Sarasota Web Design, 3d Animation, Video, Audio

WordPress has been voted “Best CMS of 2009″  in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress was awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award.  This is a landmark, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS.

Every day thousands of new people are discovering why WordPress is the software of choice for websites, blogs and communities. Unlike other CMS software, Wordpress empowers a website owner without compromising on usability or scalability. New users discover that Wordpress has the easiest CMS administration interface, and authoring a page is similar to writing an email.

The Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.

With recent releases of the DroidX and the Apple Iphone 4, mobile device Internet functionality has evolved beyond that of a mere psuedo-web browser.  I just received a new DroidX, and after using the smartphone, it is quite obvious that mobile devices will eventually become a user’s primary Internet browsing device. And it appears that the popularity of the Apple Iphone may just fade away with a mainstream graduation of the entire mobile device industry.

Droid X blogs are hearing that a lot of iPhone users are moving to Droid X. Why? The Droid X blog writes that a mobile devices most important features is the network carrier, and they imply that the Apple Iphone’s AT&T network is prone to dropping calls, for which Verizon’s reliable network is not. I don’t use an Iphone, so I can’t quote from personal experience. But I was just talking to a colleague today regarding a project we are collaborating on, and his phone dropped out 3 times during a 20 minute call. He has Apple’s AT&T network. My neighbor has an Iphone and he swears by it. His only complaint: dropped calls. I have been a Verizon Wireless user since 2002. I can have a clear conversation going up and down in an elevator. From my experience, dropped calls are a rarity.

The Droid X .net blog claims Iphone users are switching to DroidX because, “if I wished to make voice calls anytime anywhere I want” states DroidX.net, “if I wished for the next best thing that did cool things like Skype Mobile and HDMI 720P streaming, and if I wished for wireless tethering of 5 devices on a smartphone, I’d get a Droid X.” DroidX.net adds that you can’t do any of those on the iPhone 4.

You can check out the full article here>

After one day, I like the DroidX, so far.

Mobile Device editorial by Michael Rassel – July 17, 2010

There a numerous formats of video available, and what video format you use is dependent upon the environment that the video will be viewed.  Website video, for instance typically uses the .flv, wmv, or mp4 formats, but mobile video formats have been changing the video format landscape.  With the arrival of HTML5, which has native video support built in, third party video plugins such as Adobe Flash have been rumored to become obsolete. Apple announced it would not support Adobe Flash on it’s popular Iphone, which created a panic among frequent users of Adobe Flash multi-media. However, Google’s Droid mobile operating system is boldly promoting the support of Flash media, which many believe will keep Adobe Flash alive in the mobile marketplace.

read more…

In web design, characters and symbols that are not keyable via a standard keyboard require special html codes or ascii codes in order to display them on a web page. And, in other situations, certain symbols such as a forward slash  /,  quotation mark “,  pound sign # and many others, are used in web programming, and keying such characters in a web page can break the web design code. Therefore such characters must be represented in text by an html or ascii code instead of the actual key character. The table below is useful list of various HTML and ascii codes for various special characters. read more…

In Web design, the navigation selections are commonly all the same color. However, some web design clients may request that specific navigation selections be a different color from the rest. In a static HTML web page, this is easy. But in a CMS web page this can be difficult, as cms website navigation is typically generated from a database, then formatted by a global template and stylesheet.

Wordpress will often generate unique class definitions and/or id’s from which you can style specific elements. View the page source and find the specific element you want to style uniquely. If Wordpress has generated a unique ID or CLASS definition, just add this definition to your style sheet with your desired unique web design stylings. Your navigation selection will reflect the unique style.

Here is a very useful and easy to use image resizing tool for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/releases/view/30247

It’s an updated version of the Windows XP Powertoy, which places a right click menu that allows you to resize single or multiple images with two clicks. For web design clients who are intimidated by the complexity of Photoshop and similar image editors, this tool is perfect.

I am a 15 year Photoshop veteran, but I found this tool to be refreshingly quick and simple.

Digital cameras take some pretty good, high resolution photos. Cameras with a higher Megapixel capability can produce photos of a higher pixel resolution, and can thereby be printed at a larger dimension. However, these megapixel images are typically too large for display on a website. Web design clients who manage their own website content via a content management system, such as WordPress, often need to reduce such megapixel images prior to posting them to their website.

For example a 3 Megapixel image has a pixel dimension of 2048 x 1536. This image will print out nice, however if you try to view it on a computer screen, it will most likely exceed the viewable area or be resized to fit in the viewable area. That’s because the average computer screen has a pixel resolution of 1024 x 768. So any image larger than that size is overkill.

