Decoding The Science of Colors

Different colors ignite different emotions in people and thus, they are used to motivate and attract consumers. The Greek scholar Aristotle developed the theory of color psychology. The theory suggests that God created these colors through the celestial light. This was later changed by Sir Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who gave a scientific perspective to the theory.

Colors are an important factor in almost all purchasing decisions and are therefore extremely important in graphic and web design. Color matters a lot because it highlights the brand identity and helps to enhance the brand recall value. For instance, if you see a dark colored bottle in the red background then, you’ll immediately recognize the famous beverage brand Coca-Cola.

Have you ever thought why a specific color is used for entire branding? There is an important science behind the selection of colors. You have to understand color psychology to decode the science of colors.

Understanding Color Psychology:

Science of Colors

Color psychology is a branch of research that helps us to define the influence of colors on actions and decisions. Marketers use color psychology to influence the buying behavior of their target consumers. Use of certain colors for specific brands can impact the purchase decision of the customers.

There are many important studies that suggest that colors are correlated with human behavior and emotions. Two researchers of Wellesley College, Stoughton and Bevil Conway have carried out a research that says colors provoke specific kind of emotions within us.

Colors drive our eyes to look, to act and to understand something. In another way, it enables us to decide on what to look for and what not to look. Colors have the ability to set the content into context. Thus, marketers are required to know the importance of color psychology.

Different people behave differently with a variety of colors. This happens due to the past experience of people with colors from various events, culture, people, and memories. However, there are many commonalities of people’s behavior towards different colors. Let’s understand the psychology of different colors.

Psychology of Different Colors:

1. Yellow Color:

Science of colors – Yellow

The yellow color is the symbol of happiness, cheerfulness and positivity. Wherever you see yellow color, it always defines the vivacity and energy. It has a long wavelength that gives it one of the most powerful spiritual meanings. Even infants easily react to yellow color because it is the easiest color to spot.

The yellow color is used to enhance the confidence and liveliness of people. In another case, overuse of yellow color also tends to flame nervousness and fear. Select the best shade and tone of yellow color with a perfect balance of contrast to stimulate people.

2. Orange Color:

Science of Colors – Orange

The orange color combines the psychology of red color and yellow color. Thus, it has both the qualities of supremacy and youthfulness from red color and yellow color respectively. The Orange color represents friendliness and shelter.

Orange is the color of motivation and passion that encourages an optimistic attitude in life. This color has the ability to bring relaxation and a sense of entertainment and self-determination in the visuals.

3. Red Color:

Science of Colors – Red

Red color signifies power and dynamism. It is used to reflect the bodily requirements of love, affection, care and similarly horror, anxiety, and survival. The red color is also used to show friendliness and authority but, it can also define antagonism according to the context of use.

If you want rapid attention of the people then, red color is the best choice. But make sure that you use it carefully or else red color can also invite extreme negativity.

4. Green Color:

Science of Colors – Green

The green color is a combination of logic and emotions. It reflects the characteristics of stability and harmony. Green color suggests the right way of action and it has the quality to calm down aggression. This color is also the color of nature, peace, and relaxation.

In fact, green color is the symbol of progress in things like plants, profits, and prosperity. Green is the stress-busting color that encourages good health and rest. Although it does portray greediness and over-possession in some contexts, it is still one of the most positive colors.

5. Blue Color:

Science of Colors – Blue

Blue is one of the most favorite colors in the world. It reflects the characteristics of faith, belief, trustworthiness, and responsibility. Blue is the best color to highlight calmness and to relax your mind and body.

Blue color allows us to calm down and become stress-free. It has the ability to influence the psychological actions and to pursue the path of peace. Blue is the best choice to strengthen the relationship, especially in terms of marketing. However excessive use of blue color can change the context to loneliness and in-hospitality.

6. Purple Color:

Science of Colors – Purple

Purple color highlights spiritualism and dreams. It has the combination of red color’s dynamism and blue color’s calmness to create a perfect mix of physical and mystical. It displays faithfulness, luxury, bravery, secret, and mysticism.

