Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

Web Design – Mac or PC?

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Hi,

Once in a while, I use email questions sent to me as the subject of an article, this time the question is about whether someone should use a Mac or a PC if they want to get into web design.

… I’m thinking of becoming a web designer and I was wondering if I would be better off with a Mac or a PC? Is there any advantage to using one over the other when building websites?

Thanks,

Jason

Short answer: there is no real advantage on either PC (Windows) or Mac when it comes to web design. Here are the two reasons why:

  • The technology’s behind websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc…) are universal.
  • All the major software used in web design production can be found on both Mac and PC. The one exception maybe Web Expression from Microsoft.

Outside of web design, some would argue for Mac and others for PC. I use both, but I can see how some might prefer one or the other. That said, prior to the soon to be released Windows 7, Mac has had Windows beat hand-downs … all things considered.

With Windows 7 coming out though, I’ve heard from many reliable nerd sources, that Microsoft has really improved things a lot.

… I will almost certainly be upgrading my XP box when Windows 7 comes out.

Conclusion:

If you are looking to jump into web design, you are pretty much free with regards to which type of computer to get. I would be making my computer choice based on other things, for example:

  • Stability of the operating system.
  • Ease of use.
  • Cost
  • What looks nicer to you!

I hope that helps,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Posted in General, Web Design | No Comments »

Open Video Format comes to Firefox

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Firefox About Window

I just updated to Firefox 3.5.2 in hopes that it might fix some issues I have been having with it on Mac. I can’t say if it has fixed anything yet, but I did discover something new: Firefox now supports the free Open Video Format.

What? Don’t we have Flash already?

Yes, we have Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime and others to embed video into our web pages, but in all those cases, we need to use an outside plugin. With this new video format, you just use plain old HTML!

Some details from Wiki:

As originally recommended by HTML 5, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the video element:

* Mozilla Firefox 3.5
* Google Chrome as of version 3.0.182.2 [1]
* Opera video build

-

Theora is the name of this free video compression format/codec and it produces video quality that is about the same as h.264 – the video format Adobe has decided to use to replace their own FLV format. So it should be pretty good.

To encode your videos into Theora, you will need to find a video encoder that does this. There are already several out there and I am sure more will come out over time … since already several browsers can play Theora videos. For now, you may want to try a video encoder that you can install right into Firefox!

Learn more about Theora.

Final comment

This is cool except for the fact that until Internet Explorer allows us to embed Theora … it’s a no go. Internet Explorer still has the vast majority of browser market, so we as web designers have to build within its’ limitations.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Posted in General, Web Browsers, Web Design | No Comments »

Creating an HTML page with a Mac

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

I am posting this tip again because a lot of people seem to have a hard time finding the answer on the site … I am one them!

… I thought I posted this before, but non of my site searches came up with anything. Here is a common question:

Enjoyed the first video about building web sites. Very clear and to the point. I just have a difficulty since I’m using Mac 10.5.7 and I tried the Text Edit application but didn’t get the same results. I managed to save it to my Desktop as an html file and it did open in the browser but the code just appeared exactly as the code appeared in Text Edit rather than in bold with different font sizes (h6 or h4) or paragraphs and so forth. What am I getting wrong? Am I using the wrong application (SimpleText is an older Mac app).

If you are trying to create an HTML document using a Mac text editor (like Text Edit) and all you are getting is the code being displayed rather than a web page, watch this video on creating an html document with a Mac.

Hope that helps,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Posted in Podcast | Videos, Web Design | No Comments »

Server Migration … ouch! But PHP continues to Rock.

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Hi,

This is just going to be a quick blog post, because I am still busy getting killersites.com up and running properly after an emergency server move I had to make.

The short story …

I had been using the same hosting company for many years and generally with not too many issues. But in the last year, things started to go downhill fast. The server was very slow (overloaded) and it went down way too often.

The last straw that broke my weak nerd-back, was a complete shutdown of my account by some pencil-necked twit who decided that killersites.com had too much traffic … so this no-nothing nerd suspended the account!

… You have to understand, I had been with these guys for 5-6 years, I’ve spoken to the founder/owner on several occasions and they used killersites.com as a feather in their cap:

‘… we proudly host killersites.com.’

So this unannounced shut down of the entire site was shall we say, vexing.

When it get’s that bad, it’s time to leave fast!

A quick threat of legal action got the site back up quickly, but I was warned killersites.com had too much traffic and I had to move it. So, I moved it to our own dedicated servers right away … within hours.

So why did I not change over to our own dedicated server years ago?

Answer: Configuration.

Killersites.com has been around for about 13 years now and it has a lot of old legacy stuff floating around. Specifically, we are talking about old Perl scripts and a couple of Java based web applications.

