Building Websites is for the birds!

In my mind there is really no reason to build small websites anymore.  There really is no reason to build large ones anymore either. Leave the website building to people who want to break even.  They’re not worth the stress from
clients and the hassle of communication problems.  Plus you could spend a month off an on building a site and only make a weeks worth of pay , which may be fine if you are only freelancing and don’t have a regular job and you can line up several sites at a time.

Let’s build applications!

I want to make something that people can use, want to use and solves problems.  How do you do that?  Simply think of things that happen to you everyday that make you say to yourself, “that’s pretty stupid, there is a way better way to do this!”.

So lets build something that helps people.  Makes things better.  Lets build an application that can be mobile and also can aggragate medical records.  Lets put all school records in a place that people who need to see them can.  Lets do something that makes sense.

Who’s with me?

Send me a comment, and email, or $200,000.00 and we can start this right away.

Joomla 1.6

Joomla has just released their stable version of Joomla 1.6.  Their major improvement is the new ACL.  This major improvement in user/member management will have developers happy that they will no longer have to hack the core of Joomla to make these kind of changes.

Like any ACL system it is based on

• actions
  What can someone do e.g. read, edit, install
• assets
  What can you do it on e.g. News category
• users
  Who can do it e.g. Peter, Paul, Mary

Both assets and users can be grouped together to make things easier to set things up for your web site. That means you can combine a set of assets into one group if they are going to be used by one user or a group of users.  There a ton of other updates that can all be seen at the link below.

What’s New in Joomla 1.6

Drupal 7

Drupal seven just came out about a week ago and I tried it out to see what major differences there are from 6.

• The first thing that stands out after install is the new User Interface.  You don’t need to be logged into the administrative area of your Drupal install to make some text changes to the front end of your site (of course you have to be logged in).
• Drual finally put fields in their core.  You can Image Handle so you can crop, resize and other manipulations now. But thye did not put fields in the core of user profiles.
• New and Improved update manager
• Public and Private Files!!!
• Theme Improvements

Below is a link with Drupa’s new changes

What’s New in Drual 7

The Best

Product: CFWebstore

CFWebstore is a ColdFusion cart created and maintained by Mary Jo. I don’t even use ColdFusion anymore but I still stick with this cart if the clients hosting platform allows for it.  Maybe it is because I have created so many stores with it but I really think it is Mary Jo’s online support.  Mary has chat open from her site (cfwebstore.com) for any questions or issues.  It seems the chat is online around 5 hours a day.  For a quick question this is great area.  Mary herself is not usually the one you are chatting with but the person there now is very knowledgeable with CFWebstore and is still a great resource.  Mary is more of an open participator in her yahoo group for cfwebstore.  I know if I put up a question that is not totally insane, someone (more than likely Mary) will be answering my question or at least following it up with follow up questions.

Product: WPPortfolio

WPPortfolio is a WordPress plugin created by WPDoctors.  This is one of my favorite plugins, easy to use, and exactly what i needed for a simple web portfolio.  I have blogged about this plugin in the past but it was for its usefulness, now I am blogging about it because of the support I received on a free product.

I’ve had issues in the past updating the plugin and I couldn’t figure out why.  I spent around 2 hours trying to figure out why after the update I was getting errors.  I decided I would email the creators since there was nothing I could find on forums or any other blogs.  It took about 8 hours but Dan from WordPress Doctors emailed me back.

Even though Dan did not resolve my issue and I figured it out myself, he was nice enough to go back in forth about 4 times through email, trying to help me even though this was a free plugin and I in no way paid one dime for any type of support.  Just from this alone if I ever need a plugin created from scratch WordPress Doctors will be the first place I get an estimate from.

The Worst

Product: Inmotion Hosting

I have been using Inmotion Hosting for a few years now, and I am currently still using it for this site.  I had no issues the first year of my hosting with Inmotion until I tried to add to my hosting package (actually give them more money).  I went on their chat and asked my questions about my options and when I asked to purchase this upgrade they said it would take a few days to make this change.  I really needed to get this new sites hosting taken care of and have everything pointing correctly so I could get a nice Parking page up.  I asked if there was anything they could do to get it up that day (8 hours) and they still said no, so I told them never-mind and to take my auto-renew for my hosting off, they didn’t even try to help me out or go above and beyond in any way.  I moved that site to a new host and had my parking page up within 12 hours (because of DNS propagation).

Before this all happened I had actually gotten the company I work for to sign up with a pretty nice sized hosting package through InMotion, I also got two other people to open up InMotion accounts during the first year I was hosting with InMotion.  Their hosting is just not good. Its so basic and you pay much much more than say justhost.com.   Some more issues with InMotion always happen during their chat and all usually about the same issue.  For some reason InMotion servers have hiccups or are restarted every so often usually during the week anywhere from 9-5 EST, which couldn’t be a worst time to do anything that would take sites down.  Each time I have noticed a site or server is down, I will jump on their chat and notify them.  Instead of them being thankful that I let them know, they usually say something stupid about how my DNS for my domain isn’t pointing correctly, or they will ask me a million questions before they will check in with it, hoping by the time I answer all their crap the server will have restarted.

