Smashing Magazine has posted a couple articles to help web developers and designers with their Wordpress and Drupal sites.  Some great suggestions and resources are listed in these articles.

1. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox
2. Drupal Developer's Toolbox

The articles don't include everything, but it's a wonderful start for those just beginning to learn about Drupal or Wordpress.  Link found via Nick Lewis' blog.

Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal.  According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet (Mnpls) using Drupal 5.  Electric Pulp, a local Sioux Falls company, also contributed to the project by doing the design and CSS work.

I don't think I've ever met Tim Broeker, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a Joomla! Core Team connection.  Yes indeed, open source does matter.

SharePoint Designer tutorial: Working with SharePoint Websites is a new book from Packt, which teaches users different SharePoint features that will help them create a SharePoint website. Written by Mike Poole, this book is ideal for people new to SharePoint Designer who want to put together a business website.

I'm not a huge fan of creating sites with Adobe's Flash.  I personally find Flash sites difficult to navigate, bookmark, and retrieve worthwhile information.  However, I can understand why the more artistic Web designers and site owners out there prefer to use Flash when building a website.  But in my mind, one of the biggest drawbacks with Flash is that Google and other search engines have a difficult time reading and indexing Flash sites.  Let's face it, if Google can't search your site then it is highly unlikely your customers will find your site in the first few pages displayed by Google no matter which keywords are being used.

Luckily for Flash fans, Google has changed the rules by improving their search capability for Flash sites.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

So there you have it.  I just lost my number one argument against building a site using Flash technology.  Web designers and site owners will likely want to read Google's questions and answers pertaining to the improvements with Flash indexing.

Baseline: Here are a few key things to think about when it comes to Web site design and management in terms of search results, audience and growth.

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Here's an execise for the reader.  What CMS does this site use? You can find the answer and more here.

Compass Design: Many readers of this blog are one of two types of business, customization/design of Joomla websites or downloadable digital products. Prompted by a chat among some of my colleagues, I'd thought I'd see what people think about an important part an online business - your refund policy.

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