Found out from a friend today that Dreamweaver 8 (Studio 8) is not fully compatible with Mac’s new Intel based computers yet but instead is using an emulation software called Rosetta. Rosetta allows software that is PowerPC compatible to be run on the new Intel based computers. Adobe’s next release of the Studio (and Photoshop3) should all be fully compatible but for now we have to make do until the new releases come out.

Been noticing my Dreamweaver has been kinda slow compared to my previous PC experience so thats why I did some research.

When buying software for Macs, look for the Universal symbol – that lets you know the application is using Apple’s Xcode and means it runs natively on both the new Intel-based Mac computers and on legacy PowerPC-based Mac systems.

This PDF might be helpful – I know it was for me.

PDF from Adobe

Hope this helps some other Mac newbies out there.

I normally require 50% of the project cost up front before starting any work. The final 50% is due upon project completion. I send invoices for you to keep for your records.

Payment is due as soon as possible but I normally give clients up to a month to make payments. After a month, there is a $100/month fee for late payments.

We accept the following methods of payment:

• Paypal
• Cash
• Check
• Visa
• Mastercard
• Discover
• American Express

Many clients come to me and want the ability to update all or some of the pages of the site on their own. Sometimes they may have changing prices, new sales events and specials, they want to display different ads in different seasons or they just want to have that sense of control over their site text.

Many tools are available on the market today for what are called Content Management Systems or CMS.

One method I use is to create a ‘backdoor’ for a client with a listing of pages. Each page has a content box and that content box is where text edits can be done. They hit ‘Update’, the data is sent to a database and then the site updated on the front end.

Another option is to purchase a copy of Contribute, a product by Adobe (formerly Macromedia). Contribute connects to your web server, where the files are stored, and lets you edit the content of the site pages using a nice GUI editor, similar to Microsoft Word.

These are just two examples, but I know there are many other type systems on the market today. If you are a web developer and know of another CMS system, please feel free to share your ideas here on this forum.

Link: Content Management System

Finally found a nice FTP client for my new Mac – Transmit.

If you came from a PC like me you are probably familiar with other FTP clients like Filezilla, WSFTP or IPSwitch.

Pros:
These all pretty look the same – your PC is on the left and the server you are connecting to is on the right. I like that, am use to it, and work faster that way. And that’s how Transmit is.

Other FTP clients for Mac like Fetch did not have the 2 panes and it was hard for me to adjust.

Cons:
However, Transmit is $29.95 so it is on the pricey side for an FTP client.

Link: Transmit by Panic

I found a really nice tool tip maker for a website I’m currently finishing up.

I normally do 50% up front and 50% when it’s done. However, this was a special rush case so I went ahead and did the work.

What other guidelines do other web designers/developers out there use for pricing and getting paid?

I recently ran into a CSS issue that I could not figure out. I wound up contacting Richard over at Akira Media about it and he sent me to this site:

http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/08/29/

It describes a technique using CSS that will keep a footer at the bottom of a browser window no matter how big the browser gets or how big the content gets.

Note: you must know the height of the footer for it to work and I wound up having to use some line breaks (
) inside the div tag right before the #footer div to make it work. I tested it on IE7 and the latest Mozilla and it seemed to work ok.

I was looking on the web the other day trying to find something. When I roll over an image on my company’s website, I wanted a nice little image or something to appear with some instructions or something.

Here’s what I did with AValive. Roll your mouse over the large image on the homepage.

I wasn’t sure what they were called but now I know they are called ‘tool tips’.

But, I didn’t want just any tool tip, I wanted the trendy bubbly kind, and I wanted the code to be handed to me on a silver platter so I didn’t have to write anything myself.

Lo and behold I found the ultimate bubbly tool tip site:

http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/scripts/bubble-tooltip/bubble-tooltip.html

Here is a link to a site where you can validate your website’s css.

http://validator.w3.org/

You simply type in the url of the page you want to check and click ‘Check’. This will validate your site’s markup and return a page that will either congratulate you on your excellent coding skills or tell you all the bad things about your css.

Having valid css and html is important for good SEO because…..well, I’m not really sure why but I would think the cleaner your site and the less errors and bugs you have the better.

The cleaner your code is, the easier it is for spiders to search your site. There…I think that’s probably the reason why – I guess. 🙂