Web Design

Pros And Cons For Web Designers When Doing Business As A Sole Trader

Pros And Cons For Web Designers When Doing Business As A Sole Trader

When web designers take their knowledge and skills and use them to start a business such as a web design agency, there are numerous legal obligations to be met and decisions to be made. One of the first and most important is what legal business structure their web design agency is to have. There are three main options, which are sole trader, partnership, and company.

Unless they are starting the business with another person, a partnership will not apply, and for many web designers setting up a company is often not necessary at this stage. That leaves us with sole trader, or sole proprietor, as some call it. Being a sole trader is a hugely popular way for web designers to establish a business, but, as with anything business-related, it does have rules, pros, and cons, so let us look at them in some detail.

What Being A Sole Trader Means

First, being a sole trader is a perfectly legitimate way to operate a business, and is the choice of millions of business owners. In effect, it is you, the individual, which takes on the responsibilities and obligations of your business. As the business is yours, you have complete control and are not answerable to directors or shareholders when making decisions concerning the business.

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3 Facts about eCommerce Website Builders That No Expert Is Telling You About

3 Facts about eCommerce Website Builders That No Expert Is Telling You About

In the last few years, digitization has been gaining momentum. With e-mails, writing letters are becoming irrelevant. Social media is replacing text messages. Also, automation is replacing manual operations. As the changes take place, the business arena is not left out. E-commerce is taking shape each dawn. More entrepreneurs are launching online stores. Customers are also adapting to online shopping. In a word, virtual space is becoming the main customer-seller interaction point.

For you to become a successful entrepreneur in this era, you do not have an alternative than establishing an online store. An e-commerce website builder is the highway or building block to joining sellers in the virtual world. With the demand for virtualization surging each day, more developers have come up with builders promising heaven to new entrants. However, before subscribing to any builder, here are facts you need to know about them:

No builder is 100%
Regardless of the features and tools availed in an e-commerce website builder, no builder is 100%. Each of the top rankings has their benefits and shortcomings. Also, each of the builders has its limitations that have some impact on what you can do about them. For instance, if you are a code pro, open sources are a good option for you. They offer you an opportunity to customize your templates and other features through tweaking the availed codes. However, if you lack these skills and cannot hire an expert, you do not have an option rather than going for the hosted builders.

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Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails

Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails

Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails for Joomla 1.7+ with Administration Control Panel for multiple Banner Rotators.

This Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails has all the possible options you might need, is very versatile, easily resizable and easy to use.

It includes our powerful advanced dock menu for thumbnail along with its 30+ settings.

Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu

Options you can change in Administrator Backend:

  • size of the rotator (with and height in px)
  • dock menu show/hide/auto-hide (when mouse is out of the banner rotator)
  • navigational arrows show/hide/auto-hide
  • description show/hide/auto-hide
  • description background color and alpha
  • blur intensity for transitions
  • transition slide speed
  • initial position (first selected element)
  • autoplay timer (how much time to wait between rotating images)
  • for each item you can specify the thumbnail image, main image, title (for tooltip), description (optional), link url and target

Dock Menu options in the Administrator Backend (30+):

  • item size (width and height in px)
  • spacing between items (px)
  • zoom amount on mouseover
  • zoom speed on mouseover
  • amount of zoom/position influence on adjacent items
  • y axis offset (px) for zooming (dock can open upwards, downwards or centered )
  • reflection on/off, reflection size, reflection alpha and reflection distance from the picture
  • brighten item on mouseover on/off and amount of brightness
  • tooltip on/off, tooltip skin (white/black), tooltip placement on top, bottom or follow mouse, y axis offset of the tooltip (move it up or down)
  • independent stroke size and color setting for all three states : normal, mouseover and selected. Stroke can be set to 0 independently if you don’t want stroke for any/all of the states.
  • and quite a few more

This Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails is seriously powerful as you can see from the ton of options, don’t miss out !

Advanced Banner Rotator DM: Demo | License | Requirements | Support | Tips
When you install com_wmt_advanced_banner_rotator_dm, Demo Banner rotator is installed by default.

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Responsive Grid Gallery – Joomla Component

Responsive Grid Gallery - Joomla Component

Responsive Grid Gallery – Joomla Component – responsive and adaptive design, optimized for desktop, mobile and tablet browsers, 6 types item hover animation, easy install and use, Joomla 2.5 and 3.x compatible, unlimited items. Free download from our download section

Responsive Grid Gallery – Front-end Preview

Add new category, and add images to category

To setup Responsive Grid Gallery navigate to Components –> Responsive Grid Gallery –> Responsive Grid Gallery

Then click on the New button to create new Responsive Grid Gallery.

