Dreamweaver FAQ » CMS

Where do I insert the Google Checkout shopping cart code?

janinewarner — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:44:18 +0000

Janine,

I just watched your class on E-Commerce on Kelby Training. It was an excellent class for someone like me, but I am experiencing a little difficulty in adding the Google checkout to my site. I have no problems adding the code for the items, but that 2nd piece of code that you said to put at the bottom of every page is causing me problems. I am using iWeb and I am not quite sure where to insert that code, or if it is even possible.

Thank you in advance,

Joe

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the kinds words about my training videos. I don’t know much about iweb specifically, but some web services — especially those that over simply web design and limit you to templates — make it difficult, or even impossible, to get to the right place in the code to use Google Checkout.

If that’s your situation, you may need to use PayPal instead. Unlike Google, which gives you a small piece of code for each button, and another small piece of code to put at the bottom of each page, when you use the shopping cart service from PayPal, you get all of that code in one big chunk. I still prefer the interface of Google Checkout, but in your case, PayPal may be your best (or only) choice.

I know many people prefer to learn with training videos, but I also have a written tutorial on how to use Google Checkout that may help you find the place you’re having trouble.

I hope that helps you find the right solution for your website and I wish you all the best with your online sales,

Janine
DigitalFamily.com

How do I create better URLs in my website?

janinewarner — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:57:52 +0000

Dear Janine,

While adding pages to my site, I have been organizing them via subfolders locally on my hard drive. This results in web pages URL’s appearing long and messy. Is there a way to enter a tag, style, or code to change the display URL on my website?

Thank you for your time,
Mike

Hi Mike,

Great question, here are few tips to help you create better URLs.

First, remember that browsers will open the index.html file in any folder or subfolder, even if you don’t type it into the URL. That means you can create shorter URLs by carefully naming folders and saving an index.html file inside each one. You can have as many index files as you want, just keep them in separate folders and make sure that you save all of the folders and subfolders in one main folder on your hard drive so that you can copy the structure to your Web server when your done.

The result is you can create a URL such as:

DigitalFamily.com/videos

if enter that URL into a browser, it actually opens http://www.digitalfamily.com/videos/index.html

Another tip, everything after the .com is case sensitive. Thus, if I had named that folder Videos, you’d have to type the V uppercase, so pay attention to that detail when you share the URL, and try to be consistent. I make all subfolders lowercase to keep things simple.

That said, everything before the .com is NOT case sensitive. So whether you enter: DigitalFamily.com or digitalfamily.com, you get to the same place, the index.html page at the main, or root level, of my site. I like to use DigitalFamily.com when I write the main URL because it’s easier to read.

Finally, search engines such as Google are known to use the URL as one of the many criteria for ranking search results. As a result, if you want to optimize for certain keywords, including them in the name of the files and folders in your site can help.

If you enter, DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver, you go to my dreamweaver section, and the fact that I used the word Dreamweaver in the URL is probably helping me with search results (at least a little).

I hope that helps you create great URLs and I wish you all the best with your website.

Janine

Why do my web pages look different in Internet Explorer than in other browsers?

janinewarner — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:37:44 +0000

Unfortunately, different web browsers display text and HTML differently, and Internet Explorer is one of the worst, and most notorious, for bad code display. What most web designers do is test their pages in a variety of web browsers and work to make sure their pages look ‘good enough’ in all of them. Because the text size and spacing can vary from browser to browser, it’s challenging to get exactly the same display in all browsers. And if your concern is the way text wraps, it’s almost impossible. That’s because your users can change the text size in some browsers, and because text size is different between Mac and Windows computers. Here’s an article I published on my web site addressing this issue. It may help you understand why this is a challenge for all web designers. You’ll also find links to a few online testing tools that can help you make sure you site looks good, even in web browsers you may not have on your own computer. http://www.digitalfamily.com/dreamweaver/resources/web-browser-test.html I hope that helps and I wish you all the best, Janine

How do you add text to an image so that the text appears when someone rolls a cursor over the image in a browser?

janinewarner — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:31:57 +0000

Good question. Dreamweaver includes the Alt text field when you insert images, but it has no easy way to add the title attribute, and that’s what you need if you want the text to appear when you roll a cursor over an image in IE.

Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Note that the code: alt=”My Great Photo” is alternative text, which is recommended because this text is used by screen readers for the blind that ‘read’ web pages to people.
Adding the code: title=”My Great Photo” is not redundant, but you don’t have to use the same text for both. The title text will appear when you roll a cursor of the image.

Hope that helps,
Janine

How to fix broken images when using GoDaddy’s Preview DNS with WordPress?

janinewarner — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:26:26 +0000

Special thanks to Dale Ellis dale@ellismultimedia.com for this guest post. I hope it saves you the grief he suffered:

I recently redesigned a site for a client with WordPress and hosted it on GoDaddy. Unlike a standard blog where we would be starting off from scratch, there was already an existing site, hosted on another service, with a lot of content so we used GoDaddy’s Preview DNS feature to give us time to put in the necessary content before switching over to the new site.

