“Through dpBestflow, we are striving to make best practices in digital photography readily accessible to all professional photographers, no matter what their level or working style” – Project Director Richard Anderson.

“dpBestflow helps translate the intricacies of preserving digital images into useful information that can be incorporated into everyday workflow habits.” – Senior Project Manager Peter Krogh

You can see the results of their work atwww.dpbestflow.org where the glossary is worth scanning through as a matter of interest or to find out about those acronyms you just did not understand in the handbooks! You can also download the Quick Reference guide as a summary of the information they have on their site – a single page summary of the most important info.

If a company requires a website and the WordPress engine is chosen for this purpose then there are several things to consider:

Advantages

• Free open source code available for personal or commercial use – WordPress has been adapted for a more Content Managed System approach in recent years which allows the creation of whole websites using the system.
• Support from WordPress.org in terms of software updates and upgrades
• Support from a global WordPress community in the form of forums and template designers
• Use of strict, high quality coding standards compliant with all major browsers
• Ability to create additional functionality through the use of plugins

Disadvantages

• A good level of CSS knowledge and basic Photoshop and PHP [at least] are required to change and update a template
• Some groups claim that it is not a true CMS system as its primary development purpose was for weblogging or blogging

If you are looking to create a website for your company, organisation or academic project then WordPress is worth a look. Be aware that to create an individual feel to your site, it will require additional time and effort from a programmer and designer There are a variety of templates out there which will save a designer time but the trick is to apply these templates whilst remaining true to your company identity. You can see some examples of WordPress sites at www.simcoe.co.uk.

Templates

Popular sites for downloading templates are:

http://www.themeforest.net
http://wpremix.com
http://templatic.com

Most of the time you will only require a single user license for which you will normally pay between $30 and $75 [$US]. Its worth browsing these templates to see what WordPress can actually do for you and what it has helped create already.

A mini-website on a budget of $0.00

If you re on a budget or simply want to try the system out have a look at www.wordpress.com and sign up for an account. You can blog for free but there are a limited number of templates available to you and it is not as flexible as the version you download from www.wordpress.org and upload to your own server such as those purchased at 34sp.com.

If you want to see a brief video on signing up go to WordPress.TV and find out more. In addition, this YouTube video has been useful to some people too.

Community

This is just an aside really, but I’ve recently discovered BuddyPress for WordPress MultiUser which, if you are creating a site for a group or groups of like minded people, allows contribution to different group blogs or even hosting of personal blogs on the same server with the main site acting as an overview of sitewide activity. I have found that the BP Groupblog is a very useful part of this community based plugin. BuddyPress is excellent – but as of December 2009 seems to lack the ability to upload individual avatars for users. This will hopefully be resolved in a near-future update!

Conclusion

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Spend some time experimenting with these different settings and find the results that give you the best image quality. However, be guided by Photoshop’s instructions also ie Bicubic Sharper for reduction and Bicubic Smoother for enlargement. It makes a difference to the clarity of your product shots, environment photography and much more.

Google Chrome web browser is an excellent choice for anyone wishing to simply and quickly browse as it is lightweight – ie does not use much of the systems resources. Don’t expect too many bells and whistles but do expect reliability and speed.

Mozilla Firefox is the browser I use the most as it comes with a variety of available extensions including two of the most important browser plugins for any web designer – the developers toolbar and firebug

Internet Explorer is the most popular of the web browsers and ships pre-installed on Windows based PCs. Known as IE, versions 7 and 8 of IE are only just becoming standards compliant. Expect many sites to cater for this popular browser and popularity with hackers, fraudsters and other such ‘experts’ – Microsoft patch security as part of the regular updates downloaded to your PC [you know the ones....the ones that keep asking you to shut down]. You can also expect frustration from your average designer who usually experience problems getting a website to look right in IE compared to the majority of other browsers!

Safari is the browser of choice for your average Mac user [though Mac users would certainly not consider themselves to be average ] and it has some great features including one of the first applications of font smoothing, making text look less angular and more attractive – though uses more system resources.

