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Ad Management Plug-Ins And Tutorials For Your Website

Almost everyone out there who runs a website has toyed with the idea of selling ads on their website. So many options are available. Dozens of ad and affiliate networks exist, and you have different ad formats to consider. Should you sell text ads or banner ads? Should you allow Flash ads? What about ads with sound, pop-ups or floating ads? People have so many decisions to make that they often just end up slapping on some AdSense code and calling it a day. And that's fine.

But you have a ton of other options for displaying ads on your website, from using other ad networks to selling and managing banner ads yourself. There are plug-ins for virtually every CMS and blogging platform out there that allow you to rotate banner ads or insert blocks of ad code.

This post is a collection of ad management plug-ins for WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal and Joomla! to get your started. At the end are a few tutorials for creating your own banner ad rotation scripts in PHP and ASP (so that even if a plug-in is not available for your CMS of choice, you'll likely be able to build your own).

You might also want to check out our article on AdSense, 100% Google AdSense: Tools, Tips and Resources.

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Effective Strategy To Estimate Time For Your Design Projects

How many times have you been completely confused at how that 'small' project turned into such a big one costing double and taking three times the length you estimated? Many of you will say estimating time for web projects accurately is an oxymoron, but by applying a few effective techniques it's possible to dramatically increase the accuracy of most web project estimates.

So why is underestimating so common? There are several reasons, which are freely admitted amongst freelancers and web agencies, as to why web projects are so commonly underestimated - they include: a) the technologies required by the project have never been used before, b) at the time of estimating, there are grey areas or complete unknowns; c) the client operates in a specialized industry and the solution needs bespoke features that are not familiar to the supplier and d) splitting the project down into the detail would require as much as work as the requirements gathering phase that is chargeable.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 15 Useful Project Management Tools
• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites

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15 Useful Project Management Tools

There is a huge variety of project management applications out there. Most are general purpose apps, not aimed at any one industry. But there are a growing number of project management apps aimed specifically at one industry or another. Applications geared toward creative types are becoming more readily available, and some of the offerings are really quite good.

Many of these project management apps have built in code repositories and subversion browsers (or are built around them). A few have built in bug and issue tracking. Others include more than just basic project management. All of them can help you keep track of activities and team members. There are both free and paid options. Some have very slick interfaces, and some are modeled more after desktop applications. All are relatively easy to use and easy to set up.

Below are 15 useful project management applications, almost all of which are targeted directly at web developers, designers (both web and graphic) and other creative types. The last one is not geared specifically at creative types, but is the most unique project management application I've found, and was included on that basis as well as its potential usefulness for designers and developers.

Also consider our previous articles:

• Web Applications: Improve Your Workflow

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25 Font Management Tools Reviewed

If you are one of those people who work with fonts on regular basis, then choosing, comparing and analyzing fonts is a serious business for you. Font management is not always as easy as a walk on the cake. Font management issues like installing and uninstalling fonts, handling missing fonts, taking care of font conflicts always keep graphic designers and typographers on their toes.

Also hundreds or thousands of fonts activated on the system can use up considerable amount of system resources which in turn reduces efficiency and productivity. Mac, Windows and Linux platforms have their own font management utilities, but these utilities are not sufficient in a specialized or professional environment. This is where professional font management tools come to the rescue.

Below we have reviewed 25 free/commercial font managers for Mac, Windows and Linux. Which one do you use and why? Your favourite tool is missing? Let us know in the comments!

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Web Applications: Improve Your Workflow

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