This feature allows you to preview your site on a separate URL with previewdns.com appended to the normal domain name.

Several days after launching the new site, many of the pages suddenly appeared with broken image link indicators. It turns out that the previewdns.com domain will get assigned to any images you upload in the WordPress database so, when the Preview DNS expires, WordPress will be looking for the images in a domain that no longer exists.

GoDaddy’s technical support, while usually very good, was not able to provide us with an easy solution to this problem. Their recommendation was to re-upload the images to the site under the new, real domain name – but at that point that would have amounted to uploading a few hundred images again and, through the WordPress system, would have cost us a lot of time and effort.

After doing some research it turns out that there are a couple of fairly quickways to correct this problem, but they require performing the equivalent of afind-and-replace command on the MySQL database that WordPress uses. These processes can be risky so you may want to backup your WordPress database before performing these procedures (http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups)

The first method, which I consider the easiest and preferable way, is to download and install a WordPress plug-in called “Search and Replace,” which you can find at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/. This should allow you to search for and replace all the instances of http://www.[yoursitedomain].com.previewdns.com with http://www.[yoursitedomain].com.

If the plug-in method doesn’t succeed in eliminating the extra “previewdns.com” from the URLs, the next method involves operating on the MySQL database at a lower level. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that WordPress is that the domain name is updated in the WordPress’ options. Two good sources for instructions on that are GoDaddy’s help system (http://help.godaddy.com/article/5712?) and Sallie Goetsch’s blog (http://www.wordpressasylum.com/previewdns-can-bork-your-wordpress-installbut-theres-a-fix/)

The second thing you’ll need to do is replace all the instances of the
previewdns.com URL in the database with the new, normal URL for your site(replacing http://www.yoursitedomain.com.previewdns.com with http://www.yoursitedomain.com) Full, detailed instructions on how to do that can be found at Lorelle Van Fossen’s blog at http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/12/01/search-and-replace-in-wordpress-mysql-database/

That took care of the problem for me – saving hours of rework – and it should for you, too!

– Guest post by Dale Ellis dale@ellismultimedia.com

Do you have a suggestion for our clients who want to use CMS?

janinewarner — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:05:45 +0000

Dear Janine

We have successfully completed your online training with Total Training for web design using Dreamweaver which was GREAT! and we are now utilizing the training effectively in designing sites for our clients.

My colleague e-mailed you about a year ago regarding ecommerce and you recommended Zen Cart as a graphic designer’s choice for taking a base template that would be of sufficient adaptability to satisfy a designer’s need to have total design freedom but with all the background functionality in place. This has been a fantastic recommendation and we have been using it very successfully. THANK YOU!

We now have clients requesting Web sites that are mainly informational that, after handover, they would like to manage with a CMS. Do you have a similar recommendation like Zen Cart that we could utilize using Dreamweaver?

With kind regards
John

Hi John,

Delighted to know my training and recommendations have been so helpful. I’ve been pleased with the CMS features in WordPress (yes, it’s far more than just a blog program). For a more sophisticated CMS, consider Joomla, which I believe is already integrated with Zen Cart.

Hope that helps and I wish you all the best,

Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Can I set up a blog or an RSS feed within a website by using Dreamweaver?

janinewarner — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:29:14 +0000

Janine,

I purchased the entire Studio 8 suite that was included with the Adobe CS2 Web Bundle a few years ago and have just recently begun learning Dreamweaver 8 by using your entry-level Total Training DVDs. First off, THANK YOU for such wonderful, clear, and precise instruction! It has made all the difference between gearing up and giving up.

I am presently in the planning stages of a new website and exploring options. My question is: can you set up a blog or an RSS feed within a website by using Dreamweaver 8? The terms don’t even come up in the DW help files. And if not, can you set up a blog or add an RSS feed within a website by using the newer version of Dreamweaver CS3?

Thanks for your help,
Debra

Hi Debra,

Although you can use Dreamweaver to edit the templates used with most blogging programs, and you could, in theory, use Dreamweaver to create a dynamic site that works much like a blog, most people seem to do one or the other: create a custom site with Dreamweaver or create a blog with a tool such as WordPress or TypePad.

I’ve seen many people combine the two by simply linking from one to the other. I do that myself. My site at www.DigitalFamily.com was created in Dreamweaver (of course), but if you go to the Dreamweaver section and follow the link to my FAQ Blog, you’ll come to a blog I created by using WordPress.

It is possible to include a section of a blog, such as the most recent post, in a custom Dreamweaver site, but you do need some experience with the programming language used in the blogging program.

If you want to learn more about WordPress, here are a couple of articles on my site that might help you:

What’s the difference between a Web site and a blog?

How to edit a WordPress blog with Dreamweaver

Hope that helps you sort through the options and find the best solution for your site.

Janine