When I build a website and write content, I try to find the right balance between SEO and the visitors experience. A sure way to optimize your website for search engine without altering your visitors’ experience is to use CSS.

One important thing to consider when it comes to SEO is your webpage’s first sentences. Your most important keywords should be at the beginning of your webpage. Unfortunately for most websites, the first thing that’s appearing on their website is… the header and the top menu! And usually this menu consists of keywords like: home, contact, about us, privacy, etc.

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If you are regularly developing dynamic websites, you probably have the need for a fast and powerful development environment. Notepad may do the job for short scripts but when it comes to creating more complex applications, it’s your salary that goes down the drain if you’re wasting too much time on coding.

Personnally I’ve been using CodeCharge Studio from YesSoftware for about four years (since version 2) to develop PHP websites. While I haven’t used any other programming languages it offers, here are its possibilities:

• PHP 4/5
• ASP 3.0
• ASP.NET C#
• ASP.NET VB
• CFML 4.01/MX
• JSP 1.1 JDK 1.3
• Perl 5.0
• Servlets 2.2 JDK 1.3

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Dropdown menus, or popup menus, can be very useful to your visitors if used carefully. When a visitor enters a website, he visually scans the page for useful informations. Therefore if you are “hiding” important links in your dropdown menus, be sure that the visitor will be able to navigate without them.he

I tend to use dropdown (listboxes) in web applications but not in standard, public web pages. When people use an application on a regular basic, they can afford to learn how to use them efficiently.

I made the following video tutorial so you can learn how to create dropdown menus using Adobe Fireworks. The link open in a new window as using YouTube.com produced a video too fuzy to watch here.

Watch Fireworks video tutorial here

Please bear with me as this is my first video tutorial. I think the speed is kind of fast but the video file is almost 5 Mo so I didn’t want it to last longer.

Let me know what you think!