Millions of hobby and professional photographers alike have been drawn to Instagram, amassing extensive collections of stylized photos. Statigram, a third-party Instagram application, gives these photo-sharing aficionados a bird’s-eye view of their app activities.

Statigram connects to your Instagram account, analyzes your past behaviors alongside your connections’ actions, and distills all this data into interesting metrics, charts and graphs.

The end result is a lovely looking and shareable profile page (as seen below) that sums up your Instagram history and identity.

Statigram includes the date of your first Instagram photo, total number of photos, counts and averages for all comments and “likes” on your photos, your top photos organized by “likes” and comments, a collection of the people you “like” most frequently, a days-of-the week breakdown of your activity and a few other interesting data points — like most used filters, for instance.

Statigram comes from France-based startup Tripnity, also makers of the Patchlife application for iPhone. So far, the relatively new application is proving quite popular with the Instagram crowd; it’s already racked up more than 40,000 users around the world.

More About: instagram, instagram apps, Patchlife, Statigram, stats, Tripnity

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Millions of hobby and professional photographers alike have been drawn to Instagram, amassing extensive collections of stylized photos. Statigram, a third-party Instagram application, gives these photo-sharing aficionados a bird’s-eye view of their app activities.

Statigram connects to your Instagram account, analyzes your past behaviors alongside your connections’ actions, and distills all this data into interesting metrics, charts and graphs.

The end result is a lovely looking and shareable profile page (as seen below) that sums up your Instagram history and identity.

Statigram includes the date of your first Instagram photo, total number of photos, counts and averages for all comments and “likes” on your photos, your top photos organized by “likes” and comments, a collection of the people you “like” most frequently, a days-of-the week breakdown of your activity and a few other interesting data points — like most used filters, for instance.

Statigram comes from France-based startup Tripnity, also makers of the Patchlife application for iPhone. So far, the relatively new application is proving quite popular with the Instagram crowd; it’s already racked up more than 40,000 users around the world.

More About: instagram, instagram apps, Patchlife, Statigram, stats, Tripnity

For more Social Media coverage:

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• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

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Charts and graphs are the most effective ways to show the relationship between two different and interlinked entities. On a web page, a comprehensively designed flowchart, diagram or graph can be worth a thousand words. Creating such charts that inform your visitors about all the necessary details is a daunting task, and many designers find creating charts, diagram and graphs a difficult job to accomplish.

Here, you will discover some of the best available free web services that let you create copious amounts of charts, diagrams and graphs. A majority of these services are easy to use; and will produce results that will be comparable to what you saw on the screen. Enjoy!

The Showcase

ChartDemo
If you need to create a stacked area chart along with complete labels and legends, then ChartDemo is for you.

Flowchart
This tool not only lets you create charts and diagrams but also provides you a platform to collaborate with your colleagues. This does not require you to download any software rather it works in your internet browser.

Track-n-graph
An easy to use web based tool for friends, family and colleagues to track and graph information

Barchart
This online tool allows you to create bar charts without the need of an applet bar graph creator. An absolute must have tool for those who want to create bar graphs.

Bubbl
Create multicolored mind maps online, share and work on them with friends. With this tool, you can embed your mind map in your blog or website, can email it or have it in printed form.

ChartGizmo
A free web based application that lets you create charts for your websites, blogs and even for social network profiles.

CreateAGraph
CreateAGraph gives you five different types of graphs and charts that you can consider for your use. With this tool, you can work online right from your browser.

DrawAnywhere
As the name suggests, draw anywhere you like. You can create flowcharts, diagrams, organizational charts and on top of that you can export your charts and diagrams as an image file (jpg, png, pdf, etc).

Fooplot
Fooplot is an online tool that lets you create charts & diagrams.

FusionCharts Google Gadget
Another useful web based tool to draw charts and diagrams with ease and comfort.

Gliffy
It is online diagramming software that allows you to create professional looking flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more!

Mindomo
A versatile Web-based mind mapping tool for creating, editing and sharing mind maps. It offers the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in an internet browser with no installation and maintenance required.

Mindmeister
This tool comes with all the customary features of a typical mind mapping tool with as many concurrent users as you like.

MGraph
MGraph is an online tool with which you can plot simple graphs.

Plotr
Draw simple charts with this lightweight charting framework which is based on Plot Kit. No use of Flash and no other interactive elements as you don’t always need them.

PlotKit
A comprehensive chart and graph plotting library for Javascript that comes with HTML Canvas, native browser and SVG support via SVG viewer.

Rich Chart Live
Use your web browser to create enjoyable and enchanting flash charts. High-impact charts can also be created with this absolutely free online tool.

SimpleSeating
This is an invaluable tool for those who are responsible for planning an analyst event which can be a major time sink and massive pain without it.

Online Chart Generator
With this online tool, you can create amazing 3D graphs instantaneously.

DIY Chart
DIY (Do it yourself) Chart is an easy to use, simple yet powerful online tool that can be used to create interactive graphs and charts using static or dynamic data.

Chartle.net
This tool offers simplicity, ubiquity and interactivity to online visualizations, and tears down the complexity so that novices can also use it.

ChartGo
ChartGo permits users to generate charts online rapidly. Simply paste your data in the chart data area and hit the create chart button. It’s that easy.

JS Charts
A JavaScript chart generator that lets you create charts in different templates. It is an easy to use tool that requires little or no coding.

Pie Chart Tool
A simple and easy Pie Chart creator that creates pie charts based on the data that you provide. Simply type in your data and the name of the categories.

Piecolor
Piecolor is an online tool to create colorful pie chart with ease.

Hohli Charts
Hohli Charts lets you animatedly create charts.

CSS Chart Generator
Generate your charts on the fly with CSS Chart Generator.

CHARTPART
This is a simple and straightforward online tool for creating charts.

Google Chart Tools
The Google Chart Tools facilitate adding live charts to any web page.

amCharts Visual Editor
You can use amChats as a web service through this editor. Configuring the chart and pasting the generated HTML code to your HTML page is all you need.

Pie Chart Maker
The Pie Chart Maker lets you generate your own customizable pie charts. You can save your pie charts as an image on your computer as well.

Online Chart Tool
This online tool allows you to design and share your own graphs absolutely for free.

OWTChart Generator
The OWTChart Generator is yet another useful online tool that can produce charts. It displays a GIF image of the chart on the screen

Chart Maker
Chart Maker allows users to easily create charts according to their individual needs.

Highcharts
It is a JavaScript library for creating different types of charts including line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter charts. It offers an easy way to add interactive charts to your websites and even web applications.

Google Chart Generator
This tool creates a Google chart in seconds!

JGraphpad
It is a feature-rich, online, standards-compliant and open source graph component available for Java that includes Process diagrams, workflow and BPM visualization, flowcharts, even traffic or water flow etc.

yEd Graph Editor
Another Java based graph editor that lets you generate drawings quickly and effectively. With this tool, you can implement automatic layouts to a wide range of different diagrams and networks.

Graphviz
Graphviz is an open source graph visualization software that presents structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. You can employ this tool in networking, bioinformatics, software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains.

XML/SWF Charts
A simple yet powerful online tool that allows you to create beautiful web charts and graphs from dynamic XML data. You can either manually prepare the XML source or can generate it via any scripting language such as PHP, ASP, CFML, Perl, etc.

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What can you use the application for?


Empressr gives users a way to create captivating online presentations that they can share with anyone. The available tools allow users to incorporate images, audio clips, videos and animations into their Empressr presentation. Users can also customize the size of the completed video and access their presentation from anywhere with internet access. Power Point presentations can be imported, edited and saved as well. Empressr also maintains an online community of individuals who create and share their own presentations to help others learn about various topics. The user stays in control by choosing to make their Empressr presentation public or keeping it secure and private. Users can organize their own media library, measure the effectiveness of each slide using analytics and import data to build charts and graphs.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Empressr was founded in May of 2006. The application was intended to give users a convenient way to create, store, edit and share presentations online. The company is based out of New York City. The President is Bryan Thatcher and Stephen Michaels is the Managing Director.

What are the differences to other applications?


Empressr gives users everything they need to create an eye-catching, effective presentation. The application goes a step further with Power Point importing tools, transitions and analytics so users can see how their presentations performed with audiences. The application also allows users to add any kind of media, including audio and video clips as well as images.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Empressr website welcomes users with fiery orange color scheme that is calmed down by the all-white background and blue links. The orange header includes five navigational links and the stylish Empressr logo. The homepage features recently created Empressr presentations as well as a helpful list of categories. The user can also see where they can use their Empressr presentation by viewing the list of logos on the homepage. These include MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Blogger and WordPress.

How does the registration process work?


A new user can get started with Empressr by clicking the orange “Sign Up Now” button found near the center of the homepage. The registration form is found along the left hand side of the following page. The form asks for a username, first and last name, email address, password and a short bio of up to 140 characters. The user must also check a small box at the bottom of the form that confirms that they are over 13 years of age and agree to the Empressr terms of use. After clicking the orange “Submit” button below the form, the user is taken to their dashboard where they can begin creating Empressr presentations or search through presentations created by other users.

What does it cost to use the application?


Empressr offers its services to all users for free. There are no subscription fees or other charges for creating presentations using this application. The user is also given a free account that saves their presentations. The site provides a search tool to find resources from published content or to locate content created by the user that they would like to include in their presentation. No premium paid membership currently exists with no indication that one will ever be added to the site.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Empressr is a convenient tool for anyone who needs or wants to create a presentation and share it online. The site provides users with all the tools they need to build an effective, engaging presentation on just about any topic imaginable.

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A series of performance charts and graphs will let you understand everything – the density and position of keywords, the number of indexed pages, the number of inbound links.

Read more

Learn more about seo-SHARKX.com in Dataopedia.com

Find out how much seo-SHARKX.com is worth with Stimator.com

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The United States government has made its IT Dashboard, a cost-cutting tool for federal transparency, freely available for anyone, especially other governments, to use and customize.

The IT Dashboard gives citizens important information on how the government uses tax money for technology initiatives across various agencies. Citizens can see how government investments are paying off, and they can compare types of IT spending over time by accessing easy-to-reach charts and graphs.

But this clarity of and access to vital information isn’t just good for citizens; it’s also used by the Federal Government, including Congress, to make important decisions about IT budgets and spending. Open-sourcing this cost-saving tool is part of the government’s larger plan to save on IT by eliminating redundant efforts. In other words, the IT Dashboard already exists and has been paid for, and the government isn’t going to hide that light under a bushel.

Here’s a video demonstrating some of the features of the federal IT Dashboard:

The government is working with Code for America for this release. In am announcement, CfA said, “The IT Dashboard was a major component of the process the Federal Government employed to save over $3 billion in just its first two years of deployment.”

In addition to the Dashboard, the government is also open-sourcing the complementary TechStat Toolkit, a set of tools and processes for reviewing any yellow or red flags that might pop up while using the Dashboard.

In this video, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra talks about the results the government has seen by using the IT Dashboard and how those results were achieved:

But open-sourcing something like this isn’t a cakewalk. The government worked with FOSS and government experts, Code for America and CfA’s Civic Commons project to get the job done.

Project lead Karl Fogel wrote on the Civic Commons blog, “We knew from the beginning that a high-profile project can’t be open sourced casually. It’s not enough to just put an open license on the code, move development out to a publicly visible repository, and call it done.”

He continued to note that for the Dashboard, Civic Commons had to ensure that all the code and documentation was safe for public use (i.e., not classified or a government secret) and audit the code; reduce dependencies on proprietary libraries; write documentation; ceate non-sensitive, non-classified sample data; work with the Drupal community; and much more.

Interested parties can download the Dashboard code now at SourceForge. While the Dashboard is intended to help governments cut costs and manage IT budgets, we can see such tools coming in handy at just about any large company, tech or otherwise.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, GottfriedEdelman

More About: code for america, it dashboard, open source, U.S. government

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We’re designers, so it makes sense that a lot of us are visual learners and do better looking at charts and graphs than reading an article or listening to a podcast. Typography and color are two great topics that are perfectly suited for infographics, charts, and other graphical learning tools.

Below we’ve collected a good number of great infographics that will teach you how to use typefaces and colors effectively. There are guides for choosing a typeface, for combining typefaces, for figuring out what different colors mean in different cultures, and a lot more.

Typography

Dig into the history of typography and catch up on the typographic origins. Whether you need help choosing the right font or want to know how to effectively combine fonts, the graphics below can help, for both print and online design.

So You Need a Typeface
While at first this infographic appears to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s actually quite useful. Start by choosing what type of project you’re working on, and then just answer a series of yes or no and good or bad questions to find a suitable typeface.

The Anatomy of Typography
Understanding all the elements that make up a typeface is an important step in learning to expertly combine typefaces. This infographic breaks down the anatomy of individual characters within a typeface, covering everything from aperture to strokes to the different types of terminals.

Periodic Table of Typefaces
The most popular fonts are graphically represented in the style of the periodic table of elements in this poster. It gives some brief history of each typeface (including the date it was first designed and who designed it), as well as the classificiation of each font. There are a number of different versions of the poster available for purchase, or you can print it yourself.

The Evolution of Typography
This infographic showcases the changes in typographic design throughout history. It covers the evolution of serif typefaces and sans-serif typefaces, as well as a brief description of the history of script and blackletter typefaces.

Mixing Typefaces
This simple chart serves as a guide for combining twenty-two different common typefaces. It offers three separate classifications for determining whether two typefaces are compatible: “Combine at will”, “Not a conservative choice”, and “Think again.”

19 Top Fonts in 19 Top Combinations
This great chart provides an instant visual reference to good combinations of popular fonts, including Helvetica, Garamond, Gill Sans, Minion, and more.

Type Palettes
Graphical representations of typography combos are a great way to see how different fonts work together. This Type Palettes article shows a number of complex typography combinations, using different typefaces for headlines, subheadings, text and captions.

Most Popular Fonts by Operating System
Not everyone is using @font-face for their website designs yet. And even those who are need a backup for older browsers (or in case their font service is down or unavailable). This chart shows all the most popular typefaces by operating system, and even includes the most commonly used fonts from Google Font Directory and FontSpring.

