Mercier & Stephens Blog

Posted on October 30, 2010 by Rick Stephens

This blog is dedicated to issues and current events that are of concern to small and medium sized companies. If you have a issue or question that you would like to post, please do so. The content of this blog is meant to be educational and helpful to small business owners. However, we are not attorneys and the content is not meant to be legal advice. If you have specific legal issues, we encourage you to contact an attorney.

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Posted in General Business Topics | 2 Comments

Father of Total Quality Management

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Rick Stephens

In order to gain some perceptive on quality systems, I think it is always good to look at how all this began. In an effort to do that, today’s topic is going to me in honor of Dr. W. Edwards Deming with whom most would say is the father of modern quality systems. He was born in 1900 and lived until he was 93. In 1950 he was invited to Japan by their industrial leaders to assist them in a turnaround of their manufacturing industry. In a very short time he took the war torn country of Japan, from the ashes of World War ll to an economic super power.

How to turn around a country

Father of Quality Systems Dr. DemingFirst of he was not without experience. He was an engineer, with graduate degrees in Math and Physics. So let’s assume that he understood what numbers were all about. He worked with another very influential quality guru by the name of Walter Shewhart at Bell Laboratories. His work with Shewhart is what lead him to Japan after the war.

Ok, so he was a numbers guy. But this doesn’t explain how he was able to turnaround a whole country’s economy. At that time Japan was known for producing cheap, often imitated goods. Since he was invited by the industrial leaders, they actually listened and implemented his strategy to success. Interestingly enough, his first premise was that 15% of bad quality was due to workers, and 85% of bad quality was due to bad management. Wow, image a consultant coming into your shop and telling you that 85% of your quality issues sit directly on your shoulders. Well, since I subscribe to this methodology, I will tell you that at least 85% of your quality issues are directly on your shoulders.

So, if you are still reading this, you might be open minded enough to turnaround your company. Dr. Deming applied a 14 point strategy to quality the was very successful in Japan. He later was called in by Ford Motor Company because they found that the transmissions that Ford was buying from Japan were much more reliable and all parts were virtually identical.

Why would I listen to THAT?

Now the real question is, why all these big industrial leaders would listen to someone tell them that they are the problem. Simple, Dr. Deming also told them that improved quality results in lowered cost and higher productivity. Now is about the time the most small business owners and managers start talking about not having time to implement a quality system. Well, he was able to show them by example that their bottom line increased with improved quality. So he basically reinvented quality management systems as well as the numbers part of quality control.

If Einstein’s most famous equation is E=mc2, Deming’s is Q=RWE/TC. This equation states that quality (Q) is equal to the total result of work effort (RWE) divided by total cost (TC).

Based on this equation, he said that when management focuses on quality, quality increases and the total cost decreases over time. If however, management focuses on cost, costs tend to rise and quality declines over time. So, they listened because he said they could improve their bottom line.

Ok, I’m listening

As we have discussed, Dr. Deming noted that quality was 85% management. As such, he created a 14 key principles for MANAGEMENT to turnaround and run an effective business. Below are the principles he authored in his book “Out of the Crisis” when creating the Total Quality Management (TQM) system:

  1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.
  2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
  3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.
  4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
  5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
  6. Institute training on the job.
  7. Institute leadership (see Point 12 and Ch. 8 of “Out of the Crisis”). The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
  8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of “Out of the Crisis”)
  9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
  10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
  11. a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
    b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
  12. a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
    b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia,” abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective (See Ch. 3 of “Out of the Crisis”).
  13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
  14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

Dr. Deming was very impressed by those who took the chance and invested time and resources to making effective change. I will leave this article with a quote from the him:

“Massive training is required to instill the courage to break with tradition. Every activity and every job is a part of the process.”

Posted in General Business Topics, Quality | 2 Comments

Small Business and Discovery of the South Pole

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Rick Stephens

South PoleToday in 1911, Roald Amundsen and his team of explorers become the first humans to set foot on the South Pole. Interesting as that fact may be, there is an even more interesting fact about the mission that has a lesson for business, in particular, small businesses.

