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Adobe Muse
Well well well - it seems that Adobe can’t stop releasing previews and betas at the moment!
We recently saw the unveiling of Adobe Edge – a potential future replacement for Flash which creates animations using HTML5. You might like to check out my summary of Adobe Edge (and my atrocious attempt at an animation).
Then last week, they also lifted the lid on Adobe Muse. Muse is a “code name” – so we wait with baited breath to see what the final product will be called. Adobe is currently “working with the branding team to determine the final name of this product” (perhaps the developers are fans of the Devon rock band of the same name!)
Whatever it ends up being called – Muse is a web design tool that allows designers without any coding experience to create website designs and publish them without having to look at any HTML. It’s a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) tool.
Hang on a minute though! Adobe already has the industry standard WYSIWYG web design tool on its books in the shape of Dreamweaver – which has been around for a LONG time (we’ve been running web design training since 1999 and our Dreamweaver course was the first Silicon Beach Training ever offered!)
Dreamweaver was originally released in the age of static HTML pages – and has had to reinvent itself over the years to keep up in the age of dynamic database driven websites. It hasn’t done a bad job of that, and remains a very useful design tool and code editor (Dreamweaver CS5.5 also includes tools for mobile authoring – which is the biggest growth area in web design at the moment). But – to use Dreamweaver effectively to produce dynamic sites which include blogs, social integration etc… (all of which are really important now), increasingly requires more coding experience.
This is where blog and web design CMS systems like WordPress and Joomla have come in to their own in recent years. Via simple interfaces and easy to use plugins, these tools allow people with genuinely NO programming experience to set up sites with interaction and social integration. They are theme based, and don’t have as much flexibility in terms of layout design as Dreamweaver – but nevertheless can deliver professional results.
So who is Adobe Muse for, and what can it do?
Adobe Muse’s strapline is “Create websites as easily as you create layouts for print” – so it’s clear that this product is aimed squarely at print designers who want to build websites (the tool was created by the team behind InDesign)
We’ve downloaded the beta, and the interface will certainly be familiar to all you Photoshop and InDesign users out there:
Click image for full-size version
OK – so far so good – Muse is a kind of “Dreamweaver lite” with a more designer-friendly interface. I had a quick play, and without having to follow any tutorials quickly made a very simple 4-page site using a master page.
Read the rest of "Adobe Muse – The New Dreamweaver?"
Posted by Andy Trainer in Dreamweaver Training, News, Web Design on August 22nd, 2011| 8 Comments »
Why you should upgrade to Dreamweaver CS5?
The best updates in Dreamweaver CS5 are the development tools for dynamic sites built using PHP-based content management systems like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.
Using Dreamweaver CS5 with Joomla, WordPress and Drupal
Silicon Beach Training provide a great 2 day Dreamweaver Training course in Brighton, Sussex, as well as WordPress Training, Designing custom Templates in WordPress, Joomla Training, CSS training, in fact everything a web developer could need. See our full range of Web Design Training.
There is a general shift in business sites towards content management systems because of the growing popularity of blogs and community sites so this is a welcome addition. These CMS’s (Content Management Systems) don’t create static HTML files, most of the pages on a WordPress blog or a Drupal site are generated using templates and include files. This made it impossible previously for Dreamweaver to render previews of the pages. Dreamweaver CS5 now gives you tools to design templates and see what your layout will look like in your final design. Using the built-in WebKit engine Dreamweaver CS5 now renders your page as it would render in WordPress (or whatever PHP-based CMS system you’re using).
Dreamweaver CS5 can now identify and establish the relationship between the pages created in WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal based Web sites and their dependant files. This makes finding what file you needed to edit and making a specific change much easier.
The addition of new inspection tools in Dreamweaver CS5 let you make adjustments to the CSS or the DOM of pages and see them rendered in real time. The inspector shows you how your code will change as you interact with dynamic elements on a page, and it will show you how various changes you make to stylesheets show up on the rendered page.
There is extra support for PHP with new code hints for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, with support for custom functions and classes, so you can even create your own code hints and error highlights for other PHP frameworks.
Added support for WordPress and other like-minded CMS tools is a big improvement, and one that’s necessary since so much of web publishing has moved to PHP-based systems. If you have a joomla, WordPress or Drupal site you should test out Dreamweaver CS5 and see if it helps to make designing templates easier.
