It would be fair to call Markup Factory a CMS (Content Management System), but that would be cutting it short. Markup Factory is much more that, but be scared or think for a moment that it’s “over your head”. It’s not. Markup Factory is one of the most full-featured, powerful, and easy to use web services I have ever seen for creating and maintaining your own websites.

For starters, Markup Factory provides the hosting for your site. So yes, this costs money (packages start at $14.95 / month), but hosting costs money too and often more than these packages. So when you sign up, you’ll get a “your-choice.markup.factory.com“, but you don’t actually have to use that, you can point your own domain names at your Markup Factory site.

Also I’d like to make clear, this isn’t some elaborate advertising scheme where they are trying to get people to make websites on here so they can plaster them in ads. There is no advertising involved in this whatsoever. Unless of course, you wish to put them on your own ads on your own site. This leads to perhaps the most important thing you should know about Markupfactory:

Markup Factory websites are under your COMPLETE control

Have your own site already designed? No problem, you can upload it and use it. Want a nice pre-built template to start from? They have those too.

The theory behind building sites in Markup Factory is that the pages are based on templates (much like any CMS). You can create these yourself. Then to create a new page, you just add a new one, choose the URL for it, choose a template, and away you go. The main content for that page you control with a Rich Text Editor (Like TinyMCE you may be familiar with from WordPress, but they also have WMD, CodePress or Advanced Mode).

Great, the pages are template based, but what if you want to share code even between templates? For example, you might have 5 different templates for different sections of your site but they all should have the same footer. You could easily do that on your own site with something like a PHP include, but Markup Factory has you covered here too. You can make “snippets” of code you can insert anywhere on pages and templates to include common content. I’d also like to mention that there is a file manager at your disposal for maintaining things that your site will need like CSS and Javascript files.

Markup Factory helps your site DO STUFF

This isn’t just a tool to build a website and keep it’s content updated, Markup Factory helps with all the advanced functionality of sites that actually do stuff. With Markup Factory, you can build:

• Blog (with comment system and all)
• Event Calendar
• eCommerce Store
• Group Management & Email Newsletters
• Podcasting

eCommerce? Doesn’t that need to be secure? Yep, Markup Factory provides SSL to keep your site secure (and your customers warm and fuzzy). Speaking of advanced functionality, the upper plans offer email hosting as well.

There are two killer new features that are in Beta right now that will make these packages even more appealing to advanced web designers and developers like yourselves. One, databases. Enough said. Two, a form builder. Websites are full of forms and you will certainly need them at some time or another. Build a survey, have a contact form, an event signup form, a donation form… build them all!

They will help you

Markup Factory keeps regular phone support hours, has full documentation, and does email support. Very nice to have the peace of mind that there are people that will help you through all of this.

There is a live demo you can check out. You can even log in and check out the admin section. (The username and password is already filled out, just click the button to enter).

If you are looking to build a brand new site and would like to have this kind of easy-updating and advanced functionality, Markup Factory is worth checking out. I bet you could even train a client to use this once you already have it up and going =)

Today is the 232^nd birthday of the United States and the 1^st birthday of CSS-Tricks!

Been a great year! This blog and this community have helped me grow tremendously. I’m sure the next year will be even better and bring lots of good stuff to all.

WordPress is a hugely popular CMS for blogging. The blog section of CSS-Tricks is run on WordPress and I am very happy with it. By popular request, we are going to walk through designing for WordPress. In part one, we will be downloading and installing WordPress. Then we will install the “Starkers” theme by Elliot Jay Stocks to start with a completely fresh slate for our new design. No sense starting with the default theme, it’s more trouble than it’s worth! In part two, we will go over the theory behind designing for WordPress and how it’s much like “working modularly” and actually get started designing. In part three, we will finish up the design and start in with some more advanced functionality.

This is a hot time in the world of browsers. Despite a rocky morning, Firefox 3 got over 8 million downloads when it was released. It’s up to over 24 million now. I bet many of you are amongst these downloaders, I know I was =)

I bet many of you do your web design and development in Firefox. Things just seem to behave as you expect them to in Firefox. Plus, it has a wealth of invaluable development tools like the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug. If you have never heard of or aren’t currently using Firebug, I did an introductory screencast for it you can check out.

The ability to view and manipulate the entire DOM of a web page after it is rendered is crazy powerful. I’m not sure if Firebug was the first tool ever created to do this (I doubt it), but it has certainly popularized it. The way that it works, being part of the browser itself, has started a new paradigm of browser-specific development tools. Let’s take a look at all the browsers and their latest offerings.

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Students: Are you going to be employable?

Andy Rutledge’s article The Employable Web Designer is about how schools may not be properly preparing students with actually employable web skills:

These students are worried that they’ll emerge from school without marketable skills, unprepared for what agencies and clients will expect or demand of them. Unfortunately, I think most of them are right to be worried.

I think Andy is dead-on with most of this, but perhaps a bit extreme. He puts forth quite a laundry list of things students should be being taught, and specifically excludes specific tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I agree that training students in the fundamentals is far more important than specific tools, but you need a tool of some kind in order to practice your fundamentals so why not these.

Most design programs are 4 year BA degrees, less if you are just getting a technical degree. Maybe half of that time is taken up by generic requirements. Now you have 2 years left. At least one of those needs to be purely dedicated to artistic fundamentals. Things Andy mentions like drawing skills and artistic fundamentals. Now we have one year left to start honing those real world design skills. By the time you get people up to speed with the tools needed in real world web design, you are getting shoved out the door with a degree.

The point? There just isn’t enough time in school to craft a human being into a fully-employable design employee. Your business sense, communication skills, and technological skills are going to come from your own time, and hope that you have the fundamentals solid enough to carry you through. That is sure as heck what happened for me.

Custom MooTool-Tips

David shows us how to make non-boring tooltips.

Interviews

I did a couple of interviews recently. One on Berriart where I talk mostly about CSS-Tricks. Another on ScrnShots as a “featured user”, where I talk a bit about my career generically and how I user ScrnShots.

jQuery Explained (by 12 year old Dmitri Gaskin)

This kid will probably be one of our bosses in like 3 years.

Live Search

Making search more helpful is going to be big on the web in the coming years. Try using the search on Apple.com, now those are quality results. Another way to make search more useful is by paring down results in real time. Steve Smith is calling it “Quicksilver Style” and he has an example written up using Prototype. [jQuery port]