Since the days when open source CMS applications began coming out, I’ve always been a bit unsure about which ones were the best to use for what. At the beginning, none of them were really very good, but now they have evolved and improved so much, there are now too many good ones to choose from.

Drupal versus Joomla

For the last few years, two of the most popular CMS platforms have been Drupal and Joomla. You can even see many job offers today looking for people who can develop using Drupal or Joomla. They are definitely among the most popular, that’s for sure. However, I don’t like either of them, and find their admin systems, especially, to be clumsy and overly-complicated.

Website Baker

My first favorite CMS was one that was not well-known at all when I first started using it. After trying out all the most popular ones, though, and then giving Website Baker a try, I was hooked instantly. It was so much simpler than all the others, and I found, as a programmer, that I could do pretty well anything I wanted with it to create custom functions and modules for customers. Best of all, though, was the admin system. It was so simple, almost anyone could just log in and start editing pages instantly. It also had the ability to allow an editor to use multiple menus and edit multiple sections on a page right out of the box.

Unfortunately, Website Baker is not being supported very well these days, and production and updates are few and far between. I still like it a lot, but it’s now not my only recommendation for a CMS.

Another thing that Website Baker can’t do is enable you to add a blog to your site. Well, there is a simple addon for allowing people to comment on pages, but it’s as simple as it comes. Instead of using Website Baker for the blog part of the site, I would use Website Baker for the CMS, and then just used WordPress for the blog part of the site. That required two different logins into two different administration areas, so it was a bit inconvenient to have that kind of setup.

WordPress - the best solution for a blog and CMS

In the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of freelance work for a local company. When I first started, they told me that they wanted to create CMS sites for customers using WordPress. At first, I didn’t think that was going to work out so well, but when I started to learn more about WordPress and how it could be used as a CMS, I gradually started to convert. As a programmer, and by adapting the skills I learned while working with Website Baker, I was able to become quite proficient at using WordPress in a short amount of time.

The best thing about WordPress is that it can be used to both manage your blog and manage your website content. Of course, since it was first developed as a blog platform, that is where its main strength lies (WordPress is by far the most used blogging platform), but its CMS features are also good for doing what most people need done.

To learn more about WordPress, I recommend checking out the offical Wordpress site at http://www.wordpress.org.

In my next article, I’m going to share some information about some of the things I do when I’m developing a WordPress site. Stay tuned.

We just got word from Hostgator that they are going to be offering their best deals of all time for one day only on Black Friday. Beginning at 12:00 am CST on Friday (right after the stroke of midnight on Thursday night), you will be able to purchase any of their hosting plans at unbeatable savings. This is how it’s going to work:

• 50% OFF EVERYTHING From 12:00AM CST – 5AM CST
• 80% OFF EVERYTHING From 5AM – 9AM CST WHILE SUPPLIES LAST (first come, first receive; so definitely don’t miss out!)
• From 9AM – 11:59PM CST OR after 80% OFF accounts have sold out, they will continue to offer 50% OFF EVERYTHING

For more information about this SUPER sale, go to Hosting Discount Codes to read the full article.

For the last couple of years, I have been using Enom for purchasing most of my domain names. They are one of the bigger domain registrars out there, and they have a powerful set of tools for managing your domains.

One of the things I don’t like about Enom, though, is that their prices are a bit higher than some of the other options out there. For example, they are charging $21.97/year for a .ca domain name, which is one of the biggest rip-offs I’ve ever seen. Their .com prices are much better at  $9.74 per year, but I’ve still seen some better prices.

Of course, I wasn’t using Enom to purchase .ca domain names. Only a crazy or ignorant person would do something like that. Instead, for my .ca domain names, I was using a local company called Netnation. They are selling .ca domain names for $11.95.

Well, recently, I just went through the process of purchasing another .ca domain name through Netnation, and I realized that it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. The problem for me is that they don’t accept payments through Paypal. Since I don’t have a credit card, that leaves me with just one option: cheque. The worst thing about paying them by cheque is that, even though you have gone through the process of purchasing a domain name through their shopping cart, you still have to wait for your cheque to make it to their office and then clear before the domain is actually purchased and you can use it as your own.

This week, I spent a few hours searching for the perfect company that I could use to purchase all of my domains — both .ca and .com — in place of Enom and Netnation. As a result, I believe I’ve finally found the best option for me: Netfirms.

One of the best features about Netfirms for me is that you can do all your payments through Paypal, which is about as convenient as it gets. Another thing I like is that both their .com and .ca domain names are just $9.95/year. To make things even better, at the moment, they are offering their .com domains at a 30% discount, so you can get one for $6.95! Now you’re talking!

