I have been using the various beta and release candidate versions of WordPress 3.1 since November and am especially excited about a few of the new additions and improvements.

From an interface perspective, WordPress 3.1 shares the same look as WordPress 3.0. A few minor changes have been made to give the WordPress dashboard a cleaner look, but the overall design remains the same. The one exception is for users of the blue admin theme. The colors and stylings for the blue theme have been refined and improved across the board.

Post Formats, At Last

My favorite new feature in WordPress 3.1 is the addition of Post Formats. Not to be confused with the similar sounding Custom Post Types, Post Formats can be used by theme authors to customize the way a WordPress post is presented on the web. Post Formats is not a required feature, but it is something that theme designers can implement to better show off certain content types.

Post Formats are especially useful for users who want to create a Tumblr-like experience on their WordPress blog. That means that users can designate a post as an aside, link, video, image, quote, status, audio, chat or gallery. That designation can then help a theme determine how content should be displayed.

That means that a post formatted as a quote might display a quote in a big italicized font, whereas a video post has a custom width.

Over the past few months, a number of WordPress theme developers have instated their own versions of Post Formats into themes, but with the new standardization, we expect to see the feature crop up in more places. Adding support for Post Formats requires theme authors to add a few lines of code to their templates and stylesheets.

WordPress contributor Otto wrote a great post about Post Formats several months ago that is definitely worth the read.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is a new feature in WordPress 3.1 that makes it easier for publishers to find and link back to previously published content. At Mashable, we often use internal linking to refer back to earlier coverage or give additional insight into a topic or idea.

Most of the time, the process of finding the link requires either searching the site or doing a custom Google search to get a specific URL. I use TextMate for all of my writing and have a custom bundle that actually lets me search the Mashable archives by entering a keyword or phrase without having to leave my editor.

1. Making visitors register or create an account for no reason.
How many of us have visited an online retailer, added hundreds of dollars worth of items to our cart after a good hour spent browsing, and just when you clicked “Check Out” you were taken to a sign up page forcing you to register? And how many have just decided not to bother and closed the window without going ahead with the purchase? You aren’t the only one – econsultancy.com has found that a whopping 45% will opt out right there, instead of going through the hassle of first providing an email address, then waiting for verification of the email address and so on and so forth.

Some websites take “annoying” to a whole new level. Take loopnet.com for instance, a real estate website which allows you to browse for accommodation based on your current location, requirements and budget. Now get this:

I have to pay to look for an accommodation?? Isn’t this website making enough money from the advertisers and the sellers? This makes me think of a car showroom, which puts out a sign outside the door, asking you to pay 30 dollars just to browse. Imagine how you would feel.

One might excuse these websites for being “small dealers”. But even Fox news does it. A variety of their shows used to be available on their website, with advertisements inserted at strategic intervals exactly like the real thing. I have no issues with that – no one’s running a charity here. But then they signed a deal with “Dish TV network”, according to which visitors with a Dish TV cable connection would have to register with their Dish TV credentials and only they would have access to the full show. Everyone else will have to wait for eight days before the show is available to them. They must be joking! Isn’t Fox network making enough money with all the advertisements?

2. Hiding the Information I am looking for behind a lot of other things I don’t really care for

Case in point, any random restaurant’s website.

Take Jam restaurant for instance. Would you really believe they ask you to download their menu?

You ain’t seen nothing yet. Behold easybistro’s menu, where you need to download each menu item separately:

Or how about those glitzy Flash websites that may or may not open or work correctly in the web browser or system you may be using, such as pizzaza.com

Restaurants still haven’t managed to figure out that I came here looking for specific information – I don’t care whether it is available on Facebook, or what the environment is like. I only care about the kind of food I can find here and how much I can expect it to cost me. Full stop.

3.  Using Long or Highly Inconvenient URLs
A link to an eBay auction will typically look like this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/DONNY-AND-MARIE-OSMOND-SIGNED-AUTO-MAGAZINE-PROGRAM-JSA-/180703996193?_trksid=p4340.m8&_trkparms=algo%3DMW%26its%3DC%26itu%3DUCC%26otn%

3D5%26ps%3D63%26clkid%3D1806135911305102056

Maybe there is a technical reason for this, but imagine having to share that with a friend.
Or let’s say you are browsing the Wall Street Journal through Google News and find something that you think would interest a friend:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903885604576486282598040892.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

What just happened here?? I understand there are URL shortening services to make sharing much easier, but why should I have to worry about shortening a URL in the first place?

