8 ways Rev9 can make your life easier
If you are wondering what Rev9 is and what it can do for you, here's a quick summary:
What is Rev9?
Rev9 is a browser based web site maintenance tool that allows you to keep your site maintained and up to date. You can use Rev9 wherever you have access to a computer with an internet connection. "Browser-based" means that you can edit the text on your website using your web browser. No additional software is needed.
How can Rev9 make my life easier?
Rev9 allows you to:
1. Edit the content on your site yourself. You no longer have to send a request to your web developer to change a word or phrase, add a new page, or post an update.
2. No FTP software needed. After you make the changes to the text on your web pages, you can preview the changes in your web browser. If everything looks the way you intended, you just click a button, and your changes are published to the public web server.
3. No WYSIWYG editor needed. When you decide to edit a page, you simply login, browse to the page you want to edit, click a button that says "Edit this page", and you will see an editing window with your current text available for you to edit. Just change the text in the editing window, and click the "Post Changes" button.
4. Add as many pages to your site as you want. If you want to add a new page, you can do that very easily with Rev9. Your new page will maintain the look and feel of the other pages in your site.
5. Add new pages to your site whenever you want. If you decide to add a new page while on vacation in Sydney, Australia and it is 3:00 AM Sunday morning, you can add your page if you have access to a computer with an internet connection. No longer do you have to wait for standard business hours to contact your web developer.
6. Create links to other sites just by typing the url. The url you typed will become a link.
7. Edit your site while traveling, from any computer with an internet connection. See number 5.
8. Preview your changes before sending them to the public web server. With Rev9, you get two servers in one. The Rev9 server is your development server where you can make changes and update your site at your convenience. If you make a mistake, don't worry. The Rev9 server can be kept hidden from the public so that your changes will not be seen until you are ready. Then, when you get your site looking the way you want, you send your changes off to the public webserver where anyone in the world with an internet connection can see them.
Sound good? It is. If you want to learn more about how BIGSEA and Rev9 can help you maintain your web site, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Wednesday, April 11, 2001 |
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HTML Basics
If you have been keeping your website updated using our Rev9 tool, you have probably run across the occasion when you would like to add a little emphasis to a word or sentence. If you are using the WYSIWYG interface (What You See Is What You Get) available to Internet Explorer users on the Windows platform, you probably haven't put much thought into what is going on in the background.
But, if you are like me, you might be a little curious as to how your browser and the html code in your pages work together to create what you see on the screen. Or, maybe you haven't enabled the WYSIWYG mode in your Rev9 web site. Maybe you are editing your website on a Macintosh (my personal preference), or you use Netscape (or any other browser at this writing) and you don't have access to the WYSIWYG tool that is built into Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Windows. If this paragraph applies to you, continue on...
O.K. Its time to learn a little HTML. Don't click away so fast... it won't be that bad.
Here we go:
Almost every HTML formatting function uses opening and closing tags to tell your browser how to display the text on your page.
Opening tags look something like this: <tag goes here>.
Closing tags look something like this: </tag goes here>. Note the "/". Closing tags always have a "/" before the tag.
To make your tags work, you just put some text between the tags. This might not be too clear yet. Let's try an example:
To make some text italic, add these <i>tags around the text you want to make italic.</i>
To make some text bold, add <b>these tags around the text you want to make bold.</b>
To center some text, add these
<center>tags around the text you want to center.</center>
To put a double-space between two lines, use <P>these tags.</P> (By the way, if you have not enabled the WYSIWYG mode in your Rev9 site, you don't have to use these <P> tags. Just double space your text when you type it into the edit window, and Rev9 will automatically insert the code for you. This is a really cool feature.)
To put a single-space between two lines, use this tag:
<br> at the end of a line of text. The next thing you type will appear on the next line. (This tag, incidentally, doesn't have a closing tag).
Now lets try something a little more advanced. To make a hyperlink, type something like this:<a href="http://www.domainname.com/pagename.html">click to visit my domainname.com</a>
(Be sure to put the code shown above all on one line-- it wraps here because there is not enough room to show it all on one line.)
That's a really brief tutorial on some common HTML tags. That wasn't so bad, was it? If you are interested in learning more about html and how it can help you spruce up your pages, pick up a basic html book from any bookstore or the library. Another great way to learn is to use a WYSIWYG editor like Pagemill or Frontpage to generate some code, then view the code to see what the editor did to create the results you see.
Or, if you are working on a Rev9 website and have WYSIWYG mode enabled, modify some text using the WYSIWYG toolbar, then view the source code.