34 Typographic Sins
There are dozens of mistakes commonly made in typographic layouts. This poster details thirty-four of them, as well as what the correct usage is.

Color

Color science and theory is a remarkably complex field. The graphics included below, though, can offer valuable insight into the world of color, including how to effectively create color palettes and what colors mean.

Basic Color Relationships
This infographic gives all the basic information you need to know about color theory. It includes terms, the way RGB and CMYK work, and meanings of different colors, as well as a color wheel the illustrates warm and cool colors.

What Colors Mean to Different Cultures
When designing for an international audience, it’s important to note the effect your color scheme will convey to your audience. This handy chart shows exactly what different colors mean in different countries, helping to prevent any cultural faux pas.

How Color Effects Purchasing Decisions
If you’re designing an ecommerce site, it’s important to know exactly how different colors affect purchasing decisions made by your visitors. This chart shows the effects different colors have on those purchasing decisions, as well as which colors work bets for which types of buyers.

Colors of the Most Powerful Brands in the World
Certain colors have become associated with certain brands, both in the “real world” and online. This series of graphics explores the colors used in the various design schemes and logos of the biggest brands in the world. Each of these graphics explores a different aspect of the use of color in branding.

Colors of Twitter Profiles
This infographic compares the use of colors by geography, keyword, and demographic of Twitter users who have used the Colourlovers Themeleon Twitter profile designer. It also showcases the most colorful Twitter personalities, and the colors they use.

What Your Web Design Says About You
This infographic showcases the most popular color, typography, and other design options in web design are most popular, and what the different choices say about the site itself. The graph also delves into color science and theory, with interesting graphics representing each hue.

Top Voted Colors of 2010
Staying current on trends in color is important for designing a site that looks current (or stays timeless). This infographics shows the results of a survey of over 1000 people chose the most popular colors of 2010 and the words that the colors represent.

His and Hers Color Names
A useful, interactive infographic that displays the results of XKCD’s color survey, which used five million plus samples to judge what men and women consider accurate names for all the colors of the spectrum. Some are downright hilarious, while others are incredibly creative. In either case, it gives a good indication of how the sexes feel about different colors across the spectrum.

The Color Strata
Here’s another visualization of the XKCD Color Survey dataset, broken down into the 200 most common color names. The format used here is really interesting, and not something commonly seen.

Recognizing Brands by Color Scheme
An interesting study that seeks to simplify brand logos by breaking it down into it’s basic color and circles to represent text and lines. A useful way to see where the color scheme of a logo works it’s magic, which can help you design color schemes with more impact.

Useful Infographics

Why Does Gen Y Buy
This infographic is useful to anyone creating an ecommerce site that’s aimed at Generation Y, who spend about $20 billion online each year.

Interesting Facts and History of CSS
This infographic combines the history of CSS with a number of interesting facts about it. It includes the different versions of CSS, as well as support by different browsers.

WTF is HTML5 and Why We Should All Care
This is a brilliant infographic that shows what new features HTML5 has added, and what those features mean for the future of the internet.

User Centered Design
This infographic breaks down the elements of user-centered design, as well as the process of creating such designs.

HTML5 & CSS3 Readiness
This interactive infographic breaks down exactly which browsers support which new features of HTML5 and CSS3.

The Visual FAQ of SEO
This infographic gives a great breakdown of what you need to know about search engine optimization. It covers things like site architecture and structure, link building, and SEO tactics.

The State of Web Development 2010
Here’s a great rundown of the state of web development in 2010, including the popular browsers (desktop and mobile), OSs, and more.

Bounce Rate Demystified
This infographic from KISSmetrics showcases how bounce rate statistics work, and how they’re calculated.

The Anatomy of a WordPress Theme
This is an incredibly useful infographic that breaks down the parts of a WordPress theme in great detail. If you’re a theme developer (or want to be), it can also serve as an excellent quick-reference guide.

The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page
The creation of a great landing page is equal parts art and science. This infographic breaks down exactly what goes into a great landing page.

Interesting Infographics

Salaries in the Realm of Design
This infographic compares the salaries of different design professions in the United States, India, and the UK. It also covers salaries by country depending on the type of employer (Company, College, Non-Profit, etc.).

Through the Generations: How the Web is Being Used
This infographic breaks down common internet usage patterns among different generations, including Millenials, Gen X, GI Generation, Silent Generation, and the Boomers.

The Awesome Evolution of the Internet
This is a fun infographic that breaks down the evolution of internet users from the beginning of the web.

The History and Present State of Domain Names
Ever wondered what the evolution of domain names looks like? This infographic breaks it down from the first .net domain name in 1985 through now.

The Evolution of the Blogger
An interesting infographic that shows the evolution of bloggers from those keeping online diaries to company bloggers, vloggers, and others.

The Power of WordPress
This infographic showcases the power of WordPress as both a CMS and a blogging platform. It includes a timeline of WordPress from May 2003 through September 2010, as well as details on the types of sites using WP and daily user activity.

Multiple Identities
This infographic discusses what profiles users utilize to sign up for and use different services across the internet, including Google, Facebook and Twitter.

The Internet in 2020
Here’s a great graphical representation of what the internet is predicted to look like in 2020, based on current data. It covers how many people will likely be online, who those people will be, and more.

Origin of Important Typefaces
This infographic shows a timeline of when important typefaces were developed and by whom.

Just How Massive is Google, Anyway?
Figuring out just how big Google is can be tricky. This infographic sheds some light on the subject.

The History of Programming Languages
This infographic from O’Reilly shows the history of various programming languages, from 1954 until 2004.

Dribble: What Is It Used For?
An interactive HTML5 infographic that offers details about Dribble usage and users.

The World of Data We’re Creating on the Internet
This infographic from Good Magazine shows how we use the internet and the data people create on a daily basis, including email, video, and other content.

The Brads – Learning About Contrast in Design
Contrast is a very important concept designers need to grasp if they want to be successful. This infographic/comic strip from Vectortuts+ explains contrast in an easy-to-understand way.

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What can you use the application for?


Zoho Reports gives professionals a better way to monitor their data and analyze business information. Users can upload their data using spreadsheets, traditional applications or the web. Within minutes, the data is compiled into readable, organized reports. Zoho Reports also provides users with a drag and drop interface to easily customize the user’s reports. Each report features vibrant colors in the form of line graphs or bar charts so the user can easily review the data at a glance and look for trends or changes. Zoho has also included collaboration tools with its Reports application. Users can come together to make decisions and discuss the data. Zoho Reports also includes SQL query functions so the user can quickly find the information they need.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Zoho Reports is member of the Zoho family of web based applications. Based out of Pleasanton, California, Zoho was founded in September of 2005. Today, the team has grown to enormous proportions to consist of around 1,500 individuals, including Evangelist Raju Vegesna and Director of Business Development Ian Wenig.

What are the differences to other applications?


Zoho Reports offers many of the same features that similar applications offer. It is most likely a more appealing option for current Zoho users because they are already familiar with the company and its applications. Zoho Reports are also very functional and well organized, making them a good choice for businesses and individual professionals. Users can compile data, view it in readable charts and graphs and even share it with others.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Zoho Reports website looks very similar to all other Zoho applications. The company always utilizes a white background with a colorful block logo. The Reports application takes those same vibrant colors and employs them in its bar and line chart indicators. Zoho Reports is nicely organized and makes a good option for professionals and businesses that need a better way to create and manage reports.

How does the registration process work?


Users who wish to access Zoho Reports will need a Zoho account. This can be created by clicking on the blue “Sign Up” link in the top portion of the log in box. The registration form requires a username, email address, password and word verification. The user must also check the terms of service and privacy policy box in the bottom area of the form. A second box is present to sign the user up for the Zoho newsletter, but this is optional. Clicking the blue “Sign Up Now” button at the bottom of the form takes the user directly to their Zoho Reports dashboard page.

What does it cost to use the application?


Zoho Reports gives users five membership options. The first is a free account which is automatically chosen when the user first registers. This membership includes up to two users, five databases, 100,000 rows, five query tables, three scheduled imports and SSL security. Next is the Basic plan which costs around $15 per month and upgrades to include up to 250,000 rows, a backup feature and unlimited databases, query tables and scheduled imports. The Standard account costs around $35 per month and includes up to five users, 500,000 rows, multiple database owners and rebranding capabilities. The Professional account costs around $60 per month and includes up to 10 users and one million rows. The Professional Plus plan costs around $95 per month and includes up to 20 users and two million rows.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Zoho Reports is a helpful tool for professionals and businesses. The numerous account options makes it easier for users to select a plan that suits their budget and offers the right level of access. Through Zoho Reports, business owners and individual professionals can compile, manage and review data easily.

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What can you use the application for?


Kampyle provides users with a better way to receive and analyze feedback from customers and leads. The site allows users to receive reviews on their sales, marketing and customer support efforts. Kampyle compiles data into colorful, readable charts and graphs to break down the details and help website owners find trouble areas in their approach to converting visitors to customers. Through Kampyle, users can ask their visitors and customers questions and find out if there were any obstacles that may have deterred them from making a purchase, such as a broken link, website bug, or poor design choice. The user can also determine if their site has any product gaps or is missing any vital add ons that would entice users to make a purchase. The support side of Kampyle immediately gathers important information, such as the visitor’s session details including their operating system, location and browser, the URL where the feedback was generated and the visitors click stream.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Kampyle was founded in April of 2007 in Israel. The current team consists of around 10 individuals, including founder and Vice President of Marketing, Product and Business Development Eran Savir, CEO Ariel Finkelstein and Vice President of R&D Eylon Steiner.

What are the differences to other applications?


Kampyle gives users many ways to gather information directly from the people who matter the most to their business: the website visitor. Users can take the information they gather about their sales and marketing approach or customer support and locate any issues with their current system. Using Kampyle’s diverse collection of detailed reports and features, users can increase the profit of their websites by growing their conversion rate.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Kampyle website has a very stylish, elegant look highlighted by the gently curled logo in red and silver. The website features a white background and colorful people icons. The application generates organized reports using color bar graphs, pie charts and more to break down information into a format that is much easier to consume.

How does the registration process work?


New users can join Kampyle by clicking on the green “Plans and Pricing” button positioned along the right hand side of the homepage. The user must select their desired membership before continuing. The registration form requires a full name, email address, password, phone number as well as agreement with the billing policy and terms of service. Enterprise customers can click on the white “Enterprise Solutions” button found on the pricing and plans page to request a quote for their business. The “More Information” form requires a name and email address. Optional fields are also provide for company name, job title and phone number.

What does it cost to use the application?


Kampyle provides users with three membership types to choose from. The first is the Bronze membership which includes up to three feedback forms, one user, 200 feedback items, basic reporting, SSL encryption and the ability to export to Excel for just under $100 per month. The Silver plan comes with a 15 day free trial (no credit card required to sign up for the trial) and costs around $250 per month. This membership upgrades to include up to five feedback forms, five users, 500 feedback items, expert feedback form templates, advanced reporting and Google Analytics integration. The most expensive plan is the Gold membership which costs just under $500 per month and includes up to seven feedback forms, 10 users, 1,000 feedback items, Google AdWords integration, SalesForce integration and account management.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Kampyle is a valuable tool for businesses. The pricing might be a little steep for a startup or small business. The application includes many tools that can help website owners find out what makes their customers buy or choose not to buy.

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This video is from Think Vitamin Membership, a high-quality video training site, curated by us at Carsonified and Think Vitamin, with hundreds of short videos on topics like …

• Accessibility
• CSS3
• Design
• Django
• HTML & CSS
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• Ruby
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• SASS
• UX
• Version Control
• WordPress Theme Design

10 new videos are added every week, so it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest technology and methods. Browse the entire library of videos.

No Video? Watch it now on Think Vitamin

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Tempo is a time tracker and report generator developed by the good people at Zetetic. Ideal for both employee and employer, Tempo keeps accurate record of every minute worked through use of a timer or direct time entry, and organizes that time by projects and other customized categories.

What lifts Tempo a cut above other time trackers are the reports, charts and graphs it produces with the time data. With this tool, the employer can analyze team efficiency, compare performance and identify trends. A benefit for the contractor is, by way of charts, one can spot missing entries, under billing and provide evidence of time worked. At the end of the pay period, the contractor can export an invoice, directly from Tempo.

Thanks to Zetetic’s value of convenience, enter time via email, twitter, widget, iOS or other mobile browser. Not a minute has to be wasted surfing the internet.

With prices starting at $12 per month (in addition to a limited free plan), Tempo ensures that every party involved gets a bang for their buck.

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Why be ordinary when you can be awesome? Microsoft® PowerPoint® has always offered its own charts and graphs. But then, there was only so much you could do with them. The need of the hour? To add some real oomph — oomfo!

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There are techniques that will lessen the static images and create more accessible content of the charts and graphs. Techniques in using CSS, jQuery plugins ,and online chart tool generator are some of the few things you can do about your charts and graphs.
Here are some techniques to style up you charts and graphs:

1. CSS Charts and Graphs

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet )is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. – Wikipedia. It affects the display properties of a web page.CSS deals with HTML, XHTML and XML language. Here are techniques that will create a style on your charts and graphs. I think that the most useful feature of the CSS is that the style and layout are removed on the HTML page making the size smaller that reduces bandwidth requirements and faster download for your visitors.

Browser issue is one of the disadvantage of the CCS because it does not work consistently in different browsers. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape will just display a plain html page not like Firefox and new versions of Netscape.

CSS Vertical Bar Graph
A technique that uses unordered list element to achieve the height and width. The positioning of the 4 quarters using the ul element of position: absolute. The div element that uses to create the horizontal bars. To add the colors, go all the way with the CSS color image elements.

Pure CSS Line Graph
Line graph is the simplest way of data representation. If you are not comfortable using scripting language to create your line graph, this CSS line graph will give you an ease in presenting your data. Combination of your CSS sprites and positioning that creates a simulation of the line graph. This technique used definition list element (DL) that represents the coordinate system.