This is the color of comfort and imagination and thus, it is used for creative presentation. Over-utilization of purple color leads to unnecessary thought stimulation and distractions.

7. White Color:

Science of Colors – White

White is the color of purity, peace, harmony, and innocence. It showcases the start of new actions and provides a free space to begin. White has the qualities of all the colors with equal stability. The white color also represents minimalism, ideation, and ease. However, don’t use this color too much as it conveys separation and hollowness in life.

8. Black Color:

Science of Colors – Black

Black color defines superiority, importance, control, and individuality. In another case, black color is also the sign of death, secret and hopelessness. It is has a lack of colorfulness. This color is a sign of unknown and separation. It is perfect with high contrast and clarity. It is a powerful color but lacks liveliness if used excessively.

So consider the color psychology to find the best connection with your target audience. The best way is to test colors with your brand so that you can have a better idea how to choose the perfect color. Selecting the most suitable color combination will automatically attract your target audience to help you to generate more leads and conversions.

The post Decoding The Science of Colors appeared first on Line25.

Source: http://bit.ly/2IXAutl

Understanding The New WordPress Gutenberg Editor

Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins of 2019

An image has the ability to convey a story of a thousand words. The statement says everything about the importance of using an image. WordPress developers have understood the fact that including images in the website content such as blogs and advertisements helps to gain more traffic and conversion. But there are demerits along with merits of using too many images on a website, calling for the use of an image compression plugin.

You should be alert about the fact that using too many images reduces the space on the server. You should store the images on the website’s server to save or delete them easily. Besides, storing images on the server allows you to enhance loading speed rather than using a third-party image gallery website.

Due to the burden of too many images on the server, it will automatically decrease the loading speed of the webpage. All of the above troubles on the website will result in a high bounce rate of the visitors. Apparently, you’ll lose your clients and you don’t want that.

Thus, here are the 5 best WordPress Image Compression Plugins of 2019 that helps you to use as many images you want without reducing the loading speed of the webpage.

1. Smush Image Compression and Optimization

Smush is one of the most used premium plugins created for the optimization and compression of images. An award-winning plugin, it has a great ability to optimize and compress images without degrading the visual quality. It automatically works itself and doesn’t optimize the images on your website server to reduce the load.

The Smush plugin scan every image on the website and tracks the future image uploads. It also rips off the unnecessary data from the images and compresses them along with resizing if needed. Smush has the quality of compressing the images of a specified folder. In addition, it also supports premium image plugins like NextGen Gallery, WPML, WP Retina 2x NextGen Gallery, WPML, and WP Retina 2x.

Key Features:

• Lossless compression of images without slowing down the server
• Supports GIF, JPEG and PNG image files
• Automatic rescaling of images
• Automatic optimization of images
• Image optimization on the whole network
• Compress images on multiple websites with international and individual settings

2. ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel is one of the top range image compression plugins that justifies the use of automation in the perfect sense. You just have to install it once and the plugin will automatically resize and compress the images. The plugin opts for a minimalistic approach by optimum utilization of resources to lower down the load on the server. Additionally, it is perfectly compatible with shared cloud network, VPS or dedicated web hosting.

It allows you to optimize images sent through FTP and images in the media library.  ShortPixel has the ability to use both lossless and lossy image compression as well as glossy JPG image compression for pro photographers. It has the feature of free optimization of bulk images.  The plugin also provides image optimization report of 40 days and test the optimization parameters with a single click.

Key Features:

• High-quality lossy compression
• Auto-conversion feature – PNG to JPG
• Supports Webps, WP Retina 2x, various image galleries, WooCommerce, and WooCommerce plugins
• Single API key with the feature of multiple site integration
• Supports Watermark and Watermark plugin

3. EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW image optimizer enables you to improve your website experience by compressing images. It is a lossless image optimizer plugin which allows you to compress images as per the compression ratio for JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF files. The plugin automatically compresses the images according to the format of the image file. It is free and optional paid version of the plugin is also available.