It turns out that Amundsen was 100% funded to take an expedition to the North Pole. Then the Norwegian explorer got news in 1909 that Frederick Cook had already claimed the Pole. Amundsen then had a decision to make. He could either use his funding to travel to the North Pole where other men had already been or change his plans to explore the South Pole, which was still unclaimed. He spent the next 2 years studying every piece of literature available at the time about the Antarctic. He changed his plans, and became the first man to discover the South Pole on December 14, 1911. He thus secured his place in human history forever.

I’m sure by now you can see many business lessons in this historic event. He planned for years to achieve a particular goal. He assembled his team and planned accordingly. He secured funding for the mission, and right before the implementation, his competition beat him to the mark. Undaunted, he showed tremendous flexibility to use his strengths and prior planning. He was able to make a very difficult decision to change the goal, literately 180 degrees, and still ensure that he and his team would have remarkable success.

So, how flexible is your company? Do you have the vision to use your collective skills to accomplish remarkable things? Would you be able to react to market conditions with Amundsen-like flexibility?

Happy 99th anniversary Roald Amundsen! Hopefully, we all will learn from your achievement.

Posted in General Business Topics | 1 Comment

Social Media for the Small Business Owner

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Rick Stephens

Linkedin IconHere is the situation; you are a small business owner, you need another 4-8 hours a day to finish all the work that you to do, and you have no time for social media. In fact, you might think that social media, per se, is a waste of time. Your kids are on Facebook all the time and you see others waste time on MySpace or Twitter.  Well, this article is for you.

Social Media or Social Waste of Time?

Admittedly, Facebook and other social media outlets are or can be a tremendous waste of time. You hear of those people that update their Facebook accounts when the weather changes, or when they arrive at their mother’s house.

Many teens and others do spend a tremendous amount of time, looking up old friends, finding new “friends” and browsing for hours through pictures of people that they have never met. This is like the old days when people would spend hours at a video arcade and get caught in a time warp that would steal hours of their lives.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Ok, so we have concluded that Facebook and others like it are not particularly beneficial to your bottom line. Or is it? Don’t forget that if the demographics of your customers’ are on Facebook, you need to be there with them. The same applies for Twitter.

How to market yourself or your company on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is a topic for another article. What I really want to explore here is LinkedIn and why you of all people should be well connected into its network.

Back in March 2010, Fortune magazine published an article titled “How LinkedIn will fire up your career”. This article is a must read if you don’t have a LinkedIn account, or if you do and have never spend time completing your profile and getting solid business connection. If you are not familiar with LinkedIn by now, you really should be. For those of you who don’t know what LinkedIn is, it’s a social network for business professionals. It is not for teens to update how they feel from one moment to the next; it is for serious business professionals to network. Think about it like you Outlook contact list, with the added benefit that your contacts keep their profiles updated for you.

LinkedIn is also your public resume’. Yeah, I know a resume’ should be a document that should be used to get a specific job. However, it can be used to give the world a brief summary of many components of a resume’, such as education and work history. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is a place where you can put up information that will help you with your customers and with future jobs. There is nothing on Facebook that will help you in this regard. In fact, many jobs and customers have been lost based on what is on someone’s Facebook account.

Ok, so you are a successful business owner and don’t need another job. Do you ever hire how about hiring other professionals? This is where they are connected. In the Fortune article named above, the consulting firm Accenture says they are going to hire 50,000 new employees this year and that 40% of them will come from social media. That’s 20,000 jobs to be had from one company in one year. In fact, the article continues, Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.

Additionally, if you don’t have a COMPLETE profile on LinkedIn, you are not showing the public that you are as professional as you hopefully are, and that you are not as technologically up-to-date.

Ok, you now believe that you need to have a profile. Now it is time to connect to people. Please remember that LinkedIn is not Facebook or Twitter. This means that you don’t connect to others like you do there. Only add people that you know, or whom you have met recently. If you try to link to people and too many of them say they don’t know you, LinkedIn will think that you are trying to indiscriminately connect to people and they will ban you temporarily from sending out invitations. Start with people that you know. Link to people that you have met in conferences or seminars.