Ok, so maybe these companies have databases which automatically generate these URLs for them. But companies choosing their domain name aren’t much better. I recently came across an advertisement on radio about a community college they were encouraging visitors to attend. The URL they decided to give on air was http://iccbdbsrv.iccb.org/clusters/home.cfm — or as I heard it: “To find out more, visit eye see see bee dee bee ess arr vee dot eye see see bee dot oh arr gee forward slash clusters forward slash home dot see eff em.” Imagine what you must be going through if say you are driving and were actually interested in noting the URL down. Even if you weren’t, you would still need to have a pen in your hand, and hope you didn’t get any of the Vs, Ds, Cs or Bs mixed up – you can hear nine being mentioned in that unbelievable URL.

Nothing however beats https://www.mxyplyzyk.com/v03/index.htm

This is an actual store that sells actual products, which relies on customers being able to find them. So why would they want such an unholy mess of characters half of which their customers would never be able to remember? Oh, wait there’s an actual reason.

In case these guys forgot: they are a store! At no point can they afford to start spelling the URL of their company, and then stop in the middle and offer to write it down. And what if someone was asking them the URL over the phone? The whole objective of text based URL is that it should be user friendly and easy to remember. The objective of a store is to sell products and make money. If a store, especially one that relies on online sales, is unable to convey its URL conveniently, it will never be able to achieve the second goal!

4. Restricting My Usage of their Website

If you have an account on XBox Live you will well relate to this. Microsoft, the largest IT company in the world, has a huge website where you can do anything you want to – except cancel your subscription. If you need to do that, you have to call.

And then hold – after which a rep will convince you to change your decision.

Companies need to realize that the whole point of an automated website is ease of access. It’s supposed to be operational 24 hours a day and offer convenience, something I don’t see here.

Give them credit, at least they do seem to operate 24 hours a day. When I saw this one, I couldn’t believe they were serious. Apparently the Ohio Board of Regents has been offering educational loans for prospective nurses through a program that they call NEALP (Nurse Education Assistance Loan Program).

Try to access their site after their working hours, and this is what you get:

At The Designs Firm we find that what our clients commonly need for the daily changes on their websites, these changes are just so small but they still need us if their websites is just developed on HTML, PHP or ASP. But what we can offer them in these situations is that we are giving them there approved design on the CMS (Content Management systems) So that client can make those daily changes on the website from their own systems with the sound knowledge of computer and MS Word only.

Clients Never prefers to change the codes.

Here are five ways that you can achieve this goal.

•       Remain in Control Throughout

A client-graphic designer relationship is a two-way street where the input of both parties is always critical. However, as a graphic designer, you should learn to remain in control of the situation, so that the client is never able to run rough-shod over you. This will also help you to define the client’s expectations from the very start of the project so that the client can always be sure of what they will be getting.

• Never Reject Clients’ Ideas Outright

You are the expert in the field, and you should know what works and what won’t and what the industry standards are. Yet you should never give the client the impression that his or her ideas are rubbish (even if you do think so). Employ a “Yes..But” technique, in which you tell the client that their ideas are good, but state a reason why yours would be better.  This makes the clients more receptive to your ideas and more willing to implement them.

• Educate Clients

Some clients may be unsure of what their role is in the graphic design process, and of what your own role is.  For this reason it is generally recommended that prior to launching a project, you conduct a meeting with the client to outline your entire work processes of your work. This will help the client to be clear about who is responsible for what.

• Package your services attractively

It is an unstated rule of doing business and closing deals that how you present yourself and your product counts for more than what you are selling. The same holds true in the field of graphic design. You may have designed a very attractive logo in the most stunning of colors, but if you decide to present a very low-quality version to the client, it is not very likely that they would show interest.

• Communicate the Benefits

It is very important that you communicate to your client the benefits of what you are offering – in the language the client wants to hear.  Your client is not interested in how good your design is technically. They are only interested in how it will benefit their business. Where possible, focus on how your design will help them enhance business value or the bottom line.

In the past, web developers made heavy use of Flash to provide highly dynamic web content over the Internet. As browsers and browser technologies continue to develop, sites which are rich in features and interactivity can easily be developed using combinations of HTML/CSS, JQuery and Javascript. By making use of these scripting languages, web developers can produce captivating and engaging websites while at the same time remaining safe from the following problems inherent in Flash:

ü  Flash websites are not SEO-friendly: The biggest problem with Flash is that a Flash-based website cannot be fully indexed by a search engine such as Google. Therefore, it is best to avoid it if your website goals include any form of SEO.

