Thursday 17th July

Netscape's Future

According to an entry made earlier this week on Eric Meyer's site, it would seem that there will be no more new versions of Netscape developed and that the browser will go into maintenance mode. As someone who cut their teeth on Netscape 3, I am very saddened by this news. My thoughts are with Eric and the rest of the Netscape team during this time of transition.

Wednesday 16th July

Contribute Version 2

Today Macromedia announces the arrival of the latest version of their content contribution application, Macromedia Contribute 2 »

Key New Features:

Apple Macintosh OS X Support
Macromedia FlashPaper (Windows 2000 and XP Only)
PayPal E-Commerce
Third-Generation Site Connnection System
Powerful Security

Tuesday 15th July

Announcing Dreamweaver MX Advanced mini site

Today sees the launch of the Dreamweaver MX Advanced mini site found in the new VTC category located in main menu bar. Here you will find additional tutorials, links and other resources related to this title.

Monday 14th of July

CSS Design at its best

Last week Douglas Bowman announced the launch of the redesign of the Adaptive Path web site. Again this Master of CSS shows how standards-compliant sites can be made to look beautiful.

Thursday 3rd of July

The demise of free Internet Explorer

Read what the Web Standards Project has to say about the recent announcement that future versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh and Windows will cease to be free, standalone products.

Wednesday 2nd of July

What are Web Standards?

Want to know what web standards are, and why you should care? Listen to Digital Life's interview with CSS Guru Eric Meyer. Oh and if you think that sites created using Web Standards are both boring and plain, then check out the CSS Zen Garden and experience the beauty of CSS Design right now!

Monday 30th of June

VTC Dreamweaver MX Advanced (Update)

I'm pleased to announce that the rest of the remaining chapters of my latest VTC title “Dreamweaver MX - Advanced” have been uploaded to the VTC Online University servers.

In other news, last Tuesday Apple released Safari 1.0 Check out Surfin' Safari by Safari lead developer Dave Hyatt to learn more about the new Mac OS X default browser. Visit diveintomark'sSafarilist to find out more about this awesome new web browser for the Macintosh.

Tuesday 24th of June

Learn how to unlock the power of hidden navigation access keys

A List Apart is back! Check out this excellent article which will teach you how to unlock the power of this navigation tool. Using the access keys may not be for everyone, as you can see in the discussion, but it is still great food for thought.

Monday 23rd of June

VTC Dreamweaver MX - Advanced

On Friday I authored the last tutorial of my latest VTC training course “Dreamweaver MX - Advanced”.The remaining movies are currently being edited and I'll post again once they have been uploaded to the VTC Online University. Below is the complete list of all the topics that are covered in this title.

Introduction
Site Configuration (View free of charge)
CSS Overview (View free of charge)
CSS and Dreamweaver MX (Subscription required)
Advanced CSS (Subscription required)
More on Advanced CSS (Subscription required)
CSS Bugs and Hacks (Subscription required)
Coding in Dreamweaver MX (Subscription required)
More on Coding (Subscription required)
Dreamweaver MX Templates: Basic (Subscription required)
Dreamweaver MX Templates: Advanced (Subscription required)
Optimization and Validation (Subscription required)
Accessibility

I'm also in the process of developing a mini-site for this new title that will be available in the near future.

Thursday May 15th: New VTC Dreamweaver MX title announced

Words from Mark Fletcher: Today VTC announces the third in my series of Dreamweaver MX titles - VTC Dreamweaver MX Advanced.This one isn't finished yet, but for those of you who are prepared to subscribe to the VTC Online University you can now get access to all the tutorials that are available. If you haven't come across the VTC Online University before then you can still view chapter 2 and 3 completely free of charge. VTC normally includes the first three chapters gratis, but I tend to always author the first chapter last. I'm currently working on two chapters on using Dreamweaver MX templates, which I will announce once they have been completed. There is much more to come but I'll talk about that another day.

Join the VTC Online University for $25.00 per month and get access to over 25,000 Quick Time narrated video tutorials

Chapter titles that are currently available

Chapter 2 - Site Configuration (View free of charge)
Chapter 3 - CSS Overview (View free of charge)
Chapter 4 - CSS and Dreamweaver MX (Subscription required)
Chapter 5 - Advanced CSS (Subscription required)
Chapter 6 - More on Advanced CSS (Subscription required)
Chapter 7 - CSS Bugs and Hacks (Subscription required)
Chapter 8 - Coding in Dreamweaver MX (Subscription required)
Chapter 9 - More on Coding (Subscription required)

Thursday May 8th: WA PayPal eCommerce Toolkit v3

WebAssist.com announces the WA PayPal eCommerce Toolkit version 3. This new version of the free WA PayPal eCommerce Toolkit for Dreamweaver MX offers the quickest and easiest way to add eCommerce to a business web site. With this extension you can easily create payment buttons and basic shopping cart functionality for your web site. You can learn more about this extension in the new WebAssist section of this site.