Once you see that someone has changed a job or moved, drop them a quick note. This is the real networking part of LinkedIn. Don’t be that guy that only reaches out when you need something, like a job or a candidate for your company. Use the LinkedIn groups to expand your LinkedIn network.

Posted in Developers Corner, General Business Topics, Online Applications | Leave a comment

Is Random Alcohol Testing Legal?

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Rick Stephens

Random Alcohol TestingIn a press release dated 10/5/10, the EEOC claimed that U.S. Steel Corporation violated federal law when it applied a nationwide policy of requiring probationary employees to undergo random alcohol tests and fired an employee as a result of such a test, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit.

Apparently, the company randomly requires alcohol testing for all probationary employees. The employee was given a random alcohol test where she gave a false positive. The company doctor refused to give another form of test, which she obtained from her doctor. The employee told the company doctor that her false positive was due to a medical condition.

At issue is that the employee’s union negotiated a contract that allowed the company to test for alcohol without cause. The EEOC’s position is that the union did not have the right to negotiate on a topic that would give away rights granted under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“Although an employer may, of course, prohibit the usage of illegal drugs and alcohol in the workplace and hold all employees to the same conduct and performance standards, the ADA strictly restricts workplace medical examinations, including breath alcohol tests,” said Regional Attorney Debra Lawrence of the EEOC’s Philadelphia District Office.  “An employer can only require an employee to submit to a medical examination such as an alcohol test if the examination is job-related and consistent with business necessity.  The EEOC is committed to eradicating systemic discrimination in the workplace, including blanket policies mandating medical examinations that violate federal law.”

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Civil Action No. 2:10-cv-01284.

The case could have far reaching impact on alcohol policies for companies of all sizes. If you have a company policy that requires random alcohol testing, you are going to want to follow this case.

Posted in General Business Topics, Human Resources | 1 Comment

Benefits of ISO 9001 to Small Companies

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Rick Stephens

Recently I came across an outstanding study by David Levine and Michael Toffel published by the Harvard Business School. The title of the study is Quality Management and Job Quality: How the ISO 9001 Standard for Quality Management Systems Affects Employees and Employers. At first glance of the title I didn’t think much about it until my eye spotted the affects of Employers. This was something I needed to look at in more depth. I am very glad that I didn’t skip over this as just another article that I read part of and don’t get much from it.

I found this study to be fantastic. This is a must read (at least the introduction and conclusion) for ANY company that is considering becoming ISO 9001 certified.

The study focused on the overall costs and benefits of companies becoming ISO certified, as the title suggests. Most of the findings in the study come as no surprise to me, but I must admit that I did find some conclusions extremely interesting.

My intent of this post is not to go through the entire study, but here are some of conclusions that the study found.

  1. Companies with ISO certification had lower death rates. This was interesting to me since the ISO 9001 standard itself doesn’t really have a safety, health and environmental component.
  2. Both sales and employment grew faster for ISO certified companies than at “matched” companies without certification. This comes as no surprise to me since companies with certification have a more disciplined and systematic approach to business and have processes for continual improvement. Other companies without this system will tend to rest on their laurels and continue to make the same mistakes over and over.
  3. Both payroll and earnings per employee increased at a fast rate after ISO certification than did other non-certified “matched” companies. Again, no big surprise here based continual improvement and corrective action processes.
  4. Perhaps the most interesting finding, is that companies that adopted ISO certification had fewer injuries than their “matched” companies, even BEFORE they were certified. Now this must mean that if you are a company that is considering ISO, you are already well on your way to having the program in place in some aspects. This I found to be very interesting.

For my audience perhaps the most important, is that they found that ISO certification often has the most positive impact on small businesses. They quote studies by (Docking and Dowen 1999; McGuire and Dilts 2008) that the benefits of the ISO 9001 are greater among small companies and those with average level of “technological diversity, and/or early adopters”

Posted in General Business Topics, Quality | Leave a comment

How to Pay Yourself as Business Owner

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Rick Stephens

So here is the situation: you are a small business owner, the business is structured as a LLC and you are paying taxes as a partnership. How do you pay yourself? Maybe you are starting a business and you are considering what structure to use and how this will affect how you pay yourself. Well I will try to cover the basics in this article, but in reality, before you set up a business structure, consult an Accountant or Attorney that knows the details of what you are trying to accomplish.

