Dropbox [link] is a highly recommended service that lets you share large files amongst different groups and machines. A typical use would be to sync your files between two or more computers, but I find Dropbox incredibly useful for my client work.

Like many of you, I work with virtual teams that come together on a project-by-project basis. With Dropbox it’s easy to set up a shared folder for each project and control who has access to it. As soon as one person throws up a file, everyone in the group has it there locally on their computer. Brilliant.

On the downside, Dropbox sorely needs a better public dropbox. At the moment, you can share a file with the world, but if you want to allow someone to put a file in your public drop box, they have to sign up for the service and install the app. Even though the service is free, this is a bit much to ask for these one-off uploads. Based on the forum traffic on this topic, I’m not alone in thinking this is a glaring omission in Dropbox’s feature set.

Dropbox is free for a 2GB shared account with paid options for more storage and workgroup options. For the typical web developer, the free option is just fine.

Dropbox can be found at GetDropbox.com. Sign up with this link and you’ll get an extra 250MB of space for free!

I came across this very nice gallery of Flash preloader screens. I am continually humbled in the presence of true creativity. This is well worth checking out.

Showcase Of Creative Flash Preloaders

Google has released a useful SEO starter guide that outlines the basics and some pitfalls. This is good stuff.

[via the Google Webmasters Blog]

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Blame the economy, but everyone is trying to cut corners.

Lately, I’ve come across any number of examples of DIY graphics and marketing materials. This is a trend that will only end up biting the creators in the butt. By pinching pennies and doing a poor job, these people are diminishing their brand, angering their customers, and utterly failing to promote their business in a positive light.

Repeat after me: “I am not a graphic artist.”

Now, say it again. “I am not a graphic artist.”

Just because you give someone a hammer and some nails doesn’t mean that person can build a house you’d want to live in. Graphics are the same way. Power to the people be praised, but just because a free or inexpensive software tool can be used by anyone with a mouse and a frontal lobe doesn’t mean that effective marketing materials are going to spring forth.

Bottom line: leave the graphics to the professionals and your customers will turn toward you, not away from you.

Email marketing is a particlarly nasty black hole for customer goodwill. I present to you Exhibit A:

Now, this is a classic, textbook example of what not to do in an email marketing campaign. Let’s go through the mistakes made here one by one.

1. Using a non-company domain for your email address
Although it’s blurred out in the example above, the person sent this from a GMail address. Just as any business using an AOL address in days past, nothing says amateur like a business email that doesn’t use your domain.

2. The “To” Field – A mine field of customer anger and resentment
This person put 74 recipient addresses in the TO field. Being a gross breach of email etiquitte, it’s a sure-fire way to anger your potential customers. Under no circumstances should you use someone’s email address if they did not explicitly concent to receive marketing communications from you. And under no circumstances should you violate the person’s privacy by exposing their address for all to see.

3. “Fun With Fonts” – An effective way to communicate with 1st graders
In the history of branding and marketing, no adult customer has ever responded positively to the use of all-caps (it’s perceived as SHOUTING), mutliple exclaimation marks (we’re not in grade school any more), comic sans (or any “cute” font), verbose copy, or the use of the full spectrum of colors within a single sentence. So, unless you are communicating with a 1st grader, understand that typography is an art best left to professionals. When used well, it guides the eye to key communication points without distracting from the overall message, compliments your branding, and conveys a sense of intelligence and sphistication. When used poorly…well, you can see for yourself in the example above.

4. “Do-it-yourself” Graphics – Microsoft Templates do not equate to Professional Graphics
Yes, software packages put a lot of power in your hands. Microsoft Word and Publisher have a number of great templates. These are great if you’re putting together a “Lost Dog” flyer or a garage sale sign. They aren’t so great for your marketing materials. Using them immediately tips your hand that you designed it yourself. The customer immediately thinks things like “cheap” and “cheesy,” not things like “sophisticated” and “professional.” Why would they take your business seriously?

5. (Not pictured) Send from Yourself – How to get black-flagged in one easy step
This is a real consideration: if you send a mass emailing from your personal address, or even the one you use for your business communications–or even one from your company’s domain–and you risk getting your address, or worse, your server, black listed by all the major ISPs. This actually happened to a client of mine and it took a ton of work and weeks of time to repair the damage.

So let’s recap:

Marketing matters. Graphic design matters. Use of professional, third-party email marketing tools (I recommend MailChimp, personally) matters. Leave these to the professionals and resist the urge to do it yourself. Failing to heed this advice will only anger your customers, burn your company’s goodwill, and fail to increase sales. For all intents and purposes, the damage is permanent, so just don’t even think about it.

Resources:

MailChimp Email Marketing Resource Center (free)

Constant Contact Email Marketing Learning Center (free)

(via @goatlady‘s tweet:) For the next 14 days, one of SitePoint’s most popular books, “The Art & Science Of CSS,” is available to download for FREE.

The promotion is designed to get you to follow SitePoint on Twitter, but you can enter your favorite spam catching email address to get the download for free, too.

Click here: Twitaway Free Offer

[NOTE:] In fact, at the moment, the email signup is the only way to get the download link. Twitter spanked SitePoint for sending too many DMs with links, so following them won’t do you any good at this point (unless you just want good karma points).

