Recently, I discovered a technique for reclaiming RSS feeds for link building purposes. Many RSS feed usernames on Feedburner, for example, are available to be claimed. Claiming an old username and attaching it to the RSS feed, there’s a good likelihood of you being able to take advantage of links pointing to the feeds. Some RSS Feeds also have traffic and clicks associated with them, which is a bonus. I have been testing this on a few websites, and it seems to be a promising new SEO technique for those who are looking for something new and who understand the risks.
I’ve decided to share my knowledge of this link building technique for a few reasons:
It’s important that you know about this, so you can check your own RSS feeds on your website. Make sure you’re not linking out to a Feedburner feed unless it’s live and you’re still under control of it.
It’s important to crawl your own website, to make sure that you’re linking out to who you want to link out to: it’s a part of regular website maintenance.
If you’re wanting to try out a new link building technique and you understand the risks of doing this, then here you go.
The more you know about SEO techniques like this, the better SEO and marketer you’ll be.
I decided that it was best to post a video explaining this link building RSS reclamation technique on video. Especially since it needs some explaining, and how it works. Below is the embedded video, along with a transcription of the video. Of course, subscribe to my YouTube Channel if you’d like to see more of videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/hartzerconsulting
Links Mentioned in the Video
I mentioned several links in the video, here they are:
feeds.feedburner.com (look at both the https and http versions, but also feeds2.feedburner.com
Majestic.com for the link analysis – they tend to show more links and pages.
Claim the feeds here: https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds once you’re logged into a Google Account.
Do you have any questions? Feel free to comment on the YouTube video, on Twitter, or email me.
Bill Hartzer (00:03):
Hi, this is Bill Hartzer from Hartzer Consulting. And wanted to tell you today a little bit about the alternative of link building method that I have actually been testing and the one and, and this method I know a lot of people have been kind of waiting to hear of, of what this new link building method is. And I’m going to go through it a little bit today. I don’t want to take too long. I know there will be a lot of questions, so I may have to record some additional videos about implementation, but this is essentially a, you can think of it. As I try to put a name on it, actually RSS feed, link, reclamation something, you know, something to do with that. Let me go ahead and share my screen and I’ll get into it.
Bill Hartzer (01:11):
Okay. I’m going to move stuff around a little bit, so it should be able to see my screen here. I’m going to move things. Okay. So let’s say we have a website. This is a good example, symphony.com just for kind of a random site. And at about 10, 15 years ago what happened was, is, is we started to add, you know, social, a social icons and social media icons in, if you look at the, the footer here we have, we, you know, links to get hub. So, you know, Twitter or Facebook, YouTube, and so forth, but you’ll notice that there is an RSS feed icon. And if you look at that particular link that is feeds.feedburner.com/symphonyblog. Okay. Now keep in mind the new username is symphony blog. Now here’s the concept. The concept of this is that you create an RSS feed or you take the, the, the RSS feed of your particular site.
Bill Hartzer (02:24):
And essentially you find on feed burner. You find feeds that have links that actually for whatever reason have been removed. And those are actually those feed burner feeds are 4 0 4. Now, if you find essentially, if you find the username of one that is a 4 0 4, then essentially you can claim the feed and you can claim while you, what you’re doing is you’re claiming that username, that unique username. And what you do is you claim that unique username, and then you then connect your RSS feed with add user her name. And instantly I can tell you is that we basically, the feed will work again and through feedback. So here’s the idea let’s go to majestic and let’s look particularly at feeds.feedburner.com. We want to look at the winks. Okay. And obviously it’s a there’s, you know, over a billion links millions and millions 245,000 unique domains and so forth, linking to feed burner fees.
Bill Hartzer (03:43):
Well, if we look at pages in particular pages would be here’s. I go to example feeds.feedburner.com. Okay. That particular name for whatever reason Google did not or Google Majestic didn’t crawl that, but they have found 213,000 winks from 41 88 domains. We don’t know whether that for the out, you know, we don’t know whether that’s a 4 0 4 right now. However, if you were to use, tell us, take that particular name and see if that can be claimable. So basically the idea is that you take your particular feed. You go, you know, you have to go and log in to a Google account. So something like the you know, it’s feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds. Yeah. If you go to feeds.feedburner.com, you’ll probably get redirected over there. So essentially here’s a few ones that I’ve claimed. What you’ll do is you’ll put in your feed name you know, you are, you know, URL of your feed. Yeah. Next.
Bill Hartzer (05:12):
And there’s an issue with that particular feed. So I’m not going to claim it. I have a but essentially what you’re going to do is you’re going to come to a page, you know, and, and what you’re going to do is you can name it, put in a title, whatever you want, there’s your feed. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to put in the username, right. You found, okay. And as, as, as her space initially, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to claim that feed and what’s going to happen. Is this particular feed, fierce, your best McFee that I found and the username was the future is make feed. I pointed it to this as a sample. And it had 67 subscribers. Well, that kind of is interesting because that is not only just, and this was let’s you know, let’s look at this right now.