So I am now in the process of switching to Netfirms to manage all my domain names. If you are interested in purchasing domain names at the best prices, as well, then I recommend you check them out. Just click on the banner below to see the great deals for yourself.

The competition is as fierce as ever in the world of cheap Web hosting plans, and more and more hosting companies are entering the fray all the time.

Because of the competition, we are seeing prices as low as $3.50/month for unlimited features, and as a result, it’s now possible for almost anyone to afford their own personal hosting package.

With so many companies offering the same kinds of features for the same price, it’s not an easy task to decide which one to sign up with. Personally, I think nobody is the best, and many are good choices, but in this article, I’m going to recommend a company called HostUpon.

HostUpon, like many of the other big shared hosting companies, has the usual features:

• UNLIMITED disk space
• UNLIMITED bandwidth
• UNLIMITED MySQL databases
• Free domain name for life
• 30-day money back guarantee

Some features they have available, and that other hosting companies don’t typically have are:

• SSL secure server
• A variety of hosting plan packages including Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated Servers.

Another reason why I would like to recommend HostUpon is because we have a exclusive coupon code that can help you get an extra $30 discount. That’s an extra 30 dollars off any hosting plan that you are signing up for. And the coupon code is…

hdcodes

Just go to HostUpon, read through their features, and sign up if you like what you see. Then, while you are going through the signup process, just enter the above code to receive your $30 discount. It’s as simple as that.

Not too long ago, I discovered something really interesting about HostPapa. They have two different websites, HostPapa.ca and HostPapa.com, and there are some curious differences between them.

HostPapa.ca is aimed at Canadian customers, so it has the Canadian flag at the top of the site, while HostPapa.com is aimed at American customers, and thus has an American flag at the top. However, there are a few more differences that everyone should know about.

In both cases, it is still a Canadian company, and the data centres (or ‘centers’ as it is spelled in America) are located in Toronto just the same, but the price difference between the two sites is quite a lot. If you purchase a 3-year hosting plan from the Canadian site, it is $5.95/month. That is a pretty good price by itself, of course. However, if you purchase the same plan from the American site, it is just $4.95/month. That’s a difference of $36 over 3 years!

One other difference worth mentioning is that you are not able to select a Canadian (.ca) domain name if you order from the American site.  Your free domain will have to be a .com, .net, .org, .biz, or .info. So if you want a .ca domain name, you will have to order from the Canadian site and pay $36 more for a 3-year plan. Is it worth it? I think not.

So if you want to purchase a hosting plan from HostPapa, my advice to you is to sign up through the American site, HostPapa.com, which isn’t really an American site, but actually a Canadian hosting company’s website aimed at American buyers. You can purchase it through there just the same and save $36 in the process, especially in these times when the Canadian and American dollars are dancing around parity.

Canadian aimed site

To sign up through the “for Canadian customers” site and pay more just to get a .ca domain name that you can buy yourself for less than 1/3 the price, click here.

American aimed site

To sign up through the “for American customers” site and get the best hosting deal possible from HostPapa, click here.

The choice is yours.

Update: Hostpapa has now increased their price for Americans to $5.95 to match the Canadian price. I should have known that instead of making them both $4.95, they would choose the higher price for both. They are also lying about the new price on the American-aimed site. They say that their regular price is $6.95 and they are now offering their hosting at $5.95. In fact, it used to say the regular price was $5.95, and they were offering it as $4.95. Very dishonest.

Disclaimer: The above banners are hosted offsite and may change at any time. At the time of this writing, all prices and details stated above were indeed true.

Here is a challenge that has stumped many users of SlideShowPro over the years, and it’s something that I have managed to figure out just recently with the help of a lot of research and trial and error. 

The situation is this: you or your client wants his slideshow to appear in a browser window and take up 100% of the width and 100% of the height of the browser window, no matter what size, and have the slideshow resize in real time as the browser window is dragged and resized. 

I have accomplished that, and have provided an example that you can check out: 

SlideShowPro scaled to browser window 

To do this, you will need to follow these steps: 

1. Add an actionScript to the FLA that contains the SlideShoPro component
2. Add a name to the instance of the SlideshowPro component on the stage
3. Make a few changes to the component properties
4. Update the HTML file

First, open your SlideShowPro movie in Flash, and you’ll see that there is only one layer and one frame. Click on the add new layer button, and a new layer will appear above the layer that has the SlideShowPro instance. Now, right click on the first frame in that layer, and when the context menu opens, select actions. Copy and paste the following code into the actionScript area: 

import flash.display.StageScaleMode;
import flash.display.StageAlign;
import flash.events.Event; 

stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, resizeHandler); 

// initialize sizing
resizeHandler (null); 

function resizeHandler (event:Event):void {
  var sw:Number = stage.stageWidth;
  var sh:Number = stage.stageHeight;
  backg.width = sw;
  backg.height = sh;
} 

The ActionScript window

The most important thing about this function for completing the next step is the part that says backg. It is making reference to an instance, and since you want it to refer to your SlideShoPro instance on the stage, you have to click on the stage. After you do that, you will see the properties box, and a field with the text “instance name.” Click in that field and type the word backg. 