The “Right” answer is in your business structure

Corporations

Let’s start with the easiest one to answer and the hardest one to set up, the C corp. If you are providing services to a C corp and you are an owner, you just pay yourself as you would any other employee.

Partnerships and Sole Proprietors

The IRS will not recognize you as an employee, you are a business owner. As such, the company’s profits will be added to your income to your personal income tax (schedule C of your 1040). Remember that sole proprietors and partners may be liable for self-employment tax, which is the equivalent of Social Security tax that employees pay. You can pull money out of the company and use it to buy that trip to Europe as you see fit. The IRS sees you and the company as the same thing. If you are in a partnership, you will still have to pull money out in accordance with the articles of organization or your partner will not be happy. But the IRS is fine with pretty much whatever you want to do. You will just be responsible for the profit on your person income tax.

LLC, the answer is it depends

If you or are considering a LLC, you can choose to be taxed as a partnership/sole proprietor or as a corporation. If you are not being taxed as a corporation, you can pull money out of the company since your personal income tax will cover the earnings on the company. Pulling money out in this case is considered a personal draw out of the company. Just remember that like a partnership, you are probably going to pay a self employment tax if the company makes over $400 of profit. Also, you can take losses to your personal income tax if you are not being taxed as a corporation.

The downfall for these non-corporate tax structures is that the earnings that you need to keep for on-going operations could be taxed higher than corporate structures due to self employment taxes and potentially higher personal tax structures.

S and C corps tax factors

Due to the way that income flows through  a S-corp it is often advantageous to pay yourself a wage that is as little as possible and split the rest with dividends. This will lowering the wage taxes of Social Security. It is just the opposite for a C-corp where it is best to pay yourself from wages and not from dividends to avoid double taxation.

In both cases, the IRS will expect that you don’t over or under pay yourself to avoid this. They will expect you to pay yourself a reasonable wage for the job you are doing for the company.

Posted in Accounting, General Business Topics | 1 Comment

Business Process Automation

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Rick Stephens

Back in the early 90’s I was an account manager in Northern California working for a major oil company. I was part of a pilot program that they called “Sales Force Automation”. I was one of the few salesmen at the time that had any experience with computers, and especially programming. I was very excited about being part of the program. The company was investing a lot of money into the program and I was one of 5 or 10 salesman in the county that had input into the new system. By the time I left that company, vertically all sellers across the country, and there managers had laptops. This did not come with everyone’s support. In fact, most of the sales force protested heavily. There were arguments that the sales force was being turned into office staff and that this wouldn’t work because the sellers were going to be spending their time on the computer, many of whom would have a steep learning curve, instead of spending their time selling. In the end, it was a very useful tool for this company and its sellers and today there are very few people in that sales force who could imagine trying to sell to a customer without that tool at their disposal.

That was in 1990-1991. Today the learning curve for most people on computers is very low. Virtually everybody in the workforce today has some kind of working knowledge about the internet. Most also have familiarity with Microsoft Office programs and many know or work with databases at work. The cost of a laptop today is about a tenth of what it was in 1990 and has better reliability and capacity. Yet, most small companies are still making excuses why they are not automated similar to the employees at my former company. The internet today is a very capable, secure and cheap method that we didn’t have in 1990.

So, this begs the question; why are small businesses not jumping all over the internet to integrate their business systems? I think that the answer to this falls into one of 2 categories.

The first category, and probably the most common is that small business owners don’t really know and understand what the advantages are of Business Process Automation (BPA). This situation is relatively simple to overcome. From the owner’s stand point, do your research and find out how the internet can keep your company out in front of your competition. This requires very little effort compared to the potential gain that can come out of this research.