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CSS Stacked Bar Graph
There are lots of posting about bar graph but not with stacked bar graph. Stacked bar graphs are commonly used in placing the most uniform series in the lower part so it’s easier to gain insight about the data. HTML and CSS come hand in hand in creating a CSS stacked bar graph. It uses definition list to present the data in organize way. The <dt> tags and <dd> tags are used to dynamically access the content of the graph and it easier to style using the CSS.

Creating Pie Chart with CSS3
Pie chart or a circle graph is a circular chart divided into sectors that illustrates proportion. It is usually in percentage. This technique works only in Firefox, Chrome , Safari update, and Opera because it uses CSS3. Using the div element to create the circle and the radius. By using the clip property to show only the half of the circle. By stacking all the pie element and rotating it with its percentage amount and adding color property you’ll get that pie chart.

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Complex CSS Bar Graph
Love, Education , War Craft are few things to graph. Is it in a good side or bad side? With this complex bar graph , an indicator that uses a marker position to determine your data. The color scheme also help in identifying the data from lighter shade to darker shade. With the help of the <dl>, <dt>, and <dd> tag incorporated into CSS , your ready to mark.

2. jQuery Plugins for Charts and Graphs

jQuery is a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. Wikipedia.
jQuery plugins are tools to extend the functionality of the applications. These are easy to install plugins that will lessen out your work in coding. Here are the 3 most used jQuery plugins for charts and graphs. The advantages of the jQuery are lightweight,easy and fast , write less but do more in functionality, cross – browser compatibility, easy integrations with applications and to cite a few.

Flot
Flot is a pure JavaScript plotting library for jQuery that creates nice looking charts on the client-side. It includes simplicity on its interface, features like zooming and mouse tracking, but it’s limit in plotting.
Flot Demo || Flot Download

Features:

• Creates graphical plots
• Special Features: Zooming and Mouse Tracking
• Simple and easy to use
• Supports:Internet Explorer 6/7/8 with the HTML canvas tag (the excanvas JavaScript emulation helper is used for IE),Firefox 2.x+,Safari 3.0+,Opera 9.5+ and Konqueror 4.x+

jQuery Sparklines
Sparklines is a chart tool more on information statistics. It is usually used for stock market activities, temperature or measurements. Edward Tufte describes sparklines as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”. These are the following that you need in your web page: 1.The jQuery JavaScript library loaded into the page – At least version 1.2 or higher 2.A copy of jquery.sparkline.js loaded into the page which you can download from this site. 3. An inline tag on the page within which to display the sparkline (eg. ) 4.A call to the sparkline() function to actually display the sparkline.

The features include line chart, bar chart, tristate chart, discrete chart, bullet graph, pie graph, and box plot.The plug in was written by Gareth Watts. I found out that the Sparklines could also be use in Microsoft Excel 2010 to show the data trends.

Sparklines Demo || Sparkline Download

Features:

• Creates small inline charts
• Customize size and colors
• Numerous Style: Inline Graphs, Bar Chart, Tristate Chart, Discrete Chart, Box Plot, Pie Chart and Bullet Chart
• Added Functions: Mouse Speed, Negative Values, threshold
• Supports: Firefox 2+,Safari 3+,Opera 9,Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8

jqPlot

jqPlot is a jQuery extension to render completely client-side JavaScript charts in your web pages. It is one of the most usable plugins for charts because of its features.

jqPlot Demo || jqPlot Download

Features:

• Numerous chart style options.
• Date axes with customizable formatting.
• Up to 9 Y axes.
• Rotated axis text.
• Automatic trend line computation.
• Tooltips and data point highlighting.
• Sensible defaults for ease of use.
• Supports:IE 6, 7 & 8,Firefox,Safari, and Opera

3. Flash- based Charts and Graphs

Flash is a tool that creates interactive and animated applications in your Website. Animations or movable images are fun and create more impact on the viewers.

Fusion Chart Free

Fusion Chart is a free Flash Charting tool that let you create animated and interactive Flash Charts for your web applications, desktop application and presentations.

Fusion Chart Demo || Fusion Chart Download

Features:

• Most of the basic charting needs
• 22 popular charts like Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, Stacked, Candlestick and Funnel Chart, that look the same across all browsers
• Animated and interactive charts that make your applications look “wow”
• Works with PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, RoR, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations
• All the charts can pull data from any database and are AJAX enabled

amCharts

AmCharts offers really a great range and customize set of charts. Dynamic used of this web-based product will surely generate your data into a great chart.

amCharts Demo || amCharts Download

Features:

• Chart Styles: Pie & Donut, Line & Area, Column & Bar and Scatter & Bubble
• Can be generated in 2D or 3D charts
• Extract data from CSV or XML files
• Read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ColdFusion, and many other programming languages.

AnyChart

AnyChart offers a dynamic Flash-based charting component. It is an XML driven that is compatible in any data format It is not a free tool but it offers a trial version for the first time users but if you want to maximize the potential of this tool, $649.00 is all you need to have a license purchase.

AnyChart Demo || AnyChart Download

Features:

• Cross-browser and cross-platform
• Generate Pie, Bar, Line, Candlestick, Area, Column, Bubble, Spline, Dot/Marker, Scatter, Candlestick and Doughnut charts
• Can be used with ASP.NET, ASP, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, simple HTML pages and also PowerPoint presentations.

XML/SWF Charts

XML/SWF Charts provides flexible and dynamic chart generating tool that output best graphic quality.

XML/SWF Demo || XML/SWF Download

Features:

• Quick generation of charts and graphs from static or dynamic data (any scripting language)
• Full updates and data streaming without reloading the web page.
• Interactive scrolling (any number of data-points), drill-down, 3D rotation, links, guides, labels, etc.
• Animated transitions and quality Flash graphics, including anti-aliased fonts, transparency, shadow, bevel, glow, and blur.
• Full screen mode, scalable charts, printable charts, and bitmap export.
• Flash applications, web applications, and support for Javascript communication.
• Supports unicode text to display special characters and multi-languages.
• Variety types of charts

4.Online Charts and Graphs Generator

Are you tired of coding and just want to generate the charts and graphs you always wanted?

Here are some of the useful charts and graphs generator:

Max’s Chart

Max’s Chart is an easy to use chart generator that generates CSS output that you can also edit for customizing your own style.

DIY Chart

DIY (Do It Yourself) Chart is a web-based tool that lets you create your charts and graphs in any scripting language you want from static to dynamic one. It offers features that is user-friendly , different type of charts, support multiple data and supports and language.

Kid’s Zone

Who said that graphs and charts are never fun to kids? This is the best and easy way to use to tool for young at heart.With a friendly graph creating tutorial, surely kids will love this for their homework.

Onlinecharttool

Design and share your graphs for free. The best way to share numerous type of charts and graphs are for free.

Highcharts

Highcharts is a charting library that is written in pure JavaScript. . Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

Google Chart Generator

Ready to use chart generator. Just input the required fields and *poof* your graph is ready for presentation.

Statistical Analysis is never been fun but with the help of these existing tools and scripting your presentation will be way out easier. Just one code or click away your presentation will be the talk about in your meetings. Whatever techniques you want to use, try to experiment and find the best technique or tool your comfortable working in.

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This is our weekly column in which we share our favorites posts, articles and resources with our readers all from last week.

If you would like to be kept up to date with loads of fresh design news and resources, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebook or even by subscribing to our RSS feed.

15 Best Ever PHP Frameworks

Frameworks are the streamlined flow of PHP codes meshed up and baked for you to just use and implement. PHP frameworks are the result of codes written by many talented developers around the world. In other words, PHP frameworks help to promote rapid application development (RAD), which saves you time, helps build more stable applications, and reduces the amount of repetitive coding for developers. In this article you will find 15 of the best PHP frameworks that are both light and easy to implement.
15 Best Ever PHP Frameworks →

Library and Components for Javascript Developers

This post is a JavaScript developer toolbox that includes some JavaScript libraries that offer different modules like Core, AJAX, Events, Load, CSS and many more. Whether the programmers want to provide enhanced multiple file upload methods, creating standard based web forms, or devise mouse gesture, they have many options of JavaScript libraries. Likewise, creating interactive maps, images and image effects, multiple types of charts, and graphs is highly possible with charting or image development toolkits.
Library and Components for Javascript Developers →

JavaScript Guide – MDC

JavaScript Guide – MDC →

visualizing.org

Visualizing.org is a community of creative people working to make sense of complex issues through data and design… and it’s a shared space and free resource to help you achieve this goal.
visualizing.org →

Make a ‘View Source’ Button

Remy Sharp’s cool site for HTML5 demos has a “View Source” button on each of the individual demo pages. Click it, and you see the entire source code for the page you are looking at. It’s not a popup or a new tab, it just shows the source right there on the page. This tutorial sets out to recreate it.
Make a ‘View Source’ Button →

Jo HTML5 Mobile App Framework

Jo HTML5 Mobile App Framework →

Compact News Previewer with jQuery

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a news previewer that let’s you show your latest articles or news in a compact way. The news previewer will show some list of articles on the left side and the preview of the article with a longer description on the right. Once a news on the left is clicked, the preview will slide in.
Compact News Previewer with jQuery →

KEYS.css

KEYS.css →

The Square Grid – A simple CSS framework for designers and developers

A simple CSS framework for designers and developers, based on 35 equal-width columns. It aims to cut down on development time and help you create beautiful-structured websites.
The grid is equiped with a 28px baseline-grid for a smooth vertical rhythm. Each block (DIV) is defined with a margin of 1 square (28px) from the next block.
The Square Grid – A simple CSS framework for designers and developers →

Frame Box – Lightweight online tool for creating mockups

Frame Box – Lightweight online tool for creating mockups →

CSS3 Animated Bubble Buttons

With this button pack, you can easily turn any link on your page into an animated button by just assigning a class name. No JavaScript necessary. Four color themes and three sizes are also available by assigning additional class names.
CSS3 Animated Bubble Buttons →

Crash Course: YUI Grids CSS

The Yahoo User Interface Library is a rather extensive set of JavaScript tools for developers. Often left unnoticed are a few other useful components of the library that will speed up your coding: some CSS libraries. In this article, from Net Tuts, they take you on a whirlwind tour of the YUI Grids CSS library.
Crash Course: YUI Grids CSS →

Money Style Illustration in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will be shown how to create a simple money style illustration using a regular photo, it's not as perfect as the money illustrations you will see in the regular dollar bill, but it's still a quick and efective tip.
Money Style Illustration in Photoshop →

The creation of “A Life Of Aquatic Sounds”

In this tutorial you will be shown how to create “A Life Of Aquatic Sounds”, using a variety of blending mode tricks, photo filters and other useful Photoshop techniques.
The creation of “A Life Of Aquatic Sounds” →

Create Light Text For Easily

Create Light Text For Easily →

How to Create a Simple New Twitter Background Design in Photoshop

On September 14, Twitter introduced its newly redesigned interface that provides an easier, faster and richer experience. But with the new display interface, your old backgrounds will have problems fitting in. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a background that will fit in perfectly with the new Twitter.
How to Create a Simple New Twitter Background Design in Photoshop →

The Art Of Film Title Design Throughout Cinema History

In this article you’ll take a closer look at that short space of time between the moment the lights go down and the first scene of a film, the part that so often sets our expectations of a movie, that sequence that speaks to our creative side: the art of the film title.
The Art Of Film Title Design Throughout Cinema History →

Showcase of Minimalism in Movie Posters From 1967 to 2010

Minimalism in movie posters is something that is becoming more and more popular, as you can clearly see from the examples showcased below, there are many more minimal posters from recent years compared to the amount seen in the 90′s and earlier.
Showcase of Minimalism in Movie Posters From 1967 to 2010 →

Metro and Underground Maps Designs Around the World

These maps show the infrastructure of the city; each city is different from another because of the look, feel, regional culture, typography and many other things.
Metro and Underground Maps Designs Around the World →

270 Toolbar Icons for iPhone 4 Retina Display

DesignModo Free Social Bookmarks/Networking Icons Set

Retro Video/DOS Games For The Weekend

If there was ever a post that will ruin your producivity this week it will be this one. Take caution when visiting, and be prepared to suspend any work you are doing and enjoy this vintage selection of games. Remember Golden Axe? I am playing that just now.
Retro Video/DOS Games For The Weekend →

Previous Weekly Design News…

Design News Roundup Archives →

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What can you use the application for?


Compete is a web tool designed to help site owners and online businesses find out what the competition is doing. With this information, a strong marketing strategy could be developed to help the company move ahead in the ranks and overcome the competition. The main goal of compete is to supply user with the tools necessary to arm themselves with information. These details can go far in helping the user improve marketing and become more successful.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Compete is a part of the Kantar Media company, which focuses on improving brand marketing online. Kantar Media does this by monitoring the online behavior of consumers all over the world. Through the knowledge and web understanding and experience of the Kantar Media company, Compete is able to better serve clients by guiding them with vital information.

What are the differences to other applications?


There are many information gathering tools out there. Compete does this, but does so with a focus on providing the necessary information their clients need to get an edge in the market. Of course, how the information is used is left up to the company requesting it. However, these details can prove valuable when planning a marketing strategy or finding a new way to approach a potential market.

How does the application look and feel to use?


Compete is very professional, with a stylized logo and enough color to make the site personable. Colorful line charts and graphs assist the client in understanding the information provided by Compete. Through good organization and proper use of color, Compete has created an easy to use tool that helps users get the most out of the information they are obtaining.

How does the registration process work?


A visitor that would like to register for Compete can do so by clicking either the large green “Signup for Free” button or the smaller “Register” button at the top right hand corner of the homepage. After doing so, the user is taken to the registration form which requests a first name, last name, organization name, email address, and password. The user must manually check the terms of service agreement box and can choose to uncheck the newsletter and daily digest opt in boxes. These are automatically selected, so the user must make a point to decline if they do not wish to receive emails.

What does it cost to use the application?


