This excellent article from Unbounce draws upon the data from a selection of academic studies on copywriting plus persuasion to provide five best practices for improving your writing skills.

Here’s a quick summary of the key points:

1. Use the ‘But You are Free to’ Technique

Reminding people of their freedom to choose has been shown to reduce how threatened subjects feel about making that choice.

2. Copywriting for the Three Types of Customer

Customers separate into three core buying groups — tightwads, unconflicted, and spendthrifts. Therefore, you should customize your copy to appeal to these different types of customer.

3. Making Use of Mirror Neurons

This essentially means to focus your copywriting on how the reader is feeling and thus target how they imagine something to be — for example, how they feel about a problem that your service helps to overcome.

4. Use the Power of Verbs

Use verbs rather than adjectives in your copy as they are harder to ignore — i.e., say what your product does rather than how you would describe it. For example, say that your software application searches terabytes of data in seconds rather than just that it is powerful.

5. Write Your Stories Like a Lawyer

Apparently, there are six characteristics of persuasive stories that perform best in the courtroom: delivery, imagery, realism, structure, context, and audience. These can be applied equally well to writing persuasive copy online.

jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript library on the planet, which offers a lot capabilities. Using jQuery, we can easily manipulate – replace, insert, remove – elements within an HTML document and even create animation.

In this post, we are going to take a look at how to create or insert new elements within DOM with the jQuery Append method.

Recommended Reading: JQuery: Creating And Inserting New Element – Part II

Insert New Element

Appending is a method of creating and inserting new element within a specified element, it technically inserts the new element right before the closing tag of that specified element – thus becoming its child element.

Before we proceed, we will first show you how to do it purely with JavaScript, so you can see how much simpler jQuery can make the method.

In JavaScript, before we are able to add an element to the document, we need to define (create) the element. We can use .createElement() function to create a new element. In the following example, we create a new <div> element and store it in a variable named div.

 var div = document.createElement('div'); 

By the time we define a new element with this function, it only creates the element, but it doesn’t insert the new element to the document. We need to call one function, that is .appendChild() to insert that element. In the following example, we will insert this new <div>, simply, in the body document.

 var div = document.createElement('div'); document.body.appendChild(div); 

If we inspect the document in Developer Tool, you should see that our div element has been inserted there, before the body closing tag.

Now, let’s see how we do the same thing with jQuery. jQuery makes manipulating document elements simpler. jQuery provides a function called .append().

In the following example, we append a <div> to body document.

 $('body').append('<div>'); 

Like what we have demonstrated with JavaScript, the code line above returns the same result. It creates a new element and inserts it before the body closing tag. But we did it in fewer lines of code.

A note to remember, JavaScript does not save or alter document physically. Thus, when we view the actual document source, the elements that are generated by JavaScript will not be found.

Insert New Element with Text

Let’s go a bit further with this method. This time, we will insert a new element with text inside it. Like before, we will see how to do it purely with JavaScript.

To do so, we need to define the new element and the text. Since we will add text, we can create a paragraph element in this example.

 var p = document.createElement('p'); // create new paragraph element 

Next, we need to define the text. The text in JavaScript is created using .createTextNode() function. In this example, we store the text value in a variable named txt.

 var p = document.createElement('p'), txt = document.createTextNode('This is the text in new element.'); 

At this point, we have two variables, which store the new element and the text respectively. However, they are still separated and can stand alone. To insert the text to the new element we have created, we can run the same .appendChild() function, like so.

 p.appendChild(txt); 

Then again, we run .appendChild() to insert the element to the body document.

 document.body.appendChild(p); 

If we see it in the browser or through the Developer Tool, we get:

In jQuery, the process is simplified. Instead of separately defining two variables for the text and the new element, we can write them together with .append() function, like so.

 $('body').append('<p>This is the text in new element.<p>'); 

The above code essentially does the same thing, it will insert the the text with <p> element to the body (before the body closing tag).

Final Thought

You can see that using jQuery with .append() function, we are able to dynamically add new elements in a slimmer way than using pure JavaScript. But of course, there are times when using the JavaScript is better than loading jQuery Library – which is why we will also show you how to do it.

This article is only the beginning. In the next part, we will see how to insert element in more advanced way. So, stay tuned!

If you have some questions upon our discussion in this post, feel free to add it in the comment box below.

I have always been against the principle of helping people to prepare for an interview. All the interview tips are great to help them prepare for joining the workforce but in the process, their unique personalities (and habits) lay buried under the cover stories about commitment, passion and skillsets. It’s all so scripted.

