If you’re looking for a way for team members and your community partner to collaborate on plans, site content, and more – try using Google Docs. (http://docs.google.com) or the more robust and collaborative Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a).
Don’t worry about the “Premium” version of Google Apps… the Standard free edition should be just fine for almost any project.
YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu. Are they just buzz words that have become part of our daily vocabulary or are they related to a better marketing opportunity? We’ve all hopped on the web video train in the past few years, but there are doubts about whether or not e-commerce sites been making the most of it. New studies and recent reports indicate that adding video to your site can boost conversions, increase customer trust levels, and differentiate your e-commerce site from the competition. Read more…
Part of good web design is having the resources to effectively edit images.
The industry standard is Adobe Photoshop, however it is a very expensive program. Nevertheless, Adobe provides a “Try It” download version. You can install and use it without limitation for 30 days. The same is true for Dreamweaver. You can get both at http://www.adobe.com/download.
A free open-source editor that is similar to Photoshop is GIMP: http://www.gimp.org
One of the contest criteria is a common navigation element, but what exactly does that mean?
From a design standpoint, it means that your site’s visitors will see the same navigational element on every single page. This is most often done via a top or side nav. For example, this website uses a right-side common navigational element that is the exact same thing no matter what page you’re on. There is also a less prominent TOP navigational element that exists for the homepage and About pages.
From a programming standpoint, it means that if possible, the same file should be used on every page Read more…
General, Load Time, Marketing, Programming, Tools and Resources
Social Media and “Web 2.0″ is quickly becoming a very relevant part of any business who wants to compete in 2009. Learn more here: http://www.ebizinsider.com/2008/09/03/using-social-media-optimization-smo-to-drive-traffic-to-your-e-commerce-site/
Some easy-to-integrate social media and web 2.0 applications include: Read more…
There are hundreds if not thousands of hosting providers out there, charging anything from nothing to hundreds of dollars a month. For the purposes of this contest, however, we suggest an entry level account on the following service:
Hostmonster (Linux Hosting)
http://hostmonster.solidcactus.com
One of the criteria for the technology portion of the contest is ensuring your website is compatible in multiple browsers.
Here is a neat program that will allow you to see how your site will render in different versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Beginning with IE 5.5 Microsoft browsers began rendering what I would consider “modern” web standards including CSS. When developing a website in 2009, you really don’t need to worry about programming for browsers before 6.0 in the IE platform.
IE Tester: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
You should also be testing all your sites in:
Mozilla Firefox: http://www.getfirefox.com
Apple Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari
You might also want to… test your sites in Google Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome) and even in mobile browsers since more and more people are surfing the web using their Windows Mobile browsers, iPhones, and Blackberry.
Solid Cactus Senior Project Manager Matt Kresge provides this article on Browser Compatibility Issues: http://www.ebizinsider.com/2008/07/17/testing-1234567-testing-1234567/
Points will be awarded for appropriately declaring a doctype. More information on how this is done is available at: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_DOCTYPE.asp
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