HighEdWeb

[jason]

I just got home from Day One of the 4th annual Higher Education Web Professionals of New York (HighEdWeb) conference. I've seen several presentations on all kinds of emergency technologies and trends in the web arena. Once the coference ends tomorrow, I'll be going through my notes and checking out the many websites I've been exposed to, and I'll post anything that I think might be of interest to the JagPC community once I do.

In the meantime, check out this very cool site:

http://www.csszengarden.com

The site is designed to teach about CSS, but it gets the point across in a very interesting way. The site's content is stored in a very simple HTML file. Then, along the side of the page there are several links that let you changle the site's style. Check them out--we aren't talking about simple color changes here. Every single style is still using the same HTML, just a different stylesheet.

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Another interesting development for those of us designers/developers who have clients that want to be able to change their sites but who we want to keep from messing up the design and/or code is Macromedia Contribute. Contribute works with Dreamweaver MX and allows your clients to edit the areas of their site that you say are OK. You also get control over what they can do (for example, you can control what fonts they can select or the maximum size of images they can insert). It also allows them to drag Word documents or Excel spreadsheets (single worksheet only right now) onto the page and have the text inserted and reformatted automatically. In order for it to work, you have to be using Dreamweaver templates. The cost for a single license of Contribute (that your client would buy) is about $100 for the commercal version, I believe; I think there is also a 30 or 60 day trial available for download as well. Contribute only works in Windows right now, but they Macrtomedia reps said a Mac (I want to say OS X only, but don't quote me on it) version will be out in a couple months.

This is my second long post of the night. I'm starting to feel like Tim Greer (Those of you who were around when he worked for JPC or who search for his posts will know what I mean... )

--Jason

[jason]

Oh, if you're interrested in seeing the HighEdWeb website go to http://www.highedweb.org.

Its not much to look at right now, but I kinda (that's good college-educated/college staff vocabulary ) have a feeling that one of my college's web teams is going to change that soon. They designed some very nice print materials for the conference, and I have the feeling that they'll be applying that look to the site as well...

--Jason