St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Web Design Software’ Category

This is a test of a new WorPress Plug-in called the Lightbox-Plugin. What does it do? It presents photos in the original lightbox script style. Which is to open a photo from a thumbnail without leaving the page and while dimming the rest of the screen.

Here’s the photo:

See I told it was a nice way to present photos! It’s easy to install, easy to use, and really does present photos in a clever and eye-appealing way.
A note on usage:

1. This isn’t a very effective means of displaying large sized photos either. Large size photos don’t fit on most monitors, and if it doesn’t fit, the close button gets pushed off the screen and Noobs (new users) get freaked out. We don’t want to freak out the Noobs do we?

A lot of graphic designers and web designers have been thrust into the video editing arena lately with the rise in popularity of video viewed on the web. While most of them just say “I don’t edit video” (I even heard one say that videos can’t be edited by anyone except a film studio or TV studio – liar!), others are willing to learn. I’m fairly good at it myself, but it’s always a complicated procedure and there are no shortcuts. Here’s a perfect example of how not to edit a video to remove something you’d rather not have the viewer see.

Again, there are no shortcuts. It takes expensive software, patience, alot of tedium from someone willing to spend the time on it and lot’s of computer processor time.

Everyone who’s been embedding flash into a web page for a while remembers last year when Microsoft changed their browser in response to loosing a patent -infringement lawsuit. And then they changed it again soon after because the first change was so awful (Warnings everywhere!). What they ended up with – that white border that appears around a flash object when it is hovered over and must be clicked on before the movie can be clicked on – isn’t very graceful, but it what it is and there’s no way around it for a web designer.

It may seem like, or even be, a blatant and desperate attempt to get people to stop using the non-microsoft technologies like flash, java, etc. But yet we as web designer must come up with a Internet Explorer Active Content Fix. You could choose to follow the instruction from the new owners of Flash, here’s a link to Adobe’s Active Content Update Fix. But dues that’s like 6 long scripts that you need to choose for your particular

You could write your own solutions. In theory it’s pretty easy, for JavaScript writers, just document.write your normal code in. For php programers just echo it in. etc.

But here’s what I’ve been doing lately. Since I almost always use DreamWeaverMX 2004 on web sites, I found a nice Dreamweaver extension called the Softery IE Flash Problem Solver. It inserts a command that works simply. It only has two options, Fix the IE Active Content Update Problem on the current open document or on all pages with flash in the current local site. It works quickly and perfectly every time.

Don’t ya love it when something works just like it should?

Web Designers and Web Design Clients alike be warned:

IE 7 was released this week and already numerous bugs putting users at risk of phishing attacks, spoofing attacks, and disclosure of personal information (amongst many others), have been discovered.

Continue reading “Warning – IE7 released – Dangerous Bugs Abound” »

Google Sitemaps is an excellent opportunity for webmasters, there’s no doubt about it. To use it you need a specifically (but simply), formatted XML file. It’s well worth it for webmasters to learn the little bit it takes to participate in this program.

Even if you’re a wiz at XML, it can be laborious to write and edit and edit and edit . . . a sitemap.xml file (the specific file name that google needs to find the sitemap file) and making sure it’s error free (so the googlebot can read it), to say the least. But that’s where the joy of XML comes into play. All programming languages (at least the ones I know) are able to read and write XML based text.

So what if we had a sitemap.xml generator, one that inter-meshed with some software that I’m already using to do this kind of work? Well good news for me, some one made a DreamWeaverMX 2004 extension that will generate a google sitemap for whatever site is open at the time. It generates the file sitemap.xml and places it in the root folder, error free, eachtime. The google sitemap.xml is easy to read and edit. Then simply upload the latest version of the sitemap.xml just like a web page, from within the DreamWeaverMX 2004 interface.

Overall DreamWeaverMX 2004 is a great product, but definetly not worth an upgrade from DreamWeaverMX . There are very few differences. However if your a serious Web Designer DreamWeaverMX or DreamWeaverMX 2004 is a definite must for your toolbox. It is most definitely the most productive, flexible, stable and expandable web design software on the market. It’s one of the least expensive too!

Made by Macromedia, DreamWeaverMX gives you a excellent code view editor or WYSIWYG environment. It comes with a standard library of JavaScript “Behaviors” that5 you can attach directly to page element (like images). It also has a repository of “snippets” (bits and pieces of code written in any language, stored in plain text form), that is as easy as “copy and paste” to add your own snippets to, so you can reuse them later.

Macromedia’s DreamWeaverMX 2004 (and all previous versions) works well with all web programming languages, databases, CSS, AJAX, and it’s environment is designed to work with any technology that isn’t developed yet.

That may change now that their competitor, Adobe, has bought Macromedia. They have a far inferior software called “Go Live” that you don’t really want to even try to use much less pay over a thousand dollars for.

Other web page editing and creation software:

• Microsoft Front Page: It’s inexpensive, easy to use (for the basics only), and with very complicated processes you can embed other microsoft Office technologies into web pages. The bad news, it hates non-microsoft technology like flash, java, PHP, mySQL etc etc etc. If you don’t know how to make web pages from by writing HTML in a plain text editor, then you should hire someone. But if you must dive headfirst into a very complicated process you know nothing about, this software is for you. And one more thing, it only works on windows and most of the web pages it out puts only work on windows and Internet Explorer (which will alienate at least 20% of your viewers).
• Net Object’s Fusion: You really want to avoid this software. It’s very complicated to make the most basic pages and anything extra, well, costs extra. It also says it lets you write your own code and scripts, but it usually doesn’t.