Web Development Blog

VisualLightbox.com, the company that released Visual LightBox and Video LightBox, has just released Visual SlideShow, a program, that lets you add photo slide shows to your website or blog with ease.  Visual SlideShow is very similar to Visual LightBox, but the slide show plays inside the page and doesn't open an overlay window.  Take a look at the following demos and keep in mind that they don't use Flash; Visual SlideShow uses only Javascript, HTML, and CSS.

http://visualslideshow.com/

http://visualslideshow.com/demo.html

http://visualslideshow.com/photo-slideshow.html

Visual SlideShow is free for non-commercial use. If you want to purchase the Business Edition, it provides an option to remove the Visual SlideShow.com credit line and has a feature that lets you put your own logo on images.  From now until March 19, 2010, you can get a 60% discount on the Business Edition ($19.60 instead of $49.00).  Use one of the following links to order Visual SlideShow with a 60% discount:

Visual SlideShow for Windows

Visual SlideShow for Mac

I was reminded today of a post I made to this blog back in 2006 about a CSS tutorial.  I checked and the site is still there, but I'm not sure that "tutorial" is a good description of Albino Blacksheep's Live Design.  Whatever you call it, I think it's a great way to understand what CSS can do.  You can see the Live Design here.

The About.com:WebDesign/HTML blog has announced the 2010 Reader's Choice Awards Winners.  I won't comment other than to say that I'm disappointed that my favorite web designer's web page, Cheap Websites At Webschlock.com, was not even nominated.

Best Web Designs

Best Product Page Design

Best Information or Content Page Design

Best Use of Images in Web Design

Best Use of Color in Web Design

Best Web Form Page Design

Best Web Designer's Web Page

Best Overall Web Design

Best Web Hosting Providers

Best Windows Web Hosting Provider

Best Linux/UNIX Web Hosting Provider

Best Reseller Web Hosting Provider

Best Cheap or Free Web Hosting

Best Web Design Software

Best Windows Web Editor

Best Mac Web Editor

Best Non-Editor Software for Web Designers

Best Online Web Software for Web Designers

I've purchased enough computers over the years to know that you can get a lemon with any brand.  That's one reason I try to purchase all my computers through Costco Wholesale; Costco allows you to return a system within 90 days of the date of purchase.  I am still very happy with the iBUYPOWER S915i that I purchased from Costco.com a couple of months ago, but Costco no longer carries that model.  However, Costco.com will soon have a sale on an HP HPE 170t Desktop with a 25" LCD monitor.  The system, which has an Intel Core i7-860 @ 2,80 GHz, 8 GB of memory, and a 1 TB hard drive, will be on sale for $1,199.99 from March 11th until April 3rd (Costco Item #483978). It sounds like a good system for development work.  The system is now available on costco.com.  You can see the system here.

Those of you who have read the "About" page know that the theme for this blog was created using Artisteer, a program that can generate a wide variety of valid templates/themes for web sites (CSS and XHTML) and CMS such as Blogger, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.  Artisteer has just released Beta 2 of Version 2.4 and it includes a number of new features, including a few header Flash effects.  I generated a sample page using the Beta release and you can see the sample page here.

The Hot Scripts blog has an article on Experimenting Wth HTML 5. It’s interesting to read about the emerging standard, but it’s still a working draft.  I use XHTML 1.0, and I think XHTML 2 will be the successor to HTML 4 and XHTML 1, not HTML 5.

When I’m working, I tend to have multiple programs running simultaneously (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Outlook, Photoshop, Word, and other applications) , so I need a fast computer with a lot of memory.  I had to replace a computer, and I think I found a very good system at a reasonable price.  You can read about it here.

About.com:Web Design/HTML is conducting a poll on What Web editor do you use?  As I write this, 46% use Dreamweaver/Creative Suite.  You can see the current results here.

I’ll try to remember to mention free Dreamweaver extensions that I find useful.  Here are two:

Lorem and More…

When building new websites, most designers use a piece of filler text that’s been known to printers since the 16th century — Lorem ipsum — or perhaps some random corporate mumbo-jumbo. Lorem and more offers you the choice of traditional Lorem ipsum, a bit of genuine Cicero, random corporate nonsense, and for romantics — Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare. It also offers a choice of format — paragraphs, continuous text, ordered and unordered lists, and in the case of Shakespeare, formally laid out as a sonnnet.

There is more information here.

Smart Link

Smart Link converts an existing link so that the target page opens in a new browser window. It works in a similar way to the Dreamweaver Open Browser Window behavior, or using target="_blank", but gives you far more control over its look and position. Although it uses JavaScript, it is smart enough to work even if JavaScript is disabled (by opening the page in the same window) — keeping your site accessible to everyone, and far more user-friendly than a link that doesn’t work at all. It also has the advantage of keeping your pages valid, unlike target="_blank" which has been deprecated by the W3C.

There is more information here.

For most professional developers, there is no better web design software than Dreamweaver.  But Dreamweaver is expensive, and most people getting started in web development won’t want to spend $399 US on web design software.  I think the best choice for someone looking for inexpensive web design software is the Coffee Cup HTML Editor.  For $49.00 US, the Coffee Cup HTML Editor is packed with features, and it should be relatively easy for use by beginners.  It has both a visual (WYSIWYG) editor, an (X)HTML code editor, and a CSS editor.  It includes many features found in Dreamweaver, such as project/site management and a find and replace tool that provides options to make changes to a single file, all open files, or all files in a specified folder.  To help users get started, the program comes with ten themes, and additional themes are relatively inexpensive.  All the themes I looked at use CSS layouts and valid (X)HTML code.  For more information, visit the Coffee Cup HTML Editor website.