Web Design Blog
Searching for open source shopping carts
October 23rd, 2007 by Dustin BrewerI have recently been looking for a good e-commerce solution for a web design client and have had the opportunity to go through several of the most popular ones that I could find through Google. I was looking for a solution that was open source, preferably in PHP and MySQL and that was standards compliant.
It was also important to have a product that was expandable so I could add features easily to it for this client and any others that would need a shopping cart. I wasn’t looking for a shopping cart solution that would require hacks to get it where I needed it but something that would be as flexible as the web design business demands. Read more »
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Manipulate images online for free at Rsizr
October 9th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerI came across an interesting web site called Rsizer that allows you to manipulate an image by cropping, resizing, or several other pretty cool little tricks. All this reminded me of Adobe’s upcoming Photoshop Express that will work over the web.
It will be interesting to see our computing experiences not defined by how fast our processors are or how much memory we have but by how fast our internet connections are.
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Open source Dreamweaver alternatives
September 13th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerI have used Dreamweaver for a long time now, before that just like most in the field it was notepad. I used to not need anything fancy but the more I learned about Dreamweaver the more I liked. For instance, the ability to create keyboard shortcuts for custom snippets was endlessly handy. It is the one feature I have yet to find done decently in any other software. I also like auto-complete because when it is done right it saves you tons of keystrokes. Read more »
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Test IE5 or IE6 on your PC with IE7 installed
July 25th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerI get this question quite a bit for people that need to test their web sites on IE6 mostly that already have IE7 installed. I have found a great piece of software from TredoSoft that does just this. It basically installed IE 3.0, IE 4.01, IE 5.01, IE 5.5 and IE 6 on your computer to let you test your web page on them. This is all assuming you have IE7 already installed. If for whatever reason you don’t want to replace your IE6 with IE7 they also have a stand alone IE7 that you can install to test your web pages on.
I mostly use this software for testing web pages on IE6 standalone. This is a very useful software for testing your web page. For those of you wishing to test Safari you may know that it has been released for PC, but it is still a little buggy.
Unfortunately I don’t have a good way right now to test other browsers on your Mac but I will keep an eye out for something that does. Hopefully the company will create IE6 stand alone for the Mac soon. Currently it does work for Windows XP and Vista though.
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Safari Public Beta 3, now available for Windows!
June 12th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThats right, Safari is now available for Windows for all of you Safari lovers out there. I don’t know that I would neccesarily include myself in the Safari loving group but I definetely see it as a tool that will come in handy when ensuring that a web site is working in all browsers.
Now only if Konquerer would come out for windows, things would get interesting. At any rate the software runs great for me on Windows XP SP2 (Tested on 3 XP SP2 machines) I also tested it on a Media Center PC and it worked fine and tested it on a Windows Vista Ultimate computer and Safari worked fine also.
Apparently though I may be a rare case because there have been reports of it crashing constantly or having other weird issues. Roger from 456 Berea Street said that the software never even started up on his XP machine but worked great on OSX.
At any rate, Safari is now working on Windows so we have a new option in the browser war. Personally I will probably stay with Firefox, mostly for the extensions. I could deal with losing the memory issues with Firefox though
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Should you upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 3?
April 27th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerAdobe Creative Suite 3 has been released for about a week now and everyone has had a chance to try it out and see what kinds of new things it can do or what new features it has. So far everything that we know and love about the products is mostly there. Although the new palettes in illustrator CS3, InDesign CS3 and Photoshop CS3 are similar to InDesign CS2 as in they stay mostly out of the way unless you need them. Which is a huge benefit for saving screen real estate and possibly one of the most useful features so far. There are of course more functional features that are useful but some of the best features are organizational. Read more »
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Microsoft announces Silverlight as a Flash competitor
April 18th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThe announcement of Microsoft Silverlight comes as somewhat a shock to a lot of the design community, with Microsoft introducing a new flash competitor things could start to heat up in the design world. Especially sense they are also developing Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Expression Designer. They have already released Microsoft Expression Web which was the replacement web design product for Frontpage (which was utter crap). So far Expression Web looks like a good program, as far as standards go at least. Read more »
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Top 5 design podcasts for designers
April 1st, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThese are the top design podcasts that i frequently watch/listen to throughout the week, they are all updated weekly and have a ton of useful information for the seasoned professional designer and for the new designers whether freelance designer or just starting an entry level design job. I wish I could separate these into the top 5 design video podcasts and top 5 design audio podcasts but unfortunately there just aren’t that many out there and a lot of the podcasts available just aren’t any good or updated enough to be worth your time or mine. Read more »
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Top 10 design books for designers
March 20th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThere are a lot of books out their to get inspiration from or to learn how to design better. There are a lot. So, picking the right books instead of just a ton of useless books that aren’t worth your time or just regurgitating the same thing developed by someone else. I have compiled a list of the top 10 books I have found that give me inspiration or are truly worth reading for web designers, graphic designers, writers or just hobbyists. All of them will be helpful for graphic designers and web designers but a few are great for writers or anyone in the creative industry. Read more »
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout my web design portfolio.
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