The Traditional Website is Dead

Jun 26, 2009

A recent post by the amazing Jeffery Zeldman lead me to discover WaSP's Web Standards Curriculum, and I was so excited to see what great topics they were proposing, I started to think why. And here it is, the traditional website is dead. The days of a personal or business' brochure style website are long gone, replaced by RIA's and robust web applications. Users expect an experience, not some plain ordinary website with an address and some pictures. They want to comment, watch videos, and get your RSS feed, and if you don't offer those things, they often are not interested because you appear outdated. This is where college's are getting it wrong.
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Stay Ahead of the Curve and Impress Your Friends with HTML5

Jun 23, 2009

HTML5 is creeping up everywhere. Browser support is getting better almost daily, and many HTML5 elements are already supported. On top of that, mingle in some CSS3 and you have a cutting edge website that is forward thinking. I can almost hear the skeptics now "HTML5 is not a W3C recommendation!". Just because it is not a recommendation doesn't mean you can't use it. You just have to keep your demographic in mind. I can almost guarantee, most people viewing this website are using the latest browsers. Not to mention, this is my personal site, and personally, I like to dabble in the latest toys.
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I Should Have Coded it Myself

Jun 06, 2009

This week has been kind of frustrating from a developers point of view. I am working on a project that has three completely different sections of a website, each with their own permissions and functionalilty. With so much involved in these systems, I thought it would be a good idea to use pre-built software packages and edit them to fit what I am trying to accomplish. That is where the trouble has started.
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Dreamweaver: An HTML editor. Nothing More

May 29, 2009

For those of you that are not familiar with Dreamweaver, it is an HTML editor that is an Adobe product and it distributed as part of the Creative Suite currently in version four. It is a great tool for a beginning web designer. It allows you to drag things around in design view seeing what it should look like in a web browser. The power of Dreamweaver lies in its integration with other Adobe products (i.e. Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash). Unfortunately, this is where the power of Dreamweaver stops. In today's dynamic web, the use of blogs, a CMS, and lots of database interaction is very common if not almost mandatory. And that is where Dreamweaver sucks.
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Midwest Digital Conference 09

May 12, 2009

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural Midwest Digital Conference. If you live in the Midwest and did not attend this event, you missed something big. It contained a huge panel of experts, all with a different take on social media and how it can effectively be used.
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