I have officially taken all my sites of InMotion Hosting’s servers and have transitioned them to my new host. So far no issues.  Cross your fingers.

1.  Lightbox Plus

Lightbox Plus is a great tool for displaying any of your pictures within your blog in a Lightbox.  You get about 15 different styles to choose from, and 2 different transitions.  You can also change the opacity of the overlay that is applied behind your lightbox.

Not only can you use the lightbox for individual images in your blog but you can also have slideshows, and galleries (Must use WP Gallery plugin).  Visit the plugin’s site.

2. cforms

Ever want to have a form on your site for contact, or any other reason?   Hate plugin forms that have no versitality?  With cforms it is simple and easy to style and create multiple  Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.  cforms will then Email you with the end-user’s inputted data.

cforms has a place to edit CSS and also an API for building dynamic forms. You can basically do anything you want with it, if you know enough!   If you are looking for a form choose cforms, don’t even bother with the rest.  View the plugin’s site.

3.  WP to top

So lets say you have 5 blog posts on your homepage and an end-user has to scroll a mile to get to the bottom of your webpage, now he/she remembers something towards the top of your homepage that they wanted to read. Are you really going to make them go through the hassle of scrolling all the way back up?  You don’t need to anymore.  With WP to top you can place a “Back to top” button that when clicked will automatically scroll the user back to the top of the page.

This plugin doesn’t have too many options but if you know any CSS you will be able to find the styles and do what you need to do to make it your own.  This is a great tool to keep people on your site instead of getting frustrated with scrolling and leaving.  Visit the plugin’s site.

4. Fixed Social buttons

Fixed Social buttons is a great WordPress plugin to hook in a place for users to submit a post they like to their favorite social sites.  You can select from a variety of social sites to submit the posting or page to.  This plugin also seems to be updated quite regularly. Fixed Social buttons has these options:

• Choose beetween 3 button styles.
• Show button on top or bottom.
• You can also hide some buttons.
• Open social bookmarks links in a new or in the same window
• Set with « rel=’nofollow’ » attribute or not on social bookmarks
• You can show buttons in horizontal or vertical axe.

Also the plugin has the following social buttons for use:

• RSS
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Youtube
• MySpace
• LinktIn

and more…..  Check out this great plugin.  Visit the plugin’s site.

Fixed Social button from GraphicLux.com

5. WP Super Cache

Are you noticing that your users drop from your site because of long load times?  Did you under pay for a host and now you’re paying for it from loss of visitors because of slow connections?  Do not fret, WP Super Cache will solve all your problems.  This is a very fast caching plugin for WordPress that can triple your load speeds.  There is tons of information on what it does and how it works on the authors site.  So check it out.  Visit the plugin’s site.

Buffalo is a dying city.  It’s been dying for about 50-60 years now.  We need large corporations that will help support Buffalo while Buffalo helps and supports them.  Google is that company.  I am afraid without something big happening, Buffalo will just get worst.  Don’t you want to be able to continue to live here and maybe have your children live here too?  Please help support the cause, below are a few links to check out.  Do it for the cause.

http://www.buffalowantsfiber.com/
http://www.buffalorising.com/2010/03/buffalo-wants-google-fiber.html
http://www.city-buffalo.com/applications/googlefiber/default.aspx

PS:  Sorry about the lack of posts.  I have been sick and had a bunch of side work to get out of the way.

Although adding a CMS to a site is not the most involved process, but it will increase a clients cost but usually the convienence and money saved in the long run, out ways the price.

I would have to say a majority of sites I have helped developed with CMS’s have left my hands looking sleek, consistent and pleasing.  About 1 month after the client has control the site usually turns into a bunch of poorly written paragraphs, with styling added to them which breaks the consistencey of the site, adding images way too large, usually breaking the site, or even links that go to no-where.

So what are developers supposed to do?

One simple solution is not to implement CMS’s.  This is usually not an option since no-one will turn down money, and most developers say once it’s out of their hands then it really is none of their business. Another solution is creating detailed instructions explaining what pages and what styles to use when using the editor.  We all know clients will not read this information that you spent hours creating for them, so what’s the point then?

Obviously the above will not work.  What will then?  I think the only way to have this work is in a couple of ways.  One way is to create the site for your client and then give them update options.  You can give them a billable option of how long of a turn around they will want for a price and how much time they will get per week or month.  These options may be good enough for some clients, but then again there are other clients that want to do it all themselves.  What should we do with these people?  Train them.  Teach them.  Meet with your client while the site is in development and go over the essentials.  Of course all of this would be billable.  If you client wants a CMS and wants to update it themselves, simply tell them that you would need x amount of hours for training before the CMS would be completely ready to go live.  Usually if you put in around 10 hours of total time updating the site with the client the correct way, and explaining what to do and what not to do when using an editor, then the client will usually not destroy the site.

Any other thoughts and strategies?  Leave a comment.

Now the user has the control over the data.  No more worrying about never getting your data back again.  No more being held hostage.

