Irish Guy

Adobe FormsCentral

Gary Crossey — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 22:42:38 +0000

Why use Adobe FormsCentral?

Does your business need another form solution?

If it were 1995, Adobe would have stolen the show – game, set and match. Today, if you are like me, you already have an Online Cloud Solutions (OCS) integrated into your workflow – and it’s free! Adobe FormsCentral wants you to pay for their service, roughly $200 a year – in one simple payment (each year).

What should you expect to get for $200?

Anticipate the standard form features; buttons, text boxes and multiple choice, as well as the online collaboration and analytical tools, that we have come to expect. Adobe have the basics covered, plus a few neat surprises like Page Skip Logic that advances users to their next question, depending on their previous answer, making it easy to generate meaningful data.

Five years from now, we might very well be looking to Adobe for all our online business solutions. Presently however, the technical aspects of Adobe FormsCentral are comparable to most online form solutions. What Adobe does bring to what is typically a dull format, is design.

For our Google Form creators; that wish they could create custom branding, graphics and color options, to engage their audience, you may want to switch over to Adobe FormsCentral as they include all of these design features. For your simple forms, stick with Google Forms. If collecting valuable data is important to your business, you better have an engaging form – that is both user-friendly and attractive.

Adobe FormsCentral subcription includes over 70 easy to customize web forms or survey templates:

Registration templates
Education templates
Survey templates
HR templates
Marketing templates
Membership templates
Non-profit templates
Application templates
Sales templates
Feedback templates

Join me at the Asheville Adobe User Group for an Adobe FormsCentral demo, Wednesday March 21st 2012, 4-6pm – Charlotte Street Computers, Asheville .

Please RSVP admin@irishguy.us (sign-up form to follow)

Receipt tracker that works

Gary Crossey — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:48:13 +0000

Tax season again, and time to locate, sort and total those business receipts.

With OneReceipt, the task of tracking your receipts just got easier. With your smartphone you can take a photo of your receipt and email it to your private OneReceipt account.

When you are on the road, have your expenses submitted automatically to your team with OneReceipt.

OneReceipt connects with your gmail or yahoo account to track and capture receipt information. Collect totals and payment information to your OneReceipt account.

Special Features

Some of the other great features that are included with OneReceipt that I look forward to using are Monthly spending reports - a simple tool for tracking spending patterns and discover better ways to spend your money.

Need help recalling how much longer you have to return an item? OneReceipt will track that.

Shipping, OneReceipt tracks expected shipping dates – crazy, right!

Installation is easy to do, expect a confirmation email and a few easy steps for connecting with your gmail account. The sync for with your gmail account may take some time.

https://www.onereceipt.com

Browse Browsers – the difference

Gary Crossey — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:24:26 +0000

Internet Browsing & Internet Browsing

20 Things you should know about browsers and browsing the internet.

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/en-US/home

WordPress – How to Publish Optional Content

Gary Crossey — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:00:05 +0000

Make your WordPress website work for you

The Optional Content Plug-in is a super smart plug-in that will reveal or hide content depending upon WordPress user conditions and content permissions.A great WordPress plug-in for advanced users to WordPress, not a recommended plug-in for new users. You have to be precise. If you are new to WordPress, best to come back to an Optional Content plug-in later.For Irish Guy Computer Training having one website to promote and interact with our clients and another to help maintain our business – was a wasted resource. Now, we use the Optional Content Plug-into reveal important functions when staff and admin users access the website.

Deliver content to the right people

For a list of WordPress classes in Asheville, visit our WordPress Classes webpage - http://charlottestreetcomputers.com/classes/wordpress/

Google Chrome – Tabs Shortcuts

Gary Crossey — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:29:54 +0000

Google Chrome is a great browser with many shortcuts built in – learn how to jump between open browser window tabs with shortcut keys, when using Google Chrome – by the Irish Guy

Join Gary Crossey for computer training classes in Asheville NC (Buncombe). Visit the Charlotte Street Computers website for a fun list of upcoming Google Chrome, Gmail and Doc’s computer training classes and workshops.

Adobe Muse

Gary Crossey — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:48:04 +0000

New method for design websites

Yesterday, Adobe release Muse (code name), and in one step has transformed how we can now build our websites. Muse generates clean code, that follows all web standards, is easy to work with and loads in every browser or device, like a charm.

Adobe Muse is free until the end of 2011 – be sure to download your copy at Adobe Muse – and let me know what you think.