Bill Hartzer (06:10):
Let’s look at the back links. If you were to actually look at the back links, that particular feed and you can actually see that, you know, there are 18 backlinks trustful of 13 citations while at 10, and this future futurist make.com is still linking to it. Okay. So the idea is that, you know, there you go, you got three links just by creating an rss feed going back and recreating the feed and pointing and creating, claiming the username, obviously symphony cloud or, you know, the symphony, you know, feed burner feed is, is still there, you know, and, and that’s fine. But what you’ll find is if you go to, if you start to look at backlinks to fees on feed your feed, burner.com and you look at pages and you start to kind of digging in a little bit you actually, now we can actually, and here we can actually look at ones that there’s a hotter and 18 feeds right there.
Bill Hartzer (07:25):
Probably some of these are pages that cannot be claimed. Some of them may not, but if you start to dig around and do some, you know, unique searches, so here’s one real hot new hip hop, okay. 108 hundred 75,000 backlinks it was a sports and boxing topic. And if you were to claim this particular feed on your feed and pointed to yours and, and use that particular username, okay. Let’s look and see real quick. I want to see what the backlinks kind of look like to that one. And, you know, just to verify, cause I like to verify stuff and don’t like to just you know, go blind here. Here’s the thing is that, you know, 875 back thousand back when it’s just probably a, site-wide a, site-wide wink from 875,000, you know, or hundreds of thousands of pages.
Bill Hartzer (08:33):
There’s also HTTP. So you might want to also look in particular at, at that as well, they should keep you version. So here is a good, you know, here’s the http version of that. Now hip-hop dot com. So this is, you know, this is, if you’re, if you have a music and related, you may want to create an RSS feed and get some of these, you know, some of these links, I’m not in a really big fan of oh zeros, but there are some links and it historically it had 1.8 million links. So here’s the idea is that, remember that there’s a couple of different ways that people link to RSS fees, you need to create your RSS feed. You need to find feeds on FeedBurner that have 404s. Then, then just basically use the, my feeds and, and recreate those.
Bill Hartzer (09:30):
You will see there’s a couple of different ways that people link to RSS feeds and use. One is what most common are, site-wide links that you’ll get, and that will link to your feed. Okay. Your feed burner. Then the next is in the code. You’ll get the source code. You may see on certain sites where we see the linkage there sometimes in the header section of the page you may actually so see a link, a rail link yeah. We’ll link REL RSS feed and it will, it will link there to the feed burner. That’s another way that, that w that link will be there. That’s on automatically. Okay. The other third way is, is that a lot of sites actually use feed birder and feeds and content. So they may be pulling in automatically here’s an exam, not really an example, but kind of a situation where they are, you know, they’re pulling some headlines, these headlines, or even down here, these could be pulled automatically from an RSS feed.
Bill Hartzer (10:46):
If you were to actually put that feedback, then your content and your links would then be on that side. I’ve seen that situation that also you have the Yahoo home page where finally you have people who have customized their Yahoo page with RSS feeds of their favorite sites. And somewhere on here, here’s the, you know, they will have their own, you know, weather, but they’ll also have their own customer as us feeds that can bring traffic and clicks. I have one particular site that’s getting them out of that and clicks a day because of the fact that it is, and it actually is Ian from people’s a Yahoo homepage. So just to recap, if you look at it, you’re going to need to create your particular RSS. You’re going to be able, you’re going to have to have an RSS feed, a valid RSS feed.
Bill Hartzer (11:42):
If you have WordPress, you can actually use something like Google news publisher to create those RSS feeds. Once you have the RS, the feed URL, which is, could be your homepage, could be also every, any category laws. I’ll also have an RSS feed take that URL, find 4 0 4 hours of from feed fees, dot fender, bird feeds for bot feedburner.com. Okay. Find those links, find the pages, find the 4 0 4 and then go to your feeds and create the feed. It’s that simple. I have just even a few minutes ago, added some more feeds feed burners going in a maintenance mode in July, but you will still be able to indefinitely create those feeds. There’s not going to be a problem with that. Also I would also mention that all of the, there’s two things I’m releasing this information because for two, basically for two reasons, number one, the main fact is that may need to be aware of if you are with your site, or if you are linking out to a FeedBurner feed you need to check it and you need to check and make sure that in and who you’re waking out to, because somebody can be using that and taking that feed.