Fill in the required fields:

Title (title of your Grid Gallery)
Description.
On your right side you have form to add image/s to your Responsive Grid Gallery.

Click Browse to select image for upload
Title (title for that image)
Description (for that image)

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All Around Portfolio – Joomla Component

All Around Portfolio - Joomla Component

All Around Portfolio – Joomla Component can display your company services, personal portfolio, products, real-estate properties, vacation/holiday offers, cooking recipes and much much more.

If you want to test All Around Portfolio on your website, you can download TEST VERSION from our Download section.

Limitations in TEST VERSION
5 categories
only 1 category with 3 items
you can only edit 3 items

Add new Portfolio categories, and add entries to Portfolio categories

Navigate to Components –> All around Portfolio –> All around Portfolio’s

(here you can manage portfolio categories. You can edit category name and thumbnail, you can delete or unpublish selected category) allaround_1.png

To add category click on the New button:

Enter category name and select thumbnail for that category and click on Save & Close

Now you can add Portfolio entries to that category by clicking on the Manage Entries link next to the created category:

(here you can manage Portfolio entries for that category. You can edit entry name and description, you can delete or unpublish selected entry)

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uSquare – Responsive Squared Grid – Joomla 2.5+

uSquare - responsive squared grid - Joomla 2.5+

Another very interesting thing that is going on is the fact that on-line shopping is becoming more and more convenient than regular shopping. Furthermore, when people are searching for any kind of service, they will certainly rather Google it from the comfort of their own home than go for a long walk in search for whatever it is they need. So, whatever it is you are trying to sell, you need a cool looking web-site, so that you don’t go bankrupt. Even if we are talking about some kind of blog, if the blog is not visited regularly, it kind of misses its point, right?

Let’s cut to the chase!

So, you have to have a great site, and you are not a web-design and development team. Hmmm… What to do? Well, you can go on-line, find something that you like, buy it, modify it a bit, and there you go. It’s always a good idea to go for a tested and tried product, and an organized uSquare plug-in definitely fits this description – with over 1800 sales on the WordPress platform and 2500 sales overall, it’s one of the very popular choices for an admin that wants functionality and style on his site.

In the following piece of text, I will present to you a responsive grid for WordPress, which is, in my opinion excellent for whatever it is that you are “selling”. It is called uSquare Component for Joomla 2.5+ CMS , and you should definitely check it out. First of all, when I said that it is responsive, to those of you who are not acquainted with the term, it means that it will fit every screen resolution, which means that it can easily be accessible via loads of devices.

In comparison to most other “responsive” thingies that you can buy on-line, the team that developed this one put a lot of effort in making the responsive part of the plug-in do the work properly. Furthermore, it is organized so that you can make it your team or services page, or you can attach blog posts.

You can display whatever products you are selling with it and, frankly speaking, you can use it for pretty much anything you like and anything you can think of.

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Horizontal Gridfolio – Joomla Component

The Horizontal Gridfolio has a responsive layout and 4 predefined themes that you can use. Take a look Live Preview that is provided, where you can see in which way you can use this grid.

The grid gallery can have unlimited number of images. When a thumbnail is clicked the lightbox can display images, or videos loaded from YouTube or Vimeo. You can also prove URL that will be opened when the thumbnail is clicked. Download Horizontal Gridfolio free version from our download section.

Add new category, and add images to category

To setup Horizontal Gridfolio navigate to Components –> Horizontal Gridfolio –> Categories

Then click on the New button to create new Horizontal Gridfolio Category .

Fill in the required fields:

  • Title (title of your Category)
  • Description.
  • Click on Save & Close

To add new item to Horizontal Gridfolio Item navigate to Components –> Horizontal Gridfolio –> Images
(or click on Images link next to the Categories link on top)

Then click on the New button to add new Item.

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Thumbnail JQ Gallery – Joomla Component

Thumbnail JQ Gallery - Joomla Component

Thumbnail JQ Gallery is jQuery, responsive image gallery with multiple categories options via menu item. Download Thumbnail JQ Gallery Joomla Component for FREE from our download section.

Plugin for inserting this gallery in content item, is available in PRO version.  Thumbnail JQ Gallery – Front-end Preview

Add new category, and add images to category

To setup Thumbnail JQ Gallery navigate to Components –> Thumbnail JQ Gallery –> Categories

Then click on the New button to create new Thumbnail JQ Gallery Category.

Fill in the required fields:

Title (title of your Category)

Description.

Click on Save & Close

To upload image Category navigate to Components –> Thumbnail JQ Gallery –> Images
(or click on Images link next to the Categoies link on top)

Then click on the New button to add Image to Category.

Fill in the required fields:

Title (title for that image)

Select Category

Description (for that image)

Click Browse to select image for upload

Click on Save & Close

Display Gallery on front page

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