9. You Outsourced Your Work
Another tempting alternative to what might seem to be costly work inside the country. There are two reasons why this alternative is very risky and painful for you and your business. First, communication problems. You will either have a hard time understanding or being understood by the firm or freelancer you hired and most likely will not be able to find a civil time to be able to communicate over the phone.  Second, like so many have already found, you may be promised everything and receive a small portion of what you expected.

8. You Used Hosting Software to Easily Build Your Own Website.
How hard can building a website be? The honest answer is “not very hard at all.” HTML is one of the easiest things to learn.  You can find tutorials or take a class that can get you started building a website within hours. Templates make it even easier. Just about anyone can create a website, but being able to build a website that brings success takes a lot of experience and a lot of talent.  If you’ve decided to try it out as a hobby, go for it. I personally find very few things more enjoyable than crafting new designs and programming new systems.  But if you want a website that gets results, turn it over to the professionals.

7. Your Website Design Sucks
If you don’t take your business seriously, how can you expect your clients to do the same. Your visitors are looking for the latest and greatest products or services. In short, get with it, or fail.

6. The First Page on Your Website Says, “Click to Enter”
It is starting to become rare to see these pages, for good reason.  Visitors despise them. Have better respect for your visitors and you’ll see more of them stick around.

5. You Can Count the Number of Pages on Your Site with One Finger.
Limiting the content on your site is a very ignorant maneuver.  There are so many opportunities your website can take advantage of, but without content virtually none of it is possible. Content is king, build it and they will come.

4. Your Site is Boring
If your site can’t create interest in your product or services, your website will lose to the competition. Focus your attention on benefits, not features. Create page titles that make your audience  want to learn more. Show how the application of your product or service will change your audiences’ lives in some positive way. Design some sort of mystery that needs investigating on your site.  Build your customers interest or fail.

3. You thought a Web Designer Was Enough.
Whats the problem with this picture: You build a state of the art sports arena, its beautiful, has many sought out commodities and  was built in Antarctica. You may ask, “What’s the point of a sports arena if you aren’t going to have anyone use it?” A silly scenario, but a common pitfall for many websites out on the Internet, because they have a professionally made website with no budget for marketing. When budgeting out your website, make sure to appropriate sufficient funds to attract an audience to it. Use the following flexible rule of thumb for a website budget: a quarter of your budget for design and branding, a quarter for development, a quarter for public relations and SEO, and a quarter for advertising.

2. Your Website is Too Generic
This is why web templates can be a very bad move. If your web design and content are generic and bland, you aren’t portraying a well conceived and implemented brand image. Branding is about determining your companies persona. A well branded website builds trust with your visitors and shows competitive advantage.  In short, differentiate yourself from your competitors or fail.

1. You Didn’t Monetize Your Site
If you didn’t plan out the primary and secondary objectives of your website, then your website is probably spinning your visitors in circles.  Give your website an objective, and every aspect of it should be working to accomplish it.  If you’re trying to sell a product, make it appealing and easy for them to buy it. If you want them to call you on the phone do the same.  Too often a website is about a company and loses the potential influence it can have to make your company more money. If you aren’t getting what you need from your visitors, your website has failed.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

10 Reasons Why Your Website Failed

Get Free Web Designs, or GFWD, currently has 167 open source templates for free download available on the site, and they are all valid XHTML! The designs can be viewed by author as well as being searchable by validation (XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1), license (Public Domain, GNU GPL, Creative Commons), contrast, width (fixed or fluid), number of columns, and color. If you would like to get regular information on updates and the addition of new themes to the site, subscribe to the RSS feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GFWD-Design-Feed.

GFWD is open to designers who would like to list their themes and templates on the site for hosting and download. It’s excellent exposure for new designers and it’s a great way for seasoned designers to give back to the community. If you would like to register to submit designs, visit the Get Free Web Designs Registration Page now to get started!

Thanks go out to Wolfram Fiedler for the amazing design which helps to truly showcase each of the designs submitted to the site. Also, Sean of Blogging Rockstar for the site layout, search engine optimization, and user interfaces, all of which I’m sure you’ll appreciate whether you are contributing designs, looking for designs, or both! Lastly, Aaron with Xavisys Web Development for the back end coding which allows the site to be responsive and reliable, allows the searching to be robust and intuitive, and also makes things like the statistics page possible.

