We designed a beautiful infographic that lists all our achievements during the past year, it was (and still is) a nice journey for us. Let’s have a look:

Spread the word, copy this code and embed the infographic on your blog or site:

SPECIAL OFFER

To celebrate our 2nd anniversary, we’re running a limited time offer providing 50% discount on all our products (WordPress themes and subscription plans). Simply use this coupon code TESLATHEMES2 to get 50% OFF on everything. The offer is available until 29th of May, 2015, hurry up!

Questions on WordPress security have been raised several times. Brute Force Attack and vulnerabilities are common with WordPress. Most of the developers to whom I posed a question on security of WordPress were concerned about the  security of the CMS.

UPDATE YOUR PLUGINS & THEMES

There are thousands of plugins and themes registered within the WordPress repository. The giant WordPress companies update their plugins right after every new release. Actually, it is necessary to update your websites with every new version of WordPress.

One of the basic chances you can create for the hackers to attack your WordPress website is to run outdated plugins and themes. And the products that aren’t active may lose their customers soon. WordPress forces its users to update to the latest version by culminating the support for the previous version. But, unfortunately many WordPressers do not upgrade. This eventually results in hack attacks on the websites and databases.

HOW SHARED HOSTING CAN BE HARMFUL TO WORDPRESS SECURITY?

Hosting with shared servers is one of the biggest reasons for the increasing number of these hack attacks. Bots tend to look for open ports to enter and attack the servers. If you have a weak password and bots crack them, it is not only harmful for you, but also for those who have hosted on the same server. Keeping each site on server secure is very important.

When giving access to the customers, these hosting agencies should ensure to keep an eye on their activities. There are several plugins available for making the website admin secure. It is also recommended to use two-factor authentication.

Also read: Think twice before ignoring these 3 WordPress security tips

HERE ARE SOME VALUABLE ADVICES ON HOW TO SECURE YOUR WORDPRESS SITE FROM INDUSTRY’S EXPERTS:

ENDING NOTES

Sometimes we can control the security of WordPress through easy steps. All these experts explained it beautifully. I am summarizing the steps in few tips:

• Choose your WordPress host wisely.
• Always keep backups of your work.
• Keep your WordPress, plugins, and themes updated.
• Use two-factor authentication at WP backend.
• Use strong password for login.
• Use the recommended security plugins like VaultPress, WordFence, etc. to avoid attacks.

What are your common practices to secure your website? Tell us in the comments below.

1. MATERIAL DESIGN

Google is setting a new design trend by introducing its material design into the latest version of Android, web applications and Chrome OS. Material design comprises specific components, patterns, style, interaction design across different types of devices.  It reproduces real tactile materials like paper and ink, using animation and lightning.

With material design you can achieve beautiful layouts, transitions, scrolling effects and awesome interaction designs. User’s action provides meaning, transforming the whole design. Here are some nice examples of material design elements.

Google even launched Polymer library, to help designers and developers easily create material design components, applications for desktop or mobile, etc.

2. RESPONSIVE DESIGN, AGAIN

There is no doubt that responsive web design is a must these days. Why? Because more and more users are accessing websites using their mobile devices, and your design should look nice on all of them. Recentstatistics show that in 2014 mobile Internet usage increased by 67%. Thus, 28.5% of users were accessing the web using their smartphones and 6.8% using their tablets. This means that mobile devices account for 35.3% of Internet usage. In 2015, “mobile first” design will be for sure an important factor to consider.

3. SVG, A STEP FORWARD

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is probably the best format for responsive web design. It fits ideally flat and material design and it could become the default image format in the future. The advantage of SVG is that it’s a vector format and it’s keeping its sharpness after scaling. Also, you can manipulate it with CSS or JavaScript and create awesome animations.

SVG allows web designers to think less about different screen resolutions and focus solely on their design.

4. STYLE GUIDES

Style guide is an efficient way to consolidate and standardize your markup and CSS, and document the visual components of your website (header, colors, forms, typography, etc.). It’s a comprehensive guide/repository of design and code that can be used as a reference for the whole team (project manager, developers, designers, etc.).

Style guides have a lot of benefits: you standardize your CSS and can build new components/pages faster, you keep your design consistent, you have an efficient communication on the project, you’re documenting your work.

Here is a complete guide on how to create and manage your style guides.

5. SCROLLING FOR EVERYONE

As the mobile Internet usage emerges, long scrolling pages will be more present. It will probably be completed with interactions, effects and animation to provide a great UX and turn the content into an interactive story.

Studies show that most of the users (from 91% to 100%) will scroll down the page and reach the bottom. Moreover, many users will scroll down even before the page loads completely and over 80% of the views are occurring just above the fold (at approximately 550px). Here is a nice research about scroll behaviorof users across the web.

6. INTERACTION DESIGN

A unique web design is a design that provides meaning and emotion. These can be achieved via interactions, which can be defined as feedback mechanisms providing a great UX. The interactions that are created by designers can separate awesome experiences from poor ones.