The plugin has the SSL protection for the security of your files. It gives an option to optimize image on your server or any other specific server. You can also optimize bulk images from an entire folder and skips the images that are already optimized. This plugin supports WP Image editor, WEBP images, WP-CLI, and NextGenGallery.

Key Features:

• Background optimization of images
• Free backup of images till 30 days
• Automatic resizing
• Automatic lossless compression and retina support
• CDN support for cloud server uploads
• Compatible with Buddy and images

4. TinyPNG: Compress JPEG and PNG Images

This plugin works with online tools available for the compression of images. It allows you to optimize images with the external tools without hampering your website speed. The plugin enables you to optimization for compression of bulk images. Additionally, it has a feature of automatic image optimization for newly uploaded images.

The main advantage of this plugin is that it allows you to store the metadata, creation dates, copyright information and GPS location for enjoying full credit of your website images. This plugin has a dashboard widget to monitor the data and statistics of image compression. It can also optimize color profiles and save space with the conversion of images to RGB color profiles.

Key Features:

• No size limitations for optimizing images
• Compatible with PNG and GIF
• After conversion of images, it preserves Copyright metadata, creation date, and GPS location
• Multiple site optimization with a single API key
• Dashboard widget to monitor data and statistics of compression

5. Optimole

Optimole is a savior of your budget. It is a free image compression plugin that enhances your website experience by reducing the size of images. Another important advantage of using Optimole for image compression is that it compresses the images without any visual alterations. In nutshell, Optimole serves the images at any location via CDN after resizing and compressing them.

Additionally, Optimole has a great autopilot feature that saves your time and completes the job itself after getting installed once. It has a user-friendly modern interface to track the activities. Otimole also has three premium plans consisting more viewer bandwidth, disk space, CDN locations, priority support, and custom CNAME.

Key Features:

• Covers 110 server locations that serve images via CDN
• 15 GB of images allowed with the paid version (Free Version – 1GB)
• 100 GB viewing Bandwidth with the paid version (Free Version – 10GB)
• Auto Optimization
• DPR detection along with Retina and HiDPI support
• Lossless and Lossy optimization techniques
• Modern Dashboard for easy tracking

With so many good options available for optimizing images, do not forget to squeeze the images of your website to ensure the best results on the website.

The post Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins of 2019 appeared first on Line25.

Source: http://bit.ly/2Dx2qRj

How to Properly Showcase Your Logo Design Idea to Your Client

Design your way

A creative website design company would always choose to stay clear of the dreaded cookie-cutter designing philosophy. They would much rather present daring and innovative design ideas than to create a template website that gets the job done and looks pretty.

The constant introduction of innovatively-designed websites proves that website designers are still passionate about convincing clients to pay for out-of-the-box concepts. While a lot of these fresh ideas fall through the cracks and get rejected for being impractical, some get the attention they deserve by becoming website design trends.

In this post, we talk about 6 of these website design trends that are sure to survive in 2019.

Pages with More Breathing Room

Gone is the trend of cramming websites with huge chunks of texts, menu items, images, and other elements without any breathing room between them. The trend of consciously adding empty spaces and keeping the text count low to create a clutter free design is here to stay.

While this is not really a new trend, pages with significant negative or empty spaces go a long way into improving the user experience. This idea of designing websites with huge chunks of empty spaces between texts and other elements enables greater readability. The pairing of large white spaces with smaller chunks of texts also makes navigation easy.

Utilizing Animation Only When It’s Required

Nothing is as off putting as a video or animation that does not serve any purpose. In other words, placing an animation just for the heck of it.

Incorporating custom animation can be expensive and it’s a complete waste if it fails to perform a critical function and can distract users. Therefore, the trend to watch out for is the inclusion of helpful animated elements and the deletion of ones that are gimmicky.

Quality Content Writing that Tells a Story

Well-written and unique content is going to remain an essential building block of an effective website. Text paragraphs are going to remain short and snappy. Informative and humorous is going to trump repetitive and boring.

Large Text Sizes to Draw Attention

HuffPost has a lot of faith in this idea as they routinely publish articles with massively big titles.

