The time has come to make the change.
Isn’t it pretty?
I’ve been approved for a small loan to buy this greatly needed and long desired bit o’ kit.
Should be putting in my order later this week. Ooh I can’t wait.
Recently one of our clients decided they would like to have some background music on their website. I went down as many routes as possible to find a way to make audio play in the background while not being interrupted as the user moves through the site.
Firstly:
I spent a bit of time exploring this option:
The audio could be played from a popup / popunder however this cant be launched automatically as most browsers will catch that. This means the user must click a button to start the sound / launch the popup. Ok you could live with that, it’s better than previous options.
But another problem arises when you want to allow the user to stop the music / close the popup. It’s easily done while the user remains on the same page, the javascript object reference to the popup window can be used to close it. But when the user moves to another page that reference to the popup window dies with it and the popup window can’t be controlled from within the main window (as far as I can tell). This isn’t really acceptable either.
So the solution to the problem is not to use music on your website. Even just from this implementation standpoint, it can’t really be done without a certain amount of compromise. And in this case the compromise is too much.
The problem with a lot of clients is that they don’t understand the technical implementation problems that you may face. So here is a really good article on convincing a client that their website doesn’t need music.
I signed up for a Tradedoubler Pull account last week, as bloggers do 
It’d be nice to make a few Euros on the side.
This blog was accepted for the Dell IE program today so I set about what I thought would be the very simple task of selecting what size ads I wanted to display, pick a few keywords perhaps and choose a style or two, then copy the code into my site. Wrong.
Tradedoubler’s Ad Management feature is in no way intuitive. I figured it out in the end but in fairness I’m a web designer, if I didn’t eventually get it then there’s no hope for the average user. I will say that once you do figure it out the process of creating an ad unit is fairly straightforward, sort of, but you shouldn’t have to go through all this head scratching just to publish a few ads in your blog.
So this is my problem with Tradedoubler. Did they put their Ad Management tool through any sort of a usability test before letting people at it. If they did, did those users have some sort of Divine Inspiration™ plugin for Firefox that I haven’t heard about yet?
The whole process is begging to be broken down into short fool-proof steps. I understand that a lot of bloggers are very computer literate and will probably get there in the end, but I’d be willing to bet that a large number of people sign in once, shriek and then leave, never to return again. Some simple changes to the workflow and user interface could vastly improve Tradedoublers user experience. A bit of effort is all that’s needed and it bothers me when I see a half assed attempt from people who really do have the money to throw at usability testing.
I’d also like to add that Dell aren’t helping the situation either by providing a fairly useless bunch of graphical ads. Come on, if you want people to advertise for you, at least give us some formats that we can use! I have heard that Apple‘s ad program is much better and provides nice ads in all sorts of useable sizes.
I don’t care what they call the new Dreamweaver, but please can we have it soon.
It’s very hard to find any solid information on the new version of Dreamweaver, but it simply must get here soon. The way we approach development for the web has changed too much since DW8 was launched. So what will it have. There are obvious improvements and updates to be made to many areas of the application but here are some that stand out for me:
Better PHP application development support would be great. I know there are better development tools out there but Dreamweaver’s wysiwyg features are still better than those alternatives and so I find that I constantly need to return to using Dreamweaver.
What if DW9 adopted the Zend Framework for developing web apps? It could include nice tools for creating new actions, controllers, views and taking advantage of all the other great things the Zend Framework supports. Kind of like Rails for PHP? Personally I hate ROR but would love to see something like it for PHP.
So they are just some of the things that affect me in my day to day work that I would like to see improved. For now I live in hope. In the meantime I’ll be trawling anxiously for any news of the new DW release. Come on Adobe, we need this!
Screenshots 21/02:
I’ve found some dodgy enough looking screenshots of what is meant to be an early alpha of Dreamweaver 9. Have a look at them here and see what you make of them. They don’t really give anything away.
I just found this free eBook in PDF format as I was searching for some good learning resources. The author, Jeffrey Veen, made the book available some time ago in celebration of it’s 5 years on the book shelves. So yes this is an old enough book in terms of the technologies address however the basics of good, effective web-design and plain common sense can never be stressed enough.
When I see things like this I often wonder why this stuff wasn’t required reading when I was in college.
Grab the book here : The Art and Science of Web Design
I came accross Modern Life recently. It’s a very refreshing web-design blog by Stuart Brown. By his own description:
Modern Life is a blog about the web – development, design, search engines and statistics. Sometimes controversial, occasionally satirical and usually on the nose.
I have to say I really like a lot of what this guy has to say. He makes a lot of sense and a lot can be learned from reading his posts.
I’d just like to highlight one in particular for those of you who are in web-design business or thinking about getting into it : The biggest mistakes made by web design companies. Some really simple things in there that so many people could apply to their own sites.
Having gone through the beginner css layout, you should be ready for something a little more complicated. This tutorial again works towards creating a layout similar to that of this site. You’ll see how to incorporate margins, padding and borders without breaking your layout.
You’ll also see how to deal with the IE Double Margin Bug.
So as before you can download the source files here or view the code below.
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Firstly, if you don’t know what CSS is then I recommend you go to W3Schools and have a look at their simple tutorials. They do a very good job of explaining a lot of the simple stuff.
When you’re ready to abandon tables for layouts and embrace CSS then you here is where you want to be.
CSS has loads of little pitfalls and things you end up finding out on your own that you wish someone had told you about. I’m going to try and address some of those in my posts on CSS. First however the basics. I know you can find tutorials like this all over the web, it’s just a basic layout. It’s important however that you get the simple stuff right before you venture on any further.
You can copy the source for the html and css files below or download the zip here.
When you understand everything that’s going on here, have a look at my more advanced CSS tutorial.
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