Friday 2nd May

New home for CSS Support Charts

Trying to track down Eric Meyer's CSS Compatibility Charts? Look no further they have been moved to Netscape DevEdge. For those who don't know, these charts used to be hosted at Webreview.com, which now points to the Dr Dobbs site. I for one would like to express my thanks for all those who worked and contributed to the Webreview site I learnt a huge amount from this resource and was very sorry to see it fade away.

Thursday 1st May

Zeldman on rule based design

Read Zeldman's report on creating rule based design with Adjacent sibling selectors and learn some of the browser compatibility issues. Zeldman.com is the personal site of web designer Jeffrey Zeldman. Jeffrey is also the author of Taking your Talent to the Web (New Riders 2001) and the forth coming book designing with web standards.

Tuesday 29th April

Connect to data sources in Flash MX with Macromedia Firefly Components.
Macromedia has created a set of components that will enable developers to make it easier to connect to a data source within Macromedia Flash MX. Macromedia Firefly Components provide a framework for accessing, displaying and updating data within Flash MX applications. Learn more about Macromedia Firefly Components

Special Feature: WA Universal Email version 2.0 WebAssist.com releases WA Universal Email (v2.0.0) for Dreamweaver MX and UltraDev 4.0.

New Features

Support for Macromedia ColdFusion (CFML)
Support for sending WA eCart contents in the mail body
Support for server side code in the mail body (ASP, JavaScript, ASP VBScript, CFML)
Easily add eCommerce by inserting PayPal payment buttons to your mail body.

You can learn more about this extension by viewing the WA Universal Email video tutorials from VTC

Friday 11th April: PHP and Dreamweaver MX

New VTC PHP and Dreamweaver MX video tutorials now available at Macromedia DevNet

Topics Covered:

Overview of PHP and Dreamweaver MX
Setting up a PHP site in Dreamweaver MX
Testing a PHP setup
Creating a MySQL database
Creating a connection to a MySQL database & creating a dynamic table
Using the Update and Delete Record server behaviors
Reviewing some of the options in the PHP Insert bar tab

Wednesday 2nd April

Re-design in real time

Today I start a new series of articles on the redesign of a site that I am currently involved with. The site is Christ Church, Southport. This is the web site of the Christian Church that along with my family I have been attending now for just over 7 months.

The site itself is nothing special. It is there purely to present information about Christ Church. None of the content is driven using server technologies such as (PHP, ASP, CFML etc), though updating the content is done using Macromedia Contribute, since this offers the Church administrator a simple cost effective way of changing the content as and when required.

So why you might ask I am burning the midnight oil redesigning this site. Well it boils down to three main issues.

The site is currently framed which is preventing the site from obtaining a higher ranking
in search engines / directories.
The index page (Home) does not lend itself to new information being added.
New pages cannot be spawned from Macromedia Dreamweaver MX templates and so at present the Church administrator cannot harness full potential of Macromedia Contribute.

The site as it currently stands is a stop-gap and I for one am very grateful to the developer who spent considerable amount of time putting it together.

Initial site assessment

So what do we start with. Well after some soul searching and having spent a considerable amount of time in discussion with the Church administrator we have decide to tackle the problem in four stages though stages 1 and 2 are currently being done together.

Remove the frames and employ techniques that will improve the site's search engine / directory rankings.
Re-design the index page so that new content can be easily added.
Re-design the inner pages and create new layouts that will make it easier to add new pages and new sections.
Convert primary, secondary and tertiary page layouts into Dreamweaver MX templates to facilitate Macromedia Contribute integration.

Stage 1: Remove the frames and improve search engine / directory rankings.

Frame removal

Removing the frames is straight forward enough. At present the non-framed version of the site currently sitting on my staging server so that we can check to make sure we don't have any broken links and that the 'tweaked layout' doesn't fall to pieces in early versions of PC and Mac browsers.

Search engine rankings

Improving the search engine ranking is still being worked out and so I'll report back on that once the text components, link components and key words have been analyzed and tested.

Stage 2: Re-designing the Index page

In order to re-design the index page I started by creating some thumb nail sketches on paper. The ones that I though most appropriate for this site have then been converted into wire-frames done using Macromedia Freehand MX. Freehand MX is an incredibly powerful vector based drawing tool and therefore ideal for this task. At my next meeting I'll present the prototypes and once a decision has been made I'll post again and discuss the process of creating a more detailed visual.

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