Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Whether you are a web designer, a marketer or a just an owner of a small business you know what it’s like to be dealing with images on a daily basis.

Now, making the background white or transparent (in case you want to use your image layered elsewhere and believe me you will), may seem a bit complicated for those of us coming from the nondesign background. Well, I’ve got good news for you! It doesn’t need to be!

Today we’ve got plenty of both online and offline options that will let you do anything with your backgrounds without any knowledge of specialized software such as Photoshop or GIMP.

The following tools can be a great alternative, won’t cost you a penny and you’ll be surprised just how easy it can be to edit backgrounds. Afterall, do you really think all these bloggers spend hours learning how to edit their visuals? Nope, they’ve got a couple of tricks up their sleeves and so can you. So, let’s explore that creative zen!...

Color makes a design come alive.It can attract attention, set a mood, and even influence our emotions and perceptions.

But sometimes it can be hard to know where to start when choosing a color palette for your design project.

So we’ve done the hard work for you— giving you 100 color combinations inspired by nature, food & drink, travel, and everyday items.

Want to use these color combinations in Canva? Click here to sign up for free if you haven’t already (if you haven’t — are you kidding me?!).

Canva lets you change the colors of your design by entering the hex code in the color menu. Check out the video below for a quick tutorial on how...

Light colors are easy on the eye, which means that they aren’t as likely to take attention away from the main goal or goals of a site. Negative space, on the other hand, makes websites look less cluttered and easier to navigate. Even though negative space can actually be filled with any color, white is typically the safest bet. For example, a brand like Best Buy is associated with the colors blue and yellow, but the company primarily uses these colors in the navigation menu of its site, which leaves plenty of whitespace to help guide visitors' eyes to calls-to-action (CTAs) like "Shop" and "Find out more."

Some brands, however, are okay with challenging the rules of Web design and are doing so with colorful designs that are pushing the best-practice boundaries. Although colorful designs are certainly not for everyone, they can be successful when they are executed correctly and used for the right brand. For some inspiration, check out the six colorful websites featured below...

As one of the most successful premium theme shops in the business, Elegant Themes is best known for its top of the line themes and plugins. Even on this blog, we tend to talk about how best to use those themes and plugins (or themes and plugins like them) to get the most out of WordPress. But today, I’m going to do something a little bit different. I’m going to roundup some of my personal favorite, free WordPress themes.

The Best Free WordPress Themes Available in 2015The themes I’ve collected below are all available via the official WordPress plugin repository. I selected most of them based on a combination of their popularity, user rating, and design. Those that do not have particularly high download counts or that are relatively new and untested made the cut due to unique design and/or standout plugin compatibility....