Posted by Heather Buckley in New Free Resources, Programming, Web Design on December 29th, 2010| 2 Comments »
CLOSED CLOSED CLOSED!
win free training
You could enter our current photo competition though – click here
Want a free place on one of our public training courses? Fancy something creative for example our Photoshop Training Course in Brighton, Sussex, or Dreamweaver Training, something practical like Time Management Training or brush up on something more technical like VBA for Excel Training. A full list of public courses can be found on our training dates page (only courses with a maximum duration of two days can be claimed as your prize)
Enter our simple retweet competition on Twitter to be in with a chance!
It’s Really Easy to Enter
The only thing you have to do is -
1) Follow @SBTTraining
2) Retweet our competition invite on twitter.
RT: Win Free Training – @SBTTraining is giving it away! Visit http://bit.ly/2sCAJh for more info! #SBTweet
(click on this for an easy retweet)
Just make sure your tweet contains our Twitter name (@SBTTraining so we can track you as a contestant) and a link to this blog post (of which http://bit.ly/2sCAJh is a short version) and include the hashtag #SBTweet
We will DM the winner so make sure you follow us @SBTTraining.
That’s all you have to do. See? Entering is very easy!
Read the rest of "Win Free Training – Twitter Retweet Competition NOW CLOSED!"
Posted by Heather Buckley in Brighton, Competitions, News, Offers, Social Media on November 3rd, 2010| 3 Comments »
Smart phones are getting smarter thanks to the deluge of Apps available. Sometimes though there are so many it can help to have someone else sort out the wheat form the chaff. So here we are, we’ve complied a list of the best iPhone and Android Apps for people who want to update their website or blog on the go so you no longer have to be sitting in front of your computer to upload, manage, publish and monitor your website.
WordPress
wordpress application for iphone and android
Top of the list of course is WordPress. If you have a WordPress blog, this app allows you to manage comments, upload images, and write, edit and publish posts from your phone. Both these apps are free and are can be downloaded from WordPress.org.
If you have an iPhone see the left screen in the image, you can use location sharing to give your blog posts added context.
The Android version (see the right screen in the image) is good for smaller screens.
Download WordPress for iPhone and Android
iPhone: WordPress for iOS
Android: WordPress for Android
If you need help setting up a WordPress site we offer WordPress Training courses in Brighton and Advanced WordPress training for those who wish to learn how to create templates for wordpress and integrate their blog into their existing site. To learn to create Templates and Websites we offer Dreamweaver Training and Web Design courses as well as Photoshop for Web Graphics.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics for iPhone and Android Phones
Now you can track your web stats wherever you are by downloading a Google Analytics apps onto your phone.
There are several free and paid for options for both iPhone and Android users. The free ones may have all you need but it you are an SEO addict you may need something stronger!
iPhone: for a not free but really comprehensive Google Analytics app for the iPhone try Analytics App. If you’re looking for a free Google Ananlytics App for iPhone try Blast’s Google Analytics app.
Android: Droid Analytics is one of the most popular choices and is so cheap you may as well buy it (a free trial is also available).
If you need help installing and understanding Google Analytics we provide regular Google Analytics courses here in Brighton, we even provide Advanced Google Analytics Training for the really geeky.
Web Browsers
Web browser for android and iphone
Opera Mini for iPhone:
Opera Mini is a good alternative to Safari, the features are much the same for both the iphone app and the android app to read below for more info.
Opera Mini for Android:
Opera Mini is also available on Android, and has the benefit of lightweight browsing and homepage bookmark links.
The user interface in Opera Mini is much more usable than Android’s rather clunky browser. The speed dial feature lets you set up on-click shortcuts to up-to nine of your favorite sites. Mini supports tabbed browsing, meaning you can switch between the different pages you have open very quickly and easily.
There is also an auto-complete feature in the address bar, and a built-in search bar. Unfortunately this search bar only supports Google and is not customizable with other search engines.
Page load times are good, thanks to Opera’s server-side rendering technology.
There’s support for bookmarks and browser history, too.
Online File Management
download dropbox app
Dropbox for iPhone and Andriod
Dropbox is a brilliant tool for uploading, downloading, sharing and syncing files online. The Dropbox app comes in both Android and iPhone flavours. It’s simply amazing and what’s more it’s free.
The free Dropbox application for iPhone, iPad, and Android lets you:
- Store all you documents in one place to be accessed anywhere
- Browse the files in your Dropbox folder easily
- Open images and other media directly through the app
- Upload photos to all of your computers at once
- Share links to your files over email
- Export files to other apps
It does loads more definitely worth checking out.