Users are given the choice of five different, and diversely priced Compete membership types. The first is the free MyCompete account. This allows one user, basic account features, and the ability to measure and publish audience profiles. The next step up is the Pro Intro account, which runs just under $200 a month. This account type includes up to 50 monthly analytics reports, daily digest, traffic and engagement metrics, daily traffic metrics, and two years of monthly traffic metrics. The Pro Standard account costs just under $300 and upgrades to include 100 monthly analytics reports, demographics metrics, and more. A Pro Advanced account is also available and runs about $500 a month. This option upgrades to 250 analytics reports and many other useful tools. A Pro Enterprise account is also available that allows multiple users and unlimited reports, but requires the client contact Compete for custom pricing.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Compete is definitely intended for a business. Small businesses and start ups may have trouble with the cost of a sufficient Compete membership. Of course users can always start out at a free status, but the prices can get a bit lofty. It seems that Compete is intended more for medium size businesses and up.

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Web designing is the demand for today. When you are starting, your own business in designing then it may be difficult for you to select one of the best freelance web designers for your projects. What are the criteria that you must look in to while you carry out to search best web designer?

What special thing should be attached with the freelance designers that will attract anyone to get them for their projects? We will just peek inside some of the main things that will help you choose your own designing person for your future projects.

Selecting one of the best designers is necessary because if you select someone who hardly knows the job then it might affect your reputation with the client. If you select wisely that reflects positive results in your company.

You may be interested in the following related articles as well.

• How to Increase Web Traffic through Search Engines!
• 50+ Free Resources for Charts and Graphs Solution
• Bulletproof Email Marketing: Overview, Tips and Tools
• 21 Free Video Players For Your Website and Blogs
• 10 Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website
• 60+ Essential Web Apps for Freelancer Web Designers

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

Start off With a Vision of What You Want from The Designer

Given the demand for web designers it is Imperative that you take your time defining what you want from that designer. This is the first step where many selections fail. They go about the process with a speculative approach when what is required is a firm list of requirements that they want to fill. This is the first step that often fails the commissioning agent for these things.

• The Remote Designer: How to Work While on the Road
• Carsonified: A Developers Guide to Working with Designers

Mind42

With Mind42 lets us brainstorm individually or as a group. It’s free to use , you can create an account and record our ideas through simple mind maps. Mind maps can be group brainstorming a lot more effective because they save time when it comes to filtering our ideas.

Official Link

Imagination Cubed

Imagination Cubed provide a canvas on which we can draw with a red virtual pen. We can insert various shapes and text, draw straight lines, and change the canvas’s color. It is a very simple to use website that facilitates group drawing.

Official Link

Edistorm

Edistorm website let people engage in brainstorming sessions over the WWW with large canvas. Such a process is made very simple by the use of colored sticky notes and the presence of a series of “idea bots” make everything flow along more organically. Edistrom comes in free and paid version. The main difference free storm is public and can be joined by anybody, while the paid incarnation of the service is the one that makes for private sessions (or “private storms”) that can be joined by invitation only.

Official Link

WiseMapping

WiseMapping lets users create mind maps as a group. They have user friendly interface and saves users’ time in figuring out the controls. You can embed ready mind maps in any website. Through WiseMapping you can also save your mind maps as image files or PDF documents.

Official Link

Sneffel

Sneffel gives users to create a virtual whiteboard that can be used for the free flow and sharing of ideas with colleagues and collaborators of any nature. The URL of the whiteboard can be shared with our friends for collaborative drawing. We can embed the whiteboard on our blog or website as well.

Official Link

Be Focused on What are Your Needs

You will need to ensure that the designer is very clear about the priorities for the organisation and that he or she is able to implement them effectively. This is perhaps the single most important aspect of any work that you do with them. You should explain to them the business plan and how it relates to the work that they are going to be undertaking.

• 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
• Effective Strategy To Estimate Time For Your Design Projects
• How To Find Time For… Everything!

WORKetc

WORKetc is software for small business that helps a business, its employees, contractors, customers and suppliers to work together more efficiently. WORKetc allow managers to track employee hours and how those hours were spent.

Official Link

UseStacks

UseStacks is Tools that will empower anybody to coordinate the activity of distributed workforce and assign tasks to members of the group, no matter where they are located. This is will handled by way of a clear dashboard that lets you see tasks and timelines at a mere glance, as well as reporting when a task has been carried to completion.

Official Link

Nirvana

Nirvana is web-based task management that provides users with an effective method with the purpose to be organized. This will be a fast an easy and effective organizing tool you can use from anywhere.

Official Link

Doit.im

Doit.Im is a free web app that offers task management services and will enhance your productivity. It offers comprehensive options yet packs them into a neat and tidy interface. This is simple management tool which has the noble aim of letting you live a more relaxed life.

Official Link

Bokimi

Bokimi is a new tool for the managing of activities. This is simple to-do list. It is actually one of the simplest to do list that you will come across. This will obviously be something positive or negative according to you expectations, and your actual degree of expertise.

Official Link

Specify the Type of Designer That You Need

There are very many different areas of specialism in the field of design and you really need to focus on the ones that work best. You should look for the niche designers that seem to fit in with your own perspective or the project brief that you have been given. It is absolutely imperative that you focus on the detail rather than a random selection of designers.

It is not beyond you capacity to look at these issues but you need to ensure that you are registered with the relevant search forums. The designers will put forward a portfolio of achievements and you will need to select the ones that fit in with your priorities.

• Discover What Type of Designer Are You?
• 7 Personality Types of Designers Today
• Can You Be a Web Designer?

You Must Be Clear on The Search Priorities for The Designers

As soon as you have decided as you need to search for web designer for your project then you should start your research with options available to you. You can search them with so many freelancing websites available to you. You would find many freelance web designers who are ready to work for you. Another option is that you can ask some of your colleagues if they know some designer.

Krop

Krop career resource website for creative professionals. Krop allows you to be able to find many designers such as an art director, graphic artist, digital artist and Interactive and etc.

Official Link

Carbonmade

Carbonmade is an online community with a classification portfolio. Added Interface drag-and-drop ease organize, view and to share your portfolio. With a device that is simple and easy, and a classy display.

Official Link

Coroflot

Coroflot.com is a career and community site for creative professionals. Hosts individual creative portfolios and a database of job and project Openings. Coroflot is a fast and easy way to get online portfolio and in front of the right people.

Official Link

Shown’d

Shown’d is online resource that caters for photographers, illustrators and graphic artists in general. The site also showcases artists week by week, and those who feel their portfolios should be highlighted can send an e-mail to the address that is provided to these effects.

Official Link

Dribbble

Dribbble combining different things together and equipped with something on your own. Twitter site and the library took pictures and cross them with a game show and said that meant to be played by the designer alone.

Official Link

You Found Someone… Is He or She The Right Choice?

How would you decide whether the person, whom you have selected as the web designer for your project, is the perfect employee? Certification might give you clues but it is not the end of the matter. In fact there are many people with certificates that just can’t do the job. You need to look at the way that they have been doing their work in order to ensure that they meet the different issues that you are working with.

JavaScript Certification

The JavaScript Developer Certificate proves fundamental knowledge of web development using JavaScript and the HTML DOM.

Official Link

CSS Certification

The CSS Developer Certificate proves fundamental knowledge of web development using advanced CSS.

Official Link

HTML Certification

The HTML Developer Certificate proves fundamental knowledge of web development using HTML, XHTML, and CSS.

Official Link

Webprofessionals.org

WOW’s Web professional certification is a powerful opportunity for individuals aspiring to be or already working as a Web professional. Working with experts within industry, education and government, WOW has created a series of vendor neutral industry standard certification exams.

Official Link

Adobe Certified

Adobe certification is an industry standard of excellence, and it’s the absolute best way to communicate your proficiency in leading products from Adobe.

Official Link

Experience Matters

There is absolutely no substitute for experience. The people with experience will be able to deliver work to an acceptable standard. They also have the advantage of having seen the processes rise and fall. That way they are not intimidated by the challenges of working within a design context.

Look Out For Your Rate

As you want to hire someone, you need to look out for designers who will work for you in low cost. This becomes very important because you have your own budget constraint too. Ask your designer whether they will work in per hour basis or they will take the whole project as one go.

• Quality-Price-Ratio in Web Design (Pricing Design Work)
• 12 Realities of Pricing Design Services
• The Costs of Underpricing Your Design Services
• Factors to Consider When Pricing Design Services
• Nine Factors to Consider When Determining Your Price

Time Management

This is another important thing that has to be considered. You should know in how much time, you want your website to be ready. Look out for designers who could provide you the project ready in your time frame. You need to decide the project time line between you and the designer who is working for you.

• Schedule and Cost Summary
• Estimating Resource Time for Web Development Projects
• How To Estimate Time For A Project

Toggl

Toggl are web apps that provide a very easy time tracking and management. Using Toggl You can create tasks in fractions of a minute. You can use it from a website, from your computer desktop (supports Windows, Linux and Mac) and even from your iPhone.

Official Link

Cashboard

Cashboard provide a complete package for your online business. Cashboard can easily be integrated with Basecamp and the number of devices other invoices. Using Cashboard You can make tracking time, expenses, invoices and payments online.

Official Link

yaTimer

yaTimer is a desktop-based applications. It is very easy to use and special designers to track time. You can put a small window in the corner of your desktop that will remind you of tasks to be done.

Official Link

FreshBooks

FreshBooks build a strong relationship between hours of tracking, project management and invoice or we can say that FreshBook a management tool. It has all the features needed by a freelancer to work efficiently. Supports automatic invoice in any currency, collect online payments.

Official Link

Lay Out Your Project in Detail

As you find any web designer, make sure that you present the designer to have full information with the project details. You must make ensure that the designer would be able to come up with each module in perfect way. It is better that later you come to know, if your designer is not able to come up to your expectation. When you define your requirements and needs then you get your client to have clear vision of what you need.

iPlotz

iPlotz allows you to rapidly create clickable, navigable mockups and wireframes for prototyping websites and software applications. iPlotz is a multi-paged by design, so you can determine which page of a certain size, set the master page for them and so forth. This page also can be connected together because some components have the choice to act as a link to a web site or other pages.

Official Link

Jumpchart

Jumpchart is a tool for creating mockups of the website can be clicked. By Jumpchart you can visualize the process of building your site. If you change your mind, easy to pull the pages into new places in the hierarchy of the site.

Official Link

Balsamiq Mockups

Balsamiq mockups, these applications are built using AIR and Flex. Interface Balsamiq quite simple mockups. Balsamiq mockups have the completeness of control and ease of use and editing and graphical results that are not conventional. This application is very easy to master. It takes only minutes, we can make a mock-up is quite interesting

Official Link

GUI Design Studio

GUI Design Studio is a graphical user interface design tool for Windows that allows you to create demonstration prototypes without any coding or scripting capabilities.

Official Link

Review The Work of The Designer

You should not just stop at giving them the job. You need to start with a sample of work to see how they cope. You will then increase the requirements progressively until you reach a situation whereby you are confident that their work will be of a sufficiently acceptable standard. This testing phase is meant to avoid problems.

Clickdensity

Clickdensity an analysis tool that helps you assess the site page design. You can use the heat map to determine which part of most-click visitors, hover maps – to show people who see the links but not clicking on it, and A / B test that allows you to change a certain page elements to see which style most effective.

Official Link

Browser Shots

Browsershots is a Cross Platform Browser Test service. Here you can check the view blog / your website in various browsers and operating systems. You can also choose the browsers and operating systems anywhere in the look of your blog will check. So far there are three pieces that supported operating systems, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and BSD

Official Link

Web Accessibility Checker

This tool checks a single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to Ensure the content Can be accessed by everyone. See the Handbook of links to the upper right for more about the Web Accessibility Checker.

Official Link

W3C Markup Validation Service

This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. This validator is part of Unicorn, the W3C’s validator unified service. See the list of checks Performed by Unicorn and learn about other tools

Official Link

Mobile Checker

This checker performs Various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. The tests are defined in the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification. A Web Page is mobileOK Pls it passes all the tests.

Official Link

Image Credits

• Hand Pushing a Button | Article main Image
• Semester Critique
• Hand Over Laptop

Find Something Missing?

While writing this article, it’s always a possibility that we missed some other great resources. Feel free to share it with us.

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jQuery is the most well-known and open source JavaScript library which is being used all around the world because it simplifies the client-side scripting of HTML. You can also create marvelous effects by using these plugins. Enjoy!

You are welcome if you want to share more jQuery Plugins And Techniques that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at  SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

HoverFade

Demo | Download

jQuery-Notes 1.0.2

Demo | Download

gMap – Google Maps Plugin For jQuery

Demo | Download

jQuery Menu Style

Demo | Download

Contextual Slideout Tips With jQuery & CSS3

Demo | Download

Growl

Demo | Download

Animate Panning Slideshow with jQuery

Demo | Download

jQuery Masonry

Demo | Download

jQuery Quicksand

Demo | Download

Jquery Plugin MopSlider 2.4

Demo | Download

jQuery color plugin xcolor

Demo | Download

jQuery Image Scroller

Demo | Download

Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider

Demo | Download

Horinaja

Demo | Download

Slide Deck

Demo | Download

Automatic Image Slider w/ CSS & jQuery

Demo | Download

Create a Slick and Accessible Slideshow Using jQuery

Demo | Download

Fancy Thumbnail Hover Effect w/ jQuery

Demo | Download

Coda Slider Effect

Demo | Download

Micro Image Gallery: A jQuery Plugin

Demo | Download

Image Highlighting and Preview with jQuery

Demo | Download

Textarea Words, Characters counter and maxlength plugin

Demo | Download

GOOGLE CHARTS

Demo | Download

IdmgAreaSelect

Demo | Download

jQuery Bookmark

Demo | Download

Poshy Tip

Demo | Download

jqPlot Charts and Graphs for jQuery

Demo | Download

jQuery MegaMenu Plugin

Demo | Download

FullCalendar – Full-sized Calendar jQuery Plugin

Demo | Download

jQuery Canvas Loader

Demo | Download

Meerkat

Demo | Download

jQuery PhotoShoot Plugin 1.0

Demo | Download

jqFancyTransitions

Demo | Download

jQuery Slider plugin (Safari style)

Demo | Download

jTextTranslate: A jQuery Translation Plugin

Demo | Download

xBreadcrumbs (Extended Breadcrumbs) jQuery Plugin

Demo | Download

Get TopUp!