Bill Hartzer (13:12):
Number two, is that on the other hand there are four fours and usernames that you can train just like Luke cramming, a Twitter account, claiming a, you know, some other username on some other account. Finally. I’m just going to say that obviously this could be considered, I would say probably gray hat, marketing, gray hat, SEO and, you know use it as you want to. And that keep in mind that, you know, I personally, I think maybe the worst case scenario is that the site owner could ask, could find out it’s good, get, ask you why your content is on their site and the other, you know, and obviously you could, you could take it down. The other part is that you need to be aware, you know, that this is, this is this, this happens to sites and that people do claim their feed and they put their, you know and, and so forth if you have four or four.
Bill Hartzer (14:24):
The other part is the fact that you know, like I said the links at some point, since this, since people are probably going to be using this technique now they could just not be good links anymore and, and just be discounted and, and, you know, not be valuable anymore. So, like I said, go ahead, go out and find the feeds on feedburner. There are right now about 11 million feeds that are available. And so there are out of the 11 million I’ve just in a very small, limited crawling activity of a cup, you know, of pay. You know, I have been able to find at least a hundred thousand that are how far are fours that are claimable. I’ve been doing, I’ve been contesting us for a few months and on term after four months, it does look like the legs are still good and everything’s working fine.
Bill Hartzer (15:30):
Do you have any questions offer, don’t forget to make comment below. And if you do feel that this is a good link-building trip link building tip for you personally, and that item, I’m not asking for any payments or anything, but I do ask that you consider donating, donating to the to the DFW sem.org. And the PayPal address for them is info@dfwsem.org Dallas Fort Worth search Engine Marketing Association. And they’re a great group and that they’re a nonprofit and the whole idea of gift DFWSEM is to help promote knowledge in this industry. And that’s why I giving out information like this. So you can be a better marketer and a better SEO. Thanks for watching feel free to subscribe because I will be coming back and sharing some other tips like this fairly soon. Thanks.
Before you can build a beautifully designed site, you need to start from the beginning. You need to create an outline of how you want your site to look, so you can work out the kinks and ensure you’re delivering the best website for your business.
But how do you build a website outline? By creating a wireframe, of course!
If you aren’t familiar with wireframes, we’ve got a guide to help you out! Keep reading to get answers to your questions, like:
A wireframe is a simple black and white outline that lays out the specific placement of elements on your page. Your wireframe focuses on page and site elements, user flow, and page structure. Web designers typically use wireframes to help clients see a basic outline of their site’s layout.
3 types of wireframes
Now that we answered, “What is a wireframe?” the next thing to look at is the different types of wireframes. There are three types of wireframes:
1. Low-fidelity wireframes
The first type of wireframe is low-fidelity. These wireframes are the barest outline of your site — companies typically only use these as a starting point to jot down ideas about a website.
When you create a low-fidelity wireframe, you focus on getting the ideas down without worrying about the scale or pixel accuracy. These outlines have simplistic versions of images, shapes, and other content on your site.
This outline doesn’t consider what elements might be distracting or what factors affect the user experience. Instead, they focus on getting your ideas down and organizing them into a feasible site structure.
2. Mid-fidelity wireframes
The next type of wireframe option is mid-fidelity. This wireframe gets used most often. While this option doesn’t use images or typography, it does contain more detailed components of your site’s layout.
For example, you’ll have placeholder boxes where you plan to put images or body text. You won’t have the actual image or text, but you’ll have the general layout of how your site will look so you can make changes.
Like other wireframes, a mid-fidelity wireframe uses black and white colors, but it also features gray shading to help differentiate between elements and denote emphasis of elements. This wireframe design will also use different point weights for fonts to separate headings and create clear distinctions.
With this wireframe structure, the focus is on showing how the elements will work with one another on a page. This option allows web designers to better understand the site’s usability without getting distracted by the site’s actual images and text.
3. High-fidelity wireframes
When doing wireframe development, some companies may opt to use a high-fidelity wireframe. Your outline is drawn more to scale with this option — the elements get scaled to specific pixel sizes. The high-fidelity wireframe also uses the site’s actual images and text rather than placeholders.
Most companies use this wireframe if they’re later in the site development stage. This wireframe is ideal for refining complex site processes, like interactive elements or the menu flow.
Why should I use wireframes?
After learning about the different wireframes, you may wonder why you should use one to design your site. What’s the benefit of using wireframes?
Here are six reasons wireframe development is critical for web design:
1. Wireframes give you an uncluttered outline of your page
When you’re designing your site, you want to get a clear picture of your layout, so you can adjust and optimize your design to deliver the best experience. It’s a difficult task to do, though, if you’re trying to weed through every element on your site.
With wireframe development, especially a mid-fidelity wireframe, you can simplify your site’s layout and get an uncluttered view of your page. You won’t have to worry about distractions and can strip your site down to the basics to help you get a clearer picture.
When you have a clearer view of your site’s flow, you can better understand how your audience will interact with your website to see if you’re delivering the best experience.
