This week, we selected the most interesting articles regarding future trends and new technologies in web development.  While HTML5 seems to grow more popular, surfing the Internet on smartphones is also becoming increasingly easier, as new features and platforms for smartphones become available on a daily basis, it seems.

• Bing to embrace HTML5
• Enhance your web forms with new HTML5 features
• Seven significant trends in mobile usage
• Magento Mobile was released

Since we are sharing news about mobile optimization, we should also mention our smartphone ready websites service. We hope you enjoy our weekly articles roundup!

Competition between Content Management Systems is obviously growing stronger in the Internet world. This means that the options are richer and more qualitative, but it is also more difficult in selecting the best option to suit your needs. However, if you define and prioritize the features that interest you the most in a CMS platform, you should be able to zero in on the best solution for building your website.

At CodeMyIMAGE, we have been working with virtually all CMS platforms and we have found numerous innovative features we liked in all of them. Today we have picked 5 features which we discovered using Joomla and found very useful.

1. Joomla is friendly, fast and easy to use, no matter if you are a designer, developer or administrator.  This reduces the learning curve and the costs involved in managing a website integrated into this CMS.
2. It has great capacity for customization and development. Joomla provides fully customizable layouts, which can be used to change the look and feel of a website. This impressive feature actually influences more designers to choose Joomla to integrate their web design than almost any other.
3. Joomla is extendable and it offers a wide range of third party extensions such as shopping carts, forums, business and people directories, newsletters, calendars and events, ad serving tools, and many more. Joomla’s application framework allows developers to create add-ons that extend and enhance its features with almost endless possibilities.
4. Content sections within Joomla are fully editable and manageable. This means that anyone with basic computer skills can add unlimited content because Joomla’s hierarchal structure will keep it organized and easily searchable. Also, multiple users can manage different areas of the website.
5. Behind Joomla there is a strong open-source community of developers and users who are actively engaged to promptly correct any problems or bugs.

It’s time we catch up with the latest resources in web development and design.

First of all, Google showed its support for open source technologies by sporting a playful new logo: Google Gets Ballsy With Its Latest Logo

We would also like to share with you two interesting articles on improving website usability:

• Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness
• 18 Website Speed and Performance Checking Tools

We kept at the end a very informative and insightful article  (it is both lengthy and  a piece of work that web designers should reflect about) regarding what really makes a design great: The Difference Between Good Design and Great Design

We would also like to add that designers should only focus on being creative, and not worry about coding and programming.

Hope you enjoy the resources we shared!

If you are in the E-Commerce business, you may be struggling with the challenge of choosing the right E-Commerce platform. Faced with many emerging solutions, online store owners are looking to develop the best digital solution in terms of functionality and sales goal optimization. Magento is an open source E-Commerce platform that has grown very popular in a very short period of time, mainly because of its advanced features, rich functionality, and flexibility.

In today’s post, we want to provide you more insight into the features that make Magento such a popular E-Commerce platform. While CodeMyIMAGE has been providing Magento integration services, it has become a much more sought after solution by our clients. The benefits our clients have found in using the Magento based platform seem to be endless. But here are a couple of features that stand out:

1. The Magento E-Commerce system provides rich functionality and is very easy to use by both online store owners and customers. The platform has the capability to run multiple stores or websites, which are controlled from one administration panel.
2. It is integrated with Google Analytics, so it allows the webmaster to understand the performance of his/her store and the sales evolution.
3. The Magento platform enables shipping to multiple addresses through a single order. Customers can re-order previous orders from their account, while administrators can view order histories and create orders in the backend. Moreover, it includes RSS feeds of new orders.
4. Websites based on Magento are very easy to find – Magento provides search engine friendly URLs and an automatic SEO feature.
5. Magento incorporates useful marketing tools like Up-Sells, Cross-Sells, and Coupons (pricing rules) that help stimulating online sales.

This has been an interesting week in the world of web design and development.

First of all, we got reviewed on Killer Startups.  Check out our review here: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/codemyimage-com-psd-to-html-conversion-services

Some of the interesting and inspirational resources shared this week are:

• The Power of Colour – in Art & Brand Design
• Best of the Web – August 2010
• 50 Refreshing CSS Tutorials, Techniques and Resources