Demo | Download

FireQuery – Firebug extension for jQuery development

Demo | Download

ImagineMenu

Demo | Download

Jquery AjaxSuggest

Demo | Download

Ajax File Uploader

Demo | Download

3d Tag Sphere

Demo | Download

(MB)Extruder

Demo | Download

jQuery Simple Multi-Select

Demo | Download

Fancy Box

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Social media monitoring company RowFeeder has launched an analytics solution that gives marketers and brands the ability to monitor and measure social media data from inside Microsoft Excel.

The product is built on Excel, so instead of simply exporting data, RowFeeder generates native Excel files with pre-populated charts, visualizations and pivot tables all based around a company’s raw social media data. The idea behind the service is to bring sophisticated social media data crunching to marketers in a format that they’re familiar with.

RowFeeder tracks and aggregates data around any word, phrase, hashtag or username on Facebook and Twitter. Automated report types include velocity analysis to chart keyword activity on social sites, location analysis to find out where conversations are happening, and influencer and people analysis.

The reports are designed to appeal to marketers managing and tracking multiple campaigns. From the looks of it, the charts and graphs are also boss-friendly tools employees can use to highlight ROI on social media activity.

RowFeeder is a freemium service with paid plans starting at $5 per month for professionals and $250 per month for enterprise businesses. The service also integrates with Google Docs and Klout for influence analytics.

[img credit: kasprzol]

More About: analytics, Excel, facebook, MARKETING, microsoft excel, rowfeeder, social media analytics, social media monitoring, twitter

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• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
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Dean Hachamovitch, a general manager at Microsoft, wrote a very long post on the IEBlog to announce this move, and there are lots of pictures, charts, and graphs – along with a video – to document how everything will appear and perform.  It’s well worth a look.

But to hit just a couple of highlights from the text angle, Hachamovitch mentioned, “You can run new test drive samples that show modern SVG and native JavaScript integration in action.”

He wrote, as well, “With this installment, you will find more performance and more support for same markup.  You’ll also find many fixes to issues reported in previous Platform Previews.”

Best to get familiar with this stuff ahead of time, because within a day or two of its release, Internet Explorer 9’s almost guaranteed to attract millions upon millions of users.

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Certainly, you won’t need them all, but I offer you the choise to choose best from the best. Each of them has it’s own pros and cons, and I hope you’ll be able to choose the best option for you.

1. ChartGizmo

With ChartGizmo you can create different kind of charts for your website, blog and social network profiles.

2. Barchart

Simple online tool for creating bar charts. Choose your image size, colors, enter all values and export your chart as png. I created this chart below in like 2 minutes.

3. Bubbl.us

Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online. With Bubbl you can:

• Create colorful mind maps online
• Share and work with friends
• Embed your mind map in your blog or website
• Email and print your mind map
• Save your mind map as an image

4. AmCharts

AmCharts is a set of Flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. AmCharts can extract data from simple CSV or XML files, or they can read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ColdFusion, and many other programming languages.

5. OnlineChartTool

On OnlineChartTool you can choose from 10 chart types, choose charts style, add data, customize labels and fonts, preview your graph and then save and share it.

6. ChartGo

ChartGo allows users to create charts online quickly. Create bar charts, line charts or pie charts. Simply paste your data in the chart data area and hit the create chart button. In my opinion, one of the most useful tools for creating charts.

7. Chartle

Chartle is Java based online tool that allows you to easily create different types of charts and then publish them.

8. Create A Graph

Here you will find five different graphs and charts for you to consider. You can create graphs in 3D, customize fonts, colors and then choose one of six file formats to save it.

9. Google FusionCharts Gadget

FusionCharts Google Gadget is widget that help you create animated flash charts & graphs for your web pages, blogs & Google Pages. Be it your sales chart, inventory chart or your personal weight chart, FusionCharts can render an exciting face to all your boring data tables – for free.

10. DIY Chart

DIY (Do it yourself) Chart is a web-based, simple and powerful online tool to create interactive charts and graphs from static or dynamic data which may be generated using any scripting language. The minus is that in free version there will be a logo watermark.

11. CSS Chart Generator

The only on-the-fly generator for bar charts in the net. With this easy to use interface you can create a design your bar charts in seconds. A whole bunch of features is waiting for you – from defining the output size, over colors for each bar, titles for x and y axis, to color of font and bar backgrounds and much more.

12. Hohli Online Chart Builder

Good looking jQuery using tool that allows you to choose from over 10 types of charts, customize them and get the image or embed the chart.

13. Google Chart Tools

The Google Chart Tools enable adding live charts to any web page. Using these tools allow you to create rich gallery of visualizations provided as image charts by using a simple URL request to a Google chart server or interactive charts using a Google developed JavaScript library.

14. Pie Color

Just enter number of slices, label, all the values and PieColor will generate you an image, which you can then download and share.

15. Cacoo

Cacoo is a user-friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Choose from a number of stencils. It’s just so easy to make great diagrams.

16. JS Charts

JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs. Keep in mind that it’s only free for non – commercial use.

17. Creately

Creately is a powerful online Organizational Chart software for creating quick and easy organizational charts, department & team org charts and even photo org charts. It works in your browser and contains templates and elements that you can use.

18. yUML

Allows you to create and share simple UML diagrams in your blogs, wikis, forums, bug-trackers and emails.

19. Mind42

Mind42 is a browser based online mind mapping application. With Mind42 installing mind mapping tools is no longer needed – for a hassle-free mind mapping experience. Just open the browser and launch the application when needed.

20. Highcharts

Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

21. Diagrammr

Create and share consecutive diagrams just by writing sentences.

22. Product Planner

Product Planner help people understand and create user flows for their web products. See how other websites and products work and then create your own.

23. LucidChart

LucidChart is an online flowchart maker app where you can create and publish customized flowcharts. It’s easy to use, feature rich and has a decent free option which includes 5 MB storage for your documents and works in most of the browsers.

24. SlickPlan

SlickPlan is a web-based sitemap/flowchart generator that allows for the creation of free sitemap  and flowchart design. SlickPlan was handcrafted with PHP/MySQL and jQuery by the Dayton website design team at Atomic Interactive.

25. Charts

Useful iPhone app that lets you create and manage all kind of charts, i.e charts to track and monitor your expenses, weight, mileage and more. You can also map your data on a line, bar graph or a pie chart, apply different color schemes and share charts by email.

26. ChartPart

ChartPart is a web tool that lets you instantly create charts online. The application supports different types of charts including pie charts, line graphs and grouped bars.

27. Yellowpipe Chart Generator

Though pretty pixelated, but really easy tool to create 3D pie charts.

28. Grapher

Totally old school. Simple to use, but only bar graph with limited features is available.

29. Gliffy

With Gliffy online diagram software, you can easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more.

30. LovelyCharts

LovelyCharts is a free online diagram editor that allow you create chart and diagram freely on the web browser. On lovely chart, there are various of diagram can be produces such as creating flowcharts, sitemaps, network diagrams, people diagrams, basic symbols,and wireframes.

31. Online Chart Generator

Really easy tool to generate charts. Choose from 9 types.

32. OWT Chart Generator

The OWT Chart Generator is an online tool to be used to produce charts. A GIF image of the chart that you specified will be displayed on the screen.

Software to create graphs

• Swiff Chart Generator 3
• MindMeister
• Smarrtdraw
• Diagram Studio
• OpenOffice

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As a designer, have you ever had to work on a project such as an annual report, brochure or even a blog post that contained a lot of data?

Many designers are handed documents which contain tables of snore-inducing information with the expectation that they shine it up a bit—something akin to Extreme Makeover: Data Edition. The solution is to visualize this information in an attractive format by employing charts and graphs.

Some people may be under the impression that charts are just as boring as tabular data, but just like anything, charts can be designed with tact and taste.

In this article, I’ll be talking about when to use a chart, what kinds of charts are out there, the design elements of a chart, how to gather data for a chart, and how to create a chart.

When to Use a Chart

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of effective chart creation, let’s talk about what makes a chart useful in the first place. As the wise Solomon once said, "There is a time for everything," and this includes using charts.

Charts are most useful for packaging overwhelming information into a simple and easy to use format for comparisons and for discerning trends in a dataset.

As a real-world example of proper chart usage, we need to look no further than the ubiquitous Google Analytics.

Google Analytics showing browser usage for Design Instruct.

Can you imagine if — instead of charting website statistics — Google Analytics simply spit out raw numbers in tabular or list format? You’d miss out on 90% of the vital information!

Let’s say that, hypothetically speaking, you’re working for Coca-Cola and they hand you a table with figures that detail the amount of people that preferred Coke to Pepsi in a survey that needs to be displayed in a brochure.

You can use a chart to give a visual snapshot that compares Coke drinkers to Pepsi drinkers that’s not only more interesting than a table, but that lets the reader understand the difference almost instantly.

Types of Charts

While writing this section, I realized how powerful a graphic is as a way to convey information. You can read through the definitions below, but my guess is that most of you will simply glance at the images and then move on just because it’s easier to absorb information and ideas visually. It’s the exact same concept as charting data!

Here are some popular types of charts and graphs for data visualization.

Pie Chart

A pie chart (circle graph) is a circular chart that is divided into sections to illustrate proportion.

Source.

Bar Chart

A bar chart (bar graph) is a chart with either horizontally or vertically-arranged rectangular bars—the lengths of which are proportional to the values that they represent.

Source.

Scatter Plot

A scatter plot displays data as a collection of points. Each point on the chart is plotted with two variables on the horizontal and vertical axes.

Source.

Line/Area Chart

An area chart (which is a variation of a line chart) is made by a series of data points that are connected by a line.

Source.

Design Elements of a Chart

When designing a chart, there are typically four main parts that you can customize (although not every type of chart uses each at once).

These elements are the title, the legend, the data (sections/bars/points), and the parameters (axes, tick marks).

The chart title should accurately describe what the chart is meant to depict. It should be large enough to be easily readable, but not too large or too distracting. In other words, it should do its job and then get out of the way.

The legend is what describes the data—it’s what makes your chart make sense and is usually smaller that the data itself. Legends are generally placed beneath the data, but not always. The colors of the items within the legend should correspond to the data on the chart.

Depending on the type of chart in use, the data can take many different forms. It can be 2D, 3D or textured for example.

The axes and tick marks should sort of fade into the background but be easy to read when needed.

Gathering Data

Sometimes data is handed to you in a tidy table format. If so, you’re lucky because it’s easier to create a chart at that point.

If not, you’ll be tasked with gathering the appropriate information and sticking it in your own table in order to turn it into something cooler. It’s really as simple as sticking numbers into a spreadsheet. While any spreadsheet application will work, keep in mind that some have powerful chart creation tools built in (I’ll talk more about programs and techniques in the next section below).

Case Example: Visualizing Promotion Techniques of Design Blogs

If I’m gathering my own data and starting from scratch, I’ll open up a blank spreadsheet and place a few labels.

For example, I recently published a blog post detailing the favorite promotion techniques used by authors of popular design blogs (including the one you’re on now) based on a series of interviews I conducted.

To make the post a little more appealing, I put together a bar graph detailing which promotion techniques were used the most.

Bar graph depicting favorite promotion techniques of popular design blogs. Source.

To do this, I had to gather my own data, place it into a table and then turn it into a chart.

The first thing I did was create a new spreadsheet. In the first column, starting at line 2 (you can label the column on line 1 if you’d like), I entered different promotion techniques such as Twitter, Digg and so on.

In the second column, I added 1 to the number of mentions each promotion technique garnered during the interviews. It turns out that 16 interviewees mentioned Twitter, so to the right of Twitter in my spreadsheet I simply put 16.

I continued to do this for each mention of a promotion technique until I was completely through every response. This of course is just one simple example of gathering and organizing data.

Creating a Chart

There is a handful of good programs you can use to create sleek-looking charts. The three big ones are Illustrator, Numbers and Excel.

Numbers (Mac OS) and Microsoft Excel are of course both spreadsheet programs. I personally prefer using Numbers because it offers slick features such as 3D charts and textures that can be mapped to graph sections.

Creating a chart in Adobe Illustrator is nice as well because it offers complete flexibility. Illustrator also makes it easy to get 3D effects and, as with any editable object in Illustrator, you can manipulate chart pieces in a way that’s not possible in a spreadsheet program.

Many designers will prefer using Illustrator over a spreadsheet program simply because it’s so easy for them to save and use Illustrator files, whereas spreadsheet files must be exported for use.

Creating a Chart in Illustrator: Overview

Once you’ve opened a new document, the first thing you’ll want to do is go to Window > Show Tools. Now you can click on the Graph Tool, which opens a window full of options.

This is where you can begin to customize the look and feel of your graph by choosing a chart type. Hit OK and then select the Graph Tool and click and drag in your open document to position and size the graph.

Once you let go of the mouse button, a window will pop up which will allow you to either type or import your chart’s data.

Creating a Chart in Numbers: Overview

Once you’ve got a spreadsheet with data entered, creating a graph is as simple as highlighting the cells you want to include and clicking Charts in the toolbar.

From here, a pop-up menu appears and it will allow you to select from 11 different chart types plus eight 3D variations.

If you perform a change to the chart’s data in the spreadsheet, it will automatically be updated in your chart.

You can grab a corner of the chart with your mouse to adjust the width, height and how much data is displayed.

Creating a Chart in Excel: Overview

Similar to Numbers, once you’ve got a spreadsheet with data entered, you can create a chart with just a few clicks. Highlight the cells you want to include in your chart and click Insert > Charts. Select a chart type and you’re done!

