Thursday, January 31, 2008

Cool Internet Explorer simulator



Because there's nothing more frustrating than wasting blood, sweat and tears developing a page that renders beautifully in Firefox and Safari, only to find out that Internet Explorer is treating it like a red-headed step-child.
Thanks to Lifehacker for the link!

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Ayyiyi! Estos comentarios son tan picantes!

I love it when I go searching for a solution for a client and come across a little online skirmish like this!
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All you ever wanted to know about Wordpress...

...but didn't even know to ask:

What is it?
It's an online content management tool. That means that you are able to make changes to the site via a web browser.

How does it work?
You have to download Wordpress from the website and then upload it to your hosting server. Once it's on your site, you can upload photos, make web pages that you can edit once they are published, and keep an blog on your site for quick news items or articles or interesting links.

What's so great about that?
Say your company has a new product coming out. If you need to update your site to include information about that product then you might face a costly site re-design. With a tool like Wordpress, however, you would sign into the site, choose to add a page about the new product and your site's links would automatically be updated to reflect the new information.

Is it tricky?
I would only say, if you do not have a clear idea of what you want your site to look like or say or how you would like your information organized, then things can get a little sticky. Once you have that all sorted out, then make sure you kick the tires of your theme a little before you dive into creating the site.

So, do I still need to hire a designer?
That's an excellent question.
I would say that if you feel comfortable using an FTP program, and you know how to access your website's folder on your hosting company's server to copy the Wordpress download there, check out a couple of good books and go for it.
If you want a fully customized site with the right bells and whistles and you would rather it in the hands of someone who will manage all the details while you focus on your actual business, then a designer can be a cost-effective solution.
Simply add up how much time you spend in the forum, divide it by the cost of a cup coffee and multiply it by the square root of itself. If the end result is less than your age in dog years, have fun!

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

How do you say "Allah Akbar" in HTML?

My client wants to have her site available in quite a few languages so I've been working on a dropdown list of links to Google's site translator. Since she realized that if the viewer doesn't want to read the site in English, then they may not recognize the English word for their language, I had to copy and paste that language's name for itself into an HTML list. Both versions of Chinese worked, Greek worked, Japanese, Korean and Russian worked, but Arabic? No dice.
Hmmm....
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Friday, January 25, 2008

Blogs, and the blogging bloggers that blog them

I've been acting like a squirrel on crack with Del.icio.us over the past 2 years. In the course of trying to grow a web design business from something done on the side, when I've got free time on the weekend, through the part time graphic design job with the difference made up with web clients, to taking the plunge into the full time freelance world, every time I researched a different aspect of the web, I would hit Google and bookmark every decent article I could get my hands on.

The following list is the first of (hopefully) many where I share the best of the best on various topics such as Search Engine Optimization, hosting, web technologies and this one, blogging.

1) Detailed article on how to generate income from a blog by Steve Pavlina

2) 10 Free (or cheap) Content Management Systems. A CMS is basically a blog's sophisticated older cousin. This is a quick start in getting a handle on what words like Zope, Apache and Plone mean.

3) Adsense sense and sensibility. Useful tips onhow to use Google's Adsense feature without feeling like a big fat whore.

4) Kustomizing your tangerine candy-flake streamlined blog. Cool tutorials for giving a blog a personalized look by Jennifer Apple.

5) Now Digg this. A short and sweet article on 37 Signal's site about how to get your blog noticed, the right way.
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