This is probably the reason why one-hour interviews fail to unearth the real person within; and only after the employee has joined your company that you realize they have lied in their resume; they are just all talk, no walk; they cannot work under minimal supervision or with any other team members; or they have the tendency to make the company adapt to their likes and preferences (true story).

Recommended Reading: Weird Questions Asked During A Job Interview

The Existing Problem

When advice-mongering sites give candidates sample answers to give, and the candidates take those sample answers to their interviews, everyone becomes the same faceless drone. That’s when recruiters may have to resort to unorthodox interview methods to separate the sheep from those who know what they are doing.

And let’s face it, half an hour is real easy to fake through, and does little to nothing to help you decide. Plus, most resumes are spell-checked (any interview guide will suggest doing that) and hyped up, so if you base you base the recruitment on just their CV, the candidate in real-life may come up short of your expectations.

Hiring talent

Unless you are searching for someone who will only be doing one thing over and over again, chances are you need them to be great problem-solvers. But don’t just ask them how they would solve a problem, introduce these problems into the interview (not during the probation period, or after they are confirmed).

If you want your employees to have certain ‘talent’ criteria, there should be an effort to make them display their talent in the interview room itself. Heineken did exactly this to sort through candidates for their internship program. It’s a classic case of "don’t tell me, show me" and it’s just brilliant.

But the best video to really illustrate this is the test scene in Men In Black. I know it’s just a movie but the principle’s the same. Put them in an uncomfortable position (see: make things ridiculously uncomfortable) and see how they react.

Put Ants In Their Pants

Textbook methods are only going to get you average, mediocre candidates to join your company. Short of putting ants in their pants, there are a lot of things you can do to spruce up the atmosphere in the interview room, for instance:

Asking off-track questions

Simple questions like "How did you get here this morning? Was the traffic bad?" can ease them into putting their guard down, and revealing more about their true self.

Plus, you get an inside look into their lifestyle: does he take public transport, does he live far from here, does he drive, does he still live with his mother, and if he has an opinion on how to solve problems, or if he is the wait-and-see kind.

Distract them

Put up special items in the room, items that are designed to distract. One of the things that will work pretty well is a mirror, or a reflective surface. You’d be surprised at how many candidates think looking good during the interview trumps paying attention to the questions.

The best place for it, right above your head, behind you. Even when they steal peeks, you’d notice.

Test Their Drive

Some jobs require you to be non-tolerant of certain situations. A chef should be picky about the quality of his raw materials, a restaurant manager about cleanliness, or a sales rep about sale quotas. Apply this to the interview process, and you can give an editor an IQ test that is riddled with mistakes, a biodata form in Comic Sans to a designer to fill in, or put a hideous vase near the corner of the interview room when interviewing an interior designer.

When their natural instincts get the best of them and they voice out about these ‘atrocities’, you know you got the right person for the job.

Catch Them Off Guard

Rather than resort to oddball questions, there are many other ways to catch a candidate off guard and see how well they approach problems. For instance:

• in your expected salary section in the company form, put only 3 boxes and see the answers that candidates give
• turn up late for the interview and say, "Oh, you’re early" and watch how they tackle with the situation
• bring in the resume for another (non-existing) candidate, explain the mistake and watch how the candidate try to sell him/herself and trump the ‘other’ candidate.

Conclusion

Sometimes, though, it boils down to how you click with the candidate. You might even consider trying to simulate an actual working environment or to explain how things are going to work if the candidate gets the job. Understanding where candidates are coming from — after peeling all the surface layers — may help find you a candidate that will be a great addition to your company.

Recruiting is a costly endeavor but it is not worth getting a bad apple to join in the growing orchard. Rather than choosing to extend the lengths of probation periods, you can always just throw them into the heat of the battle and see how they escape the zone or better yet, win the battle.

What interview methods have you tried out which helped you catch a great addition to your company?

Finding the right WordPress theme for your website or for a client’s website is not an easy task. Even with the huge selection that is available, if you have some specific things in mind for your site you may find that it’s very difficult to locate a theme that would be a perfect match.  In these situations, you may be better off to start with a theme framework or a minimal theme and customize it through the use of a child theme to meet your needs.

In this post we’ll highlight 40 minimal WordPress themes that are worth a look. The themes showcased here are not necessarily bare-bones minimal, but rather they are minimalist in style which often makes it easier to use as a starting point.

