Microsoft WebMatrix review: hands-on

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Microsoft is famous for developing new technologies only to abandon them later, leaving early adopters high and dry. WebMatrix is one of those rare exceptions to get a second life (or third, depending upon how you count them) after being dropped like a stone six years ago.

In a nutshell, WebMatrix provides a free web development environment for .NET and, to a lesser extent, PHP. The aim appears to be to provide a simple entry point to .NET web development for beginner coders – the hope being that once snared within the Microsoft development environment, programmers will upgrade to Visual Studio. The initial install includes the IIS Express web server, the SQL Server Compact Edition for databases and support for the new Razor mark-up syntax.

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WordPress.com: from dream to nightmare

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

I’m regularly asked about the best way to go about building a modern website and recently I’ve been recommending those looking for the simplest/cheapest route to check out WordPress by signing up to WordPress.com. WordPress.com has been running the latest 3.0 release (see my WordPress 3.0 review) for some time now complete with new default theme and custom menu handling, which makes it far better suited to creating traditional page-based websites as well as post-based blogs.

The beauty of WordPress.com is that it makes exploring what WordPress has to offer so painless. Essentially all you need is an email address and, within a couple of minutes, you can be creating your first posts and pages, changing your theme, monitoring your stats and so on. If you like what you see, you can either stick with WordPress.com’s default free hosting package, upgrade to get your own domain name ($15 a year), redirect an existing domain ($10 a year) or, most powerfully, switch to an independent WordPress host where you’ll be able to extend the framework’s capabilities via third-party plug-ins.

Generally the response has been amazingly enthusiastic – “the difference is night and day” – especially from those owners of existing sites who had previously been paying a fortune to traditional web designers whenever they’d needed to update existing pages.

Recently, however, for one correspondent the dream descended into a nightmare…

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Dreamweaver CS5: back from the dead?

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

A year or so ago I created a mini-storm of controversy with my “I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying” blog in which I suggested that Dreamweaver’s dominance is fading and that web designers starting out today would do better getting to grips with a content management systems (CMS).

The post obviously hit home, as I realised when the Adobe evangelist demonstrating Dreamweaver CS5 at the press launch began his talk by referring to it and, when he discovered that I was in the audience, suggested that I might want to “eat crow”.

Well I’m delighted to say that he was right… largely.

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CMS and CSS: Problem Solved

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

A while back I wrote about my belief that the future for web authoring lies beyond static web pages with Web 2.0 and with the big three content management systems (CMS): Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal. I also wrote that one of the major stumbling blocks to this happening was the appalling state of CMS-based design.

I’m glad to say that I think I’ve come across a near-perfect solution…

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The Fantastico route to Web 2.0

Friday, April 10th, 2009

Recently I upset a lot of web designers by saying that Dreamweaver is reaching the end of its dominance and that the future for website production (complete with essential web 2.0 functionality such as in-built commenting, RSS feeds and end user content contribution) belongs to the big three content management systems (cms): WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. 

Admittedly I’m biased on this, but I couldn’t help feeling that the responses were divided into two camps: those who had actually tried both approaches who largely agreed and those who hadn’t, who didn’t and who felt threatened by the suggestion and who wanted to close down the debate. 

Between these two extremes I hope that there were plenty of more open-minded designers who were intrigued and ideally excited about the possibilities. After all, the cms approach doesn’t just offer more power, each of the cms solutions is open source and so free. That should mean that there’s nothing to stop you exploring both approaches and then making your mind up…

Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as this. However, with a little help, it can be…

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A nice chat with Adobe about Dreamweaver

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Following my recent post, I’m Sorry but Dreamweaver is Dying and the ensuing online discussions/abuse, I was summoned for a chat with the headmaster – Devin Fernandez, senior product manager for the web products at Adobe.

Based on my core argument – that the future of web design lies with content management systems (cms) rather than Dreamweaver – I was expecting an uncomfortable time. Thankfully Devin is far too nice for that. More than that he seemed genuinely pleased to have had a debate opened up and a chance to hear what the community is thinking about Dreamweaver and the future of web design…

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