DIY Charts: Create Your Own

Not every chart has to be created for you by a program. Depending on the situation, it’s perfectly viable to take a do-it-yourself approach.

Information graphics, or infographics, are basically charts on steroids and often incorporate standard charts with additional creative output and flair. It’s easy to put together a Venn diagram with a couple of circles in either Photoshop or Illustrator.

An example of a less common chart type charting the Beatles’ working schedule. Source.

Tips and Ideas for Better Charts

There are a few nice ways to spice up your charts and set them apart from the pack.

Use Textures

Try using textures instead of solid colors in your chart sections/bars. Wood or metal grains look particularly nice.

Source.

Use Depth

Adding depth to make a chart look three-dimensional is always nice but can impact readability, so make sure not to go overboard here.

Source.

Hand-sketched Charts

Hand-sketched charts and diagrams, while generally less accurate, can add an element of cool.

Source.

Other Ways to Spice Charts Up

You can also use custom icons to replace boring labels.

Another one of my favorite ways of making a chart stand out a bit more is to take a picture of real-world objects arranged as a chart. Why not use a real pie for a pie chart or stack pop cans on top of each other to form a bar chart?

Charting the Conclusion

Most designers, especially those who handle a lot of print work for corporate clients, are eventually tasked with finding a creative way to display tabular or charted data, which makes sense given that charts are the smart way to display information.

I hope that this article has shown you that charts don’t have to be boring to look at or hard to make and has inspired you in the design and creation of visual graphics. Got more tips, techniques, tutorials on using charts and graphs? Share them in the comments.

Related Content

• Graphing/Charting Data on Web Pages: JavaScript Solutions
• 20 Fresh JavaScript Data Visualization Libraries
• Innovative (and Experimental) CSS Examples and Techniques
• Related categories: Content Strategy and Resources

About the Author

Chris McConnell is an entrepreneur, designer and author who co-founded the design firm Brandeluxe. He writes regularly on his blog, Freelance Review . You can connect with Chris on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Below we’ve compiled the best JavaScript graphs and chart solutions. We chose to put a list of JavaScript graphs because of their flexibility and functionality.

JS Charts

JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs.

jQuery Visualize Plugin

This JavaScript technique provides a simple way to generate charts, but more importantly, because it bases the chart on data already in the page in an HTML table element, it is accessible to people who browse the web with a screen reader or other assistive technology, or with browsers that don’t fully support JavaScript or HTML5 Canvas.

Highcharts

Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

Emprise Javascript Charts

The Emprise JavaScript Chart solution relies on pure JavaScript in order to shell out great features such as zoom, interactive functionality, stackable, and a variety of AJAX capabilities that are built in.

PlotKit

PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support. PlotKit is fully documented and there is a quick tutorial to get you started.

jqPlot

jqPlot is a plotting and charting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework. jqPlot produces beautiful line, bar and pie charts with many features such as numerous chart style options, date axes with customizable formatting, automatic trend line computation, tooltips and data point highlighting, and more.

jQuery Sparklines

This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via Javascript. The plugin is compatible with most modern browsers and has been tested with Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8.

TufteGraph

TufteGraph lets you configure dynamic functions and it also allows you to work with a compact API for a much faster web app. It also uses a non-core layout that is done through the use of CSS.

Raphaël’s Javascript Library

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

milkchart

A simple to use, yet robust library for transforming table data into a chart. This library uses the HTML5 canvas tag and is only supported on browsers other than IE until ExCanvas gets proper text support.

Graph-It

With Graph-It you can easily create graphs out of raw data using Graph It! Just input the name/value pairs of the involved graph elements, and leave the rest to the script. The values can be either absolute or percentage (using two versions of script).

Canvas 3D Graph

Canvas 3D Graph is a special type of bar graph that plot numbers in 3D

Protovis

Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.

ProtoChart

ProtoChart is a new opensource library using Prototype and Canvas to create good looking charts. This library is highly motivated by Flot, Flotr and PlotKit libraries.

flot

Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming and mouse tracking.

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For one reason or another, a lot of designers use Video Players on their website. An online video player needs no more introductions for web developers or simple users. Online Video players offer you flexibility and creativity in building your own tv on your Web spaces the way you want. You can add an unlimited number of videos and arrange them how you wish by the album title, artist’s name or year; it’s totally up to you! Everything from a simple video system to an HDTV can be totally placed on your Website or Blog.

Nowadays, there are over hundred thousands of media related resources available on the web. Instead of spending time on researching for the ones you needed, we pick the some of the best website video/media player options freely available to use. Below, you’ll find a collection of Free Video Players For Your Website by which you can increase your productivity.

You may be interested in the following application related articles as well.

• 21 Free Music Players For Your Website and Blogs
• 50+ Free Resources for Charts and Graphs Solution
• 55 Best Ways To Track Your Website Daily Traffic
• 40+ Essential iPhone Apps for Freelance Web Designers
• 60+ Essential Web Apps for Freelancer Web Designers
• 30 Twitter Tools to Help Grow Your Community

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

<p id='preview'>The player will show in this paragraph</p>
<script type='text/javascript' src='swfobject.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var s1 = new SWFObject('player.swf','player','400','300','9');
s1.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
s1.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
s1.addParam('flashvars','file=video.flv');
s1.write('preview');
</script>

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What can you use the application for?


Swivel.com is a new online data analysis tool that lets users easily share their data charts and graphs. Users can view data generated by others, and manipulate the numbers themselves if they wish. Users have the option of making their data available to the public, or just to a group of people which they define. The Swivel data analysis tools allow data to be compared in new ways. For example, users could compare the rise in the crime rate with the cost of a first class stamp if they wanted to. Users can upload spreadsheets from Excel documents, or import data from Google Docs, Google Analytics, Intuit QuickBooks or SalesForce.com.

The Swivel site makes it very easy for users to share data. Rather than having to get the IT department to pull data from the company’s files, data can be uploaded and shared by individuals in the company. The site has some social networking aspects, such as Groups, Profiles and Feedback. Anyone can leave feedback on a public chart or graph – group members can leave feedback on a private chart or graph. The service is free as long as data is made public. If the user wishes to create charts and graphs that are kept private, there is a charge for the service.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Swivel.com was launched in December 2006 and has undergone continuous growth since launch.

What are the differences to other applications?


Competition to Swivel.com comes from sites such as Google Docs, Microsoft Live Documents, and desktop applications such as Excel. The primary difference that Swivel has is the ability to share data more easily. The site makes it easy to embed charts and graphs in blogs or emails. In addition, not only can data be shared, but users can manipulate the shared data themselves using the tools provided by Swivel.com. Google Analytics and Microsoft Live Documents provide sharing of private data without charge, however, while Swivel users must pay a fee to share private data.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Swivel.com site has an uncluttered look and feel. The site is quite responsive and page loads happen quickly. The site provides a convenient top menu bar for navigation, and use of the tools provided by the site is intuitive. Uploads and downloads of data are quite responsive as well. There is no advertising displayed on the Swivel.com site.

How does the registration process work?


Registration to Swivel.com is free and is required to use the site. The registration process asks for name and email address. The email address must be validated, at which time the user selects a password. Users with a free account may use the site as much as they wish as long as their data is kept public. Users wishing to limit access to data to a group of people must pay a fee.

What does it cost to use the application?


Pricing for private groups is divided into three group sizes – Small, Medium and Large. A Small group allows for unlimited members, 20 spreadsheets, 20 charts and 3 reports. A Medium group allows for unlimited members, 80 spreadsheets, 80 charts and 20 reports. A Large group allows for unlimited members, 200 spreadsheets, 200 charts and 50 reports. There is a 15-day free trial period for all three pricing plans. Small, Medium and Large groups cost $12, $48, and $96 per month respectively.

Who would you recommend the application to?


The Swivel.com site is recommended to any business or organization that has a need to share data with its members or the public at large. The site is being used by newspapers and colleges to share the data behind news stories or research studies. Companies are using the site to share data among employees. The charting and graphing tools provided by the site are easy to use, and the site makes it very easy to share data.

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Editors Note: In this Article Brian Suda explores 4 ways of creating web bases charts and graphs. Example files for the canvas and Flot based charts are available for download.

Charts and graphs are an excellent way to dig deeper, tell a story and get to the information behind the numbers. As more and more data sets are becoming publicly available, we want to convert this dull tabular data into something more visually appealing. In this article I’ll walk you through 4 different ways to take a data set and convert it into a chart that’s suitable for display on a website.

1: HTML

In HTML, the simplest way to display a chart would be to drop it in as an image. This picture could be generated offline in an application like Excel, SPSS, or R and exported as an image.

The downside of this method is that it can’t easily be updated unless you go back to the original application, adjust the data’s value, export the graphic, then re-upload it to the server. A better solution would be to create the charts as images dynamically on the website itself.

Besides hiring a programmer to create some custom charting software, there are a few other options available online. Google Charts is probably the easiest and most widely known. You get all the benefits of the Google infrastructure, caching, image processing, geographic distribution, etc. all for free.

Getting Started with Google Charts

To get started, Google has a pretty comprehensive site with examples and instructions. By passing different attributes in the URL’s query string, it’s easy for you to create a static chart with a server-side or client-side script. For most use-cases, creating an image in this way will suffice. It’s fast, simple and works across browsers with no hassle.

Let’s see how easy it is to create a quick pie chart of browser statistics. I had a look at Wikipedia’s Browser Usage Page and went with the W3Counter values for the top 5 major browsers. As you can see it breaks down as follows:

1. IE: 47.9
2. Firefox: 32.3
3. Chrome: 7.4
4. Safari: 5.5
5. Opera: 2.1

Next we need to put these into the query string of a URL that Google Image Charts recognize.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p&chs=400x200&chtt=W3Counter%20Browser%20Stats&chd=t:47.9,32.3,7.4,5.5,2.1&chl=IE|Firefox|Chrome|Safari|Opera

Chart Parameters

There are several parameters, we’ll start from left to right. cht is the Chart Type, in this case ‘p’ stands for pie chart. Next we have chs, which is chart size. In my example I choose 400 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. There is a maximum size, but it is easy to tweak these numbers as needed for your own site. chtt is chart title, which displays the text across the top to let readers know what this is a pie chart of.

Next we move to chd, which is chart data. There are several different ways to encode the data, but for this example I am using ‘text’, so we start with ‘t:’. Then it is just a comma separated list of the values. So far, pretty easy!

Finally, we have chl, which is chart legend. These are separated by a vertical bar ‘|’ and their order needs to correspond to the order of the chd values. My first data value was 47.9 which corresponds to the first chl value of Internet Explorer.

Now all you need to do is paste that url into your browser and you can see the result. You can even put that right into your own HTML using the <img alt="" /> element. You don’t need to save them and upload them to your own server. It is possible to link to them off Google’s server.

From Pie to Bar Chart

Now, let’s see what happens when you change cht from ‘p’ for pie chart to ‘bvs’ to make it a vertical bar chart! You probably want to add &chbh=a to the end of the URL, chbh stands for chart bar chart spacing and ‘a’ sets it to ‘auto’. Voila, a barchart of the same data. As you can tell, with almost no effort or knowledge of coding, you have made two different types of charts from a boring table of raw data.

The major downside to using images of charts is that your results are locked-up in as an image file rather than something that can be further manipulated by others. No cutting and pasting of the raw data, issues with screen-readers, and it doesn’t easily allow for further manipulation by the reader.

2: Flash

Flash and other plugins such as Java, allow you to create rich experiences in the browser. There are several free and paid applications to help you create charts and graphs which are more dynamic than an image. Again, Google offer many of their static image charts as interactive Flash versions, along with several new graphs that are only available in Flash.

Flash allows you to create visualizations which contain additional information. For instance, when the reader hovers over a section or clicks on a data point more information can appear. Interactive graphs allow you to drill down deeper into specific parts of a graph. Highlighting just a range of data can zoom in to the graph and view a smaller slice of the data.

Deeper Interactivity with Flash

An excellent example of an interactive chart is Google’s Motion chart. When you press the play button time progresses and you can see the sales figures versus the expenses of different fruits for different regions. This is something that is not possible with the static image charts. The ability to easily turn off and on different fruits, to add trails over time and to look at several days with of information in a single chart.

Flash used to be the goto technology for creating dynamic and interactive interfaces. You can still create robust, dynamic charts and graphs using Flash, but it’s becoming more and more problematic. As the next wave of devices don’t support Flash, no one seems to really miss it. What this means is that you need to consider alternatives to Flash-based content.

What about a pure web standards implementations? Well, there are at least two ways to achieve this, CSS and the new CANVAS element.

3: CSS

Many charts, like the barchart, can be thought of as just a list of values and we already have a pretty good way to mark-up lists in HTML. We can repurpose our old friends the <ol> and <ul> elements. With some CSS positioning and a bit of magic, it’s possible to make a nice barchart from a list. There are several implementations of pure CSS charts out there that can get you started.

Eric Meyer wrote a demo several years ago, but it is still as useful today as when it was written. He also managed to convert a table into a nice timeline using only CSS . This demonstrates the power and flexibility of HTML and CSS in creating charts and timelines.

The beauty of implementing this in CSS is that the data is directly in the HTML. Anyone changing the list values is updating this the chart for free. It’s also readable without any CSS or image capabilities, search engines can index the data, others can copy and paste out the information and screen-readers can easily access the information.

CSS Code Generators and Tutorials

Christian Heilmann has also been experimenting with CSS bar charts. On his website, he created a simple tool that will generate the code for you. This is all done in pure CSS, so there is no Javascript libraries or other heavy dependancies in the code, which makes it faster than some of the alternatives.

Another great article about CSS charts and graphs is from Wilson Miner and his A List Apart article called “Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards“. He goes ever further and demonstrates “sparklines“, tiny nuggets of data inline with regular text. It is an excellent tutorial if you aren’t as comfortable with CSS. It walks you through the whole process really well with plenty of examples.

The downside to CSS charts is that they seem to be limited to bar charts and timelines, things with long lines, vertically or horizontally. Making complex charts and graphs are out of reach of the simple tools that CSS makes available.

