Web Services and Tools

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In another one of our projects, we had a design that required a white content area with the area behind it filled with a pattern. Unfortunately, the background pattern was something that the client was not happy with at all.

In the interest of time, they asked us if we could find something nice and fix the pattern. Even though this background pattern is a fairly small part of the website, it has a large visual impact on the site. Therefore, it was important that I spend some time finding several options for the client to review. As I carried out a frustrating, time consuming search for mediocre patterns, I ran across the Tiled Backgrounds Desginer website.

Within a few minutes I had three different homepages for review, each with a diiferent pattern and corresponding style. The tools is very easy to use and provides a tabbed interface for building your own background patterns. You have the option of specifying your colors, pattern images, scale, opacity, canvas and even the rotation of the pattern.

I highly recommend this tool for every Web Designers arsenal of tools.

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As you develop your website and the amount of content grows, finding specific bits and pieces rapidly become more of an issue. This can be a problem not only for your users, but also for your content managers. But, why do you need an on site search engine when you gone to all of the trouble of categorizing everything into a nice neat menu system?

Why does my website need search capability?

Very simply, Search is the user’s lifeline when the navigation system fails to direct them to what they need quickly.

In our development projects, one of the biggest issues we have is getting to that one piece of content that requires attention. The project is for a Medical Tourism website, with a database that contains medical procedures and services, partners, hospitals and hotels. These are assigned into categories for the menu system to make it easy for a user to narrow down a list of services before selecting their exact Medical Service. But some visitors want to get directly to the information about the procedure that brought them here in the first place.

The CMS allows us to build a package for our visitors that includes hotel, flights, transfers, information on the Medical facility, additional services and of course, information on the procedure itself. But when we find an issue with the content, and need to get to that one piece of data that requires attention, the process of looking for that bit of information becomes a chore. And with out a proper on site search engine, this could also end up being a chore for our server as it eats up large amounts or processing power and memory.

These are just two of the many examples that demonstrated to us the need for an on site search engine.

What to look for in a Search Engine

Again, simplicity is the key, but there should also be careful consideration to usability. A literal search engine is nice to have, but can reduce the usability of your site in that they are usually unable to handle typos, plurals, hypens, etc. So look for a search engine that is forgiving of the search terms in relationship to these variants. Many search engines can be configured either way by default.

Also steer away from engines that prioritize results based on the number of times the search term is found in a page, rather than on the importance of the document.

Other features that should be considered are:

• Easy installation & setup on your site
• Template functionality - retains the look and feel of your website
• Auto & Manual re-indexing of your content
• Reporting on your visitors queries
• Simple & Advanced search options including Boolean expressions
• High Performance - doesn’t slow down your site during a search request

There are more features offered by many of the popular on site search engine providers. The best way forward, is to Google “website search engine” and start comparing the features offered against your needs.

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Before we begin, perhaps a brief description of what a Content Management System (CMS) is or does would be appropriate. A Content Management System is a system used to organize and facilitate digital content. Originally as simple as a rolodex or encyclopedia, today’s content management systems are elaborate software/database applications designed to store and process large amounts of complex information.

A CMS is usually comprised of a database, the data or images that make up that database, and a web based front end or application for managing the content. The result is a web site that uses the content to dynamically create web pages in a web site.

There are many CMS applications available for web site applications today. In fact, WordPress is a form of CMS in that it stores the content for the blog and displays it in a dynamic manner. I myself am currently involved in a project to build a CMS for a medical tourism company, and it is no small challenge.

My experiences over the last few months have taught me a lot about certain elements of a CMS that I didn’t realize were so important to the larger picture. For example, it has been made clear to our development team that the Sales people refuse to learn or use the CMS to create content to resell on the site. So we have had to revise an internal process that lets our sales people create content in their favorite application and pass this onto a CMS Team to add the content into the site and keep it updated. The result was additional resource and additional cost to run the system.

This is just one instance of the many challenges we have faced. But I found this little gem in my search for some assistance on CMS planning and implementation. This article, Better Content Management through Information Architecture by Massod Nasser, helps to define the elements critical to deploying a CMS. While some of these issues may not be as critical for a one-man shop, the strategies and planning methods outlined are worthy of consideration for anyone contemplating, or currently deploying a Content Management System.

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Finding a tool that let’s you polish up your photos for the web is not an easy task. Some photo editing tools are so feature packed, they become a little too difficult to use for the average computer user. So we went searching for online photo editing tools to see what was available and we’ve found three products that we think meet the needs of most.