There are some other browsers not mentioned here or only viewed on specific hardware such as Opera and AOL amongst the numerous mobile phone browsers, each having their own quirks and limitations, and some of the more dubious inbuilt console browsers such as Playstation 3′s contribution!

iGoogle as a web browser homepage – every time my browser opens or I use the home button the Simcoemedia Google page is shown. To create your account simply login / create a Google account then edit the settings for displaying your content by ADDING items. It is easy to set up and provides an informative and constantly updated dashboard for your business.

Xmarks – a great FREE plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer web browsers. User’s bookmarks will automatically synchronise between all computers running the Xmarks plugin and logged into the same account. This is particularly useful if you have more than one computer for your browsing and general business – you may have an office and home machine or a main workstation and a netbook that can synchronise to avoid constant updating between browsers.

YouSendIt – is a useful program designed to help you send large files without blocking up someones email account or needing to set up tricky FTP sites. Its simple and you can send files up to 100Mb without signing inl. Paying customers can send up to 2Gb per upload with masses of FTP space and plenty of happy customers who can easily access their emails [ie you have not filled their inbox with your data!] and the file you’ve sent them!

FreeMind – another FREE download that is great for formalising your spider diagrams, mind maps, brain-dumps [or whatever you like to call them] for presentation or submission purposes. Once the initial learning curve is overcome then creating diagrams is relatively straight forward, with a variety of options for highlighting, adjusting text, creating lists and nodes and other techniques for communicating your lateral thinking. Diagrams can be exported to PDF and various bitmap formats such as JPEG, BMP etc.

Skype – theres not too much you cannot do with Skype these days and I find it most useful when sharing my design work on screen whilst talking to my client on Skype at the same time. It is FREE to use and Skype to Skype calls cost nothing – which is particularly relevant when you consider that any phone with Skype, such as many of the 3 phones, can make and receive these calls for FREE also. It is also a great replacement for a landline at around £4 / month for any UK landline – but only if you have a speedy connection to the internet otherwise this system can create embarrassing lags in those business conversations when there is high traffic volume.

Quicktime – if you have some digital video input as raw video via Firewire and just need a quick edit and professionally compressed look to your final output then you could do worse than spend the £25 Quicktime are demanding from you for a license to access Quicktime Pro. One of the best features of Quicktime Pro is the excellent H.264 Codec that really shrinks your video size down but maintains high quality output. If nothing else, you should invest in this piece of software for that Codec alone. Files are easily accessed from a PC or Mac with Quicktime installed.

Google Reader – Another part of the Google suite of free online products which basically collects the latest news from all of your favourite sites without you needing to visit those sites to check out the headlines. Personally, I keep up to date with the world of design through online RSS feeds grouped together in Reader, grouped into an easy to read format and constantly updated. This can save alot of surf time and effort to get the news you really want to read.

OpenOffice – Most people know about Open Office now, but in case you do not – it is a free suite of office programs very similar and compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint products. There are occassionally a few compatibility or inconsistency issues but generally this makes a great alternative to shelling out £400 for the Microsoft products.

Acrobat.com – Adobe have created some excellent design software such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. They have also created a website where the user has access to a variety of media production related tools including PDF conversion for those without Acrobat Standard or Professional, file sharing where a massive 5Gb file can be uploaded, ConnectNow for screensharing and professional online meetings and Buzzword, a document writer. PDF conversion requires payment to Adobe but other services are FREE.

CamStudio – is a FREE screen capture tool. With this free download you can record your on a computer screen then output a file containing video to a compressed file for delivery over the network. To put it simply, this is a great tool for creating a series of software training videos for your business! Beware though – lengthy screen captures from your PC will create large files. You might want to consider paying for a YouSendIt.com account if you want to create and send this sort of data.

In Simple Terms

Google Wave is in simplistic terms a development of email and messaging systems – a stream of information that can be interacted with in ways that make the information more ‘live’ and efficient. This is oversimplifying what is a development that could improve our online productivity considerably. Below are a few of the key features of Google Wave:

The system uses familiar interfaces and ideas when using email, messaging and word processing systems and therefore there is no need to relearn some of the basic techniques when interacting with Wave. When a participant edits or adds comments to a single Wave [or stream of information], the Wave will be moved to the top of the inbox ready for review. Wave becomes a tree structure of interactivity where certain participants in a stream of discussion can break off into another discussion.

