So if you haven’t notice, I was not blogging at Balkhis for a while. Yeah, I keep saying that I will blog and I barely do it anymore here. The sole reason for that is lack of balance. I am still trying to find balance between school, clients, social media profiles, and sites. I didn’t even get a chance to update you guys about the presentation that I gave earlier this month at WordCamp Atlanta 2010.

WordCamps are just events for WordPress users. I have been attending a lot of WordCamps lately. Since Novemeber, I have been to three WordCamps and I spoke at Atlanta. I will be attending WordCamp Miami and I am a confirmed speaker there as well.

So you guys are probably wondering how was my speaking experience. First thing I will say is that it was pretty cool. I consulted with many clients, talked with some known names, but I have never really stood in front a lot of people at a conference and gave a presentation. I was giving a presentation on WordCamp Security and as soon as I looked up, I saw one of the lead developers of WordPress sitting in front of me. Yup, it was Mark Jacquith.

Have you ever had a feeling when you are trying to explain something to somebody and all of the sudden you see the person who actually built that something. Well its not very comfortable when you see someone in front of you who probably knows a lot more about this script than you do because he is the lead developer. Anyways, I have talked with Mark on my past events so it was not that big of a deal. I stood there and gave a pretty decent presentation.

You can check out the presentation slides below:

Now till that day there was something I was doing wrong. Removing WordPress version number. I knew many security tricks but I didn’t know that WordPress also sends out the version number in the feeds. So now if you remove it in the header its ok, but if someone really wants to get it they can just go to the feeds and get it.

After talking with Mark, I wrote an article on WPBeginner how to correctly remove WordPress Version Number.

I hope you guys like the presentation. It was scaled for a beginner session, but there are a lot of stuff that you can use, so definitely go through this presentation.

There are times when you come across a feature in a blog, and you just start thinking to yourself: How can I get this in my WordPress blog/site as well. Everybody have experienced this feeling. Sometimes you know you want it, and don’t know where to look for, or even what to look for. In this article we will be sharing some of the most wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks, and Hacks that you will definitely find useful.

Earth is a beautiful planet, and we often ignore that in our dreams of success. With so many issues going around related to Global-Warming and the environment, I have decided to create a list of website designs that reminds us of the beautiful nature. We have seen more and more corporates shifting toward having green aspects in their business, how about having a green aspect in the web design? Sit back and enjoy these refreshing green website designs.

1. Lipton

2. Outdoor Italia

3. Interag

4. Nutrifield

5. Mint

More in the full post.

Mozilla Firefox has become an extremely powerful and useful tool for web developers. Using the right add-ons, it will be developers best dream. Each of these add-ons can make certain things easier and that`s especially important for web-developers, because searching for errors and optimizing your pages can be difficult and time-consuming.

1. Web Developer’s Toolbar

Web Developer`s tool bar probably will become one of the best plugins You`ve ever seen. It comes with his own tool bar that gives many useful tools for analyzing, validating and optimizing web-pages. The great thing about this plugin is that it’s on a few different browsers, so if you switch between them you will be able to use the same plugin on all.

2. HTML Validator

HTML Validator is an extremely powerful tool available to Windows users only. The add-on gives you feedback about errors on the page. It also lets you know where problems need to be addressed. But unless you’re an advanced Web designer, stay away from this tool. It’s very complicated.

3. CSS Validator

CSS Validator adds a right-click option in your browser, sending the CSS to the W3C CSS Validator. It opens the results in a new tab. CSS Validator is a nice tool that will come in handy often.

4. Firebug

Firebug is one of those extensions that you simply can’t be without. It lets you edit, debug, and view CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

5.. YSlow

YSlow requires FireBug to be installed for it to work, but it’s a great way to find out why your site is running so slowly. It analyzes Web pages and returns issues that are slowing the site down,

6. CSS Viewer

The add-on informs you of all the CSS information you’ll need from a site. Simply click on the page you want, open it in the Tools menu, and it will display CSS information.

7. Greasemonkey

It allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

8. JSView

All browsers include a “View Source” option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. You can use the JSView extension to solve the problem. If the website you are viewing contains any external js/css files, an icon will appear that says “SS”, “JS”, or both. Each individual file can then be viewed by clicking on the filename. The file will be opened in a new window.

9. Color Zilla

If there’s a color on a Web page that you like, ColorZilla will find the precise code for it and allow you to paste it into your coding program. You can also create custom colors with its built-in palette browser. It saves the most-used colors for easy access later on. It’s powerful, it’s simple, it’s a must-have.

