St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Currently I’m working on a premium web site for O Pescador restaurant. O Pescador (which means “The Fisherman”) is a Portuguese Restaurant serving authentic Portuguese foods and wines.

Update:
St Petersburg Portugese Restaraunt is what I choose for the number on SEO Keyphrase for O Pescador.

And I’m also working on a Content Management System (CMS) for a new charity called the Red Tide Coalition. A domain name hasn’t been chosen yet. I think I’ll be using the Xoops CMS. I’m also considering setting up a blog for the small (for now) charity.

Is all the difference between a blog and a Content Management System all just relative? Is it a matter of how a site is authored and maintained? Is it just a matter of which software you used to build the framework of the site in question? Is it a matter of how the content on the site is diplayed?

Some things blogs seems to have in common:

• They display content posts (or articles) in a chronological order
• They have some very nice graphical themes
• Since they do less than CMS’s, they are easier to operate

Content Management Systems on the other hand:

• Display content in numerous “blocks”
• Are more likely to fill the whole page
• Do far more things than just publish articles and links
• Sometimes can be downright ugly
• Because of there ability to do so much more, they are usually more difficult to operate and setup.

Here’s some examples:

• Blogs:
  • St Petersburg Web Design News Blog
  • Florida Red Tide Coalition
• Content Management Systems
  • Photo Sharing Center
  • Real Estate Listing Site

Please chip in and tell us all what you think the difference between a CMS and a blog is.

It seems that Microsoft is always looking for the easy fix to big design flaws. Now usually I’m all for the easy fix, but if it does more harm than good, it’s certainly time to put some extra effort into fixing the design flaw. This usually saves all kinds of problems down the road.

Microsoft seems to be extras at making “features” that do more harm than good too. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine why they put so much effort into such a bad idea. For instance in Win XP you were no longer able to make any folder you wanted “private”, only the ones that were under certain users profiles and in certain spots. Another example, with WinXP whenever you copy a folder from one disc to your hard disc, or one hard disc to another, it automatically becomes a “Read-only” folder that can’t be deleted or renamed. These were “features” according to Microsoft.

We’ve all been hearing about the mostly bad changes due to come out in IE 7. This latest one is going to screw up a lot of newbies and cause more support tickets for any web sites with log ins. The new “delete browsing history” feature under the “tools” menu wills not only clear the history, but also:

• the cache
• all cookies
• all saved passwords
• all saved form data
• all e-mail attachments in Outlook Express

Imagine all the new messages in your inbox reading “Please help, can’t log-in” and “I can’t remember which e-mail address I signed up with?” and “Why doesn’t your web site remember me?”

Read the source story here

First impressions really do count, especially for web sites according to the Behavior and Information Technology journal. According to a study they’ve just released, a web user makes up his or her mind, thumbs up or thumbs down, within less than a twentieth of a second.

This could explain a lot of pages that mysteriously have high “Bounce Rates.” While the researchers couldn’t seem to pinpoint the reasons for poor or positive ratings by these viewers, they were able to determine that the results weren’t random. They flashed some of the sites on screen more than once and they consistently got, well, consistent ratings.

The lesson learned? If a page has a high bounce rate, try changing it’s look.

Read the quoted news story