Next, you have to make a few changes to the SlideShowPro Component Inspector. Click on the stage again, and then click on Window -> Component Inspector to open the Component Inspector. 

Not all these changes are exactly necessary for getting the scaling to work, but this is what seems to be working for me. Make sure you have the following settings, just in case: 

1. Directory Publishing -> Large Publishing -> Off
2. Options -> Full Screen Reformat -> On
3. Options -> Full Screen Takeover -> On (Use this if you want your image to scale to full screen when you click full screen button.)
4. Content -> Align -> Top Left
5. Content -> Scale ->Crop to Fit All

Show here: the Component Inspector (left) and Properties dialog box (top-right). Click to enlarge.

Okay, now save your FLA file, and publish it. No need to set any publish settings for the HTML because we are going to handle the HTML manually next. 

The next important step to take is to make sure your HTML is coded properly for displaying a full browser window Flash movie, and also for allowing full screen. 

I have included my entire HTML code here: 

<html>
    <head>
        <style>
        html, body {
        width: 100%;
        height: 100%;
        }
        body {
        overflow: hidden;
        }
   
        #wrapper {
        width: 100%;
        height: 100%;
        position: absolute;
        top: 0;
        left: 0;
        }
       
        </style>
    </head>
    <body bgcolor=”#ffffff”>
        <div id=”wrapper”>
            <object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=10,0,0,0” width=”100%” height=”100%” id=”test_full_screen” align=”left”>
                <param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”sameDomain” />
                <param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” />
                <param name=”movie” value=”slideshowpro.swf” />
                <param name=”quality” value=”high” />
               
                <embed src=”slideshowpro.swf” quality=”high” salign=”lt” wmode=”transparent” bgcolor=”#ffffff” width=”100%” height=”100%” name=”test_full_screen” align=”left” allowScriptAccess=”sameDomain” allowFullScreen=”true” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer” />
           
            </object>
        </div>
    </body>
</html> 

The most important parts of the HTML code are every place where the width and height are set to 100%. You have to have it in your object tag, embed tag, and also in your html, body, and wrapper styles. If you copy this code exactly, and use it for your own HTML file, you shouldn’t have any trouble.

I have found that copying this code directly from the blue area doesn’t work very well, as it tends to carry over the pretty quotes. Instead, I recommend doing a view source on my working example, and copying the code from there.

If you were able to follow all these steps to the letter, you should now have a SlideShowPro slideshow filling up your entire browser window, and expanding and shrinking in real time as your resize it.

I have another website for featuring top-10 Web hosting companies, discount coupon codes, and hot deals called Hosting Discount Codes, and I’ve been spending quite a lot of time researching hosting companies and other Web deals for it. As a result of my work and research, I’m now able to recommend one of these hosting companies as the one that gives you the absolute best value for your buck. That company is called iPage.

Actually, I haven’t had an account with iPage yet, but I haven’t really heard anything bad about them yet. However, I have been through all their pages, and tried going through the sign up process right up to the point where I was required to pay. I can say that their sign up is very simple, and only requires you to fill out a few form fields. You are then able to pay by credit card or PayPal.

iPage has similar features to many of the other companies in my top-10 hosting companies list, including:

• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• Unlimited emails
• Unlimited addon domains
• Google, Yahoo, and Facebook advertising credits
• Free domain for life
• Anytime money back guarantee

What sets iPage apart is mainly the price. While most hosting companies require you to sign up for multiple years to take advantage of their lowest cost, iPage is always at the lowest cost. You can sign up for $3.50/month whether you decide to pay for 3 years, 2 years, or even 1 year.

One other thing that is really useful to people who would like to sell something online is the included shared SSL. This makes it possible to accept payments by credit card or PayPal securely, which site visitors often need. Setting this up yourself by purchasing an SSL certificate and a dedicated IP would be an additional expense of around $100 per year.

Despite its less appealing name, iPage has a very attractive website, and they go into just enough detail about their hosting plan features to let you know what you need to know without confusing you (though most of the best hosting companies are pretty good at doing that now). I highly recommend you check out iPage so you can view all these features, and see for yourself the amazing value you can get for just $3.50 per month.

