No tears shed today. Goodbye MYOB! As I’m migrating over to Mac heaven I purchased some sweet new invoicing software today. Finally my weekly invoicing drudgery doesn’t have to be quite as painful.
After a load of research, Billings came up number one. If your a small company or freelancer, I have no hesitation in recommending Billings to take care of your simple financial needs.
I want to love Safari some more, but I don’t. For me, theres no denying, Firefox is it. And yes, I’m one of those “oh theres another free app that’s going to change my life, I better try it.
continue reading "Could you do without these Firefox favourites?!"
An enormous group of shared digital mastery. Post your work and get some feedback. Loads of free resources too.
Beautifully creative, beautifully inspirational. The community here take every form of creativity to the next level. When I first discovered digital designery I just surfed this site day in, day out. Do your soul a favour - go check it out. Now!
The home page says it all. Just get clickin. It’s freakin brilliant imagery. Works from the heart - I just don’t get how they get it onto the screen with such perfection.
Any suggestions?
It was only about 5-6 years I was building table based, static html sites using Dreamweaver. Web design was only just moving from a part time hobby to my bread and butter. Boy have I/web development come a long way since then. I must admit when I saw the move toward css I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Sure I’d been using css to format my headings and paragraphs and the advantage of site wide changes in one file was obvious. I guess it was pure frustration at yet another learning curve.
I wouldn’t yet call myself a css guru by any stretch of the imagination but I’m getting there. I’m loving the challenge and pretty chuffed at my latest efforts. But this article is about cms so what’s css got to do with it. CSS has given my the confidence to tweak code. Not just regular html but code I’m unfamiliar with. Through a bit of trial and error and a bit persistence and some great help of course using forums I’m able to get the desired result.
Css is only part of the equation. Nowadays I’m finding clients are pretty savvy in what they want. Most clients I find have heard about these sites they can update themselves. Whether they are kept ‘up to date’ is another thing but it’s nice to give them the power. Like they say, who better to write about their topic than those who know it best! So a CMS (Content Management System) is the answer.
Say for instance you’re an affiliate marketeer selling a single product. You might have a landing page, a contact page, a testimonials page.. and that’s about it. There’s no reason to bother with a cms. It’s so much quicker to grab a template, insert the content, some formatting, some links and upload. You won’t need to upgrade anything, you won’t need to maintain a database. Just set and forget in no time at all.
It’s obvious really but here’s a summary to easily identify whether it’s time to install that database.
I did a LOT of research on this topic and even to this day, I simply can’t go past the following:
CMS Made Simple
This was my introduction to the world of CMS. At the time I discovered cms ms I simply found a programmer and told him I ‘wanted a cms’. I was specific about what I wanted, I had already done the design in 
Photoshop but didn’t have a clue what cms platform to ask for. What I got a few days later was my .psd in all it’s dynamic glory powered by cms ms. I got into the admin and started looking around, tweaking this and that. Over the following months got to the point where I could just about do the whole process myself. And that’s saying something, I am NO programmer.
It’s open source (free). It has a friendly, quick to respond community that will help you on your way. It has some great plug-in’s and some templates to get you started.
Wordpress
I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It’s certainly no secret, in fact it’s probably the most popular out there, and for 
great reason. Home of the ‘famous 5 minute install’, it really is simple to install and just as simple to use. The reason it comes 2nd after cms ms is, although you can use the cms plugin to force it to act more like a cms, it’s actually blogging software, so you’re always going to have an application wanting to be just that. I still prefer the templating system in cms ms. I won’t bother writing much more on the WP topic, there is so much info already availble, I would however simply like to point you inthe right direction. It took me ages to work all this out.
Another option
Say you’ve already built a site (I’ve had this happen more than once) and the client is regularly wanting to change text on one or two on the pages regularly. You may like that because it means recurring income for you but you may also want to take a look at this option. It’s very clever and like most app’s I recommend around here, it’s free.
What this one does is convert you’re existing static html pages into dynamic editable pages! So you build a regular static site, then the regions you would like to be editabl, you simple insert some simple tags. Go check it out, theres a video that will explain the process. It’s very clever.
If you’re going to get reasonably serious about web design you’ll need to know a bit about FTP (File transfer Protocol). Put simply, it’s the way you transfer files to and from your website.
continue reading "What is FTP?"
It’s a big question and one that will continue to weave itself continually as long as this site is alive so be sure to subscribe. I’m going to share with you everything I’ve learnt over the past 10 years in the web design industry. As the name suggests, there’ll be nothing too complex. I have so many friends who are realising the potential of the net but not really sure where to start or how it can benefit them. My day job is to educate teachers of the potential of Web 2.0 in the classroom.
continue reading "Getting online - Where to start?"
