VISIBLE RANKING — ONLINE MARKETING

What to know if you want to maintain your website by yourself?
Part 2: Basic tools for site maintenance

There are a lot of good HTML tutorials online from beginning to intermediate and advanced levels. You can find almost everything about HTML and other web design coding languages at www.w3schools.com. This article and the followings, however, only aim to help you gain some fundamental knowledge of essential tools and HTML basics – not enough to build a whole website but perhaps enough and quickly enough to know what to use to look at an HTML page and know what’s what and to maintain the web pages by yourself.

Content Mangement System (CMS) and CMS advantages

Ever wonder what is a CMS and its advantages? Ever wonder whether your company should switch from using a traditional website to a CMS-driven website. Hopefully this article will give you some understanding about CMS, the differences between CMS and non-CMS sites and more.

FYI - The second half of this article was originally posted in DIY website maintenance part 1.

CMS overview - From Wikipedia

A web content management system is basically a way of separating your visual presentation from your actual content - whether that content includes photos, text or product catalogs. This separation allows one to accomplish several key things, including:

How to create a cross-browser drop-down menu with Dreamweaver in minutes

This is going to be short and the main purpose is to let you know Dreamweaver CS4 has a built-in functionality letting you create a good CSS-based drop-down menu in minutes. I’m not sure at what version Dreamweaver started to have this built-in drop-down generator. Perhaps it was from CS3.

The drop-down is CSS/text-based, very easy to customize and maintain and works well with different browsers even when you have a big Flash or image banner right underneath.

What to know if you want to maintain your website by yourself?
Part 1: Website maintenance and CMS [Content Management System]

Do-it-yourself website maintenance has multiple purposes: cutting costs, taking control of the online content, speeding up the maintenance process, securing data confidentiality… If you suddenly want to or have to deal with website maintenance, what do you need to know? This article and the subsequent ones hopefully will give you some ideas about website maintenance process.

Learning web design with Dreamweaver based on MS Word knowledge and perspective

If you’re in marketing, I’m pretty sure that you’re very familiar with MS Word. Believe it or not, your MS Word knowledge will make it easier for you to understand web design and even create web pages with Dreamweaver. Hopefully, this article will help you gain some fundamental understanding about web design and web design with Dreamweaver.

Wonder why people use Dreamweaver to create and maintain web pages. Here are some cases when Dreamweaver has a complete advantage over text editors

Dreamweaver is considered by many one of the best HTML editors, if not THE BEST HTML editor currently available. It’s more than just another WYSIWYG [What you see is what you get] software where you can design/develop web page without having to know HTML. I will have multiple posts about Dreamweaver and how to use it to create websites and HTML emails for marketing professionals. This post is going to be about how using Dreamweaver saved me and probably you lots of time and efforts compared to using a text editor.

Details about absolute urls and relative urls - what are they, how and when to use them.
Also referred to as absolute paths and relative paths in this article

In another post about Create HTML Email with Outlook, I briefly mentioned that images used in HTML emails need to be on a live server, and the paths to those images must be absolute. Apparently, some still have problem with their images not showing in the HTML email due to broken/invalid paths. Here are some more explanation.

Create web graphics with Photoshop - The Fundamentals
Part 2 - Save image for the web / Optimize image for the web

Already know about different image types supported by web browsers, below are some simple steps to save your images for the web with Photoshop.

To save image for the web or to optimize it for the web, you just need to open your image in Photoshop, then go to menu File > Save for Web or File > Save for Web & Devices with CS4, or you can use the combination of keys Ctrl Alt Shift S. No matter what versions of Photoshop you’re using, a dialog box will appear to let you change your image settings and your image size. That’s basically it.

Create web graphics with Photoshop - The Fundamentals
Part 1 - GIF, JPG, or PNG

Photoshop is a very deep software, you can play and learn with it for hours, days or even years and probably still discover something new and interesting about it. This post or series of posts aims to provide you with fundamental but easy skills to understand as well as to create better imagery for the web in a matter of minutes.

Part 1 is about image types supported by web browsers: GIF, JPG, or PNG. If you know about this already, then check out part 2 Save image for the web.

All Flash website — what you want may not always good for your business.

As a member in the marketing team, you may be responsible for either designing or coordinating the design process of the new website. You may want a complete Flash-based website because many of your clients have Flash websites, and you really like the interactive, animated site navigation, and the visual effects including the page transitions on each and every page. Well, that’s what you like, but is it good for your online marketing and for your business as a whole?