There are huge benefits to the applications owner(s) too.  Now there would not need to be huge amounts of server storage space to pay for, now you only have to host the application and maybe a small database or 2.  This would make prices cheaper.  This would make people happy.

There would be issues with speed of data transfer but the internet, and computers are only getting faster and more powerful, and should be able to handle these connections in the very near future (if not now).

I think this would make supporting the application much easier too.  If you know the application is not having issues you can be confident that it’s on the end users side and then you can charge for support or the client will end up having to fix their issue.  So now you have less money and time invested in support and the ability to make money supporting end users with their problems.

There are many ways people can say this is a terrible idea but everything one of those ideas can be proven not to be a problem with the proper precautions.  Thoughts?

SlickPlan is FREE!  Just sign up, get the email, click the activation link and you’re ready.  Within minutes I was adding pages, sub-pages and all the navigation elements what would be constant.  After you are done you have several options to export.  

You can “Get HTML” which a great place to grab the code to start your real site map, add a little CSS and boom.  You have yourself a nice sitemap.  You can Export to PDF.  This function is nice but I was hoping for a better PDF.  It still looks good but not great.  The lines connection the pages is quirky to me.  You can also Email an HTML link to anyone so they can view what you have created.

There are a few things I would love to see updated.

1. I would like to see the ability to style  the page “buttons”.  Being able to change the colors, font, font size and size of “buttons”.
2. Being able to create copies of pages
3. Having the list of pages on the left not get so unmanageable in large site maps.
4. Having the ability to zoom in or out
5. Having the ability to collaborate.
6. Having the ability to export to html and css (matching what is on screen)

Not bad for something that is FREE.  I suggest everyone at least try this and if you like it support it with some donation cash.

The install is pretty easy and straight forward.  Just download the files put them on your web server, setup a database, run the database scripts, change some settings in the config file and you are off and running.  If you work like most developers then you already should have an approved mock up of what the e-commerce site will look like.   For me the easiest way to implement a design with CFWebstore is to first build-out your approved mock up into valid XHTML.  Now you just have to cut and paste your build-out code into your default_layout file within CFWebstore.  Most code is well commented within files, and gives you a good idea what that code is doing.

Within CFWebstore there are many built in functionalities.  Some of these include  payment processing integrations (including Paypal, Authorize.NET, and a few others), UPS integration, downloadable products, articles, discounts, and promotions.  I know I am missing a bunch of other great reasons to use CFWebstore but I am just giving a taste.

There are many more positive notes in using CFWebstore than negative.  Other than the already given functionalities, the support is superb.  Mary Jo (creator of CFWebstore) is always updating CFWebstore’s yahoo group, adding comments, advise and instruction.  Not only is she daily making posts in the group, but Mary Jo also has live chat which is available on her website for the most part of the weekdays.  Another positive of CFWebstore is that it is often updated, and if you are using the same version number as the revision has, you can download and upgrade for free.

As for the negatives, here they are.  CFWebstore is still using table based layouts in a bunch of places, which can be annoying.  Also there are a bunch of tables and <td>’s that should use css, but have some unneeded inlined styles which are a pain to find and update.  Also CFWebstore’s main style sheet uses classes and id’s that are way too generic, such as .header, which becomes a problem when you build out your mock up and now have to change your styles so the two don’t mix .(I’ve always been in the frame of mind that the application should use some kind of naming convention for style naming.)

You can see that I don’t find the functionality of CFWebstore to be bad but the HTML code and CSS that the store runs with.  If you have a client that is not that picky about how every single thing looks like then maybe this won’t be an issue for you.  Overall I will give it 4 out of 5 stars for a ColdFusion E-Commerce engine.

I understand the need to charge for support at some points but I also believe that you should only charge support if you have a great deal of knowledge base, FAQ’s, and troubleshooting information easily found at the tips of someones finger tips.  This is not saying that Kentico doesn’t have a bunch of documentation, but the quality of the support documents is low and to search for anything specific is a nightmare on Kentico’s Development site.  

I have had some issues in the past (when I was a paying support client of Kentico’s) and would always go to their documentation and come up completely empty hoping by some chance of luck that I would find something.  When I couldn’t find what I needed I would email Kentico’s support and I could expect a follow up email from them about a day later.  Most of the time they where helpful.

Now that my year of support is over I cannot get any support help at all.  I have emailed, tweated, left messages in forums but no help.  The only reason I need any support is because of what I believe to be an upgrade bug from 3.1 to 4.1 from Kentico themselves.  I could understand If I gave them no details of my problem but I spelled it out and sent the error I was getting, and I could understand If my problem was a problem with some custom programming done but this site had none.

So now I am done ranting.  I will end with this.  Kentico would be one of my favorite .NET CMS’s of 2009 but the lack of support has changed my decision.  Support for your clients should be above your blog postings that nobody reads.  Stop planting trees and give your clients some support.  It’s not like I didn’t pay for licenses.  I will probably never suggest you as a CMS for any of my clients or any web developers if the topic comes up.  OK now I am done ranting.