You’ll need a Dropbox account, but it’s free to sign up.
iPhone: Dropbox for iPhone
Android: Dropbox for Android
In case you didn’t know we don’t just offer techie stuff . We also provide InDesign Training, Management Training and Leadership Training courses. Come down to Brighton!
Posted by Heather Buckley in News, Photoshop, Social Media, Web Design on October 27th, 2010| No Comments »
How to Create Email Templates using Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver’s template feature makes it really easy to adapt existing HTML email designs to suit your brand with minimum time and effort. Email Marketing is enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment as people are more being selective about whom they wish to receive promotional materiel from. Keep your emails relevant and well designed and they can be an extremely effective sales tool and a way of interacting with your customers.
To learn more about the effectiveness of Email Marketing you could enrol on one of our Email Marketing Training in Brighton, Sussex.
- Simply download a free email template from one of the many available on-line, just type in Free Email Templates into Goolge, this one is a good start. If you know dreamweaver already and a bit about design you could design one yourself (See our Dreamweaver Training course if you need some help) . We are going to show you how to create the template not how to design it, if you need help with web design we offer a great Web Design Week here in Brighton which includes Photoshop Training for the web.
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- Open up one of the templates (HTML file) that you have downloaded in Dreamweaver.
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- Create an Editable Region by selecting the areas of text or images that you will need to change for each email/newsletter.
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Read the rest of "Email Marketing using Dreamweaver"
Posted by Heather Buckley in New Free Resources, News, Sales & Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Web Design on October 27th, 2010| 1 Comment »
Nadine was delighted to win our Twitter Re-Tweet competition!
At the end of last year we had a fantastic response to our Twitter Re-Tweet competition – the prize was a free place on any of our public training courses.
Our lucky winner was Nadine Burzler (@NadineBurzler) who works at Cactus Language Worldwide.
Nadine was delighted to win the competition and has chosen a free place on our 2-day Dreamweaver course as her prize. She also chose to extend this to come on the whole Web Design Week package, which includes our Web Design training and Web Graphics Photoshop Course.
When she told us why, we realised that there couldn’t have been a more worthy winner…
Read the rest of "Twitter Competition – A Fairytale Winner!"
Posted by Andy Trainer in Competitions, News on January 7th, 2010| No Comments »
We’ve been providing Dreamweaver Training since it’s first release in 1997 and in that time we’ve seen Dreamweaver evolve to support a wide range of new scripting languages and functionality requirements as they’ve come to prominence.
Since the rise of Web 2.0 and, in particular, the increase in popularity of social networking, the ways we design, build and interact with websites have changed considerably. More and more websites now contain blogs, forums, polls and a host of other ways in which users can interact and generate their own content. We now offer a one day Social Media training course.
Programming this sort of functionality from scratch isn’t easy for beginners, and this has led to the rise in popularity of Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress and Joomla, which allow those with little or no programming knowledge to manage social sites and blogs effectively. To meet this demand we now offer WordPress Training and Joomla Training. These open source tools are free and user friendly, leading some to suggest that WordPress could replace Dreamweaver altogether.
Read the rest of "Will WordPress Kill Dreamweaver? We say NO!"
Posted by Andy Trainer in Social Media, Web Design on December 4th, 2009| 6 Comments »
Joomla is growing in popularity as an out of the box free CMS tool. It is becoming so popular in fact we have just launched a new Joomla Training course in addition to our popular WordPress Training course (we also offer a one day course on Social Networking and course on Blogging). Should we all be thinking of abandoning WordPress and jumping on the Joomla bandwagon? That depends on what you want, what you are capable of and if you will be maintaining your own site.
Should I use Joomla or WordPress?
This article will show the pros and cons of each tool so that you can make an educated choice.
WordPress
WordPress is a really great blog creation tool. It makes simple tasks really easy like adding images, making pages and posts, managing comments etc. Installing it, running it, and publishing basic content with it is quick and simple. It is efficient and allows easy optimising for maximum search engine ranking (blog searchbots, ping /trackback/tag capability etc)
Joomla
Joomla, is geared towards portals and content management. It is extremely powerful and has much more capability than wordpress. It’s also much easier to go wrong with Joomla if you don’t know what you are doing. It demands more technical knowledge. If you want an image library or an extensive ecommerce site however you are going to need something more powerful than wordpress for the job. Joomla comes into it’s own when you require it to work with a custom database. Read the rest of "Joomla vs WordPress comparison"
Posted by Heather Buckley in New Free Resources, Social Media, Web Design on November 23rd, 2009| 16 Comments »
