Web designers have a full plate when it comes to trying to keep up to date with the latest trends. This is especially true in 2018. These days, several different approaches to web design have surfaced.
It takes time to acquaint yourself with each of these trends. This is the time you would rather spend doing actual design work. You can stick to the tried and true and ignore the latest trends. The problem is you run the risk of having the competition leave you in the dust.
With each emerging trend, the competitive bar is raised a bit higher. This makes your work that much more difficult.
The good news is there is a WordPress theme that has always kept up with the latest creative trends. It incorporated them into its selection of more than 330 professionally-designed pre-built websites.
Here are examples of how Be Theme has put 8 recent trends to good use.
How Be Theme Has Put Current Design Trends into Practice
Design Trend #1: Illustration & Graphic Art
Custom art is the current rage in website design and is expected to continue to be so for some time to come. Designers and their clients have taken vintage watercolor illustrations to heart. This is due to the feelings of comfort and relaxation they generate. These are coupled with a sense of nostalgia.
The use of bold fonts plays an important role. It helps to get a message across without taking anything away from the illustrations.
Design Trend #2: Light, Shadow & Smoke
There is much that can be accomplished in the art of creative design. You can experiment with light and shadow. When you’ve achieved the look you want, add smoke to the mix and see what happens. Typically, your design will take on a completely different look.
One way to use time most efficiently is to schedule tasks and track the time spent on them. Another way is to automate recurring tasks instead of performing them manually. You can automatically prepare and send invoices, for example. Time used efficiently usually translates into time saved and increased productivity.
Somewhat ironically, the best way to save time and/or use it more efficiently and effectively is to back off a bit. It is better to put forth a little less effort, instead of simply working harder.
That is precisely what the following apps will enable you to do. 1. FreshBooks
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Small, service-oriented businesses will find the FreshBooks app a particularly useful tool to use for expense management, time tracking and invoicing activities.
FreshBooks has proposal-generating capabilities that really improve productivity as they provide a framework where project outlines, timelines and scope can be detailed. These proposals can then be automatically converted into invoices with a single click. Having an established format and style within such a framework is a big timesaver, and with FreshBooks changes are easily made whenever necessary.
Expense tracking is another common small business need. FreshBooks makes it easy and takes the process a step further with the ability to take smartphone photos of receipts that are stored in the user’s database for expensing and adding to invoices. Expense and time tracking functionalities create output that is easily added to invoices. These invoices are personalized with your logo, color scheme, custom terms and conditions and more. It takes 30 seconds or less to prepare and easily send an invoice from directly in the FreshBooks app. Once an invoice is sent, you will receive an alert when the recipient views it. Read the rest of this entry »
Success breeds success. It’s an adage, but recent scientific studies have shown that once you achieve some success, more is apt to follow. That’s also true of WordPress, the premier website and blog creating platform.
WordPress’s popularity continues to grow. More web design entrepreneurs and companies are turning out more themes and plugins. WordPress happily supports these.
You might even be tempted to say that WordPress has become too successful. This can happen when you realize there are thousands of themes and plugins to choose from. Some are better suited to your needs than others, but you really don’t have the time or patience to try them all.
We’ve chosen 9 of the best on the market to help you out. Pick one, two, or all nine. Be prepared to be amazed at the design features you can easily incorporate into your website.
The data management tasks involved in building a well-structured, easy-to-comprehend table or chart can be formidable. This is especially so when you’re dealing with large amounts of complex data. You not only need to know what data to present, and how to present it, but how to come up with a result that is precisely what users need and are looking for.
wpDataTables is a best-selling WordPress plugin that does all the difficult work for you and does so in minutes instead of hours or even days. You should be prepared to be amazed at the power and flexibility this premier plugin brings to the table. wpDataTables accepts data from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats, and produces colorful, responsive, and easily maintainable tables and charts without any need for coding on your part.
This is a must-have plugin if you work with large amounts of statistical, scientific, or financial data, if you have a product inventory or catalog to manage, or if you simply have large amounts of data you need to keep organized.
LayerSlider is a premium multi-purpose animation platform that can do much more than simply add pleasing slider effects to your websites or blogs. With this versatile plugin, you cannot only create sliders from a variety of different layouts, but you can generate slideshows, animated popups and page blocks, image galleries, and even landing pages and complete websites.
LayerSlider is device friendly, so your image galleries, sliders, slideshows, etc., will be displayed correctly on desktops, tablets, and smartphones alike. Insofar as slide layouts are concerned, you can choose among full width, full size, hero scene, and OS native fullscreen.
Thanks to the visual drag and drop editor, neither coding nor special technical skills are needed to put into play everything LayerSlider offers. You can expect excellent support, extensively-detailed documentation, and regular updates over the product’s lifetime. Read the rest of this entry »
