In the current economic downturn, for very small business, we would always advise that they use a pre-built open website design, as it not only lowers initial design and development costs, but also gives the client the chance to see their new website (90% of it) before any work begins.

If you have worked with small business then you will no doubt recognise the fact that initial designs can be a complete nightmare that never seems to end. One part the website design gets changed or evolved, and then often a few days or weeks later the client will ask if ‘we can try this or that’. By using an open design you essentially can get your client to sign-off (on the design) upfront leaving them to concentrate on content rather than design.

In most of the cases that we have worked with the client has been more than happy to keep the designers link in place, thereby shaving days of initial design and development time - which can be quite a substantial saving - up to 80% of project costs in some cases.

For those that are adamant that they do not want the designers link, then in a lot of cases we have worked on, the designer is more than happy for them to remove the link for a small fee.

In order to present and highlight the professional designs currently being released as Open Designs, we have now created a new website called: Open Websites - built using exactly the same technique - e.g. the customisation of an existing open website design.

We hope to work with some of the providers of these designs in order to make the process of either employing the designer to customise the design further, or to remove the designer’s link, a much easier affair.

If like us you have say 5 or more log-ins per domain (hosting log-ins, email, social sites, applications, etc) and have so 10+ accounts, then trying to remember passwords is a complete nightmare.

Now rather than use insecure, easy to remember (and easy to hack) passwords, we would instead recommend the excellent, free, open source password manager KeePass.

By being open source you can download the code and check it is not doing insecure or unsafe things with your essential log-ins!

Also if you currently use E-Wallet, AnyPassword, Oubliette, PINs, or PasswordSafe - you can now import your existing password database straight into KeePass.

Now with a new beta version, as well as many very useful modules or add-ons, not to mention ports on to other operating systems - including PocketPC or SmarthPhone,  now is definitelythe time to utilise this ESSENTIAL software.

If you have rang Adobe suport for help and support on, say Dreamweaver MX 2004 or CS3 problems, then you will no doubt understand our sentiments!

Not only does Dreamweaver has serious problems handle thousands of images in a given directory, but if you ask Adobe support for a resolution they will tell you to ‘another ftp client’ - which clearly should be illegal under the grounds of ‘not being fit for purpose’ (here in the UK).

If that was not bad enough, if you have a given file that you are working on that is a specific size in bytes - or any factor of this size, you will have serious problems with Dreamweaver. This is clearly an outrage and needs to be solved, rather than just releasing new versions such as CS4!

In our opinion, if you dont have to use Adobe Dreamweaver MX2004, CS3 or CS3 - then we would recommend either the Open Source GUI IDE’s such as Eclipse and Notepad++ - both of which can print in colour - something which Dreamweaver MX2004 and CS3 cannot!

Transfer Dreamweaver CS3/MX Sites

February 1, 2009    Category: IDE Editors

Ok so you have your sites setup in Dreamweaver MX 2004 or CS3 and now you want to move them to a different computer. These are steps that you need to do in order to the move successfully.

Please note that if you are moving the sites from the same version of MS Windows e.g. Windows XP to another Windows XP, or MS Vista to another MS Vista it makes the process simpler and quicker. Essentially if you are moving to a different version then you will need to redefine the site root for each site which is easy but a little time consuming.

Complete steps to follow.

Dreamweaver CS3

January 25, 2009    Category: IDE Editors

As a WYSIWYG IDE (integrated development enviroment), Dreamweaver can hide the HTML code details of pages from the user, making it possible for non-coders to create web pages and sites. One criticism of this approach is that it can produce HTML pages whose file size and amount of HTML code is larger than an optimally hand-coded page would be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts.

In addition, some web site developers have criticised Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards, though recent versions have been more compliant. Dreamweaver 8.0 performed poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Adobe has increased the support for CSS and other ways to lay out a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.

The Eclipse I.D.E

January 25, 2009    Category: IDE Editors

Eclipse is a multi-language software development platform comprising an IDE and a plug-in system to extend it. It is written primarily in Java and is used to develop applications in this language and, by means of the various plug-ins, in other languages as well — C/C++, Cobol, Python, Perl, PHP and more.

The initial codebase originated from VisualAge. In its default form it is meant for Java developers, consisting of the Java Development Tools (JDT). Users can extend its capabilities by installing plug-ins written for the Eclipse software framework, such as development toolkits for other programming languages, and can write and contribute their own plug-in modules. Language packs provide translations into over a dozen natural languages.