2. Wireframes help you see your site from the visitor’s perspective
Wireframe UX design is critical to helping you see your site through your audience’s eyes. You cannot only understand your site’s flow, but you can get a better idea of how people will interact with your site.
The wireframe structure enables you to analyze components like your:
This raw, stripped-down version of your site setup enables you to understand how your audience will interact with different parts of your site. It allows you to see if, at the core, your site is easy to use for your audience or if there are hiccups that will hinder them from completing specific actions.
3. Wireframes enable you to identify flaws
As mentioned, wireframe design enables you to see your site as your audience sees it and better understand how people interact with your content. Along with that, you can also identify flaws more efficiently.
Whether you’re analyzing your site flow or path to conversion, you can focus on each step to identify where users might get confused or where they may miss steps.
You may find that your navigation is disorganized or confusing while looking at the wireframe structure, or your conversion path is missing a step. Using a wireframe enables you to identify these issues early before becoming bigger and more expensive problems later.
That brings us to the next benefit.
4. Wireframes save you money
Having a wireframe UX design can help you save money. If you design your site without a wireframe, it can end up costing you big time in the future.
Wireframe development enables you to build an outline of your site before you launch it. It means you have time to tweak your site and adjust before you make it. You can identify problems and get ahead of them before you put any money into building your site.
Here’s a scenario that could happen to you if you don’t use a wireframe:
You want to build a website for your company and decide to research some small business website builders. In your research, you come across Squarespace and think it’s a good fit for your business. You opt out of wireframe development and just start building your site.
At this point, you’ve already paid your monthly fee to use Squarespace and put money into a chic theme for your site.
You launch your site, and it’s successful.
After a year, you find your operations growing, and you increase product offerings for your customers as a result. With so many new product offerings, you realize you need to create a more in-depth and organized navigation to help customers find your products.
Except, Squarespace doesn’t offer the ability to build an in-depth navigation bar.
You didn’t plan for this growth, and now you’re finding your site builder can’t accommodate it.
Now, you’ll have to build an entirely new site somewhere else, costing your business more money and time.
But if you had used a wireframe and planned for scaling your site (we’ll dive into this more later), you could have identified that Squarespace was not the best fit for your business.
Wireframes also prevent you from making costly mistakes after your site is published. Instead of finding a hiccup in your conversion process and having to hire an outside company to fix the problem, you can identify the problem before launch and avoid the extra cost.
5. Wireframes save you time
Wireframe development is also valuable to your business because it saves you time. Your wireframe will help you create a planned design, so it’s easier to execute when you’re ready to build your site.
Think of it like writing a research paper. You wouldn’t just start writing and figure out where to place quotes and how to structure your writing as you go. It would make you waste time rearranging and rewriting to figure out how to make your paper make sense.
Instead, you would create an outline before you write to determine your paper’s flow and where to include quotes. This outline helps you write more efficiently because you know what to write next.
It’s no different with a wireframe.
A wireframe is an outline that helps you create your website’s design. Instead of wasting time changing elements and changing different parts of your site’s structure until it works, you can have a planned outline that saves you from having to do trial and error with your design.
6. Wireframes help you plan for the future
The last reason to do wireframe development is that it helps you plan for the future. When you first design your site, you’re building a website that fits your business’s current needs. But as you continue to grow online, your site needs to grow with you.
Wireframes can help you identify if your site is scalable for the future. Your wireframe enables you to see how well your site will handle growth when adding pages and content. If your wireframe is not scaled well, you can make adjustments to make it scalable before you start building.
A typical example of scaling is adding more products to your navigation.
As businesses grow, they tend to add more products to their site, which means adjusting the navigation. With a wireframe, you can ensure you’re designing a navigation that scales with your business and doesn’t disrupt the entire site or its flow.
Wireframes are critical for helping you plan for the future, so you can ensure your site adapts as your business changes.
Need help with wireframe development?
Wireframes are critical to helping you develop a site that’s user-friendly for your audience. If you’re feeling confused or overwhelmed about creating a wireframe, WebFX is here to help.
Our award-winning design team can take your site from wireframe to development. With over 25 years of experience, we know how to craft UX-focused designs that deliver the best experience.
Ready to build a site that drives more traffic, leads, and sales? Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our web design services!
I’ve looked at most of the options out there (there’s a ton of them) and chose the top 5 free online photo editors I’d gladly recommend to anyone who needs to perform simple photo-editing work.
Pixlr Editor is a very robustly-featured free online photo editor that reminds me of Photoshop.
It has layers, the capability to work on multiple photos at once, built-in trendy photography effects like Mimic HDR, Infared, and Tilt shift, the ability to directly save your photos onto Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, useful tools similar to Photoshop like the Magic Wand tool, and more!
It’s fast and responsive, which is remarkable given the intricacy and amount of features this photo editing software has (at least on Google Chrome, the browser I used to test these online photo editors).