Have a look at this interesting interaction design examples by Chris Wright – an interaction designer from Sydney, Australia.

7. CUSTOM TYPOGRAPHY

Web typography is not only the use of fonts on your website. It’s the art of creating and manipulating the typefaces and whitespace as a mean of communication and readability. As Oliver Reichenstein said “Web design is 95% typography”. Beside existing components and resources like Google fonts, Ghost buttons, lettering, big headlines, icon fonts, text animation, etc. we will probably notice a mix of new vs. old techniques that will offer users and designers more flexibility.

You can find everything you should know about practical typography in this ebook or browse some examples of websites with good typography, listed by Awwwards.

8. WEARABLES, GET READY FOR THEM

The revolution of iPhone 6 and Apple Watch will for sure change the way we design. As we previouslyinvestigated this topic, we can assume that the quick adoption of wearable devices will accelerate this process. Web designers will have to move their focus from traditional design for web pages to more flexible design for mobile apps and wearables. We’ll keep an eye on those smartwatches!

9. PERFORMANCE

Site speed is a ranking factor in Google search algorithm. Google encourages web masters to make their web pages load fast on all devices. While this is not mainly a front-end trend, there are lots of optimizations that can be done in CSS and JavaScript to achieve a better performance.

Google is the pioneer in this area. You can investigate your website’s load time online or inspect lots of parameters in Google Chrome console (timeline, rendering, audits, etc.).

10. DECLINE OF ADOBE AND FRAMEWORKS

This is what you’ll not see in 2015. Web designers will still opt for Photoshop to create their works and be a part of its huge community. The Adobe’s releases, presence and authority will keep professionals under its influence. As of popular frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation, we’ll not notice a considerable decline. We could expect some custom tools and small frameworks for specific cases.

CONCLUSION

2015 will be another year full of excitement and new trends in web design industry. We’re doing our best to implement the latest web design techniques and to offer professional products. We’ve done a lot in this direction and more implementations are yet to come: TeslaThemes site redesign, new WordPress theme based on material design, internal style guides, page speed optimizations and much more.

Keep an eye on the latest web design trends; leave a comment if you have more trends to share!

1. GITHUB

If you haven’t come across GitHub, then chances are you have been living under a rock for the last many years. GitHub is a Git repository hosting service. GIthub is fully web based which means you can use it anywhere without having to download anything first.

2. CODEPEN

Codepen is every coders best friend, not only is it an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code editor directly in your browser, but it also offers an instant preview, so you automatically see what your code looks like.

3. DROPBOX

Dropbox should really be one of the first things you install on any new device. If you are unfamiliar with Dropbox then it is a cloud based storage solution where you can store practically any file. What is great is the fact that as soon as you upload a file to Dropbox, it will automatically sync with all your devices, whether this is a computer,tablet or smartphone. Dropbox also offers a website where you can access your files without having to install anything.

4. EVERNOTE

In the past, we used to take notes with a pen and a paper, today, however, that has changed dramatically. Thanks to Evernore, we can now keep all our notes stored in one place. A note can be either a snippet of text, or it can be a whole website. Anything you want to remember can be kept safe with Evernote.

5. GTMETRIX

GTmetrix is a free tool that tests and grades your website’s speed. However what really sets it apart from competitors is the fact that the company doesn’t only test your page speed, but it will automatically come up with different ways for you to improve the speed of your website. Furthermore the site will also post your websites YSlow grade.

6. UNSPLASH

Unsplash is one of those tools you will love aft having tried it. The site offs high quality photos completely free, and what’s great about this site is the fact that all the images look amazing. Up splash doesn’t use stock looking images, instead it relies on talented photographers to keep adding images to the site. The site works in such a way that every 10 days, 10 new images are uploaded to the server.

7. BROWSERSTACK

If you have ever wanted to see what your website looks like on a plethora of different browsers, then BrowserStackis the right tool for you. Technically this plaform isn’t free, however they do offer a free trial, and after trying it, I am sure you will want to sign up for one of their plans.

8. INVISION

With InVision you can easily create beautiful mock-ups for web design, you can also use this tool to create mock-ups of smartphone applications. The platform comes with a great set of tools for creating website prototypes, furthermore the tool comes with a great communication solution built right into the platform, in other words you can work together on a project with a group of people and have a conversation about it directly within the platform.

9. TRELLO

There are literally hundreds of different project management tools available, some are free and some a quite expensive. Many of them will allow you to keep track of time spent on a project as well as assign projects to different teams, however, few of them will complete the task as well as Trello. With Trello it is easy to see what projects have been completed and what projects still need work.

10. DIFFNOW

Every web developer will tell you that reading through hundreds of lines of code just to find one difference can be a really annoying task, that is where DiffNow enters the picture. This online app allows you to easily compare text, code such as HTML, Python Unicode as well as PDF documents, binary files and Zip archives. When the app detects a difference in the text it automatically highlights the text accordingly.