Here's another great reference I just found: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/teachingtool/viewsource.html
If you would like to learn more about how BIGSEA can help you spruce up your web pages, give us a call. We're here to help.
A store without price tags.
Imagine that you were to walk into a attractive boutique to make a purchase. You see a lot of great stuff, and you wonder: "How much is that?"
You pick up an item. No price tag. "Must be expensive", you think. You pick up something else. No tag. You pick up another item-- no tag there either. How would that make you feel?
That's how I feel when I browse the web checking out different web development firm's web sites. A lot of these sites are professionally developed and very attractive. But don't bother trying to find any hint of pricing. It's not there.
On the other end of the spectrum, you will find firms clearly selling based on low price. You'll see a headline like this: "Get a professionally developed web site and one year of hosting for only $499." I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling that a site like that will give you a choice of templates to choose from and give you a brochureware site with limited functionality. For some small business people, that may be just what they need.
Or you might see a hosting firm touting a web hosting package for $14.99 per month. And if you buy a year's worth of hosting in advance, they will give you a 10% discount. Never mind that they pack their servers full with thousands of sites and you have to wait on hold for 49 minutes to get someone from tech support to answer the phone. They don't tell you that a "techie wannabe" customer could bring down the whole server with a poorly written CGI script. They don't tell you that you have to put in a service request to create a new e-mail address. They don't tell you a lot of stuff.
I know some people shop on price. There must be a good market for it because a lot of firms sell on price. But this brings me back to the boutique in my first example. What is wrong with building a business around value, and not being afraid to post your prices?
Marketing types would say that it puts you in the position of being "stuck in the middle". On the one hand, you have the "price sellers" setting a percieved value on the low end. On the other end, you have the custom development shops that charge you based on who you are and how much they think you will be willing to spend. The poor guy "stuck in the middle" ends up trying to defend his pricing on one side but not being able to build high percieved value on the other side.
O.K. I'll accept that that theory has merit. But I think there is a segment of the market that the two ends of the spectrum are missing. I'll call this segment the "Man in the Middle".
The "Man in the Middle" is the business person who doesn't have time to put out bid requests to the custom firms, who wants a general idea of what things will cost, and who is willing to pay a little more for personalized service, custom design work, and other value-added services.
So, if you are the "man in the middle", you are the person BIGSEA is trying to reach. Our prices are not the cheapest, and our clients are not the biggest, but we feel that we offer a good value for your money. I like to think that our customers feel that way too.
If you are interested in learning how BIGSEA can help you build an effective internet presence for your business, give us a call. We're here to help.
Another Free Upgrade!
In January 2001 we offered a free bandwidth upgrade to all of our web hosting customers. We're at it again!
We are pleased to announce that all of our existing web hosting customers will receive a free web space upgrade. Here's how the free upgrade stacks up:
Personal Plan: was 20 MB, now: 50 MB
Professional Plan: was 50 MB, now 125 MB
Corporate Plan: was 75 MB, now 175 MB
Commercial Plan: was 125 MB, now 225 MB
Enterprise Plan: was 140 MB, now 275 MB
High Volume Plan: was 200 MB, now 525 MB
And you thought the days of free 'anything' on the internet were over.
This is a free upgrade for all of our hosting customers. Enjoy your new web space. Use it. We'll buy more.
What is your screen resolution?
Statmarket.com recently did a study (February 17, 2001) to try to figure out how much screen area web users were seeing on their screens. They found that most users had their screen resolutions set at 800x600 pixels. In fact, 53% of web users had their screen resolution set at 800x600 pixels.
Why is this important? Well, if you are designing pages for the web, you want to make sure that the viewer can see all of your page without scrolling horizontally, if possible. On the other hand, you don't necessarily want to design for the smallest screen resolution because on a larger screen, your design will be swamped by empty space.
But what if the viewer doesn't have their browser window set to maximum? What if they customized their browser tool bars to make more viewing area available? What if global warming is real?
What I am getting at is that there are a lot of factors beyond our control when it comes to viewable screen real estate. So how do you design for this infinitely flexible canvass?
Two techniques come to mind (but I am sure there are many other creative solutions). One solution is to make the design stretch to fill the browser window, regardless of the screen resolution, or the size of the browser window, or anything else for that matter. The other solution is a hybrid: make the main area of the page float so that it always stays in the center of the screen.
For example, this page is totally "stretchy". Go ahead. Change the size of your browser window. The page should stretch or squish to fill the screen. If you want to see something cool, watch the top navigation bar as you resize the window. See how the geometric thingies slide over the net in the background? This is an example of a stretchy design.
