Free Microsoft products for small businesses…

By Simon, 9 October, 2009, 1 Comment

WebsiteSpark is designed for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others. It enables you to get software, support and business resources from Microsoft at no cost for three years, and enables you to expand your business and build great web solutions using ASP.NET, Silverlight, SharePoint and PHP, and the open source applications built on top of them.
What does the program provide?

WebSiteSpark provides software licenses that you can use for three years at no cost. Once enrolled, you can download and immediately use the following software from Microsoft:

* 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
* 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
* 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
* 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
* 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
* DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

Click here to visit the Microsoft WebsiteSpark programme.

Share this post with others:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • De.lirio.us
  • Live
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Print
  • Slashdot
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis

HTML 5 – An interesting step-by-step post

By Simon, 6 August, 2009, No Comment

Smashing Magazine wrote an excellent post a couple of days ago about building a page in HTML 5. It has a step-by-step guide and the explanations for each section were clear and concise.

HTML 5 is still well in its infancy and very few browsers even support what has been approved. The thing is we know it is going to happen so there is no harm in learning the foundations of how it works now. I’m not advocating that we should all start developing everything in HTML 5 but this is another tool to think about when building or updating a site. In the age where job competition is fierce this can only be another string in your bow.

Visit the Smashing Magazine HTML 5 post here.

Also See…

- HTML 5 on Wiki

- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/16/html5-and-the-future-of-the-web/

- W3C’s oveview of HTML 5

- Differences between HTML4 and HTML 5

- A HTML 5 validator

Share this post with others:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • De.lirio.us
  • Live
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Print
  • Slashdot
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis

Microformats – Google back the RDFa format

By Simon, 5 August, 2009, No Comment

One of the big issues of Web 2.0 is the computers inability to distinguish what the content is. You might well have “Author: Simon Day” which, to a human, is very obvious but to a search engine spider or computer it isn’t because the page can contain many names. It simply cannot extrapolate the information as well as a human because the pages can contain many other names, dates, times, URL’s, email addresses and so on . What we’ve needed for a long time is a way for the spiders and computers to know what is actually happening on a section of a page and give it precise details like, as an example, the when, the what and the who.

Microformats are a way of adding a small piece of markup so it can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

Share this post with others:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • De.lirio.us
  • Live
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Print
  • Slashdot
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis

All the IE bugs plus fixes in one handy location

By Simon, 29 May, 2009, 1 Comment

There are a number of IE bugs and with IE8 the bug list just keeps on growing. Positioneverything.net has the nost extensive list of IE bugs and fixes I’ve seen.

Visit: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

Every web designer should have this bookmarked!

Share this post with others:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • De.lirio.us
  • Live
  • StumbleUpon
  • LinkedIn
  • Print
  • Slashdot
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis