Required Form Fields: Where Should the Asterisk Go?
Date: 27 Aug 2008 | 5:54 am
Here's a simple question, and one which I feel should have a definitive answer.
Assuming that an asterisk is the correct way to indicate a required field in a form, where should it go?
Should it be:
1. To the left of the label?
or
2. To the right of the label?
or
3. To the right of the required field?
Shouldn't there be one right answer to this question?
While I'm on the subject, should the asterisk be separated by a space from the label/field or should it immediately precede or follow it with no additional separation?
The Impact of User Feedback, Part 2 (and more Popular Picks!)
Date: 27 Aug 2008 | 2:41 am
As a follow-up to my recent post about how user reports of webspam and paid links help improve Google's search results for millions of users, I wanted to highlight one of the most essential parts of Google Webmaster Central: our Webmaster Help Group. With over 37,000 members in our English group and support in 15 other languages, the group is the place to get your questions answered regarding crawling and indexing or Webmaster Tools. We're thankful for a fabulous group of Bionic Posters who have dedicated their time and energy to making the Webmaster Help Group a great place to be. When appropriate, Googlers, including myself, jump in to clarify issues or participate in the dialogue. One thing to note: we try hard to read most posts in the group, and although we may not respond to each one, your feedback and concerns help drive the features we work on. Here are a few examples:
Sitemap details
Submitting a Sitemap through Webmaster Tools is one way to let know Google know about what pages exist on your site. Users were quick to note that even though they submitted a Sitemap of all the pages on their site, they only found a sampling of URLs indexed through a site: search. In response, the Webmaster Tools team created a Sitemaps details page to better tell you how your Sitemap was processed. You can read a refresher about the Sitemaps details page in Jonathan's blog post.
Contextual help
One request we received early on with Webmaster Tools was for better documentation on the data displayed. We saw several questions about meta description and title tag issues using our Content Analysis tool, which led us to beef up our documentation on that page and link to that Help Center article directly from that page. Similarly, we discovered that users needed clarification on the distinction between "top search queries" and "top clicked queries" and how the data can be used. We added an expandable section entitled "How do I use this data?" and placed contextual help information across Webmaster Tools to explain what each feature is and where to get more information about it.
Blog posts
The Webmaster Help Group is also a way for us to keep a pulse on what overarching questions are on the minds of webmasters so we can address some of those concerns through this blog. Whether it's how to submit a reconsideration request using Webmaster Tools, deal with duplicate content, move a site, or design for accessibility, we're always open to hearing more about your concerns in the Group. Which reminds me...
It's time for more Popular Picks!
Last year, we devoted two weeks to soliciting and answering five of your most pressing webmaster-related questions. These Popular Picks covered the following topics:
- Susan outlined a few ways to ensure your site is being indexed by Google.
- John answered some questions about spam reporting and reconsideration requests.
- John also wrote a blog post that is a great resource for meta tags.
- Wysz provided some clarification on hidden text.
- Matt detailed appropriate uses of the nofollow tag.
Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality
Free Vector Flower Frame
Date: 26 Aug 2008 | 11:57 pm
Beautiful vector floral frame in EPS format with swirls, flowers and some butterflies.
Format: .EPS
Size: 815.2 KB
Most Desired WordPress Hacks: 11 Common Requests and Fixes
Date: 26 Aug 2008 | 3:40 pm
This is the first article in our new three-part WordPress series. I want to share with you some hacks that i found to be very useful when i was working on the redesign of Noupe and during the design of my other site Devsnippets. Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.
You might be interested to check out our previous four part series, "Powerful guide to master Your WordPress Theme
So let’s get started and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-Feed to keep track on our next post in this series. One of the most interesting features in WordPress is using Custom Fields, which can turn your WordPress blog into a fully customizable CMS website. I use custom fields to create image thumbnail for each post here on Noupe and on Devsnippets as well and display the thumbnails on the home page and the Archive page. Duplicate content refers to two or more web pages that have the same, or almost the same, content. We must avoid duplicate content to not get penalized by search engines. But sometimes we need to show two (or more) lists of posts on one page, we usually do this by using Multiple Loops (one standard loop and one from a certain category). This is done when you want to feature not only the very latest post written, but also posts from a certain category. When i was designing DevSnippets, i wanted the users to easily login through the front page and skip the login page. Many solutions are out there and i found a good one at WPdesigner, i will add the code here just in case we don’t find it in the future. Of course later i wanted to make it even more easier and prettier to register and login through the front page and skip the login and register pages, so we coded a small widget using Prototype to switch between the login and registration box all on the front page. I will write a tutorial about this very soon. If you would like to have a menu like the one we have here at noupe, to show certain categories, just add the line of code below and style it as you wish. The template tag, wp_list_categories, displays a list of Categories as links. You can Include or Exclude Categories as you wish, just enter the category id and don’t forget to add the “include” or the “exclude” parameters to manage it. By default, wp_list_categories() generates nested unordered lists (ul) within a single list item (li) titled “Categories”. You can style that list item with a CSS selector. Sometimes you want to displays a list of categories in a select (i.e dropdown) box with no submit button. The easiest way to do this is use the wp_dropdown_categories template tag. If you want to display certain posts from a certain category like the one i am using for the news section on Devsnippets. Having multiple authors on your blog is really fun, we need to have good solutions to have nice custom author pages, show their latest posts, highlight author Comments in WordPress posts, show their avatars and author bio below every post. By default WordPress will use the author.php then the archive.php file then your index.php file to display the author info. That is, if you do not have an author.php file, WordPress will check for archive.php, and so on.