For anyone who has been coding in HTML for any length of time, one of the biggest challenges has always been with trying to get a website to look the same in different browsers.

There was a time when you could program your site to work with Internet Explorer, and not have to worry too much about the other browsers; though, if you wanted to be considered as a professional company, you would have to try to make it look good in Netscape, too. Those were the only two relevant browsers.

Since the mid 2000′s, however, several other browsers began to take root and have been growing ever since. While IE is still the most used browser, Firefox is now running a close second, and Mozilla browsers, Opera, and Safari are trailing quite a ways behind, but have a loyal following nonetheless.

According to the Web Browser Statistics page at SynAxiom, the breakdown is as follows:

Actually, for anyone who has had a lot of experience with coding websites–and I don’t mean using Dreamweaver in design mode, but actually typing in code and understanding it–it’s actually not that difficult to get a website to look almost identical in different browsers, as long as it’s just your average site. Unfortunately, there are some designers out there who really like to push the limits with their designs, and there are times when coders like us have to try to pull off a miracle to satisfy a designer’s dream. In situations like these, when you have to do complicated code tricks, the differences in displays across browsers can be quite dramatic.

To make matters worse, when something does go wrong, often it’s on a browser you don’t have and aren’t able to test the site on. If you’ve installed Internet Explorer 8, for example, and someone is having problems on Internet Explorer 7 or even 6 (believe it or not, some people are still using that mess of a browser), you can no longer test on those browsers. Another case would be when someone has problems on a Mac, even when the same browser you have on your PC doesn’t seem to have any problems. How many developers can have all these computers and browsers available at the same time for testing?

This is where the website, Browser Shots, comes in handy. Browser Shots allows you to enter in any URL that you want to view on different browsers, and select all the browsers that you would like to view your website on. The choices include pretty well everything that is out there now. You can also choose which screen size you want to view the site on, the color depth, and you can even disable things like Javascript, Java, and Flash. What an amazing tool; and the best thing of all is it’s entirely free to use.

Anyway, so you’ve entered in your domain name, made your selections, and clicked on the submit button. What happens next? Well, all you have to do is wait. Unfortunately, that can sometimes be a big problem for this site, and it’s where it can get buggy, too. The waiting can be quite long, and your session will eventually time out after 30 minutes, though you can click on the extend button to extend it for another 30 minutes at any time. Sometimes, a few of your browser selections won’t work at all, and you’ll have to try again. So it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to complain about such a useful applications that doesn’t cost you a dime to use.

Browser Shots for my site, Dominet.ca

So there you have it. For all you developers out there, you now have a nice tool to help you with your programming tweaks in trying to get the website your working on to look as consistent as possible across a wide array of browsers. It has helped me to solve my issues many times, and I’m sure it will be useful for you to.

Working as a freelance website coder for 10 years now, I’ve long gotten used to relying on the Internet to have my questions answered and problems solved.

Now, I’m pretty strict to myself at trying to do my code properly. For instance, I would never add in a tag attribute without putting quotes around the attribute (i.e., width=”20″ instead of width = 20). That was one of the first things I learned in college when I started studying HTML — luckily I had a C programmer for a teacher who taught me high standards for coding.

In the old days (well, within the last 5-15 years), just about everyone was using tables for layouts. It was pretty well the only way it could be done, and the table format was an ideal tool for producing complex layouts that were often demanded by graphic designers (sometimes they want things that are almost impossible).

Beginning around five years ago, though, was a new kind of movement to try to separate content from style. It may have been around for more than five years, but that was around the time I first started hearing about it. One of my clients had asked me to look into developing sites in XHTML for him, and learning how to do that led me down this path of discovery. It almost seemed like I was reading the writings of some new religion, with people getting angry and looking down on developers who were not following the rules of this new movement. One of the biggest things emphasized was that tables should not be used for layout, but for tabular data (an actual table found within the content, usually with borders and lines separating the cells).

I remember spending a lot of time trying to develop sites without using tables for layout. Sometimes I could do it, but if the design had a lot of complexity, or certain design elements, it was difficult to get rid of every table, so I just reduced them to as few as possible. When I encountered problems, I sometimes found solutions, but it usually involved writing a large amount of extra CSS, complete with hacks — something I’m really reluctant to do. After all, I was getting rid of some code by eliminating the extra code involved in creating at able, but actually adding a lot more code in the CSS. Was I really getting ahead?

