T&S Web Design

Looks like a nasty security hole has been discovered in Internet Explorer. And this one is big. It’s present in every version of Internet Explorer in use today, from IE5 released in June 98, to the beta of IE8 that’s currently out.

This is just another reason to switch away from your pre-installed Internet Explorer to another web browser. For those of you who aren’t familiar with all the options, here’s a few popular alternatives to Internet Exploder Explorer.

Firefox

Google Chrome

Flock

Opera

Epiphany

Safari

Konqueror

Now that we’ve talked about saving time, let’s talk about saving money. This one is actually pretty easy to see from several standpoints.

First, the flexibility of a website can save money over traditional marketing materials. Let’s say you have some marketing material printed up. 5,000 brochures, 5,000 business cards and 5,000 fliers. As is common with small businesses, things change. Maybe it’s an email address, maybe a phone number, maybe even a service or product you offer. All of a sudden, you’re out over $1,000 dollars.

With a website, it’s different. You don’t have to spend tons of money to reprint brochures, business cards and fliers. Instead, you just go online, tweak your website’s text, and you’re good to go.

Another method was brought to our attention by one of our earliest clients, Cactus Jack’s Family Fun Center. One of the reasons they wanted a website was to save money on an ongoing basis with advertising. The fact that you can fit plenty of information in a website means you’re not paying to cram all that info into a phone book ad or into a television spot. Instead, you put just enough information to whet the appetite of your potential customer, then send them to your website for more in depth information.

While ads in the phone book, newspapers and magazines are still helpful, you don’t have to sell the product right there. You do still need to have eye-catching and memorable ads, but you can do the actual sales pitch on the website.

Finally, some websites simply save money on postage and gas. While musicians like The Herndons and Devin Derrick could mail out sample CDs to get their music out there, why not put a website up and include samples on the site instead? Sure, photographers like Beautiful Bride Photography and Colette Staats could drive around showing potential clients their portfolios, but why not point them to their websites?

I think you get the idea.

< Back to part 2 On to part 4 >

I have always wondered what open source tools are out there for web design just in case I decide to boycott Adobe or Adobe goes bankrupt or something. It turns out there are some pretty good options for web design. None of them are quite as good as Fireworks or Dreamweaver, but they do get pretty close at least for the classic Apache, MySQL, PHP setup.

The best PHP editor actually turned out to be the best CSS and Javascript editor I could find as well. They are actually plugins to one of the best open source IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) available, Eclipse. Eclipse can be downloaded from www.eclipse.org.The plug-ins for PHP, CSS, and Javascript are PHP Development Tools, CSS Eclipse Plug-in, and JavaScript Editor Eclipse Plug-in, respectively. The PHP Plug-in was designed to work with XAMPP, a cross-platform Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl distribution.

Last, but not least we have the GIMP. It is by far the most popular open source image editing application. It lacks many of the features of Photoshop, but most can be accomplished using either plug-ins or a combination of steps. Exporting images using slicing is much more difficult than using Fireworks, but it can still be done.

Using open source software would not be my first choice, but if something happened where I did not have access to Adobe products I would still be able to be productive.

Recently I scoured the web to come up with some website resources that could be useful for small business owners. While I’ve personally written on a lot of these topics in the past, it’s good to get a third-party point of view. As typically happens, I found others had already come up with great lists.

• Lid of BlogWell came up with 100+ Useful Web Resources for Small Business and Non Profits.
• WebsiteTips.com has a list of Web Design resources.
• About.com has an entire Online Business section.

So I’ve obviously been going on about logos for a couple of weeks now. I thought I would do a final post on the topic with some related links. After all, it’s always good to get third-party input.

• How to Design a Successful Logo
• LogoSauce (logo design inspiration)
• LogoPond (logo design inspiration)