“Online testing provides a mechanism for applying the principles of quantitative analysis to improve the Web site experience and drive metrics that affect the bottom line,” wrote the recently published report. “Adobe Test&Target is a component of Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite, and the company’s historical strength in Web measurement and analytics shines through to its perspective on online testing. Test&Target exhibits strength in almost every dimension evaluated.”

Adobe’s position as a Leader in the online testing evaluation was also attributed to its “consistent strength across the full range of capabilities” and “support for integration with the Web marketing ecosystem.” Additionally, Adobe Test&Target was found to excel in “overall application usability, customer satisfaction, and content support.”

Adobe received high scores across criteria such as campaign management, testing, integration, service and support, product strategy and corporate strategy. In addition, Adobe received the highest score in quality of customer references, earning the only 5-out-of-5 rating in that category.

“We think that Forrester Research’s report is timely and shows that marketers are indeed getting more sophisticated,” said Aseem Chandra, vice president, product marketing, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “Many marketers are now incorporating online analytics with testing strategies to ensure the right content is getting in front of the right audience at the right time, giving them a distinct competitive advantage. We will continue to expand Test&Target and the entire Adobe Online Marketing Suite to help customers transform their businesses to better meet visitor needs, improve marketing content performance and generate real business value.”

Requirements for this tutorial:

• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, CS4 or CS5
• Flexi CSS Layouts Dreamweaver extension

Installing the Flexi CSS Layouts Dreamweaver extension

Before you open the Flexi CSS Layouts, you need to download and install this Dreamweaver extension. To download the extension, go to the product page and download a free trial, or if you have bought the product you can find the download link in your account on Extend Studio site.

After you have download the Flexi CSS Layouts extension kit, you need to install the Dreamweaver extension. Open the archive and double click the .mxp file and the Adobe Extension Manager should open and install it automatically. Or you can extract the archive, open the Adobe Extension Manager and select install. Then search the folder where you extracted the .mxp file and click open.

After you did these steps, open Dreamweaver and go to the Insert Panel (press CTRL + F2) to find the Flexi CSS Layouts tab.

Here is how to do the next steps.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=546zfdo0KAo

Flexi CSS Layouts is an easy to use Dreamweaver extension that helps you create table-less HTML layouts without coding in less than 5 minutes. You can simply build the page structure directly from the interface and the extension will automatically create the divs and CSS for your layout; you can further customize the layout with your own CSS rules directly in the easy to use interface.

Quick Steps

• Installing the Flexi CSS Layouts Dreamweaver Extension
• Understanding the layout structure
• Using the Flexi CSS Layouts Dreamweaver extension
• Creating the main Layout structure
• Creating complex pieces of layout

Read the tutorial here.

Requirements for this tutorial:

• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, CS4 or CS5
• Flexi CSS Layouts Dreamweaver extension

Flexi CSS Layouts is an easy to use Dreamweaver extension that helps you create table-less HTML layouts without coding, in less than 5 minutes. You can simply create the page structure directly from the interface and the extension will automatically create the divs and CSS for your layout. Or choose from a wide range of embedded templates for your layout, then customize the layout with your own CSS rules.

Quick Steps

• Installing the Flexi CSS Layouts Dreamweaver extension
• Setting the layout main properties
• Adding the header, footer and content rows
• Adding 3 columns in the content area
• Uploading the page on the production server
• Suggested usage of the layout

Read the tutorial here.

Adobe’s acquisition of Day will strengthen the company’s enterprise software solutions with market leading Web Content Management (WCM), Digital Asset Management and Social Collaboration offerings. This acquisition represents a significant market opportunity for Adobe to help organizations transform themselves by enabling them to create, manage, distribute and monetize content while optimizing the web experience for their customers.

Day’s leading web solutions combined with Adobe’s existing enterprise portfolio will enable customers to better integrate their global web presence and business applications, unlocking value across their marketing, sales and service processes.In addition, Day customers will be able to leverage more interactive application and document capabilities from Adobe® AIR®, Adobe® Flash®, Flex, Adobe® LiveCycle® and PDF.The combination of Day and Adobe will help customers realize the full potential of the web in acquiring, servicing and retaining their customers, without disrupting their existing IT infrastructures.

“Adobe’s acquisition of Day represents a key milestone in our efforts toward delivering best-in-class customer experience management solutions to enterprises and governments worldwide,” said Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Enterprise Solutions, Adobe. “With the addition of Day to our enterprise portfolio, we will be able to enhance the value of our offering and deliver on our vision of the web as the hub of customer interaction.”

“Organizations around the globe have recognized the importance of the online and mobile channel and turned to Day as their enterprise standard for next generation Web Content Management,”said Erik Hansen, CEO, Day Software. “We are excited to join Adobe and combine our expertise in WCM with technologies that create and deliver rich online and offline experiences leveraging the ubiquity of Flash and PDF. We believe this is a winning combination for both Adobe and Day customers.”

Transaction Details
As part of the expected integration of the two companies, Day will operate as a product line within Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit. Day CEO Erik Hansen will join Adobe reporting directly to Rob Tarkoff.