We want Get Free Web Designs to be an amazing resource for you, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, please contact us. Also, stay tuned and watch the Get Free Web Designs blog! We’ll keep you updated as new features and functionality are added to the site.

Please feel free to check out the free XHTML and CSS designs on Get Free Web Designs. If you’re overwhelmed or aren’t sure where to start, hopefully some of these will help (pulled from the current statistics):

Top Web Template Contributors

1. graystatic contributed 30 designs
2. wfiedler contributed 22 designs
3. NickyD contributed 19 designs
4. Outsider contributed 14 designs
5. coollew contributed 13 designs
6. Karen Blundell contributed 9 designs
7. Gigacore contributed 8 designs
8. conartistdesign contributed 8 designs
9. Pat Heard contributed 7 designs
10. Payal Dhar contributed 7 designs

Most Downloaded Designs

1. wfiedler_21 by wfiedler (42 downloads)
2. Wild City by Outsider (38 downloads)
3. Leaves by NickyD (35 downloads)
4. lazydays by Pat Heard (30 downloads)
5. Orangealicous by graystatic (28 downloads)
6. Falling Away by Pat Heard (27 downloads)
7. Metamorph Floral by metamorph (26 downloads)
8. Simple Life by Pat Heard (24 downloads)
9. wfiedler_12 by wfiedler (22 downloads)
10. Chocolatey brown by kalyan (22 downloads)

Most Downloads Per Day (Average)

1. Nature by NickyD (15 downloads per day)
2. Mustard Green by kalyan (9 downloads per day)
3. Simply Plain v2 by kalyan (7 downloads per day)
4. Simply Plain v1 by kalyan (5 downloads per day)
5. wfiedler_22 by wfiedler (5 downloads per day)
6. metamorph eagle by metamorph (5 downloads per day)
7. dip! by Outsider (4 downloads per day)
8. metamorph darkside by metamorph (4 downloads per day)
9. Simply Black v1 by kalyan (4 downloads per day)
10. Chocolatey brown by kalyan (4 downloads per day)

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Get Free Web Designs

Too many times a web master will create a site that has meaningless information about their business. The problem is, web traffic cares less about your business and more about the what they want. Don’t appeal to their interests, and you’ve lost them.

So how do you appeal to these visitors?  The easy answer, “Give them what they want.” The more important question you should ask is, “What do my visitors want?” To answer this question, you need to research three imperatives

1. Who are your visitors?
2. What attracted them to your site originally?
3. What do they want when they come to your site? Once you know who your visitors are, what attracted them and what they are interested in, it becomes very simple to attract and retain them.

The next question, “How do I find this out about my visitors?” There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. First, ask them. Open up a dialogue with your visitor and find out more about them point blank.  A second way way to learn more about your customers is by using traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics. Not only will this software track the number of customers and the number of pages accessed, but it will also show pinpoint locations where your visitors reside, how long visitors spend on your site, how often they return to your site, as well as the amount of visitors who come to your page and immediately exit it.  With this valuable information it becomes much easier to provide unique and quality content that your customers will love.

Bring in More Traffic

Once you have created a reason for your visitors to stay on your site you need to learn how to attract more visitors to your unique content.  You have many options to build a constant flow of traffic to your site. We discuss two of the most important tactics to build traffic in this section.

If you want immediate traffic now, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the way to go. I offer a fair warning though, carelessness and lack of expertise can lead to a waste of your money.  If you are new to PPC advertising we recommended to use a budget of $5 or less a day and use one of the most popular PPC systems: Google Adwords. One great benefit of using Google Adwords is that it connects directly to Google Analytics for extra detailed reporting. If done right, you’ll find PPC advertising as a very valuable tool in bringing in new sales every month.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another must in traffic building for those who are serious about maximizing their profits. SEO is a way in which you can have your website ranked higher within search engines, thus creating more traffic to your website. SEO is done in two parts: First, your website must be search engine friendly. Second, there must be other websites linking to your site.

Gear your website to make money

While you want to provide your web traffic with the content that they want, you also need to make it easy for them to make you more money. Does your website make it difficult for your visitors to sign up for a membership or make a purchase? Why? Make it easy for them, and your visitors will respond appropriately.

You can make it difficult for your visitors to make you money in many ways. Give them too many options to nonprofitable actions, making your navigation confusing and cluttering your web pages with random text and graphics.  Get your customers attention to a profitable action by using varying degrees of contrast, color and font choice.  When in doubt use different approaches on different pages and measure the results.