10. Font Finder

Font Finder allows you to highlight a font you like on any site, right-click on the selection, and after choosing “Font Finder”, view the full CSS text styling of the selection. You can then paste that into your own Web page.

11. IE Viewer

This add-on lets you preview websites in IE. It helps when checking for cross browser compatibility. You can also set some websites to always open in IE viewer if there are some compatibility issues.

12. Fire FTP

Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more!

13. Screen Grab

Screengrab saves entire web pages as images. This tool will allow You to take screenshots of what is currently on your screen – you can even choose the portion of the screen you want to “grab”!

14. Code Tech

Get the feel of Dreamweaver in a Firefox extension. Edit your documents right next to your web pages as you surf.

15. Aardvark

This tool can be used to clean page from unwanted banners and ads, especially prior to printing a page. Pretty useful for web developers for analyzing the structure of a page.

It is important that we provide our users and audiences a way to contact us which makes our contact pages one of the most important one. On many sites, contact pages are the least cared about. On some it is mis-aligned, or on some it has some other design problems. Well they need to be fixed, and if you want to give it a spectacular look, then I have collected some of the most amazing contact forms on the web that definitely worths a mention in here.

If I missed something, you are welcome to share it in the comments.

1. Created 201 Studios

No doubt this form incorporated in flash is by far one of the best contact forms I have seen on the web.

2. Substrakt

This post card style look of substrakt designers is just a very creative use on a google map background. This really shows creativity at it its best.

3. Qwertcity

Another retro colorful style of postcard design for the contact form. This style is getting more famous as we see more and more retro designs in the trend.

4. Tony Yoo

Tony’s contact form can be best described as well-organized, neat, and simple which makes it very pleasant on the eye.

5. Frexy

Min’s contact page might be very simple, but the color combination around it on the background of the page just makes this contact page to be featured in my list.

6. Alexandru Cohaniuc

People try very hard to make their contact form spectacular, but what they don’t understand is that it must incorporate into the design. Alexandru shows how well you can incorporate the contact form in the design with his grunge style contact form design.

7. Bert Timmermans

Bert’s book style contact form is just fabulous. The neatness of it, creativity of it is just superb.

8. Chemistry Recruitment

This folder style look in the contact form really goes well with chemistry recruitment’s whole design.

9. swFIR

10. Point of Entry

Very effective use of the notepad is being displayed on this website. Usually you see the notepads on the corner of the page as just a placeholder, but in this case it is a contact form. Very creative.

11. Deluge Studios

Another great example using their map in the contact form. Very nicely incorporated contact form.

12. Headscape Web Design Solution

Headscape shows a very creative touch in their footer. They not only just highlight their contact form, but they also put their staff with their phone lines. This is a good way, but if you have a bigger staff, then you will find difficulties.

13. Envero

If you look at this contact form, you wouldn’t find anything special. But the fact that it is so neat and well organized with a good color combination and spacing, this deserves to be in the list to show that simple contact form are great.

14. Bcandullo

Brian likes the artsy touch to his design. He loves to make corrections therefore you see alot of pencil use on his design. His contact form is well incorporated with the design and goes with the flow.

15. Veboo Labs

Use of a cartoon character right next to the contact form always bring life to your contact area. Veboo labs do just the trick. Their cartoon is very eye friendly and make their contact form stand out.

16. Intuitive Designs

Another example of adding a cartoon next to their contact form is displayed here. This technique really works and it can spice a simple form up.

17. BubblesSoc

I love the work that Bubs put out on the website and the contact form is just one of that. This contact forms goes well with other aspects of the design and it is a perfect example of a well incorporated contact form.

18. Kev Adamson

Kev really knows how to highlight small features when presenting creative work. His contact form fits in a compact area. It does the job, and it has a small little captcha button which I find very cool.

19. Sidebar Creative

A simple text next to the contact form is always catchy if you use good fonts and spacing. Sidebar Creative does just that. Their contact form is very simple, but the organization of it is just noteworthy.

20. Five Cent Stand

Five Cent Stand has a very interesting design and a contact form that fits in it is even more interesting. Because I don’t think I could’ve made a contact form to fit in.

These are just some of the jaw dropping examples of beautiful contact page designs on the web. I am sure there are more that I missed. So you are welcome to share them in the comment box. Folks contact forms are important, so add them in your site because it saves alot of trouble to your users. I see some people put an email in the image, or just text which does the job, but contact form is always preferred.