive

• Completely CSS driven layouts – No more clunky table-based e-commerce solutions.
• Web 2.0 features such as customer comments and ratings modules.
• Uses the Smarty Template Engine, separating application code used by developers from your presentation code used by designers.
• PrestaShop uses dynamic jQuery/AJAX powered code to make your store front as intriguing and interactive as possible.
• Object Orientated PHP5 and MySQL.

SEO in mind

• ‘Pretty URLs’ functionality included – ‘/product.php?id=2’ becomes ‘/paper-shredders/dahle-safetec-strip-cut-shredder.html’ automatically for accurate and stronger indexing!
• Automatically take care of canonical URLs to avoid your store being flagged by search engines as containing ‘duplicate content’.
• Generate Google XML Sitemaps featuring all your categories, products, images and CMS pages in seconds.

Customisable and Modular

• Want to offer a request option when an item is out of stock? Create your own modules, or edit the current ones to bring unique features to your store without the worry of interfering with PrestaShop’s core code.
• Modules for most popular payment options available, such as PayPal, Google Checkout etc (you can also create your own too, of course!)
• Or if you prefer, purchase premium modules by community developers over at PrestaStore.
• Add additional content pages using the inbuilt TinyMCE CMS editor in the back office.

And much more of course… For a full list, PrestaShop also provide their own impressive full listing of features available here.

You may also be interested in the Live Shop Showcase they provide. This gallery of online stores that use PrestaShop clearly demonstrates the customisation potential.

Great! So are there any disadvantages?

Unfortunately there are a couple of issues with using PrestaShop, aside from the growing community forums, little documentation is offered in terms of development (creating modules, Smarty Engine etc) via the official wiki.

Another issue of note would be that as the PrestaShop team are located in France, the community itself was largely French speaking for a long while. This is rapidly changing however as awareness grows, and there now appears to be around 3x more English speaking users than as recent as 3 months ago.

Here to help

Getting started with PrestaShop was very much mostly trial and error to begin with, but it was time well spent.

Having created multiple stores powered by the PrestaShop software (including a largely customised prestashop system running multiple store fronts across differing domains via a single back office), as well as many custom modules based on client’s requirements, I now feel more than comfortable with the PrestaShop’s format and structure.

Therefore I intend to begin writing detailed tutorials regarding PrestaShop, sharing the knowledge I have gained over the last 12 months (some were more enjoyable than others).

Sound like too much work? Hire Us!

Looking to set up, or improve an online store of your own but don’t have the time, or knowledge of web development to do it yourself?

Have a look through some of previous client work and get in touch to find out how we can help you. We offer web design services of all sizes, from custom PrestaShop payment modules, to full ecommerce packages.

With rapid concept to delivery turn-around, and reasonable rates flexible dependant on the scale of work required, Internet Assets are a team of experienced e-commerce developers capable of any sized project.

Related Links

• PrestaShop Homepage – http://www.prestashop.com/
• Download Prestashop – http://www.prestashop.com/en/downloads/
• Community Forums – http://www.prestashop.com/forums/
• PrestaStore – http://www.prestastore.com/

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404 page errors are displayed when a web page you’re trying to view cannot be found.

There are several reasons for being shown a 404 error:

• You may have got the address wrong
• The page may have been deleted
• The link you clicked was incorrect.

Its basically a dead end. They’re stuck, trapped, lost and alone!

Internet Explorer's default 404 error page

Usually, its not such a nice ”web experience’, especially if you’d been merrily browsing through a website to be suddenly greeted with your browser’s “This page cannot be found” 404 error. Urgh.

These pages are neither seamless with the rest of your web site, nor appealing to your visitors. This doesn’t have to be the case.

What can be done?!

Web Designers can create their own customised 404 error pages, designed to be integrated with their website. This has a bunch of advantages, allowing your visitor to seamlessly navigate back onto your website for instance, or having the ability to search for the correct page they were looking for.

Note: There is also the possibility that someone arriving at your site from elsewhere, may see a 404 page and just assume that your entire web site is down! Not good!

Simply put, custom 404 pages are marvellous.

Get creative!

Your pages can be used to reflect the feel, or look of your web site. Or they could just be a bit humorous.

Here are few examples of some of the more interesting and witty custom 404 error pages around.

Hopefully these examples can provide some inspiration when looking to retain visitors to your website by creating your own custom 404 page!

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Sometimes when designing a web page, you just want that footer to stick to the bottom of the window, even when your page is thin on content. I don’t mean permanently as you scroll, but on those pages where due to a lack of content there is no vertical overflow, and so you’d like the footer to actually remain at the ‘foot’ of the browser window. Not freely hiking up to the middle of your page, uninvited!

Well, the clever chaps over at CSSStickyFooter.com have devised a way to do this more cleanly than the ‘solutions’ of the past.

As you can see in this quick example, due to the sparse content on the page, the footer has decided to wander up the page leaving a gap beneath

This looks a bit messy. However, it easily be fixed and become…

The footer has now rooted itself to the foot of the browser window, regardless of the page's content.

Why is this solution better than others?

• Works in all major browsers. Chrome, Firefox 2/3, IE 6/7/8, Opera 9/10, Safari… and loads more. Full list of browser support.
• Works with columned CSS layouts.
• No overlaps in resized windows.
• No empty ‘push’ div clogging up your code.

Okay, so how do I do it?

Full credit here of course goes to those chaps at CSSStickyFooter.com.

I will only include the raw HTML/CSS code here, however you can get the full instructions over at the CSSStickyFooter website.

The HTML

The CSS

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Mockingbird is an online tool created to assist in the early stages of web design. While still in ‘beta’ stages, Mockingbird already looks to be a useful utility.