For most of us, Pixlr is the only online photo editor we’ll need.
PicMonkey is an amusing tool for spicing up your photos. With this photo-editing web app, you can apply preset photo effects (like Film Grain and Black & White), give your photo a fancy border, touch up photos of people to remove blemishes and wrinkles, and add graphics like hearts and speech bubbles.
If you’re looking for a professional-level photo-editing tool, it won’t quite help you get the job done, but if you just want to add fun effects and perform easy photo corrections that can make your Facebook photos look better, cool, and interesting, try out this free online photo editor.
Photoshop Express Editor is a free online photo editor by Adobe. Don’t expect the same features and user interface that its big brother, Adobe Photoshop, has — it’s not an online version of Photoshop. Photoshop Express Editor is just a fun and easy online photo editor for basic photo fixes.
Photoshop Express Editor has features that you’ve come to expect from a photo editor such as cropping, resizing, red-eye, exposure and color correction, and a handful of charming photo effects like Crystalize and Pop Color.
Splashup is another free online photo editor that is reminiscent of the Photoshop UI. It’s packed with useful features you don’t typically see in free online photo editors: layers, layer effects, the ability to draw shapes on your images, and more.
What works in Splashup’s favor is that you can open the images you want to edit directly off of popular web services like Facebook and Flickr — a tremendously handy option.
The web app is speedy — it really feels like desktop software when you’re using it.
What’s a deal-breaker for me — which might not be a big deal for you — is the lack of keyboard shortcuts (like the Ctrl+V shortcut for Undo, which I use a lot when experimenting with photo edits). Keyboard shortcuts affect my workflow significantly when I’m using creative software.
iPiccy is a free online photo editor that’s easy and intuitive to use. You can use it to make simple photo corrections, such as adjusting your photo’s exposure and sharpening it if it’s too blurry. iPiccy also has a bevy of interesting photo effects and filters, like Emboss and Sepia, for you to employ onto your photos.
iPiccy has a tool for creating photo collages, which might be awesome for some of us. And if you want a Photoshop-like interface, you have that option to change the default workspace UI.
iPiccy is a good photo-editing tool with loads of options; spend some time exploring this free photo editing software online to see what it can offer you.
There’s a lot of confusion about parallax design and how it works on the web. Generally speaking, parallax design uses motion to create the illusion of depth on a page.
This can relate to background changes or semi-fixed position items that move alongside the user’s scrolling. We’ve covered many examples from websites but haven’t gone into detail about the techniques involved.
For this collection, I’ve picked my favorite CSS and JavaScript snippets for creating parallax layouts. All examples offer free source code, so you can play around with snippets and even use them in your own projects.
1. The Great Fall by CJ Gammon
This parallax example is one of the most unique interfaces I’ve ever found. It uses a custom script to create a waterfall sprite that seems to flow endlessly down the page. It’s built on canvas elements controlled through JavaScript, so it’s a pretty technical setup.
For the most part this is really a testament to what’s possible in modern web development. Learning the canvas element gives you a lot of control over your design.
Here’s a much more practical parallax effect with a fixed background, and larger pages on top. When you scroll, each page section appears above the background. This creates the illusion of depth, and it’s one of the key elements to a great parallax design.
Developer Sebastian Schepis has used only CSS for this page, and it’s a pretty simple concept. I think anybody could clone this with ease, not to mention the background design could be greatly enhanced.
You’ll often find parallax designs coupled with large fullscreen background images. These are all too common on company sites & startups where they usually feature a certain parallax “scroll speed” for the background.
The difference here isn’t so much in how fast you’re scrolling down the page or how big the image placement is. Rather you see how fast the image moves through the background of the page while you scroll. It’s a subtle parallax effect, but this layout is an excellent template to see the different animation speeds in action.
Fixed image backgrounds work well to split up pages and divide content sections evenly. As you scroll, it can feel like the individual page sections are higher than the background images. This is all by design to breathe life into the parallax effect while scrolling.
I wouldn’t use this exact layout because the content areas seem a bit thin. But if you do like this style, I’d recommend punctuating each page section with a different image relevant to your website.
This parallax example is a unique example of how parallax effects work. All the page content rests underneath a large hero image which disappears beneath the content on scroll. This also uses the fixed image position to make it appear as if the page is moving over the image, rather than the image staying fixed in place.
You can use this same effect with a long scrolling layout and it’d have a similar design style. I think this would work best for single blog posts with large featured images, or for landing pages that use large heros to grab attention.
Here’s an interesting parallax design for a sample wedding page It has a split page design where images separate the many different content areas with parallax fixed scrolling. Everything runs on CSS, which is a nice touch, and all background images stay fixed while moving down the page.
This effect works because the content areas have large box shadows dropping over the backgrounds. Naturally, this creates the illusion of depth by giving the page a theoretical light source and hierarchy. Very nice idea for a single-page layout.
