Website Design

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Microsoft Expression Web 2.0 upgrade installation problems…

April 29, 2009 in Software, Website Design | No comments

MORE COMPUTER PROBLEMS!!!  All I do is google for solutions to my computer problems.

This latest problem started innocently enough.  I bought the upgrade to MS Expression Web, version 2, because it had PHP support, which I really needed. I had been using PHP Designer, but I decided to give Expression Web 2.0 a try.

But Expression Web 2.0 would not install, no matter what I did.  It seems Expression Web becomes a part of the MS Office suite when installed, and somehow, I have no IDEA how, my install of MS Office 2007 got corrupted. As a play on the the old saying “A fool and his money are soon parted”, my husband jokes that “A computer and Vivian and lots of software are soon together”.  So yeah, I put a lot of software on my computers.  I admit it. But Office had been working fine…

SO anyhow, after getting calling the Microsoft help line, and exchaning several emails with them, the solution was to do these steps below IN THE EXACT ORDER LISTED:

1) completely uninstall Expression Web 1.0.

2) uninstall MS Office 2007.  But, to completely uninstall MS Office 2007 correctly, I had to use a special tool from MS, even more secret than the Windows Clean Up Utility.  This was emailed to me by MS support.  It’s called Offscrub07.zip. Don’t use this tool unless you are sure you need to.

3) Install Expression Web 2.0.

4) Install MS Office 2007 again.

Good luck if you are having this problem.  This caused me days of frustration. ;-)

Next generation search engine…

January 14, 2009 in Software, Website Design | No comments

Today I learned about a new search engine at www.searchme.com. This new search engine uses Flash to show you large snapshots of the websites in the search results so you can see the page before you go to the link. It’s similar to the Apple website or Amazon.com’s “Search Inside” feature in the way it displays multiple search results via images that are selectable by arrows that let you go forward or backward through the search results.
  

Searchme.com search engine
New search engine Searchme.com

It also gives you the page description text just like Google and all the other search engines do, but in this case, you have a much better clue as to whether or not you are going to find what you are looking for before you click on a search result link.

If you have children who are going to use searchme.com, under the preferences menu pick, you can choose to filter adult content. You can also choose the ‘day’ or ‘night’ theme to change the background color of the search results. If you choose the ’searchme lite’ feature, the search results are displayed as thumbnails and text descriptions.

Search me lets you save your favorite pages or search results in ’stacks’. The tutorial video on stacks on the searchme.com site explains how you can put all of the news sites you read on a daily basis into a stack and click through all of them one at a time. Or you can share a stack of vacation ideas with your friend via email, and upload stack HTML code to your blog. Very cool.

I am surprised that this new search engine uses Flash and not Ajax and Javascript to display the results. But I am amazed at all the features it offers. Let me know what you think of it!

Electric-Webs goes mobile…not…

September 3, 2008 in Website Design | 1 comment

I had a little “fun” this weekend, in between bouts of illness, making a style sheet for the mobile version of this website. If you have a PDA or a cell phone that lets you see the web, check out the mobile version of my website at www.electric-webs.mobi

***UPDATE***

The mobile version of my site doesn’t work. :-(  The URL forwarding feature used by Register.com loads my website’s content in a frames page, which is used by them for advertising unless you pay for the ‘upgrade’ version.  Well, the upgrade version keeps the frames page shell and just removes the ads.  The problem with this is, MOST PHONES AND MOBILE DEVICES HAVE BROWSERS THAT DON’T DISPLAY FRAMES PAGES!! Duh.  So my mobile page is broken on most phones.  I need to just buck up for hosting for this mobile site, but I don’t want to right this moment….

Making your website work for you

June 10, 2008 in Website Design | No comments

I am guest blogging today on Wet Noodle Posse’s blog. The article is all about how to get the most out of your website: how to design it right the first time, get more traffic, keep visitors coming back, and use statistics to monitor your site.

Expression Web Review update

August 30, 2007 in Software, Website Design | No comments

Well, after using Microsoft Expression Web for a while, I am changing my opinion somewhat… This program has a few significant bugs that need to be fixed before it will be useful at all.

1) Undo function:

Undo does not take you back one step in operations, it takes you all the way back to the state of the file when you opened the file, as if it were a ‘revert’ function, not an ‘undo’ function. Other people have seen this problem and some fixes are mentioned here, but I haven’t tried them yet:

http://blog.by-expression.com/index.php/undo-goes-to-far-in-expression-web/

2) Expression web inserts these characters: 

When EW saves a file that is PHP or CSS, it changes the encoding to  UTF-8 (BOM) from UTF-8….and there is no way to choose the encoding when you save…and this causes those 3 little characters to appear all over your website wherever the PHP pages are…

Thankfully, frontpagewebmaster.com found a solution.

I am pretty upset because I just wasted about 4 hours on these bugs, and I won’t be using Epression Web again for a while.

Snap Shots

August 22, 2007 in Blogs, Website Design | No comments

Go to SnapShots.com right now and set up your blog to show mini snapshots of all the links mentioned in the text.

This is so cool, and it’s free, and it’s extremely easy to set up. No brainer.

Flash and WS_FTP compatibility issues with Vista

August 4, 2007 in Software, Website Design | No comments

Well, I finally got most of my web design software installed on my new Vista computer. The first really big compatibility issues I have noticed are with Flash, specifically versions MX2004 and version 8, and WS_FTP Professional.

When opening movie clips in older versions of Flash, the program goes into a weird slow-motion mode, wherein a dotted box slowly expands and contracts around the movie clip you are trying to open. If you have this problem, here is a link explaining the solution.

Also, I upgraded to the supposedly Vista-compatible version of Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional. Well, I was happily coding along in another program when I suddenly got an error message out of nowhere: “WS_FTP does not appear to have been installed correctly for the current user. WS_FTP will now exit.” I wasn’t even running this program!!! To fix this problem, right click on the WS_FTP icon, click on properties, and choose “run this program as administrator.” This seems to have fixed the problem for me. Even though my login IS the administrator.

Competition for Dreamweaver?

July 29, 2007 in Website Design | No comments

Microsoft has finally come out with totally new website design program that allows you to design compliant sites!!!

Expression Web lets you do website design with CSS-based layouts, and has a new, awesome rendering engine that lets you truly see how your code will look in the browser as you are working on it.

I have just downloaded and installed Expression Web on my computer, and I will write a more detailed review of the program after I have had time to play with it.

UPDATE: I have just finished using this program for a little over an hour and a half, AND I LOVE IT!!!

If you have resisted learning Dreamweaver because you thought it was just too complicated or difficult to use, give Expression Web a try. Those of us who are used to the Microsoft interface for programs like MS Word and Excel will feel at home right away.

Expression Web highlights  non-compliant code in yellow, like Dreamweaver, and tells you what’s wrong. It lets you edit PHP pages within the design-view window. Also, if you hightlight a section of the page you are working on in the design-view window, it shows all the CSS styles associated with that class or ID, and you can change these styles on the fly….

For those of you who have ever used Frontpage, one of the biggest improvements of Expression Web over Frontpage is the ‘add hyperlink’ interface: when you highlight text to add a hyperlink in Expression Web, YOU CAN FINALLY PASTE THE LINK URL into the pop-up hyperlink dialog box!!! This alone makes it worth upgrading to Expression Web if you currently use Frontpage.

Also, if you are used to Frontpage, the learning curve for Expression Web will not be very steep.

If you code websites, try the demo version of this program and see how you like it.

 


 

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