The tools are Picnik, Splashup and Snipshot. All three allow you to upload a photo from your computer or from the Internet. Both Picnik and Snipshot also have a Premium upgrade that gives you far more photo enhancing effects to choose from than just the standard freebie package. Here is our brief take on each of the tools.

Picnik

Registration for a free account was extremely easy and didn’t take you through the email validation process that is common today. There are more photo effects available to the free user than with Snipshot, and the premium upgrade is the least expensive of the tools at $24.95 for one year, or about $2 per month.

Splashup

This was our favorite because it opened up a familiar application window when we were ready to get started with our photo editing. Registration was very simple with no email verification. And all of the effects are available with your free registration, but there are not as many effects as Picnik offers to premium subscribers. There was no Premium membership option available for this tool.

Snipshot

There was no registration required for us to upload a photo and add some effects. However, the effects available to the free user are very limited. The good news is the premium membership is the most expensive at $9 per month, the good news being that you only needed to buy a month premium membership at a time instead of a full year.

We recommend you to try out all three and make the choice for yourself.

Happy photo editing!

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If you are just starting out in your online business venture, or you have been running your own site for a while, Google Webmaster Tools should be the one tool that you have in your arsenal of website analytics tools.

This website tool will let you analyze all of your web sites and help you to understand how Google sees your site as it exists today. Based on the information here, you can fine tune your web site to present it in the manner you desire.

To get started, you should visit the site and add one of your web sites to the list. You will then need to verify that you are the site owner. This verification is done in one of two ways; adding a specially named file to the root directory of your web site, or adding a meta tag into the HEAD section of your home page. If you have your own domain name, either option is easy. If you are running a blog on a site like Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad, you will need to edit the template file that contains your HEAD tag information. In Wordpress this is done by going into the dashboard for your blog, clicking ‘Presentation’, ‘Theme editor’, and editing the ‘header.php’ file. Just find the line that says BODY and insert the tag Google gives you just above this line.

Now you’re ready. When you visit the Webmaster Tools site again, you are greeted with the Dashboard. From here you can add and delete sites, manage site maps, and click through to more detailed reports about how your site is indexed. Once you select the site that you want more detail on, you are given a number of options to choose from; Diagnostics, Statistic, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

The Diagnostics are will tell you what problems Google encountered while crawling your website. These problems could include HTTP errors, pages that weren’t found or restricted, or just simply URLs that could not be reached. If you have pages optimized for mobile devices, you can view any issues with those pages as well. Google has recently added a Content Analysis option to his page as well to identify any issues they found with Page Titles or Meta descriptions or non-indexable content. Who says Google doesn’t care about Meta data?

In the Statistics area, Google will show you when your site was included in the search results, terms that returned your site and the position your site placed in that particular search on average. This is very valuable for determining what keywords your site is linked associated with.

This area will also show you Google’s take on your site. This is probably the most powerful part of the tool. You can see what words are used in links back to your site, the keywords Google has identified on your site, and the list of keywords on other sites that link to you. This is all very important to determining your Google Page Rank. You can see what your Google Page Rank is from the Crawl Stats link under Statistics. This will not be a number, but will be a subjective result based on Google Analysis.

Statistics will also show you your indexing stats link the pages indexed, names of sites that link to you, the cached page of your site, etc.

The Links area is pretty cool because it will show you a list of your web pages that other web sites have linked to. From there, you can drill down and see the exact URL of the pages that link to that page. You can also see how the internal page linking for your website is understood by Google.

In the Sitemaps area, you can manage and submit a sitemap for each of your web sites. This really helps Google in indexing your site, but is not a requirement. You can generate a Google Sitemap from the XML Sitemaps web site automatically, and then upload the files to your server. This might not be possible for bloggers use free blogging tools, but the Sitemaps tool is only an option and not a requirement for using Webmaster Tools.

The last area is the Tools section. Here, there are various tools that Google provides to help analyze the different aspects of your web site that are important to a crawler like the robots.txt file, your preferred domain reference, the geographic target of your web site, and more.

Each of tools and sections described come with online help and very clear descriptions of what each tool is doing and how to use it. The tools are easy to use and will help you learn a lot about how Google sees your web site and what you can do to help it place better in the search results.

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We’ve just run across this wonderful new tool from COLOURlovers.

Getting the perfect color or color scheme for your web site, or graphic can be difficult. The most difficult part is remembering those cryptic hex codes or RGB codes for your favorite color.

So the folks at COLOURlovers created a color picker tool. But the best part is this tool is free, and they’re making the code available to put on your website.