7. Scrolling Background-Image Parallax by Rich Howell
Earlier, I mentioned how scroll speed could vary based on the background-position change rate. Well, this example is the perfect comparison to see how this works in action.
Note that you’ll need to use the scrollbar to see the effects for this example. I tried with the mouse wheel and couldn’t see any difference, but you’ll see speed changes across the columns when you move the scrollbar.
None of these speeds are wrong or inaccurate depictions of parallax design. They’re just different methods for creating movement on the page, and this little example is a great way to visualize many options.
While this effect does not relate to scrolling, it directly relates to parallax design. It uses pure CSS to create a parallax star animation in the background of the page. You can add text and even a content area over the page, but the stars immediately create depth at first glance.
The animation run through CSS, but this snippet uses Sass and Compass, so they would be useful to understand before making edits.
Sometimes, parallax designs also target mouse movement along with scrolling features. This canvas design creates an endless skyline effect that reacts to mouse movement on the page. As you reposition your mouse, the viewing angle alters. But the animation stays the same, and you can see this skyline moving with a clear visual hierarchy.
Naturally, this does require JavaScript for the animation because it’s a pretty complex idea. But it’s also not something you’ll find on many websites, so it’s not something you’ll copy over to your site either. But as a parallax concept, this one’s really interesting.
I’ve seen this effect on websites before, and it creates a very peculiar design. The broken glass filter gives the illusion of a background image being split into many different parts. It almost looks like the image was on a pane of glass, and it shattered, fracturing the picture and skewing the image.
You can replicate this effect with pure CSS, and it’s one of those neat effects that’s cool to do but may not have any practical, real-world usage beyond fancy designs. Still, this is an impressive example of parallax depth and motion while scrolling.
CodeCombat is an HTML5 role-playing game (RPG) that teaches you fundamental programming concepts.
In CodeCombat, you play a hero adventuring through the game’s levels. The first level is Kithard Dungeon, which covers basic programming concepts. You’re faced with coding challenges throughout your journey, and if you overcome them, you’ll unlock the next level and earn experience points (XP) that you can use to improve your hero.
CodeCombat is appealing to young, aspiring programmers and is one of the most fun games that teaches coding. According to an in-game survey, 62% of CodeCombat’s users are under 18 years old.
CodeCombat supports five programming languages: JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Lua, and Python. The game covers a wide range of programming topics — strings, variables, method invocation, vector drawing, and much more.
Code Hunt
Code Hunt is a Sci-Fi-themed HTML5 game that teaches coding and was developed by Microsoft Research.
In this game, you play as a code hunter tasked with repairing code so that it returns the expected result. There are 14 levels, called Sectors in the Code Hunt nomenclature, for you to complete.
Code Hunt supports either Java or C#. Programming concepts you’ll learn include arithmetic, loops, and conditional expressions.
Teachers who would like to extend the game with additional Sectors can do so by first reading the Code Hunt Designer Manual.
CodinGame is a huge suite of challenging games for those who want to learn programming. If you want to improve your coding skills, playing CodinGame is a fun way to do so.
Over 20 programming languages including PHP, C, and JavaScript are supported by CodinGame. The user interface is feature-packed and can be customized. For example, you can choose your code editor’s style: “Emacs”, “Vim”, or “Classic” (the default theme).
The game can be played on single player mode or multiplayer mode. In multiplayer mode, you can solve CodinGame challenges with other users.
The game is an open-world strategy game where you control units, called creeps, that will help you mine resources, establish your territory, and so forth. Being a multiplayer online game means your creeps will be alongside the creeps of other players.
Controlling your creeps involves writing JavaScript. (Screeps = scripting your creeps.) To learn how to play the game, hit up the docs.
FightCode
In FightCode, the objective is simple: Create a robot that will defeat the robots of other players.
How do you create a robot? By writing some JavaScript. For example, you can use the .rotateCannon() method to rotate your robot’s cannon by a certain number of degrees when a certain event happens.
Before building your indestructible, world-dominating robot, the first step you’ll need to take is to read the docs to learn how to code a robot.
A designer can never have enough fonts in their toolbox, especially calligraphy fonts that are all the rage now. Calligraphy fonts add a touch of elegance to any design project, not to mention they are also great for expressing personality and character.
Moreover, calligraphy fonts can be used in a variety of projects, from logos and branding to invitations, posters, and more.
The good news is that you can find tons of quality, free calligraphy fonts online that can be used in both commercial and personal projects. Start by browsing our selection of the best free calligraphy fonts listed below.
The Endestry font was designed by Creatype studio and features a great flow. It’s a perfect choice for logos and branding projects as well as letterheads, invitations, social media posts, and more.