Live Interactivity

A key feature of Wave is that as information is typed into the browser, unlike Skype, Instant Messenger and other IM systems, the individual keystrokes are shown as they happen with minimal delay over broadband connections. To avoid embarrassment or if a sentence needs to be more carefully crafted there is the option to bypass the live typing feature where necessary.

When a Wave discussion is occurring and live conversations between several participants is being recorded it is possible for all involved to be able to edit on the fly. If a series of comments are being written these can be changed as they are being written by other participants.

Embedding In Blog Style

It is possible to embed entire Waves into web pages. Put in oversimplified terms – if Google Wave allows more efficient interactivity between groups of people wanting to communicate ideas instantly then embedding a Wave is simply a case of allowing a standard web page to show this interactivity as it happens. This is in a similar way to the way Google Maps can be embedded into a standard web page easily.

Mobile Friendly

Google Wave will be available for mobile phones including Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone allowing mobile participation and interactivity. You can see a demonstration of how this will work [though its not fully working] at 25m 25sec on the Google Wave demo video [links to YouTube in a new window]

Finding, Filtering and Translating

Another useful feature of Wave is that the user can essentially filter out the factual elements of a discussion and sent to a Wiki or other document so as knowledge is built up around a subject it can be stored and retrieved easily. Eventually Google expects that Spreadsheets and Presentation Tools will be built around the Wave system to reduce time needed to transfer information across to other systems.

Google Wave can support the use of different languages [and presumably the translation of these on the fly]. Hebrew and Chinese characters are demonstrated in the YouTube video below.

Uploading Images

Wave can handle uploading of images to the server and as these images are uploaded to the Wave conversation thumbnails are quickly generated to show other participants on the network what images are being processed. The image labels can easily be edited by the group / participants. A demo of this is shown at 35min 20sec on the Google Wave demo video [links to YouTube in a new window]

Tagging Waves

Tags are used to organise Waves and allow users / participants to search for different Waves on the system as they build up. This is similar to searching for emails in an email archive. A demo of this is seen at 40min 26sec. Waves can also be cross linked – a link to another wave can be inserted into a wave and therefore cross linking is possible. See this at 40min 39sec on the Google Wave demo video [links to YouTube in a new window].

Advanced Spelling and Other Toolkit Modules

Advanced spelling systems from Google Web Toolkit are integrated and there is an excellent example of how advanced this has become at 44min 15sec. Google have cute names for their various toolkit modules including Bloggy [for inserting Wave as a blog], Linky [intelligent method for inserting links] and Spelly. These all happen server side which means that information is all processed quickly on the server then the results transmitted over the web to the client computer [where the user sees the result].

Polling Systems and Collaboration

At 48min 56sec an interesting poll system is demonstrated where users / participants can vote or indicate YES / NO / MAYBE interest live on the site. As people change their mind or vote the results are displayed in lists and graphs for analysis.

Games and Progress

At 51mins 42sec Google staff demonstrate Wave being used for interactive games and demonstrate the progress bar that highlights how the entire Wave progresses from its origins of a single stream of information and at 52mins 42sec a demonstration of how Google Maps can be used to demonstrate interest in a holiday location is shown. Google hopes and anticipates that their examples are only a basic venture into the endless possibilities of what could be achieved with the system.

There are several other systems demonstrated toward the end of the presentation but essentially the features listed above would provide most effective for business and social development. Google Wave is currently in the final phases of development and a demo version of the system will be made available to a limited group of users in the near future. For the moment we just need to be patient before this exciting new technology creeps into mainstream workflow and daily activity.

Other discussion and links

Not everyone is so delighted about the arrival of Google Wave or, at least, they are skeptical of the benefits it may bring to the web community as a whole. Some interested articles are listed below:

TechCrunch: Google Wave – There Will Be Backlash
Lifehacker.com takes a first look at Google Wave

Google Wave: A Brief Overview [8min]

This is for the less programmer orientated viewer who may want an overview of what Google Wave can do for their business, academic project or social interaction!

Full Google Wave Demo [1h20min]

Here is the full Google Wave demo before a live audience. Most of it goes according to plan. Recommended for those with both a programming interest, patience and a reasonable understanding of technical terms for the 1.5 hour demo [and general Google banter]. If this doesn’t sound like you then go with the overview above!