4: Canvas

The newest and most exciting entry into this foray is the <canvas> element. It’s new in HTML5 and acts as an area in which you can draw 2D and 3D shapes. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, if canvas is some HTML5 thing isn’t that not going to be ready until 2020?

Well, yes and no. It is part of HTML5, but it is available in most browsers today, and the ones that don’t directly support it, can be made to support it with an extra javascript file. The <canvas> element can be retrofitted to earlier browsers including IE6, which makes it an excellent contender to Flash!

A Quick Canvas Demo

A simple example of the power of <canvas> is to draw two overlapping shapes with some simple opacity. To do this, we need two things. A <canvas> element and a few lines of javascript to draw the figures. In this example we’ll just create a canvas element that is 200 by 200 with an id of ‘figures’. The bit inside the canvas element will be ignored by browsers that support it, otherwise it will be interpreted as an inline element like a <span> for those who don’t.

The next major part to get the drawing working is a few lines of javascript. If you’re not comfortable with Javascript, that’s OK. These are pretty easy to understand, then we’ll show you a library which whisks all this code away for something much easier!

First, we need to get the DOM element that corresponds to the canvas. We do this by grabbing it based on the id, ‘figures’. Next, we need to tell it that this canvas we’ll be drawing on should be only 2D, that the bit about var context = canvas.getContext('2d');. Then we need to create a fill style. This is the colour of the shape we are creating. It uses the same rgb syntax as CSS, so you should be familiar with that.

Next, the fillRect() is used to create a simple rectangle. It takes four parameters, the X,Y of where to start and a length and a width. In our case we’re starting at 30 pixels from the left and 30 pixels from the top. Then creating a box 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall. If you stopped there you’d have a nice greenish rectangle, but that’s not very exciting.

Let’s add another one to the mix to show off a bit. Repeating the same steps, we give it a fill colour. This time we’ll use the rgba() syntax so we can give it an opacity of 50% or 0.5 from solid. We’ll then start the rectangle at 50,50 and have it the same width. What you see should look something like this:

Flot Makes it Easy

That’s the very basics in how to draw 2D shapes in <canvas>, but we’re talking about a charts and graphs replacement for Flash, not Paint! One open source library which does creates beautiful charts and graphs is called Flot. This works on top of jQuery and generates charts that are nearly indistinguishable from Flash, yet work on the iPhone and iPad platforms.

You don’t need to learn anything new since it’s using the jQuery and Javascript knowledge you already have, plus there are several tutorials and examples that can help you get started. The <canvas> element opens-up new doors and possibilities for web-based interactive charts and graphs. Pulling either from the local HTML or from a remote AJAX call, Flot can create beautiful charts on the fly with little or no coding needed. Lets look a quick example:

As you can see, we’ve generated a nice spiky line graph, but how much code did it take? Let’s have a look. Much like the previous example, we need some container. In this case we’ve started with a div with an id of ‘placeholder’ and a height and width. We didn’t use the <canvas> element here because the Javascript will automatically swap it out if the browser supports it, otherwise it will use some magic and use the <div> instead.

Then we have a two lines of Javascript code. The first sets-up all the x,y variables for the line. The second line is the flot jQuery function saying to created, or $.plot(), this chart. It takes two variables, the first is the element you want to use as the drawing canvas and the second is the data to be used. In this case the x,y coordinates we created to make a line.

That’s almost it, I did lie, you need to also remember to add a few lines at the top of your HTML to include jQuery, flot and a special javascript file to make this work in IE, but that’s just a cut and paste from the example.

This is probably the most basic chart you can create with flot, but it can get much more complex. Their examples page demonstrates multiple lines, stacked bar charts, selectable regions, and much, much more.

Conclusion

So next time you are looking to create charts and graphs dynamically online, you should remember the pros and cons of these four techniques and venture outside of your comfort zone and learn something new.

We know CSS has powerful abilities and that is backwards compatible with some help, so there is no reason you need to spend a large budget for designing a custom plugin or the slow workflow of creating static images when there are web standard solutions available.

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ZingChart hopes to end the war between HTML5 and Flash in web-based charting:

Today we launched the first charting library that renders charts and graphs in both HTML5 <canvas> and Flash. Rather than join the Flash vs. <canvas> debate, we built a version that renders charts in both frameworks. With the recent launch of the iPad, we hope ZingChart Flash + HTML5 <canvas> helps the growing data visualization community focus on building great visualizations rather than worrying about compatibility.

For you visual learners and tinkerers, here’s the demo:

www.zingchart.com/flash-and-html5-canvas/

via ZingChart.

Next question: How accessible is it?

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We all know, that today is the era of online marketing. Without neglecting how the traditional marketing system started and work as well, we still cannot assume that online marketing is a thing in vain. More than that, online marketing can make thing more efficiently, short, and more real time in terms of delivering something to the community, clients and your customers.

In this topic we’ll talk about email marketing as a part of online marketing. Email marketing works best when marketers really know how to use it. Consumers welcome email if it is relevant and of value. In a recent survey, 45 percent of consumers indicated email is a “great way” for companies to stay in touch with their customers. By the way, what is Email Marketing?

You may be interested in the following related articles as well.

• 60+ Essential Web Apps for Freelancer Web Designers
• 30 Twitter Tools to Help Grow Your Community
• 10 Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website
• 50+ Free Resources for Charts and Graphs Solution
• 55 Best Ways To Track Your Website Daily Traffic

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links that our readers may like.

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A chart or a graph is a visual representation of data, in which “the data are represented by symbols, such as bars, lines, or slices”. These symbols can represent tabular numeric data, functions or some kinds of qualitative structures. For one reason or another, a lot of freelancers use Charts and Graphs to display the meaningful data visualizations. As a full-time freelancer and part-time geek, I really like to display my data analytics on pie charts and graphs too.

Nowadays, there are over hundred thousands of resources available on the web. Instead of spending time on researching for the ones you needed, we pick the top and intelligent ones for you. Below, you’ll find a collection of Essential Free Resources for Charts and Graphs Solution by which you can increase your productivity.

A chart can take a large variety of forms, however there are common features that provide the chart with its ability to extract meaning from data.

Typically a chart is graphical, containing very little text, since humans are generally able to infer meaning from pictures quicker than from text. One of the more important uses of text in a graph is in the title. A graph’s title usually appears above the main graphic and provides a succinct description of what the data in the graph refers to.

The data of a chart can appear in all manner of formats, with or without individual labels. It may appear as dots or shapes, connected or unconnected, and in any combination of colors and patterns. Inferences or points of interest can be overlayed directly on the graph to further aid information extraction.

When the data appearing in a chart contains multiple variables, the chart may include a legend. A legend contains a list of the variables appearing in the chart and an example of their appearance. This information allows the data from each variable to be identified in the chart.

You may be interested in the following application related articles as well.

• 60+ Essential Web Apps for Freelancer Web Designers
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• 50+ Useful Mac Applications for Freelancers and Professional Designers
• 10 Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website
• 15 Real Time Web Startups Around
• 25 Best Link Indexing Softwares and Plugins

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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Also consider our previous articles:

• 50 Useful JavaScript Tools which lists excellent tools to help you achieve various tasks involved in authoring JavaScript code.
• Data Visualization and Infographics Resources which lists more than 25 useful resources for infographics and data visualization.
• The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials which explains CSS sprites technique with jQuery.

jQuery Galleries and Slideshows

GalleryView jQuery Plugin
GalleryView jQuery Plugin is a content-gallery plugin capable of displaying any HTML content in an animated gallery view. It comes with lots of many options for customization. GalleryView does require the jQuery Timers plugin to facilitate timing of animation events.

Jquery Plugin MopSlider 2.4
MopSlider is the slider box can contain any item that is set height and width. From 2.2, MopSlider can be put 2 in the page. A CSS file isn’t necessary.

jQuery Image Scroller
Making use of jQuery’s excellent animation features, this image scroller will be completely autonomous and will begin scrolling once the page loads. The finished widget will be completely cross-browser compatible and perform as expected in the latest versions of all of the most common browsers. The tutorial helps build in some interaction by adding controls that allow the visitor to change the direction of the animation.

Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery
All of these sliding box animations work on the same basic idea. There is a div tag (.boxgrid in my CSS) that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through. From this basic idea we can play around with animations of the sliding element to either show or cover up the viewing area, thus creating the sliding effect.

Create Beautiful jQuery sliders tutorial
With this tutorial, you can develop a beautiful jQuery slider that has an added image description and name. The final result is a smooth and visually pleasing slideshow which could be easily integrated into any site.

Full Screen Image Gallery Using jQuery and Flickr
By using jQuery, this full screen image gallery automatically scales the image while using Flickr as the search engine. It comes with thumbnail preview, preloader, captions, and more. The results are extremely impressive.

jCarousel Lite
jCarousel Lite is a jQuery plugin that carries you on a carousel ride filled with images and HTML content. Put simply, you can navigate images and/or HTML in a carousel-style widget. It is super light weight, at about 2 KB in size, yet very flexible and customizable to fit most of our needs.

Galleriffic | A jQuery plugin for rendering fast-performing photo galleries
Galleriffic offers fantastic performance in delivering a high volume of photos. This is a useful jQuery plugin that will render fast photo galleries, while both impressing and improving your user’s experience.

jQuery plugin: Wilq32.RotateImage
This is the final product of a Wilq32.PhotoEffect Snippet. You can use this simple and tiny script to get an effect of rotated images directly from client side, such as user generated content, and then animate them using functions.

jQZoom Evolution
JQZoom is a javascript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery javascript framework.jQzoom is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want.

Resizable Image Grid with jQuery
Image grids that smoothly scale at the simple drag of a slider are no longer confined to desktop apps like iPhoto or Picasa. Thanks to some clever CSS and the jQuery UI, fluid image grids are now surprisingly simple to implement on the web.

jQuery plugin: Tooltip
This jQuery plugin tooltip can help you use bodyHandler to display footnotes, an image with a tooltip, or block tooltip. Also is helps links to have no delay with tracking and fading, or with extra content with extra classes. It’s useful for different tooltip styles on a single page like an image map with tooltips and testing repositioning at viewport borders.

Charts and Graphs with jQuery

jqPlot Charts and Graphs for jQuery
jqPlot is a plotting and charting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework. It’s strongest feature is its pluggability. Computation and drawing of lines, axes, shadows even the grid itself is handled by pluggable “renderers”. The plot elements are customizable. The core jqPlot code allows custom event handlers, new plot types, and more.

JS Charts – Free JavaScript charts
JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts, or simple line graphs.

moBlur.org – Google Charts GUI with jQuery
This jQuery is a basic frontend GUI to be used with Google’s charts API.

jQuery Text Effect Plugins

Airport – Information board text effect jQuery plugin
Airport is a rather simple text effect plugin for jQuery. It emulates the style of those flickering information boards you sometime find on airports and train stations.

jQuery Sifr Plugin
jQuery Sifr Plugin lets you dynamically replace traditional text in a web page with Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) rendered text using native jQuery functionality, along with the jQuery Flash plugin. With this plugin, designers and developers can easily display dynamic, on-the-fly text using the font(s) of their choice, regardless of the visitor’s currently installed fonts, web browser, or operating system.

Editable (jQuery Editable Plugin)
This is a real customizable jQuery editable plugin. Currently it can convert any tag (span, div, p and …) to text input, password, textarea, or drop-down list. You can easily extend it by adding your own input type using its editableFactory object.

jQuery Plugins
jQuery Plugins are a mass of popular plugins have been merged into jQuery core in one form or another. These include the ability to batch results into an array, a resolution for IE z-index issues,auto-expand text areas,dynamically create configurable gradient to the background without using images, implement the over label technique, live query and many more helpful plugins.

Jquery Elastic 1.2 Demo
This page contains a couple of demos of the Jquery plugin Elastic. Elastic makes your textarea change its height dynamically.

Stephane Caron – No Margin For Errors ¬ Pretty comments
Here’s a small jQuery plugin that allow textareas to stretch as content is put in. If the content goes over the defined height of the textarea, the textarea will grow as needed.

ToggleVal
ToggleVal gives you the option to populate the default text of form fields in a few different ways. It will then toggle the default value when the field receives and loses keyboard focus.

jQuery sIFR Plugin
The jQuery sIFR plugin is an addon for jQuery that makes it easy to replace text in a web page with flash text (sIFR) using the internal jQuery API.

jQuery Spoilers Plugin
Spoilers is a jQuery plugin which implements a feature first seen on the imdb.com web site. The pages using this plugin to show “Spoilers!” text, but when you mouse over that text, "Spoilers” disappear and the underlying text is revealed. The intention is to keep the casual reader from inadvertently reading details which he might not want to know. By mousing over them, he can reveal the details.

jTruncate – Text Truncation for jQuery
jTruncate allows you to customize nearly every aspect of the truncation operation. It provides simple yet customizable truncation for text entities in your web page.

Further jQuery Resources

List of Useful jQuery Plugins: jQuery, JavaScript
This is a huge masterlist from the jQuery plugins in the jQuery plugins repository. These are some of the best and most practical. The truly exceptional plugins are marked with “EXCELLENT.”

Lazy – The on-demand jQuery plugin loader
This jQuery plugin is an on-demand plugin loader, also known as a lazy loader. Instead of downloading all jQuery-plugins, that you might or might not need, Lazy downloads the plugins when you actually use them. The major difference between Lazy and it’s competitors is it’s size.

jQuery Callout Plugin
This jQuery Callout Plugin is based entirely on CSS, so no images are required like in the static text below. The rounded corners come courtesy of the excellent jQuery Rounded Corners plugin.

Guapo – jQuery copy plugin
We all know that in IE we can easily copy text to clipboard. It is, however, not such an easy in FX. This plugin uses a SWF file to achieve this; the SWF file’s default location is the same to the plugin. If you move it to another location, it changes in the plugin source code.

Moousture
Moosture is a mouse gesture library written solely in javascript with power and flexibility. Implemented on Mootools following the Object Oriented standards, the library is aimed to set out a future framework for mouse guesters for any browser including modern mobile devices.

