WebAssist recently switched to using WordPress for our blog and its likely that you might be running WordPress as well. Did you know they have a free iPhone app so you can blog wherever you’re at? Check it out at http://iphone.wordpress.org/ for the details.
Archive for March 2009
Mar
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We have just launched our latest solution: PowerStore. PowerStore is a pre-built PHP application that gives you a fully functional eCommerce store complete with user registration, product catalog, and PayPal checkout The solution also includes all of the required administrative pages to manage your catalog, users, and orders. You can customize the look and feel yourself or purchase a site design from SuCasa. Check out a live demo at http://www.powerstore-demo.com.
PowerStore was built using many of our Dreamweaver extensions – including eCart, DataAssist, SecurityAssist, SiteAssist, CSS Sculptor and CSS Menu Writer. However, you do not need to own Dreamweaver or our extensions to be able to use it and customize it. Just configure a few settings and follow the detailed instructions on how to upload the site to your hosting provider and you should be good to go.
Jeffrey Zeldman recently took a look at how the top 100 sites as selected by Alexa fared in terms of validation. He found that only 7 validated completely while another 4 were close, with just a couple of errors. Obviously, the battle for web standards goes on. I thought I’d take a look to see how some of the very top sites did beyond validation–using our Dreamweaver extension, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Standards Advisor. Cut to the chase results? Everyone’s got room to grow.
I visited each of the following sites and copy/pasted the source of their home pages and a random internal page into Dreamweaver and then ran the Advisor. Here’s a bit of what I found:
Google – Fared pretty well, until the final report noted that they’re still using <font> and <center> tags. Really?
Yahoo – Again with the <font> tags; looks like old habits are hard to break. On a more modern property of theirs, Buzz, the font tags were gone, but they seem to have fallen into the trap of labeling their classes with color names, thus making redesigns a bit more hairy than they need to be.
YouTube – A preponderance of classes with color names here, too, as well as overusing classes. Yes, the dreaded classitis!
Interestingly enough, both #4 Facebook and #5 MySpace have more in common than social networking. Both have opted to lead with an h2 tag rather than an h1 tag on their pages. Not a big deal for the top guys, but if you and I made our sites that way, they wouldn’t rank as highly in the search engines. So you’ve got two choices: design your sites to be popular as Facebook and MySpace or place your <h1> tags so that they’re hierarchically positioned. Your choice 
.
All in all, kind of fun to look at their code from the web standards perspective. If anyone is interested, I saved all the reports generated by WSA and can post them later.
Due to popular demand—and a good idea—we’ve created a search facility for the posts on our previous forum. There, you can search by forum, title, author, or message text—or anything in-between. If you find something you’d like to keep available, re-post it in the current forum so current users can more easily access the info.
I’ve also just set up a job board for folks who are looking for some pro assistance. It’s also a good place to advertise yourself and your particular skill set. Share a link or two of the work you’re proudest of and, who knows, it could lead to future work. You can find the new Job Board under the forum’s General category.
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