NormanRussell.com is an example of a hybrid design. When you resize your browser window with this design, the central elements stay the same size, but move together to the center of your window. In general, a hybrid design is easier to build than a totally stretchy design.
By now, you may be wondering how all the screen resolutions stack up with regard to popularity. Here's what statmarket.com learned in their study of 50,465,595 user sessions:
- 640x480: 7%
- 800x600: 53%
- 1024x768: 31%
- 1152x864: 2.5%
- 1280x1024: 2.5%
- other: 4%
The bottom line is this: web designers should concentrate less on what the most popular screen resolution is, and focus more on how they can make the pages useable for the viewer at any screen resolution or browser window size.
If you want to learn more about how BIGSEA can help you make your design stretchy, give us a call. We're here to help.
Separating Form From Content
If you work around the web building web sites for any amount of time, you will eventually hear the phrase "separate form from content". What, exactly, does that mean?
In a nutshell, it describes the concept of separating the appearance and layout of your web documents from the text that those documents contain.
Why is this important? Say, for example, you are maintaining a web site with 100 pages. You built those pages using static html files and you painstakingly applied font sizes, colors, and font styles to all 100 pages. Someday, your boss or client will come to you and say: "change all of my type to a light blue, and make my headlines dark gray.". You will say "arghhhh..."
If you had the foresight to use a style sheet to apply the color formatting to the text in your documents, you will make the change in two places, and suddenly all 100 of your pages will take on the new appearance. If you weren't blessed with foresight in this instance, you will get busy editing all 100 of your pages manually.
That's the beauty of separating form from content. In fact, the concept behind Rev9 is all about separating form from content. If you want to learn how BIGSEA can help you separate form from content in your existing web site, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Saturday, February 17, 2001 |
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Why you need a content management system
Here's a link to a pretty good article that explains why you need a content management system.
This page summarizes some of the existing content management systems available in the marketplace today.
Of course, we can convert your site to a Rev9 site and give you the benefits of a content management system at a fraction of the cost compared to building your own content management server and database.
While we're on the subject of content management, have you been thinking about ways to separate your web content from your web design? You aren't alone-- at BIGSEA we understand the importance of this idea. But content management systems are just one piece of the puzzle. Cascading style sheets, XHTML and XML are a few others. In this article, Zeldman discusses his efforts and the efforts of other developers to convert their sites and web content to support standards-compliant web browsers. Zeldman believes that developers can pull users along to upgrade to newer browser versions by ending the practice of creating backward-compatable web pages. Whether you agree with him or not, this article is a good read if you want to stay up-to-date with the latest web development techniques.
And, as always, if you are interested in learning how BIGSEA can help you build a better web site, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Friday, February 16, 2001 |
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Client-Side Javascript Includes
I saw something this morning that got me thinking. It was a really ugly (and poorly built) web site that had an interesting feature. On the right hand side of the page, there was a nice looking news feed from internetsoccer.com. How did this gem get on this page?
The answer: client-side javascript includes.
First a little about news feeds: if you don't already know, news feeds make it easy for people to share links to interesting articles that are (hopefully) related to the content of their web site. For example, this site includes a news feed to Wired News. See the right-hand column of this page? Those links to articles are coming directly from Wired. They get updated every day, and the best part is, I don't have to do anything to maintain it. New articles appear on the news feed whenever Wired adds them.
But enough about news feeds. Lets get back to the client-side javascript includes. If you know some of the more technical details of the web, you know that some pages are static (they are just text files stored on the server, and the server just serves them up, as is), and some pages are dynamic (the server builds the page from bits and parts every time someone sends a request for the page). The page I was looking at was most definitely a static web page. So how was this dynamic news feed appearing on the page? Client-side javascript includes.
Hmmm. Pretty clever, but simple really. Instead of having the server build the page dynamically, some javascript on this page caused my client software (Internet Explorer) to build the page dynamically.
How did they do this? There are two parts to the solution. The first part is to create a text file consisting of a snippet of html that you want to include on a page. This text file has to have two special characteristics. One, the text must look like this:
document.write (' html snippet goes here ');
And two, all of the text, including the html, must be on one line.
The second part of the solution is to include a bit of code on your page where you want the included html to appear. Here is what that line should look like:
<script language="javascript" src="http://path to file you created in step one"></script>
If you did everything right, and you have javascript enabled in your web browser, viewing your modified (static) web page should include (dynamically) the html snippet you created in step one. Pretty neat.