Don’t stop there, there are other ways to increase your online sales.  From branding, and benefit centered marketing to cross promotions and improving “Call to Action” you will see a major bump in website revenues.

Hire an Expert

Like trying to do your own plumbing, Trying to do web design and marketing by yourself can lead to more bad than good.  Sure, if your dedicated and take time to get the proper experience you can do fine.  But if your serious about turning a higher profit for your website right now, you’ll be better off hiring a professional.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Increasing Profits by using Marketing Tactics

Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix:
http://web.trailerpark.com/capabilities/sites/HarryPotter/

The Risdall Advertising Agency:
http://www.risdall.com/

To review some of the other sites that won WebAwards:

Sharpe Partners won the award for “Best Advertising Agency” website for their work on the Burns Group NYC domain. Another Flash site with animated navigation, background effects, and slick page transitions, it can be viewed online here:
http://www.burnsgroupnyc.com/

The “Best Application Service Provider” website award went to Vertical Response, for a simple homepage design with three screenshots highlighted in a compact layout.
https://app.verticalresponse.com/app/login

The “Best Architecture” website award went to Michelle Kaufmann’s blog, built on WordPress and using widgets as well as YouTube video thumbnails.
http://blog.michellekaufmann.com/

The “Best Arts” website went to Situation Marketing for their “Connect: The Dot Project” concept with a bold green on green design and a collaborative, multi-media pointillist painting that recreates Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”
http://www.sundaydots.com/

The “Best Blog” website award was given to Web Associates for Site LA, an interesting blog about the exhibitions, events, and activities occurring in the life of a group of six women living in a loft space in Los Angeles.
http://sitela.org/

The “Best Computer Software” website award went to the FINE Design Group for their work on Norton Today, a Symantec sub portal with blogs, development information, and news.
http://nortontoday.symantec.com/

The “Best Design” website award was garnered by Azavar Technologies Corporation for their work on the Justyna Collections Catalog, a Flash site selling designer faucets for kitchens and bathrooms.
http://www.justynacollections.com/

The “Best Education” website award was won by Tribal DDB Worldwide for “Start a Chain Reaction,” a site designed for Phillips to educate on simple techniques people can do to save electricity and improve the environment.
http://66.245.160.26/philips/asimpleswitch/

Microsoft won “Best Employment” website for their Diversity portal designed by Worktank, a great site that takes the popular Polaroid and post-up note design theme to a new level.
http://www.youatmicrosoft.com/

The “Best Games” website award went to 7Seas Technologies Limited for Online Real Games, a kid’s site with Flash games set in various categories.
http://www.onlinerealgames.com/

One EMC won the “Best Internet Services” website award for their portal providing integrated hardware, software, & IT services worldwide.
http://www.emc.com/

The “Best Internet Service Provider” website award went to PiXEL iNK MEDiA Pty Ltd. For SSI Micro, a Drupal site with a nice gradient and tabbed, drop-down menu design.
http://www.ssimicro.com/

Newseum won the “Best Media” website award for their homepage, dedicated to highlighting their collection in Washington D.C. of great moments in journalism.
http://www.newseum.org/

NBC News took the top award for “Best News” website for their iCue site, a multimedia portal for learning about current events and history, with a great design and video content.
http://www.icue.com/

The “Best TV” website award went to Psych, from the USA Network, and a portal all about the comedy series, its characters, and community.
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/psych/

For the full list of winners and more information, visit the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward listings at:
http://www.webaward.org/

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Web Marketing Association Announces WebAwards

Before

After

The instructions from the Vector Magic website:

Using Vector Magic is super-simple:

• Upload your image
• Answer 2 to 3 questions in the user-friendly vectorization wizard, thereby picking the vectorization settings
• Vectorize the image
• Download the result! You can even review the result in detail online before downloading it

The site gives you three choices as to how the image is processed. The first is as a photo, with complex shapes, patterns, textures, and shading. These are typically converted for some type of artistic or stylish effect, and lack the “sharp corner” effect of the other processing methods. I used the photo setting to process the images displayed above, and the bitmap was perfectly rendered, in high definition and without any data loss or distortion whatsoever. Vector Magic offers an additional two settings for logos that include blending (nice curves) or without blending (jagged edges) which I did not use at the time.

