Whether you prefer developing in ASP, PHP or Colfusion, Adobe Dreamweaver and the WebAssist Super Suite extensions can turn an ordinary website into a dynamic database-driven workhorse that rivals those from professional developers costing tens of thousands of dollars.

Super Suite extensions for Dreamweaver

Just like a professional carpenter, the right set of tools can make all the difference in the finished product. In Dreamweaver, having the right set of extensions can not only allow you to build more extensive, usable websites, but they can also save you an immense amount of development time and frustration.

WebAssist Super Suite gives you The Power to Build Anything

The Super Suite extension package covers everything from website security, user administration, user login, site cookies, sessions, database administration, email processing, dynamic dropdowns, a full ecommerce shopping cart, a website import tool, Eric Meyer's CSS Sculptor, a full-featured text editor, dynamic Flash charts, dynamic Google map integration and a whole lot more!

Database-driven websites, e-commerce and more

The Super Suite set of extensions gives Dreamweaver users the tools to create every facet of a functional content management system, full featured forums with access-level rights, complete website database administration tools including search, add, edit, update and delete fuctions, full digital file upload and download features, and a complete ecommerce shopping cart system with fully customizable storefronts. All this is achieved through an extremely easy-to-use wizard interface which walks you through each step in simple, intuitive fashion.

Easy-to-use Dreamweaver wizard interface

Super Suite can be easily integrated into your current site Dreamweaver template. The wizards take you through the steps needed to configure your options, you choose your template, and Super Suite creates all necessary pages, navigation, recordsets, CSS and javascript. You simply upload the new pages and files to your server, and the new functionality is live, with the look and feel of your existing website.

Create advanced Dreamweaver websites without knowing any code

WebAssist Super Suite extensions are perfect for Dreamweaver users who are hesitant to dig into the code. The extensions create all the code for you, and you can easily return to the wizard at any time to make changes. Super Suite has some similar functions to Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox, but it includes one-of-a-kind extensions like the iRite WYSIWYG editor for integrating FCKeditor into your Dreamweaver websites, CSS Sculptor which allows you to create complete standards compliant websites in one easy operation, and Site Import which allows you to import complete websites including all HTML, CSS, script, Flash and image files onto your local drive.

Advice from a Super Suite user

As a Super Suite user, I have used all their extensions extensively in my client websites. The ease-of-use and the Dreamweaver integration make them a must-have extension bundle if you want to develop websites faster, create more intuitive and complex websites, and make more money as a website designer or developer.

Adobe Dreamweaver Compatibility

The WebAssist Super Suite package is an all-inclusive Dreamweaver toolkit which provides developers with all the necessary tools to make dynamic database-driven websites in Adobe Dreamweaver. The extensions are compatible with Dreamweaver 8 and Dreamweaver CS3 on both PC and Mac. PHP, ASP and ColdFusion are supported by all the extensions.

When choosing the best content management system for your project, it is important to weigh both the technical and non-technical pros and cons. Both technical and non-technical reasons can ultimately affect the bottom line cost. Therefore, it is not recommended to simply choose a content management system based solely on technical language or feature set. In this article, we will take a look at an open source content management system called Radiant CMS.

Radiant is a Ruby on Rails based solution that works with a variety of databases. It has a few years of development and a couple noteworthy deployments. There are technical and non-technical reasons why Radiant CMS is a good choice for a content management system.

Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: It's Ruby on Rails based which can speed development by taking advantage of the convention over configuration paradigm. In addition, the Radiant code base has excellent automated coverage in unit tests. This means the code is well tested and robust. Unit test code coverage can be one aspect to measure when considering open source content management systems. In fact, we could suggest the amount of code covered by automated unit and integration tests should be considered when choosing any open source library and/or framework. It is an easy indicator to measure and compare. But, that is an entirely different conversation.

Radiant CMS also has an excellent extension system. This allows customizations required by your project to be made. When choosing a content management system, the ability to add and maintain any customizations should be an important factor. This point should be considered not only from the beginning, but how your customizations will evolve as upgrades and enhancements occur within your chosen content management system. In other words, if the core CMS is modified to provide the custom functionality, how can upgrades or patches from the core CMS developers be applied to your modified version. Radiant's extension system provides this separation of concern.

