Announcing the Web Studio Site of the Year Contest
As many of your know, we sponsor a monthly Site of the Month contest on our online forum, webstudioforum.com. Each month Web Studio customers submit their finished site in hopes of winning Site of the Month.
We have had many years of winners now, and it was decided we should see which of those past winners are the best. Hence, the Site of the Year contest.
What you get to do is vote on which sites are the best throughout the years 2003-2005. You vote on each year separately. The years 2004 and 2005 are split into two categories, Homspun and Designer winners, so you get to vote on two sites for each of those years. Voting ends April 30, 2006.
As you vote please kee in mind: only one vote per member per year and category; once entered, you cannot change your vote. And remember, you can enter the Site of the Month contest as well! If you win you'll be eligible for next year's Site of the Year contest! So hurry to the forum and vote, let's see who's the best of 'em all!
Click here to go to the Site of the Year website and vote!
We've got a lot of new stuff for you this month.
The Site of the Year contest is underway on our forum. We've added a bunch of professionally designed videos on our site. We've added a Search Engine Ranking section to our site to help you get higher listings on Google, Yahoo, and others. We've added pull down menus to our site to simplify navigation and help you find things quicker.They also help us easily modify the site. And we have a listing of Web Studio Help Sites created by moderators and good customers of ours. Check them out, they're there to help you create a great site and get the most out of Web Studio.
And we have some technical tips for a very cool feature by Gordon our lead forum moderator.
All of the stuff that's New Online could fill an entire newsletter! Here's a brief tour.
Video Tour of Web Studio: we have added a series of informational videos to our site to help illustrate Web Studio's famous ease of use and powerful features. Take the Video Tour.
Search Engine Ranking Help: we've added a section on the site to help you with Search Engine Rankings. It contains all of the methods, strategies, knowledge we've obtained and used over the last 5 years. For a demonstration of how well these can work, go to Google and search for "website design software", without the quotes. You'll notice we're #1 out of 730,000,000 or so other pages. Use our techniques and you can dramatically improve your rankings as well. If you search for "web design software", without the quotes, you'll see we're on the first page in the "sponsored links".
Congrats to Conagher60 and Broadcast1, our winners for March
Web Studio Article:Take a look at this article written by Steve Cochard, our CEO and designer of Web Studio. It is on the Smart Company website and includes some of his thoughts about web sites and business as well as three case histories of actual Web Studio customers. You may be one of them or know them from our online forum!
Web Studio Blog: We've entered the internet age (ha-ha) and started a blog! It focuses on tips, techniques, and info associated with obtaining a website, maintaining it, marketing it, and selling via the internet. It doesn't address Web Studio specific issues, see our online forum for that. You can get to the blog via the Resources menu on our site or click here.
Congrats to InfernoCruiser and thedjmixman, our winners for January
Help Sites: There have been help sites dedicated to Web Studio since 1998. These sites were created by Web Studio forum moderators and others who want to share their experience with others. We've had a few new ones surface recently loaded with tons of tips, techniques, and resources for use with Web Studio. Note that these sites are not affiliated with Back To The Beach, they are owned and maintainted by individuals who are extremely knowlegeable about website design and Web Studio.Here's a list of them:
Site of the Year: contest, as described above. Visit it here.
New Site Navigation: we've added pop-up menus to our site for easier navigation.
Make your graphics semi-transparent
Here's an advanced tip, which is actually pretty easy to do, from our long-time Forum Moderator, Gordon. How about making a photo or other graphic opaque? Why? You can blend one photo or graphic with another. It is a trick many graphic artists to in PhotoShop and other graphic programs. You see the results on many websites. To do this:
- Drag a photo or graphic onto your page.
- Make it the size you want it.
- Right click on the photo and choose Properties from the menu
- Click on the Object HTML tab
- Click on the Inside Object Tag radio button.
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Then paste the following HTML into the edit window below the buttons:
style="-moz-opacity:0.5;filter:alpha(opacity=50);"
- Press OK to close the dialog.
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Go to the Preview Menu and choose Preview This Page.
You will see the photo with 50% visiblity. If you put the photo on top of another graphic, and preview, you'll start to see the possibilities. Also, you can change the opacity value to make the graphic more or less transparent. Change the 0.5 to 0.25 and the opacity=50 to opacity = 25 to lower it, or use a bigger number for less. Note that 1.0 and 100 are the limits, with 0.0 and 0 being the least.
Uploading:
We've found that a problem we had in 2002 is keeping many customers from uploading. It is the DSL modem. If you have DSL and are having trouble uploading, try turning the DSL modem OFF for 2 minutes or more. Then turn it back on, wait another 2 minutes and then try uploading. DSL, expecially the "home" plans, can get out of sync with itself. Turning off the modem forces it to be reset by the phone or DSL company, which in turn makes your FTP connection reliable again.
Second, we've seen a bunch of customers who use "toast.com" as their host have uploading problems. They apparently have an "accelerator" that is supposed to speed up uploading. Unfortunately, it seems to stop it dead in its tracks. If you have an accelerator, turn it off. Another company with an "accelerator" is Earthlink, it causes similar problems.
Speaking of Earthlink, customers have reported that EarthLink as a "special", modified version of Internet Explorer that they ask their customers to download and install. If you have Earthlink, please don't download this browser. It will break your Web Studio! What will happen is text you type into Web Studio will be deleted every time you save your Project. If you already have that problem, uninstall the Earthlink browser and it should work fine.
Finally, can't say this enough...The first thing to look at when you have a problem is your firewall. If you have a software firewall, make sure you tell it to allow Web Studio FULL ACCESS to the internet. Don't just turn it off. That isn't a good thing to do, and some firewalls won't really turn off until you reboot your computer. This leads you to believe the firewall is off but you still have a problem. Rebooting would fix it, but then you wouldn't have the protection of the firewall. Each firewall has a method to allow programs access to the net. Read your help or documention for your firewall and set yours correctly.