The incredibly large font size allows readers to focus their attention when they are on that page and then go on to read the entire article. This design trend may not work for a lot of business sites but can be a great idea for blogs.

Chat Bots for 24-Hour Customer Support

The problem with chat boxes that requires a human to answer all queries is that they are seldom unavailable. Most businesses cannot afford to hire a team of dedicated customer service executives to answer chat queries.

Enter the chat bot.

They have grown smarter and are now more useful than ever before. Once enabled, a chat bot can instantly answer most queries and filter out the complicated questions that require a human response.

Video Backgrounds

The last but definitely not the least is the growing trend of video backgrounds. Many designers have started using video backgrounds to improve user experience and encourage visitors to spend more time on their client’s site.

The post 6 Powerful Website Design Trends that Still Hold True in 2019 appeared first on Design your way.

Source: http://bit.ly/2VkbnaJ

How to Protect the Admin Area of your WordPress Site

More and more of us are using WordPress for personal and professional purposes. Its easy-to-operate platform and a wide variety of themes and templates make it suitable for multiple uses. However, its accessibility also means that it is vulnerable to potential attacks by outside agents, such as hackers.

Protecting your WordPress site and, specifically, its Admin area is essential if you are to continue using it in confidence. Fortunately, you can take several easy steps to secure it and reduce your site’s vulnerability.

1. Secure your WordPress login page with a lockdown feature

You access the backend of your website from your login page. Ensuring that unauthorised users cannot force their way in is relatively simple if you set up a lockdown feature, which will activate itself if a hacker makes multiple attempts to access the site. You should be able to specify how many incorrect logins are allowed before the site locks and you receive notification of the unauthorised activity.

2. Use an email address as your username to login

The default login system for WordPress requires you to input a user name. As many user names are easily predicted, this can pose a risk. Replacing a user name with an email ID is more secure as email addresses are usually much harder to guess.

3. Use two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, requires a user to provide two separate login details. As a website owner, you decide what you want to require. Typically, it’s a password followed by a secret code or question, a pre-defined set of characters or an authentication code, such as that offered by Google’s authenticator plugin, sent to your phone.

4. Change your login URL

By default, your WordPress login page is accessed by adding wp-login.php or wp-admin to the site’s URL. Changing your login URL to something much less predictable puts another obstacle in the way of hackers who want to access the site using so-called Guess Work databases that contain millions of combinations of user names and passwords.

5. Ensure password security

Making sure that your password is not easily guessable is such a simple step but also one that many users neglect. A combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols can add to its complexity. The use of a password manager, which will generate strong passwords and store them safely, is even better.

6. Virtual Private Networks

Much of the traffic on the internet is visible to anyone who cares to look at it. Using a Virtual Private Network, such as Tunnelbear VPN provides you with much stronger levels of privacy, especially when you need to administer your site via a public Wifi connection. VPNs encrypt your data and route it via the VPN server, making it unintelligible to observers as well as disguising both its origin and its destination.

7. Automatic logout of idle users

It can be annoying to have to log back into your site if you’ve only popped away for a cup of tea or to answer the phone. However, it would be considerably more annoying if someone else took advantage of your absence to change your website’s information or disable the site altogether. Various plugins allow you to customise the time for which the site is allowed to remain idle before locking the user out.

8. Password protect your wp-admin directory

Your wp-admin directory is essential for the running of your site, and hackers who manage to access it can damage or disable the entire site. Using a plugin to protect the wp-admin directory means that users must submit two passwords in order to access the dashboard. The first guards your login page while the second secures the admin area.

9. Get an SSL certificate

A Secure Socket Layer (or SSL) certificate will ensure that you can transfer data securely between your user browsers and your server. Some hosting companies provide SSL certificates as part of their package or you can buy one from a third-party provider. As an added bonus, sites with an SSL certificate tend to rank higher in Google searches.

10. Never choose “Admin” as the user name for your administrator account

It may be tempting or easy to overlook but using “Admin” is far too predictable. It’s the first login guess for many hackers, which means you should always choose something different. In addition, consider adding a plugin that will automatically ban any IP address that tries to login using the term.