ü  The browsers of mobile devices are not Flash-supportive: The browsers included with the majority of mobile phones and mobile devices available today do not include support for Flash. This is especially a problem with the iPhone and iPad.

ü  Flash does not include support for text: Flash may be very good for adding aesthetic value to your website, but if you want to provide your viewers with the ability to select text or copy and paste it, the use of Flash is a very bad idea.

ü  Abundance of other options: A complete website developed in Flash will not work unless your visitors’ web browsers are equipped with the necessary plugins and Flash players. If your visitors discover that your website requires multiple installations to work properly on their particular browser, many will not bother and will switch to another website that delivers what they want without the added annoyance.

Some people put forth the theory that they develop Flash based websites only to improve the web experience. But the truth is that there are other options that allow developers and designers to achieve the same goals without Flash. Before developing a website, therefore designers need to take their clients’ and target audience’s needs into account before they start work on a website. Because Flash is only supported on a very limited number of mobile devices, and is not conducive to SEO, the use of Flash may greatly reduce visitors to a website.

1. “Sparks” for your daily dose of inspiration

Through Sparks, Google+’ offers you the latest search results on the topics that you specify at any time you want. These search results are the most popular and latest results from the most highly ranked websites, ensuring relevancy to what you are searching for. This feature not only makes searching easier, it also allows you to share it with others in your social circles from right within Google+ itself. This allows you not only to get inspired, but also to share this inspiration easier

1. Easy communication with clients and other designers through “Circles”

Through this feature, you can very easily create groups (called “Circles”) and select topics of discussion that you think would interest them. Through Circles you can easily separate your professional contacts and communications from your personal ones. In this way you can have a separate circle for your clients and a separate one for fellow designers and colleagues. This way you can carry out exclusive communication with each group, and can ask other designers for advice and opinions without your clients ever getting to know about it.

1. 3.       “Hangouts” to help you develop and nurture social relationships with other designers

The Hangouts feature allows you to conduct video chats with fellow designers, which makes chatting and interacting a lot of fun. This video chatting functionality also helps you to extend and develop your network by keeping in touch with other people from the design community. This will help you to build and nurture business relationships that will help you in the long run and prove to be a vital source of advice and help.

4. Provides you the facility of showcasing your designs in a better way

Designers can display their portfolio in a very creative way using the display and sizing variation features offered by Google+. In addition, Google+ also offers basic image editing functionality which can allow you to enhance the quality of the images you want to display as well as apply up to six different effects to them.

5. Access other Google services while working.

Google+ integrates other Google services, including Gmail and Google Docs and Calendar right within the social networking site itself. This helps you to enhance your productivity preventing the need for you to switch in and out of Google+. This also allows you to get email and other notifications right there and then within the same window, reducing distractions and enhancing your collaboration efforts.

6. Follow other designers easily.

You can very easily follow other professionals in your field or search for them. The following feature helps to keep you up-to-date with the latest developments in the field, allowing you to get inspiration, tips and ideas for better designs.

7. Lets you create a vanity URL for easy sharing.

Because you will be given a long Google+ URL, it would be difficult to share it. You just need to use a URL shortening service such as Gplus.to which allows you to easily obtain a vanity URL that is shorter and easier to share, so that you can promote yourself more easily to prospective clients and other members of the design community.

8. Greater privacy and security for your personal data.

By making use of Google+’s “Data Liberation” feature, you can decide for yourself which information you want to keep private and which information you want to share with others. You can also prevent others from distributing your work by enabling the “disable reshare” feature if you so desire.

9. Avoidance of information overload through the “Stream” feature

It is only natural to be annoyed when you are bombarded with information that is not relevant to you, and you might end up missing important information in the sea that faces you. In order to eliminate this problem, Google+ presents a feature by the name of “Stream” (the equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed) through which you can filter the information that you see. Using this feature you can also select the people you want to offer information to.

The question still remains whether Google+ can become the social networking giant of the future. Currently it is only in testing so it is not easy to comment on this.

So, given the circumstances in which companies still request for Flash websites, but not too many designers are able to handle it so well, here we present a short list of websites where Flash tends to do more harm than good:

1. Intros of Websites

This goes without saying. Websites are supposed to exist for visitors, and are not supposed to annoy them in any way. The only use I can see for a Flash intro is to irritate users and to waste their time. Nine times out of ten, users click the “Skip” button and get to the main site. I don’t mean to say that a pre-loader is a bad idea, but I would not recommend this to last for more than one or two seconds.

