Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with webdesign and software

What program should I use to create an image map?

HylandErickson — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 11:31:24 -0800

I need to learn to make interactive image maps. I know HTML and Photoshop, but I've never used a pagemaking program before. What one should I learn? Thanks!

£50 a month to host two small (Plone) websites?

bollockovnikov — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:23:01 -0800

I think my friend's small company might be getting ripped off. I need advice as to what is acceptable pricing for building and running a couple of websites. So my friend works for a 3 person outfit. They required a simple, no fuss website, which they can easily add content to for news updates, etc. usual stuff, but constant attention to the content is important, and new sections to the site might be needed at the drop of a hat, when new projects are implemented.

They chose a particular design company, who also setup and run the hosting of the site. The first year of hosting was free, but they had to pay for the design and implementation.

The site is good, but misses some key features they have asked for. They find it doesn't quite fulfill all their needs, and not being very technically savvy, they also run two or three other services (such as a NING community) to fill in the gaps.

They ask me to help them out with tech stuff occasionally. I hadn't realised how spread out their web presence was until they showed me. I am torn as to the advice I should give them.

The design/hosting company sent them an email after a year saying:

"Now your free year of hosting is over you will have to pay £50 A MONTH".

I said that this was a lot, especially since the design fee was paid ages ago and the site doesn't really live up to all expectations. I said they could do a similar job with a wordpress site, in fact, they could use wordpress to seamlessly link all their different web needs together. Cheaply. I believe this is true, and that hosting it elsewhere would be much cheaper, but I am also aware that for a small outfit time is important. They have neither the time nor the tech knowledge to deal with backend website stuff (like implementing wordpress).

They sent a message echoing my concerns to the company, who replied this way:

"The two sites are hosted on our shared infrastructure. I understand your colleague's comments about hosting charges - hosting for simple web sites can be purchased for as little as £5/month.

However, both the sites are built using Plone (http://plone.org/) which requires slightly more complex hosting than static or PHP based sites. I realise that of course I would say this, but £25/month for hosting a Plone site is well below the average market rate.

The service is made up of the following:

* Space on our shared servers
* Guaranteed bandwidth of 10Mbps
* Unlimited data transfer each month
* Nightly full backups, retained for 30 days
* Access to our outbound email infrastructure
* Access to our DNS infrastructure
* A share of the operational cost of running the server
* Regular security patching of the application stack
* Regular security patching of the underlying operating system

The key point is that we manage the entire process for you rather than, say, one of the cheaper PHP hosts where you would have to manage the security of your own application."

Again, I believe most of these features are pretty standard on a regular hosting account. They are s small outfit and don't need shitloads of bandwidth. the company know this, or they should.

Are they getting ripped off? I'm sure PLONE is great, but is it necessary, especially for a small outfit? Should they demand a backup of their site and move on to wordpress etc? Or should they stick with the company, but ask them for a much more dynamic design and an update for their money?

What do you think?

Thanks

How do I expose invisible characters in web forms?

ao4047 — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:46:30 -0800

How do I expose invisible characters in web forms? I just got burned with my company newsletter system which crapped out un-rendered HTML code to hundreds of thousands of recipients because there was a carriage return in the subject line submitted to the mailing software. I don't know how it got there.

1) Is it normal web security that these types of invisible characters are stripped from submitted input?

2) Is there any Firefox add-on that will expose these things to me?

Thank you for your help!

What's the best WYSIWYG software for web design these days?

julen — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:03:57 -0800

What is the best WYSIWYG website builder for PCs out there these days? My uncle is still using an archaic version of Front Page to produce his family websites. The results look OK but are unusable (hyperlinks don't work) if you are using a Mac or Firefox, which is pretty much rules out 90% of his audience.

So what is the best desktop app for designing websites on a PC these days? He doesn't know HTML, and online webapps aren't an option. It should be easy to use but produce good clean code. Help me only fix the HTML once!

HELP! I need to update a site that is outdated.

Meep! Eek! — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:25:36 -0800

I need a web page design program that will work with pages that were originally done in Adobe Page Mill, and have .swf files from around 2003 or so. I'm temping for a very nice firm who are trying to keep me busy even though they've already filled the position that I was pulled in to fill while they were looking. They need an update to their website. Badly. It hasn't been touched in years, and there are silly noises, probably javascript, as well as .swf files that need updating. My days of coding are from back in the hand coding days of static web pages, although I did do QA after people started adding interactive things to websites.

I searched through the old answers, but they were old enough for me to think that there may be something better out there. As I'm temping, I doubt that they're going to want to buy a big expensive program, so something that has a trial period, or is cheap to buy, but has elements that will perform these services will be the most helpful.

ANY help appreciated. Some of their information is about people who haven't worked here in some 5 years or more. It ~really~ needs an update.

Dreamhacker

ReiToei — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:30:51 -0800

I would like to write my own HTML/CSS editor. What would be the best way to go about it? (more inside) I've been a professional web developer for the last 8 years or so. I've used Dreamweaver all the way back since the very first beta came out way back when. Without a doubt, it's the best tool for the job (for me).

Saying that, I only ever use Dreamweaver to write code. I don't use any of the visual tools, or any of the built in javascript or back end helper code. I'd say I maybe use 15% of all it's features. It got quite bloated over the years, but it's that 15% that's keeping me from ditching in altogether and going with something like Komodo edit or one of the other open source tools like Bluefish or Aptana.

These features are:

1. The awesome tab completion and code hinting for HTML/CSS
2. Code coloring
3. Color pickers when defining colors on the fly
4. File picker when defining background image files on the fly
5. Code formatting/indentation

My question is, how hard would it be to write my own standalone editor that could do these things, or could I extend another existing software package (like Eclipse) to do it? I would like to make something that would be cross-platform and free.

Apologies for the long-winded post. I throw myself at your feet, hive mind!

How can I strip out extraneous CSS rules from my stylesheets?

jeremias — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:54:49 -0800

How can I strip out extraneous CSS rules from my stylesheets? I've got an external css file that I've modified quite extensively and it's also quite long. I would like to compare the rules in the css file with the div and class tags that I've added in my html and then discard all the css rules that don't apply. So this isn't CSS optimizing like CSS Tidy . . .

Is there anything either on or offline that will allow me to do this?

CMS vs. Blogging Software - whats exactly is the difference and which would you recommend?

MaverickX — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 16:45:38 -0800

CMS vs. Blogging Software - whats exactly is the difference and which would you recommend? I've currently got a fairly successful daily "news" site (technology bargain site), running on a partially modified build of Coranto, CMS software. I've been out of the "web design game" for a while now and am frankly ~~pretty~~ EXTREMELY rusty with my skills.

Anyways, I'm looking to update my site but now with all these blogging software packages out there, I'm considering going with one of those. But there's also a slew of new CMS packages out there as well, so I'm having a hard time deciding whats the best fit for me or really what the differences are b/w the two (seems like 2 names for roughly the same thing to me). Here's what the site does/needs:

*Easy, intuitive daily news posting
*Categorical posting of news
*Thumbnails w/ each post (the more automated, the better)
*Comments
*Some user feedback/voting (a la Digg) would be great
*Ability to run polls on the home page
*Ability to EASILY add content to the main page (other than news...probably in side bars/boxes)
*Ability to generate additional pages outside of main page.
*Easy site customization (outside of using a pre-made theme).