I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do have an eye on things OUTSIDE the web design world … I pay attention to the stock market. Anyway, according to analysts who follow Adobe for investment purposes (Adobe is a large publicly traded company) Adobe should be releasing the CS5 suite of products by second quarter 2010.
… For non stock nerds, that means about mid 2010.
About the Adobe CS5 product line
Adobe (as is usual) will be releasing Photoshop CS5, Dreamweaver CS5, Flash CS5 and all the other CS5 updates at the same time. And from the previews I’ve seen, it’s going to be a big update in terms of the new capabilities CS5 brings to the table:
Flash will have 3D physics – totally nuts!
Photoshop has new crazy powerful cloning tools.
Dreamweaver will make it really easy to insert live data into web pages via AJAX.
… And I’m sure a heck of a lot more.
We will have many videos and articles covering these new products when they become available.
Every now and then I post a blog entry based on emails that I get. This time, someone asked a bunch of questions about SEO and gaining organic position on the search engines.
Because I am a lazy guy, I am just writing the answers to the questions … I think you can figure out what the questions were.
My ‘killer’ SEO reality-check tips:
Hi Wendy,
No one can guarantee #1 listings … not even Google! There is constant competition and thus positions will shift with time.
…. But, you can improve your positions on the search engines with proper SEO and web marketing efforts. In todays world, where there are a lot of websites to compete against … it takes work.
Are there ONLY three people in all of Australia who know how to position sites on Google properly? I doubt it … and I think there are probably more. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who CLAIM they know what they are doing yet they have nothing to show for it!
Would you need to rebuild your website completely – to be search engine friendly? Probably not, but you may have to restructure things if it is a really big mess SEO wise.
I just made a blog post on killerphp.com about the Killersites University, you know … a little shameless self promotion to stoke the flames of capitalism.
Anyway, within minutes of making the post, Google emailed me an alert (a ‘Google Alerts’) about the post I just made – I’m talking literally 2-3 minutes!!
… Google is getting to be hyperbolic fast – jacked up on search engine roids or something!
😉
What are Google Alerts?
Just in case you don’t know, Google has this service called Google Alerts, where you can ask Google to send you emails about any keywords you want to spy on. For me, I track the term ‘killersites.com’ to see who’s stealing my content and to track what the general buzz is, if any, on what I do here.
What can I say … Google kicks ass. Good luck to Bing and Yahoo.
We just launched the our video tutorial subscription service (Killersites University) about a week ago and we are getting very positive feedback so far:
I am getting through them easier than I thought…up to the second CSS lesson. Great site, by the way. I ALMOST signed up for a college/university course. Very glad I didn’t. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.
Mike Ouellette
Provincial Student Information Systems Consultant
And about our PHP training video courses:
Great!!! I am just getting started learning Php so I had purchased the book “PHP and MySQL Web Development – great book but I found your videos much easier to understand. Thank you for making PHP alittle easier to comprehend : ) I know I have alot to learn ahead of me though.
Sincerely,
David
… There’s more, but you get the idea.
More video added to the collection
As promised, we already added new content to the University – about 40 minutes of video on basic web design, WordPress and embedding videos with Youtube. Not a bad start, but we are just warming up … our authors are working on new content (videos and articles) and so you can expect much more to come out soon.
After a couple of months of hard work, we finally got the new video tutorial subscription system up and running.
About the University:
The Killersites University is a subscription based service that gives you total access to our GROWING collection of web design and web design related training videos. Not just a collection of tips and tricks videos, we provide complete video courses on popular subjects like:
* HTML
* CSS
* Dreamweaver
* PHP
* Javascript
* and much more
Now that we have the University up and running, we will be able to focus a lot more time on new videos. Subscribe to the RSS feed or one of my newsletters to keep up-to-date.
I occasionally use email questions sent to me as the basis for a quick article; this time around I had a question about Drupal:
Just enjoyed your website introduction video. I am a senior but am still a regular producer of ads books and booklets for my church, having been a printer all my life. A member has set up a Drupal site – I have been asked to ‘smarten it up’ – I am new to it but I don’t see to prospect of arriving at a graphically attractive site from that program. I think I would be better suggesting we start afresh and build our own site.
In 1995 David Siegel wrote one of the most important books on web design Creating Killer Websites. He taught in the book, the future of how the Web should look.
… I still have a copy on my bookshelf after all these years.
David is about to release a new book that should also be a ‘killer’ – Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business
I’ve just started reading about Pull on David’s new site and I’m anxiously waiting to get my copy of the book. This time around, I’m not going to be late to the game.
From the Amazon editorial:
The first clear guide to the Semantic Web and its upcoming impact on the business world
Imagine that, in 1992, someone handed you a book about the future of something called the World Wide Web. This book claimed that through a piece of software called a “browser”, which accesses “web sites”, the world economy and our daily lives would change forever. Would you have believed even 10 percent of that book? Did you take advantage of the first Internet wave and get ahead of the curve?
Pull is the blueprint to the next disruptive wave. Some call it Web 3.0; others call it the semantic web. It’s a fundamental transition from pushing information to pulling, using a new way of thinking and collaborating online. Using the principles of this book, you will slash 5-20 percent off your bottom line, make your customers happier, accelerate your industry, and prepare your company for the twenty-first century. It isn’t going to be easy, and you don’t have any choice. By 2015, your company will be more agile and your processes more flexible than you ever thought possible.
The semantic web leads to possibilities straight from science fiction, such as buildings that can order their own supplies, eliminating the IRS, and lawyers finally making sense. But it also leads to major changes in every field, from shipping and retail distribution to health care and financial reporting.
Through clear examples, case studies, principles, and scenarios, business strategist David Siegel takes you on a tour of this new world. You’ll learn:
-Which industries are already ahead.
-Which industries are already dead.
-How to make the power shift from pushing to pulling information.
-How software, hardware, media, and marketing will all change.
-How to plan your own strategy for embracing the semantic web.
We are at the beginning of a new technology curve that will affect all areas of business. Right now, you have a choice. You can decide to start preparing for the exciting opportunities that lay ahead or you can leave this book on the shelf and get left in the dust like last time.
I am a big believer in WordPress as a platform for web designers to build off of … why only give your clients a simple static site, when you can for the same price, provide them with all the bells and whistles that a WordPress based site can give you:
built-in search.
ability for non-nerds to upload images and add new pages.
built in password protected pages.
… And man, there is much more.
Anyway, you ought to learn how to use this blog engine (like creating WordPress templates) … or any other, if you want to beat the competition these days. Other WordPress like blog engines/CMS’ you may want to consider include:
– Drupal
– Joomla
– Movable Type
… There are many others out there, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I chose WordPress a few years back because it was powerful enough for my needs and it had a huge community to lean on – and it still does.
WordPress 2.9 just released
The nerds in charge of WordPress seem to have no lives … they just keep coming out with new versions it seems like almost every three weeks! OK, it is isn’t that often but it still is moving along at a pretty faced pace.
Some of the new features in these release:
1. Global undo/â€trash†feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure†messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