The proposed offer represents a premium of 59 percent over Day’s volume-weighted average share price for the last 60 trading days.  The Board of Directors of Day unanimously recommends the offer to Day shareholders.  The Chairman and the CEO of Day and other Board members have entered into undertakings to tender their shares.

The completion of the transaction, which is subject to customary government approvals and the satisfaction of other customary conditions, including a minimum acceptance threshold with respect to the tender offer, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2010 fiscal year.

Adobe expects the acquisition will have no material impact on Adobe’s non-GAAP earnings for fiscal year 2010 and that it will be accretive to non-GAAP earnings for fiscal year 2011.

“Our focus remains on meeting customer needs and driving innovation into the Adobe Online Marketing Suite,” said Josh James, senior vice president and general manager, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe Systems Incorporated. “The suite, now bolstered by the resources available through Adobe, continues to resonate with existing and new customers. It is becoming the exception for online marketers to utilize Omniture technology for just online analytics. Our customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated marketers and many of them are adopting multiple solutions within the Online Marketing Suite that help them unlock the power of their data to drive conversion and optimize ad spend.”

With the latest release of Adobe(R) SearchCenter +, Adobe has made it easier for marketers to optimize Facebook ads and has included support for the Google Display Network:

Advanced bid strategies for Facebook ads

– Adobe customers can utilize best-in-class analytics to identify and target high-performing customer segments on Facebook and automatically optimize the performance of their Facebook display campaigns based on any success metric, such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM).

– For example, Adobe customers can automatically update bid prices based on performance of the ad (as determined by conversion metrics), to maximize return on ad spend.

Image ad support for Google Display Network

– Adobe SearchCenter + simplifies the management and creation of Google Image ads.

– Import and storage of commonly used images allows advertisers to easily create and deliver image ads, which can save considerable time.

Adobe also announced updates to Adobe(R) Test&Target(TM), enabling marketers to more accurately personalize online content to specific audience segments. The latest release provides:

Optimization of Blackberry and Android mobile applications

– Developers and marketers can now easily modify the content delivery and user experience of their Blackberry and Android mobile applications in real-time, directly from the Test&Target online interface.

– This helps improve the effectiveness and performance of these mobile applications through A/B and multivariate testing, dynamic content targeting and audience segmentation.

Adobe analytics solutions within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, namely Adobe SiteCatalyst and Adobe(R) Discover(TM), are offering the following product updates:

The Marketing Channels Report

– Marketers can now see all their marketing channels (paid search, natural search, social media, video, etc.) compared to one another and easily tell what impact they are having on the business, helping marketers to know what marketing channels optimally influence their customer base.

– With this information, decision makers can better allocate budget to those marketing channels that bring the greatest return.

Adobe(R) ReportBuilder

– A significantly improved integration with Excel and Adobe SiteCatalyst can allow marketers to more quickly and easily build SiteCatalyst reports in Excel, helping marketers receive the insightful information they are looking for much faster.

Adobe(R) Creative Suite(R) 5 Integration with Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and video tracking

– Adobe has now integrated video tracking into its new OSMF video player as a way to play and measure online video, allowing marketers to quickly and easily deploy and tag online videos.

Dashboard enhancements

– Increased ability to customize dashboards to fit individual business needs and also include external data into the new dashboards.

Adobe Discover updates

– Using the data that is collected in Adobe SiteCatalyst with the Marketing Channels Report, Adobe Discover customers can now more effectively segment and target marketing efforts to specific customer groups based on customer-defined marketing channels.

– With this data marketers can build segments, do visitor analysis and compare the effectiveness of different marketing channels.

Requirements for the tutorial

• Adobe Dreamweaver (CS3, CS4, CS5 )
• Fusion charts for DW extension (either Designer edition or Developer)
• Results from FIFA World Cup™ Record (also you can check the All time ranking)

Read the article here.

But why it seems to be complicated to do table-less designs?

• Tables always work. There is less code to learn, so chances you do it wrong are less.
• Table code is easier to understand. Doing HTML tables is quite straightforward, you have the <Table>, <tr>, <td> tags that make things easier to follow. DIVs look the same!
• Tables designs look the same in most browsers. Being a very basic code even IE6 does a decent job in displaying the content
• Table designs make no difference for the customers. Most people don’t know how the code behind a site was made.

So, does it make sense to learn CSS if you only do small websites? There are several good reasons why you should switch from a table design to a CSS design, even for a ten pages site. And yes, if you use Dreamweaver there is a very easy way to build CSS sites, even if you don’t know how to code.

Read the original article here.

It is a fitting award for a woman whose career and business makes continued education accessible and comprehensible to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. lynda.com was initially launched in 1995 as Weinman’s personal and business web site to supplement her teaching and widely popular web design books. When the demand for her expertise took her away from home far too often, Weinman cofounded the Ojai Digital Arts Center with husband Bruce Heaven in 1998, and in 2002, they launched the subscription-based Online Training Library(R) on lynda.com that continues to teach computer and design skills through easy-to-follow videos to hundreds of thousands of members worldwide. Her venture has become the leading online video training resource for instruction in web design, digital photography, digital video, audio, 3D, animation, and much more. In 2010, lynda.com launched a free iPhone app that allows members and non-members to view its videos on-the-go. For more information on the history of lynda.com, watch The lynda.com Story.