The Webmaster Jam Session ’08 is coming right up (Oct 3rd and 4th) in Atlanta. If you haven’t signed up yet and are thinking about going, don’t hesitate. For the money, this is the best web development conference out there. I went last year and got a ton out of it.

This year, I somehow convinced the organizers that I knew a thing or two about web development. So I’ll be giving my own talk on Oct 3rd about the one or two things I know, and maybe a bit more.

“Joking” aside (it’s early, and I haven’t had coffee yet), I’ll be joining the many fine speakers on the panel and giving a talk on the Power of Frameworks. The gist will be that using a framework, be it an off the shelf CMS like Drupal, or a custom one like my own DST, will save you time, your clients money, and make you more valuable as a web developer. I’ll give some real world examples and some practical tips on how to make multi-site development easier and faster.

Part of what makes WJS so good is the fact that seats are limited to 240 people. This means sessions are intimate, casual, and focused. It also means that you’ll stand a great chance of meeting people that can help you.

There are only a few seats left. If you sign up, use the discount code ICANHAZWJS for $50 off your registration.

Links:

• Webmaster Jam Session ’08
• Sessions ’08
• Speakers ’08
• Webmaster Jam Session ’07 Podcasts
• $50 off discount code: ICANHAZWJS

The Dreamweaver team has been hard at work since the launch of CS3 to bring you…drum roll please…CS4!

That’s right! A bright and shiny new version is available as a public beta. Also available are the Bridge CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Soundbooth betas.

The biggest changes are in the interface. The OWL interface that you’ve come to know and love in Photoshop are now in Dreamweaver, as are a host of other refinements and improvements. My favorite UI enhancements by far are the Vertical Split View and Split Code View–the combination of which finally lets you work on the header and body of a document at the same time the way God intended. After all, why would she give us wide-screen monitors if she didn’t want us to see two pages side by side?

Also notable in the new Dreamweaver CS4 are the following:

• Javascript Extractor – provides an easy to make your JavaScript unobtrusive by externalizing it and tying it to watcher events. This is very cool. (Note: Read all about Unobtrusive JavaScript in this post.)
• Integrated Subversion Client – ties an SVN client into the site functionality.
• Related Documents – provides instant access to any file that is immediately linked from the document you’re working in
• New Spry Validation & Widgets – new and improved are the Spry validation widgets for passwords and radio groups, along with integrated support for the latest version of Spry.

Click the links below to get your copy hot off the digital presses:

• The Adobe Labs Dreanweaver Beta home

Please direct any feedback, bug reports, and feature requests to the Dreamweaver Public Beta Forums.

Safari 3.1 has been released for both the Mac and the Windows. The update is available via the automatic Software Update on the Mac, or via a manual update on Windows. Of course, you can download a fresh clean install here.

Included in the update is a new Develop menu which contains various web development features, allows access to the web inspector and the network time line, allows CSS editing in the web inspector, and allows user agent spoofing.

On the standards side, Safari 3.1 adds support for CSS 3 web fonts, CSS transforms and transitions, HTML 5 <video> and <audio> elements, offline storage for Web applications in SQL databases, SVG images in <img> elements and CSS images, and SVG advanced text. (Ironically, none of these things are standards yet, but whatever.)

The full release notes can be read here.

Since the launch of Leopard and Safari 3, I’ve been using Safari as my primary development browser. The only thing I miss from firefox is the ability to view the source code on selected text. Other than that, Safari 3 with the debug menu enabled has been the best browser for development on the market, hands-down. With 3.1′s update, this will only improve.

If you create any sort of training videos for your clients, then you’ve most likely been using Ambrosia’s excellent SnapzPro.

SnapzPro has been the mainstay of desktop capture for years, but it’s somewhat of a one-trick pony. It captures the desktop action very well, but it offers nothing in the way of editing capabilities. It also restricts you more or less to a small view window, and you basically had to do everything in one clean take or bring multiple clips into a video editor to bring everything together.

Now, we have ScreenFlow from Vara Software. This $99 Leopard-only app lets you capture your desktop just like SnapzPro, but it does a whole lot more.

For starters, you can capture your entire desktop and pan around in a cropped version for optimal output. You can even capture your mug via your iSight and edit this into your video to add some variety to your output. There are callouts and cursor effects that you can layer in after the fact–something you used to be able to do only at run-time with OmniDazzle. Finally, there’s the timeline where you can edit, trim and otherwise perfect your output for professional results.

ScreenFlow is a huge timesaver and lets you produce training videos of a quality that was previously possible only with an expensive video editing package and multiple “takes” with Snapz.

Get the free demo of ScreenFlow here. You’ll be able to do everything you need to evaluate the software, but any output will be watermarked. The demo is otherwise identical to the unlocked version.

A very good (and brief) blog post over at Signal vs. Noise [link]. Some choice quotes:

“Programmers often have difficulty going back to older code bases because they don‚Äôt reflect the latest, greatest idioms.”

“Even if you take that project from three years ago and scrub it clean as can be today, it‚Äôs still going to drift from the best practices of two years from now.”

“Here‚Äôs something I don‚Äôt say often: Suck It Up. If you work on more than a few projects, they can‚Äôt all smell like today‚Äôs fresh linens.”

I definitely recommend reading the whole post.