The Radius tagging system of Radiant is fantastic for adding dynamic functionality. It is nice that tags can be added directly to page content rather than some kind of comment or special character sequence in order to indicate non-static content.

Non-Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: Radiant has an elegant, intuitive administrative interface. It is not intimidating to the non-technical user. In fact, the design encourages people to embrace using the system, because they assume it is going to be easy to pick up and learn.

The lack of workflow functionality can be considered a feature in many cases. In competing CMS products, workflow can seem like an attractive feature at first, but is often hindrance to configure and work around for projects which require only a few administrators of content.

An additional, non-technical reason to choose Radiant CMS is cost. The project is open source and the community of ruby on rails developers and ruby on rails hosting providers is growing, so your cost risk of obtaining these resources is minimized.

Conclusion

From a technical perspective, the open source, Ruby on Rails based Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice. From a non-technical perspective, Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice as well. When combining both perspectives, we have had many positive project experiences and deployments using Radiant over the past year and a half.

So you managed to get a website up and working. You managed to set up a pay per click campaign. But you have not managed to get lots of buyers, callers, joiners, clickers or whatever it is you were after. You may even be advertising to a niche market, yet your website speaks to a general audience. If you try to be everything to every body these days and you will end up being nothing to anybody. So let's look at how you might make changes to your site to speak to a niche and get some conversions.

News Flash. The general store can't compete with the amazons of the world.

If you try all by yourself to compete with mega mart, you will get lost in the big black wormhole of the internet-- also known as the limp, lame, solitary server for misplaced website owners. That's why you choose a segment or a niche strategy. It offers you an opportunity to carve a market share out of that big giant pie. The trick is to identify the niche market or brand audience who will value the service or product enough to pay for it.

How can you position to a primary target audience ?

Don't shoot at the ocean hoping to hit a fish. You need to follow a plan or niche strategy to develop your website so it speaks to this primary target audience. A website is a marketing tool. So here is a brief outline regarding how you might go about the process of creating a well-positioned, marketing savvy website that is not generic. This is an extremely simplified website plan for positioning to a target audience but it outlines a process that you can follow.

• Define your site- Before you can actually choose the type of software or tool you will need to create your site, you need to first determine what KIND of site you want. Is it a site to promote your business? Or an eCommerce site to sell stuff? Is it a community forum for like minded. You site definition determines which development tools you'll need. A free template might do the trick or you might like to look into ecommerce programs.

• Define your goals- What do you want this website to do for you? Sell? Get additional business? Advertise more high-profit items or services? Serve as a status gateway for your sales and marketing team? Do you want it to be an informational platform that is supported by advertising. Writing down your goals gives you a focus.

• Define your target market- It's not "everyone on the internet". Big companies spend MILLIONS to define their market and create an appropriate strategy. So you need to research the segment of the population who you are trying to reach. If it's teenagers, is it female teens with self esteem issues? Is it teens who are book worms? If you know which segment it is, you can further define the audience and know how to speak to them.

• Define features- These are the features you want on your site. If you are a real estate firm, do you want an amortization calculator? Do you want a venue for people to leave comments? Do you want a slide show, streaming video, audio files? Do you want a schedule of how-to clinics and sign up capability for these clinics? What about registration and payment capability? All of this helps determine the tools you use, the package you might buy the host you will choose. Some hosts are better if you happen to be posting lots of video or audio content for example. Still others offer ecoommerce packages with a higher level of tech support for these customers.

• Target marketing strategy-Your marketing strategy is a plan to reach specific objectives. It does not have to be catchy. It just has to define what you would like the site to accomplish. Example: For instance, you want your computer repair business to cater to home office entrepreneurs who want same-day repair. Your focus is getting computers fixed fast from a remote location and keeping the business person at peak productivity by minimizing downtime. You may also want to get an affiliate cut for spyware you recommend on your website and other products that keep computers virus free and performing smoothly. You want to keep in touch with your market through a newsletter with free tips on how to boost performance and with latest virus alerts. You would like to start offering monthly contracts for being the "IT Department" for the home office entrepreneur and eventually establish yourself as the go-to company for IT services.

Remember to write or use copy that does not focus on yourself or your company, but think strategically in terms of how your product(s), service or company benefits your target market. Then your website should guide them along the path to the action you wish them to take much like a live sales person would do. Plan your website well and it could become one of your least expensive and highest yielding marketing and sales tools.