Transcript from video

Transcript from video may content typos -
I have just installed the new software Muse from Adobe. At the moment you can download a free copy of the software. As I said, I just installed it a few moments ago. If you are used to working with Dreamweaver in the past you are certainly going to find this application different. First of all it’s very clean.

I just love the really easy instructions on what I want to do here. I what to create a new site let’s see what happens.

I haven’t looked at this before so I’m just simply going though this for the first time but I do like that we’ve got page sizes, with heights (you know that’s certainly something new for web design. Prefect, I’m going to do three columns. We’ve also got gutters; it is going to be interesting to see what happens here.

I’m going to go ahead and press OK. So I have my home page setup here.

Well that’s pretty nice; we can go ahead and make a really simple sitemap. As you can see I’m just clicking around. I’m not really sure what I’m doing to be honest but I am just clicking around and seeing that Adobe Muse is creating a really nice sitemap here for me. I would assume I can just rename the pages.

All I am doing is simply double checking. I am going to make up some general pages that most basic websites might have.

Now, I’m assuming here that this Master A is kind of probably some type of template that you can work with. Oh there we go; at the bottom of the page, we have the master template. That’s going to provide us with navigational menus on master pages. Set header and footer guides too. Oh that’s pretty cool.

Guys, I think we’re going to love this Adobe Muse software.

Adobe Muse feels very much like InDesign and this is definitely an InDesign 5 feature. You can round these corners off. Really can give them (corners) a really nice treatment unlike before where we could change the corners to round corners you can now control each corner independently. That’s something that we’ve always wanted to do for a long time.

I’m going to make a header something like so I’m going to keep it straight on one side here. I am looking for a filled color. You know what? I can probably just click here? I’ve got my color picker over here that’s kind of cool. You got some swatches here already programmed in. I’m really like that idea able to work with color in the same way you would with InDesign or Illustrator.

We can hyperlink to any page. All of those pages that we set up in the sitemap now already have preset hyperlinks to jump to. So I’m just going to actually adjust this rectangle that I just made there, and I’m going to say that go to the home page.

Held the ALT key here; and for people who don’t understand what that ALT key does in Adobe look at the cursor you see the way it has a double arrow now that’s an automated duplication tool.

As soon as I press ALT on the first square it’s going to go ahead and duplicate that for me. The other thing I’ve noticed here that it’s given me a precise management of the distance between each one of these objects. This is also in InDesign trait that we’ve really got used to and the publishing world. I just love that the ALT shortcut key is showing up here.

Now if my guess is right, we can probably go ahead and reprogram each one of these just pretty quickly. This is going to be something that people really gravitate towards.

Now everything has been distributed, the Master buttons have all been distributed to every one of the pages I’m going to double click on the home button. We’ve got our entire font styles that we are really accustomed to. We’ve got our indent to first line. Indent the whole paragraph. Most of the type setting tools that the majority of type designers are used to working with.

Adobe Muse also has export type as images. So, my entire font is now able to go out as an image.

With the preview mode on we are able to test to see if the buttons are working. As you saw from the earlier example, I didn’t do any type of programming. But, there we are, our buttons are all in place. We can go back to the design mode we can add our text fields directly in Web Site Create with Adobe Muse.

We also have other features. Menus, so we can insert a horizontal menu. Let’s go ahead and do a quick preview to see what type of mess I just made. Now look at that for a menu.

So, if I want to jump to resources, I can quickly do that. That we can just pop that menu in anywhere we like. If you notice, it’s just a simple rollover, a little buggy, but still seems pretty cool.

Again that is jumping from the previous plan that we did in the plan mode before jumping into the design mode. I am just thinking those designers are going to just really enjoyed this.

Let’s go ahead and I’m going to grab a photograph. Okay, so I have a loaded image, and this is something that I’ve seen in InDesign before. That’s pretty nice. Now I’m not sure if Adobe Muse wants me to drag or drop so I’m going to try it first. I dropped the image. Way too big, that’s not going to work. I am simply going to undo, and simply place that image where I want it to be. Well you know what, that seems pretty easy to me. You can also float that image; you can see its giving me a little bit of guidance here.

Also able to add a custom menu, not very pretty but works really well. I am able to go back to the plan area. I can duplicate the master plan. And make a new master plan. The one feature that I really do like here though is placing an image. I’m going to go ahead and do Place image which you’ll notice has the same shortcut as place in InDesign. I’m going grab this photograph of one of our goats in Adobe Muse. I’m bringing in an enormous image that I’m able to click and drag and add to my website. You can notice here when I make the image larger than the described page size is. The website goes ahead and extends the page height and adds additional columns in there for me and provides the space that I need to add that image directly into the composition.