The Billowing Script is a modern calligraphy font that was inspired by nature. It has a bouncy feel and features 243 glyphs and 64 alternate character along with stylistic alternates, standard ligatures, and other OpenType features.
The Naira Script is a great and free calligraphy font with bold strokes and many alternate characters and ligatures so you can truly add character to your designs. This font would be perfect for artists’ branding or to make your social media posts stand out.
The Everything Calligraphy font features varying baseline which gives your art a bouncy and playful feel. This font comes free with your Envato Elements subscription and is a great choice for wedding invitations.
Try the Fabfelt Script font if you are going for a slightly vintage look. The font features neat characters and was designed by Despinoy Fabien. It can be used for personal and commercial purposes.
The Anjani font is another font that you can download when you subscribe to Envato Elements. The font features a modern and romantic look so it’s a good choice for wedding invitations, logos, t-shirt designs, and letterheads.
The Woodlands font is a brush calligraphy font with a slightly rugged look. It’s a great choice for any branding project that has to do with outdoors or nature-oriented products. It’s free for both personal and commercial use.
This font is another great choice if you’re looking for a versatile font. The Mustahe Brush Script font comes with three font styles which include script, rounded, and smooth. You can mix and match those styles to achieve a unique yet harmonious look for your designs.
Consider the Playlist font if you want a little variety in your designs. You’ll get 3 font styles which include script, ornament, and caps which you can mix and match to create a unique design. Playlist Free Font can be used in both personal and commercial projects.
The Rosnita font has a bouncy and flowy feel. With this font, you’ll get an elegant script and a sans-serif font. Pair those two together in your designs for a well-matched, yet unique look. The font would work well as a signature or accent font as well as a quote font for Instagram posts.
The Frutilla script was designed by Ianmikraz Studio and features an elegant and classic look. The font includes more than 250 glyphs and loads of OpenType features, as well as ornamental characters which make this a highly versatile font. This font is free for personal and commercial use.
The Feelsmooth Script is perfect for branding and logos. It features an elegant and flowy feel thanks to its varying baseline. It features 350+ glyphs and 167 alternate characters.
The Arabella script is a playful and romantic script font that can be used in personal projects completely free. The font is a great choice for logos as well as invitations, and t-shirt designs.
The Buffalo font is a free script font that can be used for personal and commercial projects. It has a slightly vintage yet elegant feel and quite a unique look. Use it for branding purposes, signage, and any promotional material.
Hello Stockholm is a modern brush script font inspired by Scandinavian minimalism. You can use it for wedding invitations, street ads, Instagram posts, t-shirt design, branding, and more. The font includes uppercase and lowercase alternates as well as a bonus sans serif font with a multilingual support.
Try the Carosello font if you’re on the lookout for a marker font. Thanks to its retro look, the font is perfect for vintage projects. The font can be used for free in any personal project.
The Aprillia script is a modern and bold script font that’s perfect for social media posts, logos, and t-shirt designs. The font is free for personal use.
If you want an elegant and sophisticated look, then the Olivia Script font is a perfect choice. The font comes with an impressive 351 glyphs and can be used in commercial and personal projects.
The Noelan font includes elegant swashes that automatically connect at the end or at the beginning of a word. The font is free for commercial and personal projects and includes many alternates as well as international characters.
What makes the Alex Brush font unique are its short descenders which makes this font more legible than other similar script fonts. The font is free for commercial and personal projects.
The Salmela font is a beautiful brush font that has a modern and bold look. The font would be perfect for lettering projects, wall art, and posters. It’s free for commercial and personal projects.
One look at the Allura font and you’ll realize this font is perfect for wedding invitations and stationery. The font features an elegant and classy look and can be used for commercial and personal projects.
The Autery script has a playful look and would be a great choice for branding projects that include products or brands geared for younger audiences. The font is free for commercial and personal projects.
The Easy November font is a great choice for branding projects and promotional campaigns. The font includes elegant stylistic swashes and can be used for personal projects.
Calligraphy fonts add style and character to your designs. They are also versatile enough to be used in branding projects, t-shirt designs, letterheads, stationery designs, and wedding invitations.
As you can see from the examples above, there is plenty of high-quality calligraphy fonts that can be used in both personal and commercial projects, so be sure to check them out.
Imagine if you walked into a store to grab a few things and found none of the aisles were labeled. It would feel like a chaotic mess — you would have no clue where to go to find what you need and may end up leaving the store to go somewhere else.
Your navigational structure plays a critical role in determining whether people can find what they need on your site. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of seven website navigation examples to help inspire your website’s navigation!
Keep reading to get your dose of design inspiration!
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Website navigation is the structure of your website that enables users to find pages and information. It serves as a guidance system to help users move around your site. Your website navigation also helps organize different sections of your website so users can find critical pages fast.
7 website navigation examples to inspire you
Need some ideas for designing your navigation? Check out these seven examples and get inspired!