The second category can be described by “Drinking the Kool-Aid“.  Check out the Wikipedia link which perfectly describes what I am talking about. Basically, it involves buying into myths that are simply not true or don’t apply to the situation at hand. Here are some of those myths that seem to keep small business small:

  • Myth 1: My business can’t compete with the major companies on-line

    Although this is true, it normally doesn’t apply to a small company. The thing that you have to remember is that you are probably competing with companies of similar size. Even if your competition is much larger than yours, it is likely that they have bought into some of the myths and you can level the playing field with relatively low investment. It may just be the thing that reduces your overhead enough to really compete with the bigger guys in your market. To solve belief, apply the same tactic as above, simply research what is out there, what can be gained, and what it will cost you in time and money to set it up.

  • Myth 2: It is too complicated to use and maintain

    This is simply not that case. If fact, it is often times easier to maintain a business system that is online than a laptop or desktop hooked into your office server. Ask yourself one simple question; what do I have more trouble with, my office server/database or getting online to Google? In fact, if you have trouble getting to Google, it is likely that your office server is the cultrate not the internet.

  • Myth 3: we don’t have the time and money to set up the system

    It is likely that you have a limited budget as a small company. However, take a close look at your operating expenses. How much money are you spending on IT professionals, Customer Service calls, recalls or reworking? The fact of the matter is that too many owners work for their company and don’t spend enough time working on the company. This is all about developing systems that make sure that you produce a high quality service or product. As the owner, how much time are you spending acting as an employee? Do you have the right information at your fingertips to really work on your company? Then ask yourself; how much is my time worth? If you have become an employee of your own company, you are probably doing yourself and your company a huge disservice.

In summary, I highly recommend that you use some of your valuable time to do the research into what technology can do for your bottom-line. The chances are very good that you have a lot of low hanging fruit in this area. Your research will likely return huge dividends.

Posted in Developers Corner, General Business Topics, Online Applications | 1 Comment

Optimizing Images in Fireworks CS5

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Rick Stephens

Fireworks General Discoveries

Fireworks CS5 IconI very rarely open Fireworks since I do most of my graphic work in Photoshop and Illustrator. That is why I decided to take a peek at the Lynda.com videos Fireworks CS4 Essential Training with Jim Babbage. I watch and read a lot of web developer tutorials. Many of these give some reference to Fireworks so I decided to take a look. I thought that I would include in this post something about Fireworks. Since compressing/optimizing photos is such a critical part of web design and it is somewhat different in Photoshop, this post is going to be all about optimizing photos in Fireworks.

The first thing to note about Fireworks is that it integrates optimization tools right in the main workspace of the program. Additionally, it has an optimize panel which was turned on in my program and visible from start-up. That alone suggested to me that I may have been missing the boat on keeping this program buried within my Adobe directory. Once I really started looking, the program is obviously created with web development in mind. This is in stark contrast to Photoshop, which is very much geared towards photographic manipulation, and Illustrator which is geared towards print.

Optimizing in Fireworks (Exporting)

All of the general optimization principles that apply to Photoshop also apply to Fireworks. In other words, JPG’s are still generally the best choice for photographs and graphics with gradients and millions of colors. GIF is still the file type of choice for flat color images. You still do the major tuning for JPG’s with the quality setting, and the major tuning of GIF’s with the number of colors.

Fireworks does not have a Save for Web & Devices option like Photoshop. Instead it has an optimize panel through which you export the native PNG file to some other file format. Save As in Fireworks has more options that the optimize window with respect to the number of file types you can save. The main idea with Fireworks is to export a flat file using one of several techniques that I will go through below.

The Original, Preview, 2-up and 4-up views are accessed from the top of the workspace right in Fireworks proper. This is much different that having to go to another window like in Photoshop. You can view the optimizations simply by clicking one of these button directly from the main workspace.

Export Wizard

One way to export and optimize is by using the export wizard. The export wizard walks you through the process of exporting PNG files to other, web ready formats.

File > Export Wizard...

The export wizard allows you to specify a target file size and it will assist in the optimization to maintain the target file size.

Additionally, the wizard will ask you what you want to do with the file. You can choose “the Web” and it will tell you that it recommends either GIF or JPG. Then it will show you its best shot at those two formats. It will preview both GIF and JPG side by side for comparison of the file size and the quality.