Gritter for jQuery (Growl) (Demo)
A jQuery Growl look-a-like plugin, a notification bubble/popup that appears in the top right of your layout. Think of it as calling the alert() function in JavaScript, only it’s subtle and looks nice.

jGrowl – Unobtrusive Notification System for jQuery
jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works. It has the ability to create multiple container instances, allowing a developer to raise and create various notifications in various location on the user’s screen.

Add a favicon near external links with jQuery
External links should always be marked distinctly in order to see them easily. An even better idea is using the favicon.ico of the external site, if it is available of course.

Oursignal.com used jQuery plugins
OurSignal is a awesome visualization that displays the popular stories from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz and Hacker News in single page. Developed by Stateless Systems, it is nicely implemented with jQuery Plugins.

UI.Layout Plug-in
This plug-in was inspired by the extJS border-layout, and recreates that functionality as a jQuery plug-in. The UI.Layout plug-in can create any UI look you want – from simple headers or sidebars, to a complex application with toolbars, menus, help-panels, status bars, sub-forms, etc.

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Read the Entire Article “Stocking Up on Design Resources” on Art Bistro

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Creating an accessible data chart or graph in HTML is very tricky to achieve, especially with some elements, such as images, that allow only the most basic features that give textual information to non-visual users. What are the solutions?
PHP, Flash, Javscript (jQuery, MooTools, Prototype) and CSS can all be utilized successfully to implement interactive visualizations, and there are many techniques and solutions from each that will allow you to display them on web pages and apps.
Below we have compiled 25 solutions for displaying charts and graphs using various languages, if you prefer you may like to view our earlier article on CSS graph solutions: 16 Usable CSS Graph and Bar Chart Tutorials and Techniques.

PlotKit – Javascript Chart Plotting

PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript that has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support. It is based on top of the HTML CANVAS tag which is supported in Firefox, Safari and Opera, and is available under emulation on IE6 and IE7 via the ExplorerCanvas.

jQuery Visualize Plugin – Accessible Charts & Graphs

The jQuery Visualize Plugin makes use of the Canvas element of HTML5 to give you a simple and accessible method for generating bar, line, area, and pie charts from data contained within an HTML table and allows you to configure them in a variety of ways.

jqPlot Charts and Graphs for jQuery

The feature rich jqPlot is a plotting and charting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework. There are plenty of hooks into the core jqPlot code allowing for custom event handlers, creation of new plot types and adding canvases to the plot.

Protovis – A graphical approach to visualization

Unlike low-level graphics libraries, Protovis, defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to create data with simple marks such as bars and dots to simplify construction.
It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations; no plugin is required (though you will need a modern web browser) and programming experience is helpful but not essential. It does have extensive documentation and a wide array of examples on its homepage to help you get started.

jQuery Sparklines

This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript all with a single line of code.
The plugin is compatible with most modern browsers and has been tested with Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8.

MilkChart – Graph/Chart library for MooTools

MilkChart is a simple to use, yet robust library for transforming table data into a chart. This library uses the HTML5 <canvas> tag and is only supported on browsers other than IE until ExCanvas gets proper text support.

mooCSSChart

With mooCSSChart you can easily create animated bar charts.

Highcharts – Interactive JavaScript charts for your webpage

Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.
It works in all modern browsers including the iPhone and Internet Explorer from version 6. Standard browsers use the Canvas element and in some cases SVG for the graphics rendering. In Internet Explorer graphics are drawn using VML.

JS Charts – Free JavaScript charts

JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs.
With JS Charts drawing charts is a simple and easy task, since you only have to use client-side scripting (i.e. performed by your web browser). No additional plugins or server modules are required, just include the scripts, prepare your chart data in XML or JavaScript Array and your chart is ready.

flot – Attractive Javascript plotting for jQuery

Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. It has been developed with focus on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming and mouse tracking.
The plugin works with Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2.x+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Konqueror 4.x+ with the HTML canvas tag (Internet Explorer where the excanvas Javascript emulation helper is used).

Flotr Javascript Plotting Library

Flotr is a javascript plotting library based on the Prototype Javascript Framework and has been inspired by Flot (above).
Flotr enables you to draw appealing graphs in most modern browsers with an easy to learn syntax. It comes with great features like legend support, negative value support, mouse tracking, selection support, zoom support, event hooks, CSS styling support and much more.

Libchart – Simple PHP Chart Drawing Library

Libchart is an easy to use, free chart creation PHP library. The new version features multiple datasets for horizontal, vertical bar charts and line charts.

pChart – a PHP Charting library

pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts with its data easily retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided. In this version rendering speeds have been greatly improved and run pChart on your web server, you'll need to use PHP compiled with the GD library support.

YUI 2: SWF Charts

The YUI Charts Control visualizes tabular data on a web page in several possible formats including vertical columns, horizontal bars, lines, and pies. Notable features include support for the DataSource Utility, customizable series and axes, a customizable mouse-over datatip, combination charts, and skinning.

Open Flash Chart

Open Flash Chart works by requesting data from the server when a user loads a web page. The server will knows who the particular user is and it will generate a custom chart showing up to the minute data.
You will need to include the Open Flash Chart in your HTML, and you also need to provide the data file on the server. The data file is either a text file, or a .php, Perl, Python, Java (or another flavour of dynamic) page.

XML/SWF Charts

XML/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful tool to create attractive charts and graphs from XML data. Create an XML source to describe a chart, then pass it to this tool's flash file to generate the chart. The XML source can be prepared manually, or generated dynamically using any scripting language (PHP, ASP, CFML, Perl, etc.).

FusionCharts

This version is the free and open-source Flash charting component from FusionCharts . It empowers you to create animated and interactive Flash charts for your web applications, desktop applications and presentations. It provides an impressive 22 popular charts like Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, Stacked, Candlestick and Funnel Chart, that will look the same across all browsers.

Flare – Data Visualization for the Web

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques with ease.

Visifire – Silverlight and WPF Chart Controls

Visifire is a set of open source data visualization controls – powered by Microsoft Silverlight. it is a multi-targeting control which can be used in both WPF and Silverlight applications, that can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby or just simple HTML.

Axiis : Data Visualization Framework

Axiis is an open source data visualization framework that has been built upon the Degrafa graphics framework and Adobe Flex 3. Axiis provides both pre-built visualization components as well as abstract layout patterns and rendering classes that allow you to create your own unique visualizations.

ChartGo – Create Charts Online Fast, Easy and Free

ChartGo is an online generator that allow users to create charts online quickly. You can create bar charts, line charts or pie charts and you simply paste your data in the chart data area and hit the create chart button.

iCharts – Create, Share and Embed Interactive Charts

iCharts allows everyone to upload Excel sheets or manually add data from which they can easily create, share and embed interactive charts within minutes. iCharts can be published on the iCharts Portal at iCharts and they can be embedded anywhere on the Internet in blogs, forums or corporate websites.

Chartle.net – Interactive Charts Online

Chartle is a very easy to use and completely free online chart generator that allows you to embed and share your plots, maps, charts, diagrams and business reports online.
Chartlet is non-binding towards its users, there is no forced registration and all generated charts are your own, The only thing they ask is that you link back to them.

Google Chart API

The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of images can be generated, including line, bar, and pie charts. For each image type, you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

chartpart.com – Chart Generator

This generator uses the Google Charts API to produce crisp and clear graphs that can be inserted into web based documents via a hyperlink or saved as a flat image file.

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Mint

Mint is a modern, powerful, easy and secure web–based solution for online financial management. You can register anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the log–in information for the online bank, credit union, credit card and investment accounts you want to consolidate in Mint.

Invoicera

Invoicera saves your time and helps you manage your bills in a snapshot. It is designed as a payment tracking application that helps you keep a track of your customer payments. For knowing the instant sending and receiving invoices process, just take one Invoicera tour, and call yourself a pro in handling this application.

BudgetPulse

BudgetPulse personal finance software is the perfect solution for managing your finances. You can organize your cash flow, expenses and bank accounts in one place. And easy to understand charts and graphs enable you to visualize how you’re spending your money month-to-month. This enables you to track your progress, discover where you can make savings and improve how you manage your money. Budgetpulse is absolutely free, online budgeting service for all users. In the current economic climate, this is one of the best budgeting tool available on the web.

Billing Boss

Billing Boss is a free online invoicing tool designed for small businesses and freelancers to create, send and track the status of invoices. It’s so simple to use that you can create and send your first invoice within minutes. Unlike other invoice solutions, with Billing Boss, there are no limits to the number of invoices you can create or send.

Quicken Online

Quicken Online simplifies Internet banking by automatically organizing your financial accounts “ including checking, savings, investments, loans and credit cards “ in one place. You can use Quicken Online to easily and automatically track your spending so you know very easily where to save and when to spend and the best part is, it’s free.

Side Job Track

With Side Job Track you can quickly and easily manage your side jobs with simple, straightforward project tools. Side Job Track’s flexible data entry lets you to decide how to best fit your specific needs. If you have access to a web server, you can even create completely customized estimate and invoice templates.

moneytrackin’

moneytrackin’ is a free online webapp that allows you to track all your expenses and income easily and without effort, thus allowing you to have a clear view of your financial situation. It intends to be a simple yet powerful online budget management tool.

FresBooks

FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional. This is so easy to use, it saves your time and gets you paid faster. You’ll actually love invoicing. You can keep track of your expenses, for both projects and yourself and easily re-bill clients on project expenses.

The Invoice Machine

The Invoice Machine takes a new clever approach to online invoicing. It’s beautiful and simple-to-use interface makes producing professional looking invoices a very pleasant experience. This is ideal for freelancers and businesses who want an easy way to manage, create and send their invoices. It’s great for anyone who has a service or product to sell.

Wesabe

Wesabe gives you the tools and the insights to take control of your finances. You can see all your bank and credit card balances in one place and learn ways to get ahead, in a few easy steps.

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BudgetPulse also makes it easier for you to achieve larger financial goals. You can create goals and then share with friends and family. They can then track your progress and make donations, using PayPal or Amazon, to help you reach them. Personal fundraising has never been easier.

Always knowing your overall financial status is a powerful feature and your BudgetPulse dashboard displays a complete picture in a single place. Showing budget status, net worth details, current cash flow status, and more, the dashboard presents your single entry point into your personal budgeting system.

Knowing your current AND upcoming transactions at all times ensures that you are well-prepared to pay your expenses on time, thus avoiding punishing late fees and unnecessary penalties. No more forgetting to pay a bill or risking your credit rating. Your income and expenses are at your fingertips at all times.

You can track income and plan for expenses using easy categories to tag each item. Budget multiple accounts to monitor your spending habits and begin to set spending limits and savings goals.

You can create an automatic schedule of income and expense transactions so you always know what’s coming up financially. Knowing what is coming gives you the ability to plan better and ensures you don’t miss payments, which only create additional expenses.

As you make changes to your accounts, add assets, and track expenses and income, BudgetPulse shows you your net worth, which is automatically and immediately updated at all times.

To quickly and easily pre-load your BudgetPulse data, you can import data files from a variety of sources into your budget tracking for an easy start to a complete budget view. Import MS Money and Quicken files. Import QIF, QFX, and OFX data files from banking and credit institutions. Import spreadsheets too.

While BudgetPulse supports all manner of budgeting, including graphs and charts to display where you are spending your money, you can still export your budget data, including all transaction details, to spreadsheets for examination and use in other tools, when necessary. Export and print all graphs and reports as PDF files for storing and later retrieval or sharing with others.

Quickly and easily set up your savings goals for something you have been dreaming of.  Have something you are trying to save for and want to motivate yourself to commit to?  A savings goal will keep you on track and you can view your progress as you inch closer to reach your financial goal.  Colorful charts show your saving progress and how much you contribute over time.  With everything organized in one place, you will reach your goal in no time.

Is the goal just for you or would you like to collect money from a group of people?  You have the ability to keep the goal private or can directly receive collections from people you request financial help from.  Either way you choose will be the first step to reaching that iphone, car, trip, party or any financial goal you have been dreaming of.

BudgetPulse is a kind of ‘view-only’ web service that lets you organize and analyze your finances, but does not let you directly move money into or out of your private bank and credit accounts. No one outside of you will ever know what your budget looks like, and no one – not even you — has access to your accounts through BudgetPulse

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Among the new features is the ability to narrow any search down to spans of a mere five minutes. While it’s not for everyone, if you’re trying to find better ways to filter the fire hose of information that is real-time data, Delicious’ new search tool is an easy way to do it.

There’s also a very cool new interactive graph for filtering bookmarks around larger chunks of time. For example, if you wanted to see all your bookmarks added on this day last year, just click the interactive graph, select the start and end points and then click the search button to narrow the results.

While narrowing by time is hardly a new feature, the graphical interface is considerably more intuitive (and cooler) than simply plugging your dates in a text field. If nothing else, it’s a nice example of how much careful attention to interface design can improve a website.

In fact, the new Delicious seems to have something of fetish for charts and graphs. Charts also appear on each link’s “count” page, showing who has bookmarked it. For example, the Webmonkey homepage has been bookmarked over 5500 times, but the new chart (click the chart icon to see it) reveals a huge spike in June 2008 shortly after we relaunched the site.

Delicious’ new charts aren’t limited to the site either. There’s a new “Tagometer” widget that allows you to embed a chart on your own pages showing the number of saves over time and the most frequently-used tags. Right now you’ll need to cut-and-paste some JavaScript into your pages, but it probably won’t be long before someone creates a plug-in for WordPress and other platforms.

The final change Delicious has unveiled is an iPhone-optimized mobile site. The site is geared toward making it easier to bookmark pages on the iPhone, so you can read them later. While we prefer Instapaper for that sort of thing, the Delicious mobile site has other options — like quickly browsing recent bookmarks — which heavy users will appreciate.

See Also:

• Revamped Delicious Turns to Twitter for Real-Time Search
• Send Web Video to Boxee With Delicious Bookmarks
• Delicious Gets New Look, Loses Dots

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