I’m going to go back to the home page. I’m going to jump to a deep page from here. Now I’ve got my new layout without buttons to the side. I did use Master 1 to at least setup the header. It’s got the same columns, it’s got the footer, just modified the color. But, you can see the potential here very quickly.

Web Design Trends for 2011

Gary Crossey — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 03:21:10 +0000

What is important for today’s website?

Today’s websites are about function. Designers are finally walking away from Adobe Flash and abandoning ActionScript (in whatever reincarnation) and adopting website systems that render well on all platforms and with any device. The modern website is functionality with form.

Expect more HTML 5 and advanced CS3 methods for creating compelling website content and interactive design. But let us not fool ourselves by thinking that the slick designs of a decade ago are on the return, because they are not.

Check out the top ten trends in the article - Website Trends for 2011

Website Examples

Large Images with 3D effect – www.somewhere-lefilm.com
Parallax Scrolling moving background - www.rowtothepole.com
A move away from .com - www.photosheep.me / www.irishguy.us
HTML5 & CSS3 – www.toriseye.quodis.com
Drawing with HTML & CSS3 - www.mrdoob.com/projects/harmony
Cool (non-flash) effects - www.mrdoob.com/115/Water

Other Resources

Web Trends 2010 – good comparison article.

CS5 Unofficial Blog

Gary Crossey — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:36:53 +0000

It might be the Unofficial Adobe CS5 Blog, but they have rounded up some really interesting time saving tips and tech information for us everyday users of Adobe Creative Suite 5 & 5.5.

The Unofficial Adobe CS5 Blog is heavy with follow along video tutorials – and with 22 different categories running from the A of Acrobat to the P of Photoshop there is certainly something there for you, as long as you time a little time to dig around the website a bit.

WWW.CS5.ORG

WordPress Installation

Gary Crossey — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:11:25 +0000

There are a number of different approaches to installing a WordPress website. From my experience the installation should be the SECOND consideration that you need to take if you are thinking about switching to the WordPress platform. The biggest and FIRST concern you should have about a WordPress website is how you plan to update the system.

Due the nature of WordPress updates, you really can’t delay doing them – update are there to keep your website safe, active and out of harm’s way.

BTW – WordPress updates are released often – and each time you perform an update you should first back-up all the content, themes and database. Backing up the files for a website can take hours, if not days. Installing an update is essential, but can also bring your website down – the more custom the website, the bigger your problems will be.

When doing WordPress updates, select a host provider that will provide Free WordPress Updates, with a rollback period, in case the update installation goes wrong.

For my hosting company, I always recommend www.fastfwd.info – FastFWD Online Services provide domain registration, web site hosting, email, merchant account and an installation of WordPress (for FREE).

FastFWD will email you when there is a new WordPress update. To complete the WordPress update, simply log-in to your account and follow the instructions, FastFWD will do the back-up and if something goes wrong, FastFWD will can also let you restore your entire website back (for up to 14 days).

Having an easy method for installing WordPress is the SECOND feature I want from my host provide. Here are the steps for installing WordPress with FastFWD Online Services – they have made it very easy.

WordPress Installation – Step 1

WordPress Installation – Step 2

WordPress Installation – Step 3

WordPress Installation – Step 4

WordPress Installation – Step 5

WordPress Installation – Step 6

WordPress Installation – Step 7

WordPress Installation – Step 8

WordPress Installation – Step 9

WordPress Installation – Step 10

WordPress Installation – Step 11

FastFWD will send you a confirmation email, once your WordPress installation has been completed.

Make Facebook Useful

Gary Crossey — Tue, 31 May 2011 03:39:59 +0000

The average Facebook Business page has 4,596 fans, with each fan having an average of 130 friends. With the correct message your business could possibly reach a large pool of new customers.

What makes a business popular online?

GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE

One aspect of business that a small business can often deliver better is honest customer service. Having a Facebook Business page can help improve your customer service. Unlike responding to email or phone inquiries, when you respond to a question on Facebook you are providing information to your collective. You are showing that you are available, reachable and responsive.

Don’t forget to reference your social media answers with links back to more in-depth information on your business blog or website.

Facebook for Business Class

Discover how to best connect to your target market with my one-day fast paced Improved Facebook for Business seminar.

Join Gary Crossey for Facebook for Business class

Event registration for Facebook for Business – October 2011 powered by Eventbrite