The Vector Magic interface can be seen below:

Vector Magic Interface

Basically, I did not need to adjust any of the default settings to get the image effect I was looking for, and even though the upload connection was slow, it was just a few minutes through the whole process and I was downloading the vector traced .png of the photograph to re-import into Photoshop.

I repeated the process with the image below:

Before

After

The images above are scaled down from the larger originals I used for processing with Vector Magic, and possibly the animated-style or effects are less evident with smaller images. Nevertheless, as the final image below shows, the photographs cleanly transferred into vector-based line drawings with a unique look and feel very different from the original. While this may not be desirable or needed for every image on a site, when you require an application that transfers photos to vector images, Vector Magic does it simply, easily, and free of cost, making it a great addition to your set of graphic design tools.

Final Image

For More Information, visit the Vector Magic Website.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Vector Magic – Online Conversion of Bitmaps to Vector Images

• Keywords – where they appear on the site page
• Page Rank – how many incoming links to a page & the rank of the referencing domain

If 99% of SEO revolves around these two issues, what needs to be done to optimize a site? Most important is to make sure the keywords are actually on the page. If the keywords that your users type to search for information aren’t actually present on the page you want them to find, there isn’t much to be done. Domain level keywords are the best, which is why top domain names have become so coveted and costly. URL level keywords, especially those that relate to page titles, are also very important. Often overlooked but vital to SEO are the meta-tag keywords. Without overloading them to become spam, these should be carefully edited to reflect the content uniquely on every page. A lot has been written about how much better websites with individual meta-tag descriptions for every page fare in the SERPs compared to domains using a single set of keywords for the whole site. It can make a big difference as to how your site is spidered and ranked, and which pages return for a query. So make sure to edit the meta-tags and descriptions for each page individually for best results.

Keyword analysis should be done by making a list of the top 25 to 50 keyword phrases you expect users to input when searching for your information, and then analyzing your site pages. You can use SEO software to chart your site’s placement for the keywords in comparison to other competitors. But make sure to go in and re-write the page titles and site text to include the keywords throughout the pages, making it natural and seamless with the site’s content. Place the keywords in the meta-tags and create a unique site description for each main section and you are 50% done with SEO for a site.

The other main task is building incoming links from related sites across the web. The search engines are formatted to view every link to your site as a “vote” for its popularity. If top level domains link to your site, it boosts your page rank. If spam sites link to your site, it can reduce your page rank. This is what is known as the bad neighbor effect. Strangely, directory submissions are often touted as a really important way to build the volume of incoming links. But a lot of these sub-level directories are spam magnets and send out loads of spam to you after you register with them. In my experience, I have never found a link to my site from one of these sub-level directories appearing in the search results after they have been listed. However, links from free blog sites, social networking portals, and social bookmarking listings perform really well. These sites have high page rank themselves, are frequently updated, and should be the main focus of your link building campaigns,

When doing SEO for a website, our link building campaigns typically run in the following stages:

• Building Links through Industry Related / Community Sites
• Building Links through Directory Submissions
• Building Links through Free Classified Sites
• Building Links through Press Release & Article Posting
• Building Links through Free Blog Sites
• Building Links through Social Bookmarking Sites
• Building Links through Social Networking Sites

Industry submissions are important for building organic traffic from your base community, as they target users who are interested in the same content or themes directly. Directory submissions, free classified sites, press releases, and articles build link volume, and can be posted to many bulletin boards, forums, or portals. Free blogs, social bookmarking, and social networking sites are most effective for building page rank, because the domains themselves are top level, and the dynamic content they display is frequently spidered by the search engines. We create html templates in association with our web promotions teams to include deep links to site sections with multimedia graphics, Flash animations, and brand logos that act as an online flyer. These templates can be used as social networking site profile page or as blog posts that bring organic back to the main domain.

Though there are a lot of methods and jargon involved with SEO, optimizing your site’s content and meta-tags for keywords and conducting a link building campaign are the two most important aspects which when correctly done will help your site rank better in the search engine results pages.

Make sure to also read 101 quick links for SEO campaigns.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization Tips

Freelance Web Development – Site List:

1. odesk.com

Without a doubt the best freelance site on the web today. From the number of jobs listed and the quality of development projects, to the innovative billing, collaboration, and work monitoring options, oDesk is recommended for developers and service buyers for any project.