So, if you want to change the look of your author pages, you need to create an author.php file if it doesn’t exist, by copying archive.php if that file exists, or index.php if it doesn’t. If you want to show the author’s main website, email contact, and biography, helping readers learn more about the author. If you want to have that handy little author bio box at the top of the article with an author photo, you can do the following: When you have multiple authors on your blog, you will need to style the author comments differently, here is how you can do it: If you want to display your Twitter status on your blog instead of using Twitter-hosted scripts to save loading time. Using Custom Fields to Display Post Thumbnails
Follow the steps below and you will get it ready
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<img src="<?php $values = get_post_custom_values("image_thumb"); echo $values[0]; ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />
</a>
Other great Solutions
Avoiding Duplicate Content
<?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=featured&showposts=1');
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;?>
<!-- Do stuff... -->
<?php endwhile; ?>
<!-- Do other stuff... -->
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
if( $post->ID == $do_not_duplicate ) continue; update_post_caches($posts); ?>
<!-- Do stuff... -->
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
Other Solutions
<meta name="robots"content="noindex,follow">
Login Box in your sidebar
<li>
<?php global $user_ID, $user_identity, $user_level ?>
<?php if ( $user_ID ) : ?>
<h2>Control panel</h2>
<ul>
<li>Identified as <strong><?php echo $user_identity ?></strong>.
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-admin/">Dashboard</a></li>
<?php if ( $user_level >= 1 ) : ?>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-admin/post-new.php">Write an article</a></li>
<?php endif // $user_level >= 1 ?>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-admin/profile.php">Profile and personal options</a></li>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-login.php?action=logout&redirect_to=<?php echo urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ?>">Exit</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<?php elseif ( get_option('users_can_register') ) : ?>
<h2>Identification</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<form action="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-login.php" method="post">
<p>
<label for="log"><input type="text" name="log" id="log" value="<?php echo wp_specialchars(stripslashes($user_login), 1) ?>" size="22" /> User</label><br />
<label for="pwd"><input type="password" name="pwd" id="pwd" size="22" /> Password</label><br />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Send" class="button" />
<label for="rememberme"><input name="rememberme" id="rememberme" type="checkbox" checked="checked" value="forever" /> Remember me</label><br />
</p>
<input type="hidden" name="redirect_to" value="<?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>"/>
</form>
</li>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-register.php">Register</a></li>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword">Recover password</a></li>
</ul>
<?php endif // get_option('users_can_register') ?>
</li>
Creating a menu Showing Certain Categories
<ul class="topmenubar" style="float:left; width:720px;">
<?php wp_list_categories('orderby=name&include=7,72,23,16,1,7,17,26'); ?>
</ul>
Other great Solutions
Display Categories in a Dropdown box
<form action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/" method="get">
<?php
$select = wp_dropdown_categories('show_option_none=Select Category&show_count=1&orderby=name&echo=0&selected=6');
$select = preg_replace("#<select([^>]*)>#", "<select$1 onchange='return this.form.submit()'>", $select);
echo $select;
?>
<noscript><input type="submit" value="View" /></noscript>
</form>
Most Wanted Posts and Categories hacks
How to exclude certain categories from being displayed in the loop.
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .'&cat=-13,-26'); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
How to display posts from a certain category
<ul class="news">
<?php query_posts('cat=6&showposts=5'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
Post Author Related Solutions
Getting Author Page on your WordPress blog
Articles by <?php the_author(); ?>
Author Website: <?php the_author_url(); ?>
Author Email: <?php the_author_email(); ?>
Author Bio: <?php the_author_description(); ?>
Solution
Display Author Bio below each Post
Solution
Separate Author comments from other comments
<li class="<?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == "authorname@domain.com") echo 'author'; else if ($comment->comment_author_email == "anotherauthorname@domain.com") echo 'author2'; else if ($comment->comment_author_email == "thirdauthorname@domain.com") echo 'author3'; else echo $oddcomment; ?> item" id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
Display Twitter Messages on your blog
How to
Noupe´s Fresh Look, BIG Thanks and New Series
Date: 25 Aug 2008 | 3:45 pm
After one year using that brownish layout the time for a change has come.
With over 10,000 subscribers, it’s been a great year. We’re celebrating with a new look, and some changes to make the new design better.
If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, please click through onto the site to see the new look. Let me know what you think of it!
I needed to improve the usability of the site by making navigation easier and directing visitors to the appropriate parts of the site, also i felt it was too busy.
Also i was really trying to validate the HTML of the site, so its now more valid with couple of errors here and there.
Anyways, we are still adjusting the new layout, so you may find some glitches. Feel free to report us about any problem you might have or if you have suggestions or critics as well. We’d love to hear from you.
On the other hand, we are planning to publish a new series of for WordPress designers with amazing hacks to tweak your blog as you need, new resources, ideas and inspiration.
New writers are Welcomed!
As you may know, we are looking for talented and professional writers and authors. If you think that you are one of themc, send us your ideas at info[at]noupedotcom.
Big Thanks goes to:
I would like to thank all of you for your great suggestions and contributions, we wouldn’t make it without you.
Also i owe a lot of thanks to the great blogs in the same niche as this one. Some of the best are Vandelay Design, CSSGlobe, CSSDrive, Freelancefolder, Wefunction, DesignFloat, justcreativedesign, Design Flavr, Six Revisions, SmashingMagazine, Abduzeedo, Problogdesign, DavidHellmann ifohdesigns.
Special thanks goes to Chris Coyer, David Walsh for helping me with the DevSnippets small widget at the right column here, i wanted to get the direct link to the source articles and couldn’t do it without their help.
Great Sponsors
I want to say thank you to all our great sponsors for helping keep NOUPE running at full steam.
So what would like to see more?
Well, it is your decision. Since we wouldn’t be able to do it without you, which is why we would like you to decide what you want to see more on NOUPE.
So, what do you think? Thoughts, comments? I’d love to hear them all!