Create mock ups of your layouts

Mockingbird allows you to ‘mock up’ designs and layouts using a wire frame mesh, in a web-based environment – there’s no downloads, its straight from your browser window. It doesn’t even require Flash.

The opening shot shows how Mockingbird could be used to mock up YouTube

With Mockingbird, you can lay out your pages in its most simplistic form – where your headers and text will appear, breadcrumb links, perhaps even embedded videos or form elements, all by drag and drop.

What this means is you can very quickly turn your ideas into pages, considering the focal points, rearranging text, decide whether or not you need a bit more navigation. All that kind off stuff. But, without having to mess about with a pile of layers within Photoshop.

Using Mockingbird

The workspace in Mockingbird has a whole host of features. From Undo/Redo, grouping your elements, sending them from back to front, and the most useful of all, Align. All the things you might expect from your average design software package.

Your first mock up starts as a bit of a mess, but it gets the point across.

Its also all very easy to understand and use. There’s the usual toolbar on the left hand side, where as your workspace is the white area to the right – which expands to fit your work as you drag and drop.

The workspace also includes a wide range of your typical web and UI elements, such as input boxes, tab containers, and link bars as well as your more uncommon features such as star ratings, tag clouds and volume sliders.

Just a sample of some of the drag-drop elements available

Many of the elements can also be customised – the ‘progress bar’ for instance will fill to whatever percentage you specify, or the star ratings will highlight the number of stars you specify.

Save and Share your designs

One of the major benefits to Mockingbird is that you can save your designs, as well as share them with fellow designers or even your clients for approval.

A mock up of the Internet Assets homepage

This was a quick design I did a few months ago when designing the Internet Assets layout. If you’ve seen our homepage, hopefully you can see the resemblance.  This Mockingbird mock-up was very quickly put together – but allowed guidance and allowed me to stay on track while using Photoshop.

The point is, even though it was done a number of weeks previously, I was instantly able to reclaim my design untouched by logging in with an email address.

Your designs can also be exported as PNG images of PDF files, to be able to share with your clients, and share with them your ideas before throwing hours into Photoshop to find they’d rather not feature embedded videos on the front page (for example!).

You could maybe even allow a client to have a go, and send you their thoughts on element positioning without them ever having touched Photoshop or HTML.

Some other nifty features!

• Create multiple pages for your layout, under the same saved design.
• Link these pages together as if they were on a live website.
• Snap to grid – will try to auto align the elements you drag to features of your design.
• Produce clean layouts without getting hung up and bogged down in the details.
• Auto resizing of text and elements by dragging their corners – no need to fiddle with your pixels!
• …completely free!

Or you could hire us!

If you’re looking for a new web site, web design, or even have a website and want it re-designed. Take a look at our portfolio of work, the many web design services we provide, and contact us today to own a website that you’ll be proud of.

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Ever since one particular project during my University days I’ve been consistently amazed by purely type-based design, and how much type can be overlooked as a fundamental piece of any design task, print, web or otherwise.

What is Typography?

“Typography refers to the arrangement of text on a page, and appears in some form or another in all instances of written communication. Depending on the purpose, typography can be used for optimum readability, impact, or an artistic statement. Some graphic designers work totally in text, and study typography extensively while they perfect their art. Quality typography can make a big difference in communications, because it can impact the way the reader sees and feels about the topic being discussed.” – Acuity Designs

Stunning Typography

Typography on a most basic level can be used to reflect a company’s brand, retaining a ‘style’ across different media and platforms. There are designers however who specialise purely in typography and can create some truely stunning works of art.

These examples demonstrate how Typography can be used to craft something beautiful, and the benefit well-thought Typography has in any piece of design work.

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I thought I would share this wonderful little Firefox add-on, Firebug. I must use this extension every 30 seconds at work, and would strongly recommend it to web designer/developers of all skill levels.

Firebug in essence allows you to bring up a frame at the bottom of your web browser, displaying all of the ‘source code’ for the page you are viewing, including a side window revealing related CSS. However, it contains many powerful features that take it beyond just simply displaying a page’s source.

The Firebug window pops up along the bottom of your browser

One of my favourite, and most used features of Firebug, is the ‘Inspect’ tool. You are able to roll over objects within your page (images, links, paragraphs, form elements.. whatever), and be taken straight to its reference within the source code, as well as all the areas of your CSS that are relevent to that object!

Tweak your HTML/CSS on the fly and see instant changes in your browser

If you’ve ever had it where you’re scratching your head at why a link’s font size is 14px when you clearly told it be 12px, you can use the right hand column (image above) to scroll through each area of your CSS that is interacting with your selected object.

Disable individual features of your CSS, and see which is relevant to your selected object.

This makes debugging design work amazingly quick and efficient, there’s no need for trial and error changes. Just ‘inspect’ the object, and reveal the fault instantly!

Once you’ve found the issue, you may of course then want to fix it. With Firebug you don’t even need to back into your editor. HTML and CSS can both be edited on the fly within the Firebug window, showing your changes instantly on your browser with no need for refreshing. This way you can tweak objects pixel by pixel to get them just right! When you’re happy, just make the final changes in your editor.

In the same way you can completely remove whole aspects of the CSS piece by piece. These changes will too be reflected in your web browser instantly. I often use this function to see if my newly imputted CSS code has actually made any changes whatsoever!

You may also note the ‘line-height: normal’ being crossed out at the bottom of the image above. This is another feature whereby it will reveal parts of your CSS that are being overridden. In this case ‘line-height: normal’ is not being used due to a second ‘line-height’ being specified within the ‘.post-body’ tag (image above).

I cant overemphasize how much I use this tool. I am currently working on a pre-made shop template, and finding the relevant areas of CSS to edit within the 2500 line monster .css file supplied would have been hell without this.

You can download, and read about its other many features here: http://getfirebug.com/

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