Once you see the previews, you can then click on one of them and further optimize the image manually in the options tab. Once you are satisfied with the optimized image, you then just click the export button and save it to the desired location on your computer.

Image Preview

Fireworks also has an option for exporting that looks very similar to Photoshop’s Save for Web & Devices dialog box. It is called “Image Preview”.

File > Image Preview...

This will get you to the Image Preview as shown above. The Options tab in the Image Preview gives a very similar view to Photoshop’s Save for Web & Devices dialog box.

There is another tab called the file tab that allows you other options like scale down the image and export a specific area. This is cropping on the fly when you export the image.

The last tab in the Image Preview window is the animation tab. If you have an animated GIF, you can change things like the timing of the animation and looping settings.

Export Area Tool

In Fireworks, you can export specific areas of your file, or page. You don’t have to crop the area and export; you can simply click the Export Area Tool, which is in the tool bar with the Crop tool. Just click and hold the crop tool and you will see a fly out that shows the Export Area Tool.

You use this tool like the crop tool, by drawing out the area that you want to export. Then you either double click on the area or press enter and the Image Preview dialog box will appear with only the selected area in the preview. At this point you can optimize and export just as you would with the Image Preview.

Overall, I have been missing out on some very cool features by not using Fireworks. That is not to say that I am going to immediately give up on Photoshop and Illustrator, but I will use it for quick edits to web elements and I expect that my usage will grow as I move forward.

Posted in Developers Corner, General Business Topics, Online Applications | Leave a comment

My First Bout with Dreamweaver

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Rick Stephens

Dreamweaver CS IconUp until about 4 years ago, I was designing web sites using FrontPage. As a beginning developer, I found it very easy to create pages, organize files, add links and images. This was about the extent of my ability at the time. More and more people asked me to build web sites for them and I eventually started taking it seriously. I started reading books on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and learned a little about dynamic web sites. I quickly learned that there was other ways to upload files that did not need a server that had FrontPage extensions activated. I was learning about CSS and realized that I needed a better program that allowed me to have more control over the web pages that I was creating. I did some research and talked to a few people that were in the business and found that Dreamweaver seemed to be what most designers were using.

Being somewhat OCD, I didn’t just go but Dreamweaver. No, I had to jump in with both feet and bought Adobe’s Master Collection CS3. I was impressed with the programs but NOT impressed with the cost. However, the cost was not greater than my OCD.

I got the program about 3 years ago, installed it and fired it up fully expecting to hit the ground running. Well that is not exactly what happened. I had just entered into the world of Adobe for the first time and it was nothing like the world of Microsoft. Having spent the money, I knew that I had to get to know these programs. So, I spent even more money on training videos from Total Training and learned about Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator and all the rest…

Well now I am glad that I invested the time and money to learn these programs. It took me a while but I am very comfortable with the Adobe interfaces, and they are getting to look very similar. I recently upgraded to CS5 and the integration of these programs is very nice in this version. The main reason for me to upgrade from CS4 to CS5 was for the great support of PHP in Dreamweaver.

If write code in PHP, I highly recommend Dreamweaver CS5. At least download a 30 day trial and check out the PHP support for linked files. It is great.

Posted in Developers Corner, General Business Topics, Online Applications | 1 Comment

Rely on Dreamweaver’s Design View?

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Rick Stephens

Should you rely on Dreamweaver’s Design view for your Final Design output?

The answer to this question is absolutely not! In fact one should not even rely on a single browser for the final design, but I digress.

Dreamweaver has come a long way in CS4 and CS5 to try to get browser like rendering in design view with the “Live View” button. However, it renders to a single browser, I think Goggle chrome. I can tell you from personal experience that using a single browser to test your web pages will cause trouble. I find that the last browser that I check with is Internet Explorer. This is because it is the most popular non-compliant browser in use. The fact that IE 7 and below are not compliant, makes for some very strange rendering when you are coding to HTML standards.

So, after all that rambling, no don’t use the design mode for final output, and no don’t use live view for final output and no don’t use any single browser for final design output.

Posted in Developers Corner | Leave a comment