… Once you get these sort of things working, you’d best leave them alone. That hassle combined with my general laziness caused me to keep killersites.com sitting on the old server, even when some early evidence of trouble started to brew. You can’t underestimate laziness!

Continued trouble …

So as I write, I have still to get the old Java forum up and running again and the Perl based directory is not fully operational. The nice thing though, is that all the PHP based applications:

- Wordpress blogs
- Newsletter script
- PHP based forum (to replace the Java created forum)

… migrated easily and are working fine. Once again, no hassles with PHP and I highly recommend you learn PHP as a web designer.

Bye for now.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Tags: ,
Posted in General, PHP, Real World Web Design | 3 Comments »

When to use sitemaps?

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

I recently had this question put to me:

Hi Stefan,

I found your article while doing a search about sitemaps, so I figured I’d see what your take on it is.

I work at an agency that does small business websites, some as small as 5 or 6 pages, like an online brochure. I know sitemaps are useful, and help with SEO, but it’s part of our standard design to put text links to each page in the footer of each page. I think a sitemap page with 5 links on it is kind of silly, and a waste of space. Should we continue with the sitemaps or do the footer links suffice in those cases?

Thanks a ton!

I agree. Sitemaps are really useful when there is a lot of content in a web site – if you have a really simple site, it is probably overkill.

(more…)

Posted in Professional Web Design, Real World Web Design | 3 Comments »

Can Dreamweaver edit Golive files?

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Hi,

In the following video I answer this question and more importantly, I go into the broader issue of the importance of learning the code behind the web pages – HTML and CSS:

Trying to build websites without a good understanding of HTML and CSS is like petting your cat’s fur the wrong way … it’s a recipe for disaster!

:)

LEARN HTML AND CSS THE EASY WAY

If you need help understanding HTML and CSS, then my Web Design 1 video course will do the trick.

BTW, Golive has been effectively dead since 2008 when Adobe replaced it with Dreamweaver.

Thanks for stopping by.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Posted in Web Design | No Comments »

How to use Youtube to embed videos – Part 2

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Hi,

This is part 2 of my video tutorial on how to use Youtube to deploy videos in web pages. You can may want to also watch part 1 of my Youtube video embed tutorial.

Some final notes:

Video Processing Notes:

Dimensions: 1280 x 720
h.264 (MP4)
5000 kbits/sec

Dimensions: 640 x 480 / 640 x 360
h.264 (MP4)
3000 kbits/sec

Nerd’s Choice: I find 640 x 360 works well for live action videos.

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Posted in General, Podcast | Videos, Web Design | No Comments »

Apple sees 11 million downloads of Safari 4 in three days

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Hi Guys,

This is interesting news for web designers as it seems Safari is even getting traction in the Windows world:

Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of its new Safari 4 web browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by users of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

Some interesting points about the new Safari 4:

- It uses the Nitro JavaScript engine that executes Javascript code several times faster than IE 8 or Firefox 3.

- Safari (according to Apple) renders HTML three times faster than Firefox 3 or IE 8.

And for Mac users, this is an interesting point:

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this September, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent, Apple claims.

Besides the speed improvements, Safari 4 has some really cool features like the Topsites feature that basically gives you a large thumbnail preview of recently viewed web pages.

You can read the full article here:

Apple 11 million downloads …

You can check out Safari’s 150 features here:

Safari’s cool features.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Posted in General, Web Design News | No Comments »

How to use Youtube to embed videos – Part 1

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Hi,

I just released a video where I go into step-by-step detail on how to use Youtube to embed videos in your web pages. This is part one of two.

The video:

Notes from the Video

I assume you have a Youtube account.

There are pro’s and con’s to using Youtube as your means of adding video to your web site:

Pro’s:

- Easy to do, since Youtube provides all the tools you need to embed the video.
- You don’t have to pay for the video bandwidth.

Con’s:

- Videos are public – if you want to embed.
- Youtube branding on your videos.

(more…)

Posted in Web Design | 1 Comment »

Embedding a video into your web pages.

Monday, June 8th, 2009

In the following video, I go over the two basic ways to insert video into your web pages:

1. Using a site like Youtube.
2. Embedding the videos directly using a Flash video player.

I also get into the video formats you can use to embed video in a website:

1. Flash FLV
2. H.264
3. Quicktime video
4. Windows WMV

For details and pro’s and con’s, watch the video:

As you probably noticed, I am using Youtube to deliver this video as part of an ongoing experiment. If you can’t see the video, it is probably because your work place is blocking Youtube. Let me know and I will release another copy of the video on the killersites.com servers.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Posted in Podcast | Videos, Professional Web Design, Web Design | 13 Comments »

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