There are a couple of potential problems that you should be aware of: one, you are totally dependent on the client machine to properly render your dynamic page. If the browser has javascript turned off, the include won't work. Two, if you want the included html snippet to update dynamically like our news feed does, you will have to find someone who is providing the news feed in the proper format (like the example above).
Our Rev9 product handles news feeds a little differently than the example above, but I thought it was an interesting technique that someone could use. And you don't have to use it just for news feeds. You could easily break a web page into simple text files and have the client put it all back together. Why would you want to do this? It could make editing the site easier. Instead of editing the complete static web page, you could edit sections separately. This would allow you to separate form from content.
But if you are going to go to that much effort, you may want to consider a browser based content management system like our Rev9 product. With Rev9, you get all of the benefits of separating form from content, dynamic pages that can be rendered out to a static server (for speed, reliability), and you don't have to worry about all of the messy details that are going on in the background. Rev9 makes it easy for you to use your brain power to manage the content on your web site so you don't have to waste brain cycles managing your web site.
If you want to learn more about how BIGSEA can help you ease the pain of maintaining your web site and help you keep your content fresh, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Sunday, February 11, 2001 |
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Maybe you don't want to be a webmaster.
So maybe you don't want to be a webmaster. You have read about Rev9, but you don't want to worry about the details of keeping your site up-to-date on a regular basis. Maybe you would just like to be able to tell your webmaster: "change the word 'cat' to 'dog' everywhere in my site", and have the changes made almost instantaneously.
No problem. If that's what you want, let BIGSEA be at your service. Rev9 makes it easy for our hosting customers to keep their sites updated on a regular basis, but for those clients who don't want webmaster responsibility, we can use our Rev9 product to keep your site updated for you.
Maybe you have had a bad experience with your current web developer. You needed to have some changes completed on your site by tomorrow afternoon, but your developer told you it would take a week or two before they could get to it. You thought to yourself: "there has got to be a better way."
There is. If you like the idea of having a webmaster on call to make chages to your site, but don't like the idea of experiencing long delays to get the changes made, give us a call. We can discuss converting your existing site to a Rev9 site. After that, we should be able to make most changes (text, some graphics) to your site in less than 24 hours. If you want a complete re-design of your site or you want to add additional functionality that requires custom coding, it will definitely take longer than 24 hours, but we will let you know in advance. But for most simple changes to text or graphics, we will have your work done by the next day, and often, sooner.
Sound interesting? Give us a call. We're here to help.
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Wednesday, February 7, 2001 |
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Another thing that makes Rev9 great...
You're updating the content on your website. It's late, you're tired. You are working with your favorite WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) web page editor. You find the page you want to change on your local machine, make your changes, save them, and FTP the updated page to the webserver. Just to make sure all is well, you browse to the page you just changed to see your changed page live.
Oops. Something went wrong. Your page isn't rendering correctly in the browser. Next you realize you overwrote the original copy on your local machine when you saved your changes, and you overwrote the original on your webserver when you FTP'd the page to the web server.
You were hoping to hop into your warm bed, but now you know you have another hour of work ahead of you to correct the damaged page.
If you had a Rev9 site, this extra work could have been averted. In Rev9, you edit your pages directly in your web browser, in WYSIWYG mode (works with Internet Explorer for Windows). You make your changes, click the "Post Changes" button, and then you see your changes in the web browser. You know right away if the changes you made were the changes you intended.
What if you made a mistake? Don't worry, you can always go back and edit the page again to fix it. But what if you really, really made a mistake? You are still O.K. Rev9 keeps two copies of your pages in circulation. One copy resides on the Rev9 server (this is where you make your changes) and the other copy resides on the public web server. The page your customers see doesn't get changed until you choose to "render" the final version to the public web server. So, if you get stuck, we can always help you revert your Rev9 page to the original page that is stored on the public web server. If you accidentally rendered your page to the public server and overwrote your remaining "good" page, most likely we can help you restore yesterday's page from backup. That may take some time and effort on our part, and we may charge you a restoration fee, but rest assured that in most cases your pages can be restored (Just don't wait too long to let us know you want a page restored. Our backup tapes don't go back forever.).
What if you don't know HTML? Don't worry. If you have used a word processor, you can use Rev9. Some HTML knowledge can help you, and you can use a WYSIWYG editor as a crutch, but most people can maintain a Rev9 site without using any HTML at all. In fact, I am typing this story into my browser window, without any HTML. Just plain text, no special formatting. On a Macintosh.
Are you interested in learning more about Rev9 and how it can help your business? Give us a call. We're here to help.
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