Websmitten web design

It’s that time again. I bought a new laptop for my business when my home-made desktop died in 2004. It was in the middle of a project, so I needed a new computer immediately. I went to Costco and bought an HP Pavilion dv4000 - which I have been very happy with. It was a good price, and it’s been reliable, has good battery life, excellent graphics… Now it has become slow, there are several glitches in my software, and a crack in the top of the case on the back of the display. So it is almost 5 in human years - what is that in computer years? According to this web calculator - 20 years. So I could wipe the thing and rebuild it and probably get another good year out of it. That would take me a couple of weeks probably - I could be functional in a day or two. But being a pregnant mother of two kids under 5, I have to work in increments of an hour or so…

So I am considering now as the time to finally become a Mac shop. I’ve always loved Macs, but have always been too cheap to own one. Way back when I did tech support for ARCO, 3 or 4 of us could man the phones and support our whole company using Macs. When we converted to a PC shop, we had to double our staff on the phones and still had trouble keeping up. We thought it might be just the pain of the transition, but the phone support traffic never died down  - even on into a couple of years past the migration. Macs are reliable.

And they are hard to beat when it comes to graphics.

They are slick in design, sleek in software, almost impervious to viruses…

Mac users are almost cult-like in their loyalty. Which means they love them. There must be good reason, surely?

So why have I waited so long to switch? It’s not just the expense - it’s also the software. I have already purchased the software I need for the PC platform. And there are tons of free apps out there that I use that aren’t written for the Mac.

But now the time has come where I need to upgrade my laptop AND my software… So I can make the jump.

Here is what I’m considering:

• 2.4GHz MacBook Pro 15.4″ with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz / 2GB RAM / 250GB Hard Drive / NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT / SuperDrive / iSight Webcam / Bluetooth / Extreme WiFi / Mac OS X Leopard- $1,849 from JR.com
• Switch my Adobe CS3 Design Premium to CS4 Web Premium for $440 (offer lasts until April 30, 2009) on a Mac platform - or just pay the fee to switch my current CS3 to the Mac platform ($?)
• Get iWorks 2008 $79
• Switch from Microsoft Money to Quicken online for free
• Use something like Billings 3 Professional from http://www.billingsapp.com for $39.99 (this is a Mac application)

I’m not sure if I’m thinking of everything I need, but that is the basics to keep me going. So that total is about $1,968 (or $2,408 if I upgrade to CS4).

If I were to upgrade my current situtaion and stay PC:

• A new HP Pavilion 2.4GHz / 4GB RAM / 320GB Hard Drive / Geforce 9600M GT / Blu-Ray / Webcam / 802.11AGN / Bluetooth / Vista Home Premium 64-Bit from JR.com would run me $1,150.
• Upgrade to CS4 for $440
• Upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007 Professional upgrade $270

Total $1,860. If I don’t upgrade to CS4 or Microsoft Office, then just the $1,150.

I use a plug in called reCAPTCHA on several of my WordPress sites. It’s a little program that shows you a picture of a combination of letters for you to type in that prove you are human and not a spammer. I figured CAPTCHA stood for something about character recognition, but I was curious why it was called ‘re’CAPTCHA. Well, I just ran across an article in the Christian Science Monitor about reCAPTCHA. It’s actually quite ingenious. http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/02/19/recaptcha-how-to-turn-blather-into-books/

I have been using the Kimili Flash Embed plug in for WordPress, and, of course, I’m always doing something a little out of the ordinary that’s not working. Recently, I’ve been trying to post movies. I’ll import the movie into FLASH which turns it into an FLV file. Then I add a skin and publish a SWF player. I upload the FLV, the SWF and the skin SWF. Firefox was showing the movie with no skin. So was IE, but IE gave me the error I needed to track down the solution. First, it was showing that it wasn’t taking skin location from the same directory as the FLV and the SWF. So to fix that, I went into the FLA and under Parameters, changed the skin to the full http path. Then, IE showed I was getting a sandbox security violation. Thankfully, Nicole Rutter’s blog had already figured out this one: http://nicole.cfwebtools.com/index.cfm/2008/8/1/Error-2044-Unhandled-skinError-textError-2121-Security-sandbox-violation. Thanks, Nicole! It works!

Oh, and don’t forget to tell Kimili that you want to allow fullscreen mode if you chose a skin that has a fullscreen button, for example: [kml_flashembed movie="http://standrewswichita.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/vbs2008-controls.swf"  allowfullscreen="true"/]

Decent prices - http://www.discountmountainsoftware.com

Found a great site today that explains how to build your own WordPress template. It’s also good for referencing which PHP pages are being utilized on different parts of your WordPress site: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/building-custom-wordpress-theme/

Yay! Finally, after all these weeks, ImpactsAlaska.com is indexed! Apparently, it really does just take 6 to 8 weeks for Googlebot to come back around and re-index you. Posting at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters was definitely the key to finding out what was going on. I actually got a real, live Google employee answering one of my posts. That really did lift the curtain on the wizard. It was good to clean up the site and make it more search engine friendly, but the biggest key was just removing the privacy setting on WordPress and waiting from December 8-ish all the way until January 29th.

There it is, finally listed in Google. Isn't it beautiful?

Another art show/contest has been launched from Orbs of Happiness. We designed a postcard-type flyer this time:

Here’s what the front looks like. This was done in photoshop with a photo of my daughter Eliza playing with watercolors. We put more details on the back. More info at http://www.orbsofhappiness.org

Wow, more and more folks are creating wonderful WordPress Templates - that are easy to customize, too! We just re-did the look of St. Andrews Lutheran website and it only took 2 hours to get it looking like we wanted. It was already a WordPress site - all we had to do was upload the design we found, go into the Appearance features and set several options, and upload our own graphics. WordPress just keeps getting easier and easier.

Our old design was based on an earlier template I had found, too. But here’s the difference - I had to do all the customizations through the CSS and PHP files myself. That’s no problem for me, but whenever you mess with code, you have to maintain it. So, better, more customizable templates save my clients money.

Take a look at the updated site: www.standrewswichita.org. Our primary motivation for change was the previous menu was down the left hand side and had quickly grown out of control. It was difficult to find what you were looking for and difficult to keep updated. The new design has a drop down menu across the top. It looks cleaner and now it’s easy to see what’s there. Yay!

I’m still working on ImpactsAlaska.com to get that Google listing back. Found a great video from Google about how to interpret the ‘bounce rate’ of a site. Basically, the bounce rate is the rate at which people come to your site and leave immediately, for whatever reason. A typical site’s bounce rate ranges from 40%-60%. Here’s the google video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppgfjo6IIf4.

Alaska Pacific University went live with their new website and my flash accordion file is on their front page! Very cool. Sundog Media designed it but needed a flash contractor (me) to create it for them - check it out at http://www.alaskapacific.edu!