Welcome to Jessica this week! Jessica has completed a variety of projects for Onward! Studios. This week, she joins us by sharing her expertise and experience with Joomla.

This is the fifth posting in the series “Can I Update My Own Website?” If you missed the previous postings, check them out:

Part 1: Intro
Part 2: WordPress
Part 3: CushyCMS
Part 4: Contribute

In this posting, the final one for this series, we are going to look at another option:

Joomla is a powerful Content Management System that is an open source program, meaning that anyone can use the Joomla CMS for free. You may want to use Joomla for your next web design if your organization is large enough to warrant a website that will need many pages, multiple content editors, or you want to be able to use features like a shopping cart without having to have a web programmer on staff. (more…)

This is the fourth posting in the series “Can I Update My Own Website?”  If you missed the previous postings, check them out:

Part 1: Intro
Part 2: WordPress
Part 3: CushyCMS

In this posting, we are going to look at another option— Contribute.

As we’ve seen with some of the other options, there are a few parameters that need to be in place for one to use Contribute. The primary requirement is that the site must be developed in Dreamweaver and must make use of a Dreamweaver Template. These are options your web designer should already be aware of. Contribute is a software package sold by Adobe. Obviously, this software will need to be purchased. You can find it on amazon.com. (more…)

This is the third posting in the series “Can I Update My Own Website?”  If you missed the previous two postings, check them out:

Part 1
Part 2

In this posting, we are going to look at another option— CushyCMS.

This option is an online option. It is available at cushycms.com. Your web designer will need to set up your account at the cushycms website. This account provides CushyCMS the ‘background’ information it needs to get to your web pages. After signing into CushyCMS, you will see your pages listed. Simply click on the page to edit the content of that page. (more…)

Last week I mentioned several available options that allows one to update their own website. Click here if you have not read that posting. That will give you the background for this posting.

In this posting, I will discuss one of those options. WordPress.

WordPress is being used more and more. Not only has it become one of the main ‘blog’ options for blog sites, it is becoming more and more popular as an option for designing a ‘non-blog’ website. The beauty of WordPress is that there are zillions of templates to choose from, or, if you find the right website designer, they can customize your WordPress site to your liking. (more…)

As a creator of websites, I hear this a lot: “Can I update my own website?” The answer is “You Can!,” but your web designer needs to know that you want to be able to do that, so the ‘hooks’ needed for you to be able to update your site are in place. Or, if you already have a website, your website designer will likely need to add those ‘hooks’. In the most extreme case, your web designer may need to redesign the site. (more…)

Are you a photographer wanting to get your photos online? Or do you know someone who takes awesome photos and they need to get their photos online?

I talked with a published photographer this week and we discussed website options for photographers. Options that offer online portfolios, ecommerce capabilities, password protected galleries, and provides the photographer the necessary tools to ‘easily’ set up and maintain their own site. (more…)

I was asked recently how to use CSS to format links on a web page.  This is a very basic introductory tutorial. There are many additional features one can use to spice up your buttons, but this will get you started.

In this brief tutorial, I define how I want my links to appear via CSS  (more…)

Great information from a CSS guru, Chris Coyier. He answers questions that come up regularly with CSS, http://tinyurl.com/pr4kpv

Have you ran into the ever-so-frustrating issue with png images not being transparent in IE6? I recently found very good documentation that explained how to implement the fix. The author of this fix is at twinhelix.com. I am going to cover the very basic steps here, but if you want more info, open the iepngfix.html file that’s included in the zip files.

Here are the basic steps. (more…)

For a long time, the use of Absolute and Relative positioning has confused me..and it still does sometimes, but I think I am understanding it more and more. In this 10 minute video, I explain how Absolute positioning works with Relative positioning in placing elements on the page.

Here are the files I use, if you want to see them.  zip file

Video:  CSS: Absolute and Relative Positioning (opens in new window)