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Hardy –

Hardy is a responsive theme from ThemeTrust. It includes all the necessary functionality for portfolio websites, but it could also be used for a wide variety of other types of sites. It comes with features like column shortcodes, page templates, Google Web Fonts integration, slideshow shortcodes, custom widgets, button shortcodes, a theme options panel, and more.

Hero –

Hero is another beautiful and responsive portfolio theme from ThemeTrust. It includes features like a stylish parallax banner, custom widgets, column shortcodes, Google Web Fonts integration, a filterable portfolio, page templates, a theme options panel, and more.

Reveal –

Reveal is also from ThemeTrust. It is a responsive portfolio theme with features like an ajax-powered filterable portfolio, Google Web Fonts integration, slideshow shortcode, custom widgets, button shortcodes, page templates, a theme options panel, and more.

Clean –

Clean is another responsive theme from ThemeTrust. It is versatile enough to be used for a portfolio, blog, or another type of website. It’s features include column shortcodes, Google Web Fonts integration, slideshow shortcode, custom widgets, button shortcodes, page templates, a theme options panel, and more.

Lucid –

Lucid, from Elegant Themes, is a magazine theme that is excellent for creating your own blog or online magazine with a clean and minimalist design style. It comes with five different color schemes, a responsive layout, extensive shortcodes, page templates, and a theme options panel.

Flexible –

Flexibile is a portfolio theme from Elegant Themes. While it does feature a filterable portfolio, it could also be used for different types of sites as well. It’s features include a font customizer, unlimited color schemes, a responsive layout, extensive shortcodes, page templates, a theme options panel, and more.

Evolution –

Evolution is a responsive theme from Elegant Themes that can be used for portfolios, blogs, corporate sites, and more. Some of it’s primary features include four different color schemes, shortcodes, page templates, and a theme options panel.

Modest –

Modest is a minimal theme from Elegant Themes that can be used for portfolios and much more. It includes features like five color schemes, page templates, shortcodes, and a theme options panel.

 

Minimal -

Minimal is a blogging and business theme from Elegant Themes. Its features include two color schemes, shortcodes, page templates, and a theme options panel.

 

dePosito - €39

dePosito is a minimal and flexible portfolio theme from ThemeShift. It features a responsive design and layout, custom post types, custom post layouts, custom widgets, shortcodes, page templates, and more.

 

Cleanr -

Cleanr, available at Mojo Themes, is a beautiful portfolio and business theme. It uses a responsive layout and its features include a filterable portfolio, post formats, custom backgrounds, custom widgets, page templates, and more.

Supple -

Supple is a responsive minimalist portfolio theme available at Mojo Themes. It comes with light and dark color schemes, post formats, custom widgets, shortcodes, and a theme options panel.

Rustik -

Rustik is a minimalist ecommerce-ready theme that can be purchased at Mojo Themes. It’s features include Google Web Font integration, Nivo slider, threaded comments, theme options panel, and more.

Gridlocked -

Gridlocked is a versatile grid-based theme available at ThemeForest. It comes with light and dark color schemes, a filterable portfolio, a Tumblr-style blog, post formats, page templates, shortcodes, theme options panel, and more.

Classica -

Classica is a beautifully minimalistic portfolio theme for studios and freelancers, available at ThemeForest. Its features include 2 portfolio layouts, custom widgets, page templates, shortcodes, and a theme options panel.

Good Space -

Good Space is a responsive theme that can be purchased at ThemeForest. It is intended for use by creative agencies, but could certainly be used for other purposes as well. Its features include unlimited colors, 6 footer layouts, 4 blog styles, 450+ fonts available, drag and drop page builder, shortcodes, and more.

Aware -

Aware is a responsive portfolio theme available at ThemeForest. It features an ajax portfolio, custom widgets, shortcodes, and a theme options panel.

Purity -

Purity is a responsive business or portfolio theme available at ThemeForest. It is retina ready and includes features like shortcodes, Google Web Fonts integration, unlimited colors, 20 page templates, and a theme options panel.

Garnish -

Garnish is a clean ajax-powered portfolio theme available at ThemeForest. Its features include light and dark color schemes, multiple post formats, page templates, shortcodes, and a theme options panel.

The Cotton -

The Cotton is a clean and minimal theme that can be purchased at ThemeForest. It comes with features that include unlimited skins, 3 portfolio templates, 3 featured sliders, a powerful admin panel, Google Web Font integration, and more.

Artiste -

Artiste is a clean portfolio theme that keeps the focus on your work. It comes with light and dark color schemes, a filterable portfolio, page templates, shortcodes, and a theme options panel.