2. getafreelancer.com

GAF, or getafreelancer.com, has one of the most active user communities for freelance project development. The quality of projects isn’t always great here, but the volume of bidding and the prices are low. Recently opened a Euro branch of the site, so may split business between the two, weakening overall brand and community.

3. elance.com

eLance is owned by eBay and as such attracts a fair number of high quality project listings, and a lot of freelancers are doing really well here. However, their subscription fees for connects have you basically paying for every bid you make on site, and extra fees for extra categories, etc. Worth it if you take the time to build a presence on site and manage it like your eBay store.

4. rentacoder.com

RentACoder doesn’t have the best design, but gets a lot of project traffic and has a lot of options. The user interface is somewhat counter-intuitive and intrusive, but the site boasts the largest number of completed software development projects of any of the freelance boards and some good projects do come through the vine here.

5. getacoder.com

GetACoder is a nice site, and some good projects seem to come through here on occasion, but it also has a site marketing campaign that makes it feel as if you are working on a ClickBank site. Overall, a mixed bag but worth watching for occasional gems.

5. scriptlance.com

Scriptlance is a good place for programming projects and finding web developers, a middle of the road site with about 200 new projects a day. Domain name and traffic are excellent, so expect this site to grow and improve over time. Still one of the main boards to watch for new jobs.

7. guru.com

Guru should be a much better site for freelance than it is currently, with a great domain and design. But doesn’t get much traffic, and costly for freelancers for a yearly account. Good to monitor and you may get a top quality contract from the site with a lot of activity, but not really much business here generally.

8. serebra.com

One of the newest of the main freelance sites, launched with a large PPC ad campaign to bring traffic, but Canada specific interest makes it kind of limited overall. Big budget, promotions, and a lot of hype – may turn out to be a good place to network for big contracts. Nice site design overall.

9. sologig.com

Sologig is another underperforming freelance site, worth watching and building a presence on for the reference or occasional contract, but not to be expected to provide steady work. Maybe a good place for consultants to meet up with corporations seeking specialists, should become better over time.

10. Sourceforge Marketplace

Sourceforge being the main development repository for so many Open Source projects really should be a natural place to find programmers. The Marketplace isn’t as developed or active as it could be, but a good place to network your services and find new clients.

Second Level Freelance Sites:

Maybe worth a look – some good jobs & resources

http://www.gofreelance.com/
http://www.freelance.com/
http://www.drupaljob.com/forum
http://www.eoola.com/
http://freelanceswitch.com/

Third Level Freelance Sites:

Industry related but not much going on here

http://www.freelanceindia.com/
http://www.freelancedesigners.com/
http://www.ifreelance.com/
http://www.allfreelance.com/
http://www.freelancewriting.com/
http://www.freelancerstore.com/
http://www.freelancefree.com/
http://www.freelancers.net/
http://www.freelanceuk.com/
http://www.outsourcetoday.net/
http://www.profreelancejob.com/

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Freelance Web Design – Top Sites

The top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems:

1. Drupal
2. WordPress
3. Joomla
4. Media Wiki
5. Liferay
6. TYPO3
7. Moodle
8. Dolphin
9. Pligg
10. Movable Type

Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus

1. Drupal:

Drupal gets the top nod because of its ease of use, vast number of modules, great user, developer, and support community.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: core CMS, Views, CCK, Organic Groups, & huge library of contributed modules.
Disadvantages: complex, needs more top quality themes, frequent security upgrades.
Outlook: Huge potential to continue growth and expansion on this platform over time.
Website: http://www.drupal.org/

2. WordPress:

WordPress is a simple and elegant CMS, perfect for single user blogs, with a large number of themes and modules available online.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Easiest CMS to use, customize, and extend.
Disadvantages: Lacks many of the social networking functions, ecommerce, forums, wikis, etc. used on more expansive sites.
Outlook: Best for personal publishing, huge user community, will continue to be the preferred choice of bloggers for years.
Website: http://www.wordpress.org/

3. Joomla:

Joomla has one of the largest user communities of any CMS, everything you need and more to develop social networks, ecommerce, & archive sites.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Professional standards, internationalization, customization.
Disadvantages: too many commercial products for Open Source development, difficult to learn.
Outlook: Strong challenger for the top CMS spot, commercialization of extensions should continue to provide many income opportunities for 3rd party developers.
Website: http://www.joomla.org/