11. Use caution when adding new user accounts

Some WordPress accounts have several users and this may be unavoidable. Using caution when considering if it’s really necessary to add a new user is a wise precaution. Where it is, you should reduce the site’s vulnerability by installing a plugin that forces each user to choose a strong password.

12. Use an endpoint firewall and malware scanner

A good firewall will identify and block malicious traffic. Meanwhile, an effective malware scanner will monitor your site’s core files, plugins and themes for malware, code injections, malicious rewrites, SEO spam, bad URLs and other similar threats.

The post How to Protect the Admin Area of your WordPress Site appeared first on Line25.

Source: http://bit.ly/2VQ3Tcy

Top 12 Multipurpose WordPress Themes This Year

There are plenty of all-purpose tools and gadgets on the market that can do some things well. But not everything they claim. This is in line with the familiar adage: “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

More than a few multipurpose themes also fall into this category. This is a situation that’s led some to believe that multipurpose themes don’t live up to their promotions.

The truth is, there are plenty of multipurpose WordPress themes you can use for any type of website. You can get exceptional results every time.

Your real challenge does not involve trying to find a genuinely multipurpose theme. It’s trying to find one that suits your particular needs.

We believe we’ve come across 12 products that will do just that as we regard them as being the best on the 2019 market. At least one of them should fit your needs – precisely.

With that, let’s get started.

1. Be Theme

Be Theme lays claim to be the biggest WordPress theme ever. Its huge selection of core website-building features bears that claim out. It’s not simply due to its large size that you find it at the top of our list. It’s what it can do in the website building world – which is virtually anything and everything.

A brand new Header Builder is yet another indication that Be Theme just keeps getting better. The highlight however would be its more than 400 pre-built websites.

They are professionally designed, responsive, customizable, and feature the design elements and functionality that serve as a solid foundation for a robust and friendly UX – every time.

The 400+ pre-built websites also cover the complete industry and business spectrum and also address all the website styles and types you’re ever likely to encounter. A host of shortcodes together with a shortcode generator, layout generator, and advanced options panel extend Be Theme’s flexibility even more.

If the ability to create a website in as little as 4 hours sounds good to you, give Be Theme a try.

2. Jupiter

Jupiter X is a makeover of the Jupiter WordPress theme that could claim 100,000 users. It’s the brainchild of Artbees a member of the Power Elite Envato wall of fame. Jupiter X is totally scalable and extremely user- and developer-friendly.

It’s biggest selling point may be that it enables its users to build virtually anything by being able to customize design elements that are normally not easily customizable in other themes, or not customizable at all. Jupiter X also allows you to build popups, create special forms, and design advanced menu formats and functionalities you won’t find elsewhere.

You can also design your headers and footers from scratch instead of having to try to customize templates to suit your needs. And, you can do the same for blog pages, portfolios, and WooCommerce shops.

With Jupiter X, you can customize everything.

3. Uncode – Creative Multiuse WordPress Theme

This pixel-perfect multipurpose WordPress theme is definitely worth your consideration as it has everything you need to build attention-getting, fully-responsive websites of any style, of any type, and for any purpose.

Uncode demonstrates the results you can expect to see once you use it. Their showcase of user-created website examples is stunning and inspiring. We could go on and on about Uncode’s many features, but the showcase tells you all you need to know.

In addition to enabling you to create websites of virtually any type and style, this multipurpose theme, which is one of ThemeForest’s all-time bestsellers, really struts its stuff when you apply it to creating blog formats and portfolios.

Much of Uncode’s flexibility and impressive website-building capability is due to its popular adaptive grid system. Uncode is also easy to use and you don’t have to be concerned about coding – coding is simply not necessary.

4. Brook – Creative Multipurpose WordPress Theme

Brook’s authors took great care to ensure their multipurpose theme provide the best smooth and seamless performance its users would expect. Having accomplished that, they produced an outstanding array of demos, blogs, portfolios, landing pages, online shop layouts for WooCommerce & Instagram.

