Adobe just released public betas of the next versions of both Dreamweaver and Fireworks (CS4). These two programs are the most important in their category,   And you can download them now at no cost.

Dreamweaver

• A “live view”, which renders a page right in Dreamweaver just like a standards-based browser.
• A “related files” feature, which makes all files related to the open page accessible on the top bar.
• And you CSS tab in the property bar which makes accessing and changing CSS For any selected item much easier.
• Better Photoshop integration - you can now drop a PST file into Dreamweaver and it will become “smart object”.

Fireworks

• A new completely redesigned interface makes Fireworks consistent with Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash ( this is nice!).
• Fireworks now exports standards-based CSS pages.
• Virus will now export PDF versions of pages for easy client communication.

If you are currently running Adobe Creative Suite 3, these beta versions will run until one month after the new CS4 ships. If you’re not running CS3, they will run for 48 hours. (if you’re jonesing for CS3, you can get it here.

There is something being offered for FREE that I simply had to tell you about.

You can use it to evaluate sites you design for clients to help them get better search engine ranking. You can also you it on your own site to accomplish the same thing.

So, what is it?

It’s a “priceless” tool that Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins developed for their paying customers, but decided to make available for FREE.

You can learn about it and use it here

Here is some information, directly from their marketing materials, and I think you’ll see that it speaks for itself;

Our new SEO competitive intelligence tool, was released to the public FRIDAY, May 16.

And it will cost you NOTHING.

That’s right.  You will be able to submit *your* site to our online tool - which essentially SIMULATES an in-depth site review by our faculty!

See, we did over 220 faculty website reviews and compiled ALL of the solutions to the MOST common mistakes.

It’s as if you had our entire faculty of seasoned, hands-on SEO and internet marketing experts looking right over your shoulder.

We ANALYZE your SEO, we DIAGNOSE problems…

Then, we PRESCRIBE the solution!

You can learn about it and use it here

So what is the Take Away for Designers?

This tool will be useful for anyone that has a website on the internet and wants traffic (and what commercial site doesn’t?). You could use a tool like this to analyze sites you’ve created for clients, or evaluate and improve your own site’s search engine ranking. Free expert advice that can improve any site in existence and normally costs beaucoup bucks? - it’s a total no-cost. no-brainer.

You can learn about it and use it here

All the Best,

Larry

Microsoft Expression Web Beta is now available from Microsoft as a free trial.

This will be the successor to Front Page. One user mentioned it has a unique ability to create and modify CSS based pages, and represents a leap forward in this area.

I look forward to trying this software.

You can find it here, along with free pre-release versions of other programs in the Expression series. This software will compete with Adobe applications.

Adobe announced this week that they are upgrading Creative Suite Premium to version 2.3. This version contains two major changes - Acrobat 8 replaces Acrobat, and Dreamweaver 8 is also included.

So, it looks like Dreamweaver will be part of the suite going forward, and will likely replace GoLive in the suite. Creative Suite 3, due out in Spring, ‘07, will no doubt have Dreamweaver much better integrated with the Creative Suite applications than the current version, which will create a really powerful combination. I use Photoshop for most of my graphic design work, and Dreamweaver for page creation, so I really look forward to these two apps working better together.

There are two new articles posted on the site -

Using Your Free Web Template, which contains some tips on getting the most out of the Free Template.

Using CSS to Format a Menu, which contains a simple CSS technique to create beautiful and easy to style menus from with rollovers - from plain old links - without changing a single line of your HTML code.

The webpagedesign.tv forums are now ready to use.

This is a great place to ask or answer questions relating to all aspects of web design.

Also, if you have any questions or comments about the Free Web Template available on the site, you can ask in the Web Templates section.

I hope you enjoy using this facility.

I’ve been working to create this template on and off for the last couple of weeks and it’s now available on the website for free - simply sign up for the free e-mail newsletter on the left hand side of any page.

This is a complete, working 6 page website ready for you to customize with your own graphics and content. The Photoshop CS2 graphic source files are also included. A custom site like this would normally cost several hundred dollars.

Here’s how it came into being…

It started as one of several Photoshop mockups I created for a client several months ago - he chose a different variation with a tabbed interface, so this one became available.

I wanted to create the site using only CSS to format the pages. This creates a much simpler and ligther HTML page, which means the site loads faster. It is also easier to work with, and you have finer control over formatting. If you understand CSS, changing it also is easier. Dreamweaver 8 really facilitates this process with it’s excellent CSS tools.

There were two main graphics that came from the Photoshop mockup - the header and the footer. There were also three important graphics that were used for the menu bar - they are used as backgrounds for the navigation buttons. CSS is used to swap out one background for the other when you put your mouse over a menu item, and also changes the text color. A special style was also setup to highlight the menu item for the page you are looking at, so the user will know what page they are on. Modifying the menu is very simple, since each menu item is simply HTML text.

I also created the pull box which appears on the right side of many pages which you can use to highlight imporant material. I also created a couple of styles which allows you to put white space around photos that appear in the body of the text - one style is for photos that are right-justified, and one for photos that are left-justified.

Finally, I created some information about the template and used that as content on the first two pages. The remaining pages contain a rather sad attempt at humor - please forgive me.

I hope you find this free template useful, and if you are just learning CSS, I hope it will help you learn a little by examing the styles and their relationship to the formatted page.

iWeb is a program that runs on an Apple Macintosh and produces remarkable looking websites in the simplest possible way.

While this is all well and good for the weekend web warrior setting up a personal or family site, the question for a web designer is - can I use this tool to create a useful website in my day to day work? The answer is yes - it could certainly be used to create attractive basic sites very quickly using the theme packs that ship with the product.

You can read more by going to a site that I created with iWeb in a few minutes and then immediately published to the internet.

I’m excited to open up the webpagedesign.tv blog. It will be a great place to discuss web design related issues.

And since this is a blog (and site) for discussing web design, I’ll talk a little bit about how this blog was implemented.

Installing this Blog

It was “fantastically” easy to install this blog on the site, since my web host has a “Fantastico” control panel as part of their hosting package. “Fantastico” is a feature that allows easy installation of many types of features to your website, including blogs, forums, etc.

Installing this blog simply required filling in a short form and pressing a button. Since I am primarily a web designer, and usually keep away from administrative and programming tasks, Fantastico allows me to do things that I might otherwise have to farm out to someone else (=$).

Fantastico installed the Wordpress software in a few moments. I then wanted to customize the header to display the webpagedesign.tv logo. I examined the blog files that were installed on the server until it was clear which graphic was used for the header background. Using Photoshop, I opened the webpagedesign.tv logo graphic, flattened the image (which combines all the layers into one), and used the transform command to scale the flattened image to a slightly smaller size that would fit properly into the blog graphic. I then exported the new header graphic with the same name as the original header file, uploaded it to the server, and voila, the blog was now branded with the webpagedesign.tv logo.