So I started to get better at using floated DIV tags for layouts, and I started to get better at doing really complex layouts. It was a little better than using tables for layouts, for the most part. I admit, the code did look better, and my overall HTML page had less code, but what was I really doing that was different besides reducing the code in the HTML document. The DIV tags were still essentially cells, just like the table cells I used to use. I didn’t think it was really that much better, especially not a big enough improvement to warrant the insane amount of rebukes and fits I was seeing from the semantic fanatics.

For my navigation, I liked to just use a DIV tag to start it, such as <div id=”main-nav”>. It was so simple that way, and I could style all my links between the DIV tags almost any way I wanted. But I soon found out that even this was a problem for the semantic fanatics. They were preaching that navigation should be done using lists, and they were frothing at the mouth just as much as when they said tables shouldn’t be used for a layout. They said that a navigation is a list, so list tags (<ul><li>link</li></ul>) should be used.

Well, just like I didn’t switch to completely table-free sites, I didn’t start doing my navigations with lists. If I want to use them, I do, and if I don’t want to, I do not. However, this time, the semantic fanatics have a huge problem of inconsistency on their hands. On one side of their mouths, they tell people not to use tables for layouts, and on the other side, they tell people to use lists for navigation. Now what’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong with it is that a navigation is not a list.

Lists have been found in HTML since the early days. They are used to list items in an orderly manner, such as a list of groceries, a list of symptoms of having a cold, or any other kind of list that the content requires. The key here is that it is used as part of the content. A navigation is not part of the content, but something outside of the content altogether.

So, isn’t it a bit strange for the semantic fanatics to say:

• Tables should not be used for layout, because they were never intended for layout, but for tabular data in the content

and then say

• Lists should be used for navigation.

Shouldn’t they be saying

• Lists should not be used for navigation, because they were never intended for navigation, but for lists of items in the content

In this case they are seriously contradicting themselves. Can you say double standard? Very foolish.

In conclusion, I would just like to say that it is a good idea not to take the semantic fanatics too seriously. We should strive to code as well as we possible, and it is probably best to follow XHTML standards to make sure our tags are closed and attributes are all in quotes. Other than that, I say it’s up to you to decide what works best for your site. Don’t spend a ton of extra hours trying to get rid of all your tables, use a table for layout if you want, but only if absolutely necessary, and either do or do not use a list for your navigation. Good luck with your coding!

Recently, a customer asked me how much it would cost him to get a new design for his site. There was a time when I would have told him that it would probably cost him at least $1,500 to get a decent design from a reputable Web or graphic design company. But now things are much different, and there are many cheaper options out there.

When I first decided that I wanted to go with the new company/website name, Site Fixers, one of the first things I thought about was how I could get a pretty decent looking website up there that would give the appearance of quality without the high cost that usually goes with it. Then I remembered seeing banners in the midst of my Internet searches that were advertising cheap templates, so I decided to look into it some more.

First, I came across the company Template Monster, which has a pretty nice looking banner that is hard to resist clicking, like this:

They claim to be the world’s #1 templates provider, and I can believe it. I couldn’t believe the selection there! More than 20,000 templates, and also Flash templates, blog templates, CMS templates, logos, and other types of graphics, as well. The thing that made them stand out the most, though, was the average price of these templates. The typical template there, most of which look professionally designed, is around $63. Now that’s a far cry from $1,500.

With all their templates organized in categories, it wasn’t difficult to find many good designs that I might be able to use for my site. In fact, there were too many choices. Even so, I decided to look around and see some of the offerings from other sites.

Next, I came to a site called called Dream Template which claims to have more than 5,500 templates at the time of writing, and I was impressed again at all the high quality designs, also neatly arranged in categories and multiple page results. However, with Dream Template, the price was even better: $59.95 for UNLIMITED access to all their templates for one full year.

Now that was definitely a deal I couldn’t pass up, and there was a certain template there that really caught my eye, so I decided to go ahead and buy the one year subscription. Also, I knew I would probably be able to use some of the other templates I saw there for other site ideas I had, and probably even use some of them for my customers.

Now, the template you see at Sitefixers.ca is one of the templates that I downloaded from Dream Template. Of course, I had to modify it a bit to make it my own. The first thing I did was add my own logo to the top, replacing the space holder they had there, and then renamed all the links to match the pages that I would be using for my site. One more thing that I did a bit later was almost completely redo the code. Not that the code had any problems, but it was a bit too bulky for me, and I wanted to slim it down and make it a bit nicer.

So there you have it. I got myself a nice new website for under a hundred dollars, not counting the work I put into modifying it, of course. I’m really happy with it, and now I have a great resource for more templates, if I need them. I’m pretty sure, between Dream Template and Template Monster, that I will be able to find an acceptable design for almost any customer. I highly recommend you check them out, too, the next time you or one of your customers needs a nice, cheap graphic design.