But the main disadvantage to high resolution images is excessive file size. A 3 megapixel image will often have a very large file size, like 2 megabytes, give or take. That’s a huge file size  for one image and can significantly slow down your computer. Resizing the  same photo to 1024 x 768 also reduces the file size well below 1 megabyte, which can be downloaded and viewed much faster.

Internet Explorer 6 has fallen below 5% of Internet usage. Microsoft released the IE 6 web browser in 2000, and it became functionally obsolete in 2006. The Internet Explorer 7 release added very important support for Web 2.0 standards and security protections that IE6 lacks. Most Internet users upgraded, yet for half a decade, an alarming number of people and corporations have continued to use this broken web browser.

Yahoo has an article about the imminent retirement of IE 6 at:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/IE6-Falls-below-5-for-First-bw-2049028363.html?x=0

When you create a new web page in WordPress, the order for the new web page defaults to ‘0′, which positions the display of it’s navigation menu at the beginning of the stack. To change the web page order:

- Open the web page in the editor.

- On the right column there is a panel titled ‘Attributes’.

- This panel includes two menus: ‘Parent’ and ‘Order’.

- The ‘Parent’ menu allows you to make the web page a child of another web page.

- The ‘Order’ menu is where you specify the numeric web page order.

- Set this to whatever you want the respective web page’s order to be.

- For example if you have five parent web pages, set each web page’s ‘Order’ numerically from 1-5 respectively.

- When adding a new web page, set the new web page’s ‘Order’ to ‘6′ if you want the web page navigation menu to display after all the other web pages, and so forth.

- Another example would be that you want a new web page to display fourth in the middle of the current web pages. To accomplish this, set the new web page’s numeric order to 4, then open the web pages that were previously set as 4 and 5, and change them to 5 and 6 respectively.

When moving a Magento ecommerce website to a new server, you may need to access the shopping cart website and backend administration on a temporary development url. To manually change the Magento Commerce base url to the new development url:

• open the magento ecommerce database in PHPMyAdmin
• browse the database table ‘core_config_data’
• locate the field ‘web/unsecure/base_url’ and click ‘Edit’ to open it for editing
• change the ‘value’ field to the new development domain url
• click ‘Go’
• Close PHPMyAdmin
• Open the ‘Var>Cache’ with FTP, file manager or SSH
• Delete all the content

Your Magento ecommerce website will now work on the new development url.

POP3 (Post Office Protocol) email is the most popular email method on the Internet. If you connect with POP3, via Outlook for example, Outlook will download all of the email on the mail server to your local computer, storing the email within the Outlook software. In turn, the mail on the server is typically deleted by default. Although there is an option in Outlook that allows you to leave email copies on the server, in today’s mobile world, POP3 is no longer an optimal method.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is the second most common email method, and IMAP is much more suited for modern email users who often access their email from multiple devices. Instead of downloading your emails, IMAP keeps your email and directory structure on the mail server so you can access it from anywhere, your work desktop, your home desktop, your laptop, your mobile phone, or a public connection.

Here is how to change from a POP3 email account to an IMAP email account in Outlook.

1. Open Outlook.

2. From the Outlook menu choose Tools -> Email Accounts.

3. Make sure the option to “View or change existing e-mail accounts” is selected and then click on Next.

4. Select the POP account and then click on the Change button.

5. Remove the check mark next to “Remember password.”

6. Click on Next and then on Finish.

7. Choose Tools -> Options -> Mail Setup and click on Send/Receive.

8. Click on Edit, select the POP account and deselect the option for “Include the selected account in this group”. Then click on OK, Close and OK.

9. Close Outlook.

10. Open Outlook again and if you are prompted for a password for that account (you shouldn’t be) don’t give it — instead click on Cancel. If you are prompted for a password, ensure you have followed the steps above correctly.

11. Now the POP account has been disabled, setup the new IMAP account via Tools -> Email Accounts.

12. You can now either drag the email from the POP account folders to the IMAP account folders or use the File -> Import/Export utility to import the POP based PST file into the IMAP account.

13. Once you’ve confirmed all the POP based email has been moved, delete the POP account from Tools -> Email Accounts.

When performing a web design production, or a website design rework, there may be situations where both index.html and index.php are active in your root website directory. During a website transition, you may need to keep these files active until youv’e completed the web design production. Your webserver will default to one or the other, and it may not default to the one you want it to.

You can force the file you want with your .htaccess file.

For instance, to force index.html:

DirectoryIndex  index.html index.php

To force index.php:

DirectoryIndex  index.php index.html

That will make your web design transition a little bit easier.