With every big update, users will be given new homepages with fantastic features and the latest version of built-in plugins. ThemeMove team always keep it up, that’s how they became ThemeForest’s Power Elite Author.

5. Kalium

Kalium has something for everyone. Its elegant coding will appeal to developers. Its ease of use, imposing array of drag and drop elements, shortcodes, and plugin-friendly features will appeal to designers. And the stunning websites its full-concept design demos make possible will appeal to clients and businesses.

All this, and with this purposeful and powerful multipurpose theme you can build a page, a post, or a blog in minutes.

6. TheGem – Creative Multi-Purpose High-Performance WordPress Theme

Designed for creatives, TheGem is also a perfect solution for startups looking for a way to introduce their products and services. Many have chosen this multipurpose theme as their website-building toolbox because that’s precisely what TheGem is.

It’s not just any toolbox however; it’s the ultimate WordPress website-building toolbox with a host of features and tools than includes 50+ multi-purpose design concepts and 150 demo pages with which you can build a website in minutes.

7. Bridge

Why select Bridge? Any of its 110,000+ happy customers would probably be glad to tell you. Some will say its Bridge’s library of 370+ pre-made websites. Others will mention the WP Bakery page builder and other premium plugins.

Still others will want to talk about this multipurpose theme’s open-ended customizability, and more than a few will say it’s all the above. Its 5-star rated support has also contributed to the best-selling theme’s popularity.

8. Pofo – Creative Portfolio, Blog and eCommerce WordPress Theme

As the name implies, Pofo’s main strength may lie in its ability to enable its users to create one stunning portfolio after another; making it especially useful for agencies and creative types, and for other businesses as well.

Pofo also has everything you’ll need to build the eCommerce website you may have dreamed about. Whatever your needs, you’ll find this multipurpose theme is blazing- fast, responsive, flexible, and search engine optimized.

9. KLEO – Pro Community Focused, Multi-Purpose BuddyPress Theme

KLEO is an ideal choice for startups hoping to make themselves known, but because of its extreme plugin friendliness it can easily be extended to satisfy your needs for any type of website for any purpose.

Being “interesting” doesn’t sell many website building tools, but it certainly hasn’t stopped this community-focused multipurpose theme from acquiring a large and devoted following.

10. Schema

The Schema multipurpose WordPress theme has all the tools and features you need. That in itself doesn’t distinguish it from most other top WordPress themes, but there’s a twist. Schema hits head on the search engine optimization challenges that web designers often face.

Schema guides search engines through your site one content element at a time. It also loads your pages lightning-fast, a feature that earns high marks from the search engines.

11. Movedo – We DO MOVE Your World

MOVEDO rocks – your website that is. It can be hard enough to keep visitors engaged, but what this multipurpose theme makes your visitors do is to want to hang around. The reasons; cutting edge designs, ultra-cool animations, ultra-dynamic parallax effects, and other ultra “things”, like making stationary images appear to wander around.

Yes, MOVEDO enables you to create websites that will keep people engaged – and entertained as well!

12. Crocal – Premium WordPress Theme

When a WordPress theme is the new kid on the block, you might be tempted to give it a pass, at least until it’s proven itself. That could be a big mistake. Crocal already has proven itself. Created by a #1-rated ThemeForest Elite Author, Crocal has been making some big waves since its January launch.

Its advanced grid system is one key reason. Optimized for Gutenberg, GDPR requirements compliance, and being fully compliant with the most recent WordPress version are others.

Conclusion

We’ve tried to make your search for a better website-building theme a little easier for you. We narrowed it down to 12 we consider the best of the best. We hope we’ve succeeded. That said, there’s still some work for you to do.

You still need to find the one that will serve your needs best. That choice is of course entirely up to you. We’ve provided enough information to make this final part of your search effort go smoothly.

Happy shopping!

The post Top 12 Multipurpose WordPress Themes This Year appeared first on Web Design Blog | Magazine for Designers.

via http://bit.ly/2GltMuj