2. Sites which have SEO Goals

It is possible for a Flash site to get somewhat decent SEO rankings, but it will be nothing compared to the HTML or WordPress equivalent. It may be true that SEO is not easy even without Flash, but Flash makes matters even worse. If you have any sort of SEO goals for your website, stay away from Flash.

3. Menus and Navigation on HTML-based Websites

Menus have one and only one goal on a website: to take visitors to wherever it is they want to go quickly. You should never opt for a “pretty” or “cool” solution at the expense of “accessible”. A menu developed in Flash will end up leaving several users stranded, since not everyone will have Flash installed. In addition, search engines will not rank sites without “true menu links” very highly. If you truly want a “cool-looking” menu, it is always more advisable to opt for a DHTML/Javascript based solution which will display simple lists as a fantastic navigation system.

4. Informational and Content-based Websites

Flash is a complete no-no for websites which have multiple menu items and several pages of content within each of these menu items. Otherwise you will end up with a very problematic website which will cost much more to develop and maintain as compared to an HTML or WordPress based website. Not only that, site usability is also adversely affected since visitors find it very difficult to find the information they are looking for, which defeats the purpose of an “informational” website.

5. E-Commerce Websites

The Flash platform has without a doubt come a long way when it comes to functionality and flexibility. Over the years, Flash has become more and better equipped for applications, but for an e-commerce website, the use of Flash is best avoided, due to two main reasons:

• Stores developed in Flash can end up being very complex. A typical CMS-based web store is a very straightforward website with independent modules such as accounts, carts and checkout systems, which can all be independently edited easily. A store developed in Flash may contain the same basic modules, but the integration will be far more complex and riskier than it is worth. Unless you are a very skilled Flash developer with a solid understanding of UI, and you know what you are doing, do not attempt to use Flash for your e-commerce website.
• Users are too accustomed to the conventions of e-commerce websites to be willing to try anything new, resulting in a much lower ROI. Even though Flash may be able to deliver more, and sleeker-looking functionality, the real bottom line is consumer conversion rates. In this respect even “ugly-looking” HTML websites may generate higher ROI than Flash-based websites.

6. Sites Which Require Extensive Content Management

Despite the fact that Flash has some very solid features for content management, it is more trouble than it is worth to use a Flash-based CMS when your client or you need to constantly manage your website’s content. This is primarily due to the fact that your clients always want more changes than are technically possible. And you definitely do not want to keep maintaining a Flash website for years on end. Make sure of your clients content management needs and see if a CMS such as WordPress will serve these needs.

This does not, of course, mean that Flash should be avoided completely. There are still some websites where Flash will be an option. For examples, promotional websites, game websites and portfolio websites are just not the same without Flash. Even so, you should always remember that there is a primary purpose to every website, and if Flash is not able to contribute towards it, it will only do more harm than good.

1. Teach others

Host a hangout and teach others something you are good at. There really is no limitation to whatever it is you want to teach. Because of the visual nature of the medium, you can teach anything from a musical instrument to a foreign language to a creative art. Help your “students” with their questions and be right there to solve their problems for them.

1. Do yoga if you like

This is exactly what Google+ Community Manager Natalie Villalobos is doing, by conducting group meditation and yoga classes within her own circles.

1. Hold a concert

….Exactly like singer Darla Musk, who held her first Google+ concert on 16 July 2011. She even went so far as to create a map for her audience so that they could tag themselves. Features like this are great for aspiring artists who wish to promote themselves but may not possess the resources to do so.

1. Learn a new language

Naomi Black, Accessibility Engineer at Google uses Google+ to help members using sign language in order to enhance features for Google+, but Hangouts can be extended to other spoken languages as well.

1. Conduct a press conference

The London-based International Tibet Network did just that only last month. Selected journalists were invited to connect and join in and talk about the issues they felt concerned ordinary Tibetans.

1. Conduct job interviews

Reduce the costs and hassles of interviewing job candidates in other countries by interviewing them on Hangouts. You can invite other colleagues in and make it a truly enriching atmosphere, just like a real interview

1. Conduct meetings

This is specially useful for people who are posted in different countries, or who telecommute, helping to reduce costs by keeping everyone concerned in the loop, as well as saving time and money.

1. Offer customer service

Think Michael Dell, CEO and Chairman of Dell, who has successfully connected Dell customers to Dell sales team through Google+ Hangouts in order to deal with their queries and complaints.

1. Monitor your home via a surveillance system

Monitor your home from a remote location by setting up a new Google account and adding this new account to your circles. Anytime you need to check in on your home, simply start a hangout with the newly created account