As we are always scouring the web looking for useful Web Tools for our visitors, we will be putting this on our site. But we thought we should let our visitors know they have the option to get a hold of this tool as well to benefit their web design efforts.

You can get the code here.

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I can’t tell you how many times I have been designing a web site and come to a point where I say to myself, “I wish I had a really cool looking button for this section.”

So I start up Adobe Photoshop, of which my skills are somewhat lacking, and I attempt to create a stunning button. Hours later, I have a so-so graphic that looks like something a 3 year old drew with a crayon. Not my desired result and a major waste of time.

So I was very pleased to run across this fantastic online tool for creating very cool looking buttons. It takes very little effort on my part, but looks like I know my stuff when it comes to creating graphics.

In four easy steps, you too can have a Web 2.0 button that looks as stunning as the one shown here.

Step 1 - Select the size of your button with the handy slider bar

Step 2 - Select a color for your button

Step 3 - Optionally use a predefined, or uploaded, icon in the button and size it

Step 4 - Select your Text, font style, size and color

Click ‘Apply’ and there you have your newly created, stunning looking Web 2.0 button. Don’t like it? Then revisit any step and click ‘Apply’ again. When you like what you see, just download it to your computer by clicking the ‘Download’ button.

What could be easier? And better yet, what else can make me look like the web design professional I wish I was?

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What the heck is fring?!

First, the boring description … fring is a VoIP application that allows you to make calls, chat with your friend and view real-time presence of your contact, and that works anywhere in the world.

I know, “so what” you say. “I already have an application that does that”.

You’re probably right. But what if I said that fring is a mobile VoIP application for your mobile phone? What if I told you it uses your mobile phones wi-fi or mobile data plan to allow you to make VoIP calls and live chat? Interested yet?

What if I also told you that in addition to being able to perform all of these functions among fring users, you could also seamlessly integrate fring with your Skype, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Twitter, AIM and Yahoo! accounts? Ahhh, now I have your attention! For the more advanced technology crowd, you can even setup your own SIP account and use it through Fring.

We have been using fring for about 6 months now and we are well impressed with it’s features and performance. Initially, we had some issues with connectivity, but the latest version of fring uses Wispr technology to manage your access points and allow you to experience near seamless Wi-Fi roaming between access points and 3G networks. This was the deciding factor in making this a standard application on all of our corporate handsets. The roaming still isn’t as seamless as roaming between mobile cell sites, but once you setup the connections settings for the wi-fi access points you use, you won’t be able to notice the difference.

How does it work? The website has a good section on how fring works? There are also videos on the different fring features, fring ringtones (fringtones), and a fringME widget that web site owners can put on their website to let others see when they are online with quick “click to chat” and “click to find me” options. Unfortunately, the widget only works with a limited number of handsets that support GPS positioning.

We hope you enjoy this new web tool as much as we have.

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Running a successful business means that I am in a lot of meetings during the day, socializing in the evenings and rarely in front of my computer. When I am in front of the computer, it is usually spent catching up on the news items I’ve missed and clearing out the Inbox. But my biggest problem, is when I am in a meeting, it never fails, I need access to a file or “that email” so I have a reference point for discussion. Well, I found a solution …

This little application allows me to access the files and folders on my PC in the office (and at home), my Outlook folders (Inbox, calendar, etc.) , my Desktop search application (currently Google Desktop), and Skype remotely. And when I’m using a method of remote access, it is a secure method as well. It is available for both the PC and Mac platforms.

To get started, you need to go to the Soonr website, register and download the Soonr Desktop application. This application is a resident application that stays active on your PC and controls the access to the selected content on your PC.

Once you have the Soonr Desktop installed, configure the folders you want remote access to, and active the programs that you want to access as well with a user name and password. You can also configure your mobile device for remote access.

That’s it!

Now, as for remote access, I personally use a Nokia E65 equipped with Wi-Fi. I have activated access to my Outlook folders, a few folders where I store attachments, my folder for all of my pictures, and my MP3 files, and I have activated Google Desktop and Skype for remote access. So next time I am in a meeting and I need that attachment or email, I simply access my PC using my mobile phone. I have also been in a situation where I needed to access files or my calendar from another PC, and this works fine from the Soonr Web Login panel.

I actually have this installed on my Work PC, Home PC and my Laptop, so I can access files from any of my machines. Best of all, I can make Skype calls from my mobile phone. While this isn’t the only option for making free calls, it is a quick solution for contacting people that are online when I really need something.

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