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.

After hearing success stories from other developers about how they used content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal and Joomla to develop sites for clients, I evaluated both programs.  I also learned that WordPress, which I have used for blogs, is also a good general purpose CMS.  However, after working with all three programs, and converting both my personal and business sites to static WordPress sites (I have since re-coded both sites), I came to the conclusion that I have greater flexibility and can more quickly develop sites that are stable and standards-compliant if I do my own coding.  I will continue to use WordPress for blogs. In those cases where a client wants to be able to add, edit, and delete site content,  I will use SnippetMaster. 

I recently upgraded from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium.  I would have liked to have done a clean install, but I didn’t have the time required to reinstall the many programs I use.  At the beginning of the installation process, the installer performed a compatibility check and found a few programs that might not be compatible with Windows 7.  It recommended that the programs be uninstalled before proceeding with the upgrade.  After that the upgrade went smoothly but, when I tried to run programs under Windows 7, I got an error message advising that Windows couldn’t verify the digital signature of the file.  After doing some research, I discovered that the Norton User Account Control (UAC) should have been uninstalled before upgrading, but Norton UAC wasn’t listed during the compatibility check,  For those not familiar with Norton UAC, one of the features that gave Windows Vista a bad name was Vista’s UAC.  I, like many Vista users, replaced Vista’s default UAC with the free Norton UAC, a more user-friendly and more secure UAC.

I was able solve my problem by booting Windows 7 in Safe mode and uninstalling Norton UAC.  If you are planning to upgrade to Windows 7 and are using Norton UAC, uninstall the program before upgrading.  By the way, the UAC in Windows 7 is much improved over Vista, as are many other features of the OS.

WebAssist has released Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor™ 3.  I have been using CSS Sculptor since it was first released in 2007, and it is a Dreamweaver extension that I wouldn’t be without. It is the perfect tool for generating standards-compliant CSS layouts.  CSS Sculptor™ 3 is $99.99 or $49.99 if you’re upgrading and it looks like a worthwhile upgrade.  The new features include a Color Manager which could be very important for someone like me who is "graphically-chalenged" and has no sense of color. According to the literature, the Color Manager allows you to change the color scheme of a CSS layout with the click of a mouse, it makes color suggestions to help ensure that a CSS design looks professional, and it allows the importing of a web page or image to sample the colors.  I’m a developer, not a designer and now, by importing a web page into Color Manager, I can copy the color schemes developed by professional designers.  If you’re a Dreamweaver user, you can visit the WebAssist site to learn more about CSS Sculptor™ 3.

A free utility that I use all the time is JR Screen Ruler. It can measure anything on your screen and display the measurement in pixels, inches, picas or centimeters.

After reading the comments about WordPress on this blog and on Split-Visionz, I decided to try to develop a version of my personal website using WordPress.  It was a good learning experience.  In looking for a theme for the site, I discovered Artisteer and created several themes using the program.  I also learned more  about WordPress and found some useful WordPress plugins.  You can view the site here.

Earlier this month I wrote a post titled, “I Guess I’m Not A CMS Person.”  In a comment on that post, Mike, a web designer/developer in Michigan, noted:

“I think it depends on the specifics of the project. As you are using wordpress for your blog I am guessing you feel similarly to an extent.”

Mike made a good point.  I use WordPress for my blogs, but I didn’t think of WordPress as a CMS.  However, WordPress is a CMS, and a very good one at that.  In fact, based on my limited experience with  Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, if I were going to use a CMS to develop a static site, I think I would choose WordPress over the other two.