Website navigation example #1: Best Buy
Defining feature: Organization
First on our list of examples of website navigation is Best Buy.
Best Buy offers multiple electronic products for their customers, which leads them to have an extensive navigation. Despite all these product offerings, Best Buy has an incredibly organized navigation that makes it easy for customers to find what they need.
Once you click on a category, Best Buy breaks the navigation down even further to help you refine your search. For example, if you click on “Computers & Tablets,” you’re taken to a navigation with a list of computers and tablets. Then, if you click Tablets, you can see your product options for tablets.
This navigation is extremely organized, which makes it easy for people to find what they need.
Takeaway: When you create your website navigation menu, ensure it’s organized. Categorize your products logically to make it easy for your audience to find what they need. The critical thing to remember is that you’ll want to organize your navigation in a way that makes sense to your audience.
Website navigation example #2: Skinny Ties
Defining feature: Simplicity
Next on our list of navigation examples is Skinny Ties. Skinny Ties offers a simple navigation that makes it easy for visitors to find the products they need.
When you look at their navigation, it’s broken down into categories:
Color
Width
Fabric
Pattern
When someone visits their site, this simplistic navigation makes it easy for shoppers to find the tie they need.
Takeaway: Keeping your navigation simple is critical if you want to see success with your site. If your navigation is too busy, your audience will feel overwhelmed when trying to find what they need. A clean and straightforward navigation is best if you want to see success.
Website navigation example #3: New York Times
Defining feature: Ease of use
Next on our list of navigation examples is the New York Times. Their navigation is simple and easy to use, as it lays out all the headings across the top.
And the ease of use doesn’t stop there.
Once you click on a heading, you’re taken to a page with a more refined mini navigation. For example, if you click on the “Science” tab, it takes you to a Science category page, where there are more navigational links to narrow your focus.
This navigation setup makes it easy for users to find what they need fast.
Takeaway: Creating an easy-to-use navigation is critical for delivering a positive user experience. The easier it is for people to find the products or services they need, the more likely they are to stay engaged with your business.
Website navigation example #4: Partake
Defining feature: Visuals
One of the best website navigation examples is Partake. Partake, a baking company, has a simple but visually appealing navigation. When you navigate to their products, you can see a visual for each type of product.
These visuals help customers get a sense of what their products look like, which can also help them navigate to the correct pages. It also adds an element of engagement by making the navigation more visually attractive.
Takeaway: When you create your navigation, consider adding some visual interest to it. While you may not be able to add a photo or graphic for every product you offer, you can add a single visual that represents the entire category to make it more interesting.
Website navigation example #5: Rothy’s
Defining feature: Mobile-friendliness
Next on our list of examples of website navigation is Rothy’s, a women and children’s shoe company. Their navigation is an excellent example of mobile friendliness.
They use a hamburger menu to make it easy to open their navigation on mobile devices. Once you open the menu, you can see it organized by shoes, bags, and extras.
Rothy’s offers multiple product categories that make it easy for mobile users to sift through their products.
This navigation makes it simple and easy for mobile users to browse products on their site.
Takeaway: When you build your navigation, make sure you offer a mobile-friendly version of your navigation. A mobile-friendly navigation ensures people can find the products or services they need while browsing on mobile.
Website navigation example #6: Beauty Bakerie
Defining feature: Consistency
One of the visual website navigation examples is Beauty Bakerie. They highlight their products in their navigation to help people find what they need.
With this navigation, users can rely on visuals to help them find the beauty products they need on Beauty Bakerie’s website. Most importantly, though, all the icons are the same size, which allows for a consistent look and feel.
The consistency makes it easy to look through the navigation and find products users need.
Takeaway: If you decide to use visuals in your navigation, make sure they’re consistent to create a clean navigation. It will help you deliver the best user experience for your audience.
Website navigation example #7: Verve
Defining feature: Consistent branding
The last item on our list of website navigation examples is Verve. Verve is a coffee company that offers multiple coffee products for its customers.
Their navigation is a prime example of carrying your brand’s style into the navigation. With Verve, they use a similar font style and color scheme with their navigation to create a modern look and feel.
Takeaway: If you want to deliver a positive user experience, you need to align your navigation’s design to fit with your business’s style. It will ensure your site looks clean and cohesive.
Need help building your website navigation structure?
Your website navigation structure is critical to ensuring your audience can find the products they need on your site. But if you aren’t sure how to build the best navigation for your site, WebFX can help. As an award-winning web design company, we know how to craft navigation bars that keep people engaged.
Our team of experts can help you craft a website design that drives results.
In the past five years, we’ve driven over $2.4 billion in sales and over 6.3 million leads for our clients. You can feel confident our team will build a website navigation menu that keeps leads engaged and checking out your products or services.
Ready to boost engagement on your site? Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our web design services!