4. Media Wiki:

Media Wiki invented a whole new way of working on the web, and is a CMS for collective authoring of documents, used to power the one of the largest and most popular sites on the internet, Wikipedia.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: If you need a wiki, it is the best.
Disadvantages: Does not include many other functions / extensions of other CMS platforms, doesn’t theme well, most sites look the same.
Outlook: Follows the model to success of doing one thing extremely well, has the support of the Wikipedia Foundation, very popular authoring model.
Website: http://www.mediawiki.org/

5. Liferay:

Liferay is a popular new CMS that is great for building portals, and offers a professional look and feel that sets it apart from the other platforms.
License: MIT
Programming Language: Java, PHP, Ruby
Main advantages: collaboration, calendars, internationalization, design.
Disadvantages: More closely tied to a commercial outlook / corporate structure than most Open Source projects.
Outlook: Not as well known or implemented as some of the other CMS platforms, but nice design & features to set your sites apart from the crowd.
Website: http://www.liferay.com/

6. TYPO3:

One of the most complex and professional CMS platforms out of the box, TYPO3 is popular for business websites, especially with European companies.
License: GNU
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: design, extensions, customizations, flexibility, professionalism.
Disadvantages: too difficult to learn for most, too many proprietary conventions.
Outlook: Strong CMS for web development, sure to continue with a core of specialized developers and corporate clients, but loosing support and market share to other platforms.
Website: http://www.typo3.com/

7. Moodle:

Moodle is one of the most unique CMS platforms on this list, designed specifically for Course Management and Education, and used for online learning platforms.
License: GNU
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Huge user and development community, online education, no real competitors or similar products, extremely powerful.
Disadvantages: not really applicable for most web design purposes.
Outlook: Look for this “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment” to continue to be the standard online operating system for education and spawn many interesting mashups with other CMS platforms as well as many more modules & extensions.
Website: http://www.moodle.org/

8. Dolphin:

Boonex Dolphin is popular among web designers who want the latest in social networking, with an industry standard look and all of the features of the popular online communities out of the box.
License: Creative Commons
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Plug-n-Play user community with all the bells & whistles.
Disadvantages: not really Open Source, must pay to remove ads, requires specific hosting requirements, difficult to install, buggy.
Outlook: Look for Dolphin to continue to be a popular choice for social networking, though its “cookie cutter” design runs the risk of becoming stale with too many sites implementing the same design.
Website: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/

9. Pligg:

Pligg is a Digg clone that provides social bookmarking functionality for websites, allowing users to post links, vote them up or down, and leave comments.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Best for Social Bookmarking, can be themed and extended to build top quality sites like Mixx, Redditt, Del.icio.us, etc.
Disadvantages: difficult to install, mod rewrite problems, poor support on community boards, questionable Open Source future.
Outlook: With the 1.0 release of Pligg upcoming within a couple of months, look for a big surge of use back to this platform but watch out for increased commercialization.
Website: http://www.pligg.com/

10. Movable Type:

Movable Type is the main challenger to WordPress for a personal blog platform, and supports multiple users, Themes, and Tags.
License: GNU
Programming Language: Perl
Main advantages: Blogs
Disadvantages: Too closely tied to commercial products and services compared to most Open Source communities, Perl.
Outlook: Look for MT to fall off the list as other of the blogging platforms below increase in popularity, but sustain development as PR for the company’s commercial offerings.
Website: http://movabletype.org/

Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems

It’s simple to turn a regular image into a clickable link, but in some situations, it’s just not possible to use a regular image – so how do you turn a background image into a clickable link? First let’s take a look at my original markup (I’ve removed unnecessary elements for sake of simplicity):

<div id="header"></div>

#header {
  background: #fff url(images/header.png) no-repeat;
  height: 101px;
  width: 800px;
}

So, how can we make our background image a clickable link? It turns out it can be done with a clever CSS trick. All we have to do is add the link markup between our header div tags, and apply the above markup to the link instead. All we have to add to the CSS is display: block to force the link to fill the entire space.

To handle browsers that don’t support CSS (those things are still around?), we should also add a span containing link text that we will hide with our CSS. Here’s what we end up with:

<div id="header"><a href="http://mysite.com"><span>MySite.com</span></a></div>

#header a {
  background: #fff url(images/header.png) no-repeat;
  display: block;
  height: 101px;
  width: 800px;
}
#header a span {
  visibility: hidden;
}

And there you have it – a quick CSS trick that turns your background images into clickable links.

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CSS Trick: Turning a background image into a clickable link