Sideshow -

Sideshow is a minimal theme with a Tumblr-style blog, and it is available at ThemeForest, It’s features include light and dark color schemes, a filterable portfolio, shortcodes, page, templates, a theme options panel, and more.

Spacing -

Spacing, available at ThemeForest, is a minimal and responsive theme that can be used for portfolios or business websites. Its features include a homepage builder, unlimited colors, shortcodes, Google Web Font integration, a filterable portfolio, lightbox galleries, a theme options panel, and more.

Skyfashion -

Skyfashion is a responsive business and portfolio theme that is for sale at ThemeForest. It comes with features that include custom backgrounds, Google Web Fonts integration, light and dark color schemes, shortcodes, and more.

Basic – free

Basic is a free minimal theme from Themify. It uses a very simple and clean design and layout. It features a responsive layout and comes with a theme options panel that will allow you to customize the design and layout of your site.

Simfo –

Simfo is a minimal and responsive theme from Themify. It includes a featured slider, lightbox gallery, post sorting, list view and multiple grid view layouts, 8 theme skins, and more.

ThemeMin –

ThemeMin is a minimal typography-focused theme from Themify. Its features include threaded comments, optional homepage slider, lightbox photo galleries, several widget areas, four different color schemes, and more.

Vimes –

Vimes, from WPZoom, is intended for design agencies, photographers, and artists, but it is flexible enough to be used simply for blogs as well. It includes a featured slider, portfolio template, custom widgets, custom backgrounds, color csutomization, shortcodes, and more.

Elegance –

Elegance is a minimal portfolio theme from WPZoom. It features custom widgets, custom backgrounds, color options, shortcodes, page templates, and more.

Clean –

Clean is an aptly-named theme from ThemePure. It is a portfolio theme with features that include 3 homepage templates, multiple portfolio templates, a filterable portfolio, custom widgets, page templates, threaded comments, shortcodes, unlimited colors, Google Web Fonts, and a theme options panel.

Simpler –

Simpler, from ThemePure, is a minimal mult-purpose theme. It;s features include 7 unique layouts, multiple portfolio templates, shortcodes, custom widgets, page templates, threaded comments, unlimited colors, Google Web Fonts integration, a theme options panel, and more.

Catchy –

Catchy is a clean portfolio theme from ThemePure. It comes with features like smooth portfolio filtering animations, custom widgets, page templates, threaded comments, color options, Google Web Fonts, and a theme options panel.

Exclusy –

Exclusy, from Themes Kingdom, is a super clean and responsive portfolio theme. Its features include multiple post formats, Google Maps integration, custom widgets, a color changer, page templates, shortcodes generator, and more.

Exhibit –

Exhibit is a minimal grid-based theme from Themes Kingdom. It features a responsive layout, unlimited color options, post formats, Google Maps integration, page templates, custom widgets, and a shortcodes generator.

Widely – free

Widely is a free portfolio theme from Themes Kingdom with a list of features that includes custom widgets, Google Maps integration, shortcodes, page templates, and a theme admin panel

TrulyMinimal – free

TrulyMinimal is a free typography-focused theme from FlareThemes. It features an advanced control panel, page templates, custom widgets, unlimited color options, and more.

Charlton –

Charlton, from ThemeFurnace, is a clean and minimal blogging theme. It comes with multiple post formats, font options, Nivo slider, and a theme options panel.

Capiton –

Capiton, also from ThemeFurnace, is a minimal theme for portfolios or business websites. It’s features include 4 design styles, a portfolio section, font management, Nivo slider, and a theme options panel.

Simpleton –

Simpleton is a responsive theme from MyThemeShop. It features unlimited color schemes, unlimited backgrounds, shortcodes, custom widgets, lightbox galleries, Google Web Fonts integration, and more.

Simple –

Simple is another responsive theme from MyThemeShop. Its features include unlimited style schemes, Google Web Fonts integration, multiple layout options, shortcodes, a custom options panel, and more.

 

For more WordPress themes and resources please see:

• 50+ Business and Corporate WordPress Themes
• Comparison of WordPress Theme Clubs
• 50 Responsive WordPress Portfolio Themes
• The Best WordPress Real Estate Themes
• 40+ of the Best WordPress Ecommerce Themes
• The Best WordPress Themes for Wedding Websites

Today’s freebie on Blugraphic is a free PSD file that consist of a set of vector ribbons designed with perfect attention to details.

The post 17+ Elegant Ribbons PSD appeared first on Freebiesbug.