Future of Web Design Archive

Have you worked as a tech consultant or worked in a large company as a developer or other techie? You MUST watch this video now. Seriously…stop whatever you are doing and watch this video… it is absolutely hilarious but 100% true! (found via Patrick Veverka)

• Let me make a call and see if I can get you $8.50
• It’s just a test – if my husband likes it, we can roll the highlights in next time
• I am not making anything on this you gotta help me out
• I will pay you but you need to show our internal team so they can do it by themselves next time

Add your own witty tech phrases heard from clients in the comments!

Apparently, Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 was launched the other day, and I am absolutely astounded by the significant price of the software.

I have always thought that Adobe’s products were severely over-priced, but I don’t even remember CS3 costing nearly as much as the retail price of CS4. Has the company lost its mind?

Are people and businesses, especially in today’s economy, really going to pay $2,500 for the master suite, $1,800 for the Design Premium suite or $1,700 for the Web Premium or the Production Premium suites?

Will people actually pay more for Adobe’s software suites than most spent on the computers on which they will be installing? Will they shell out five to ten times more for the design/development software than they did on the operating system on which they will be running the software (the current price of Windows Vista Ultimate – full version – is $319 – most Linux builds are available for free, and the boxed versions usually average between $50 and $100)?

Are people truly still willing to shell out $1,000 just for Adobe PhotoShop? Is PhotoShop really still that much better than Corel Paint Shop Pro (which retails for ~$99 – $60 for the upgrade) or GIMP/GimpShop (which is completely free and works completely cross-platform)?

Because I work for an educational institution, we are able to get a discount, but Adobe’s educational discount is a little strange. They only offer the full version of each product to educational institutions, and they sell it at the cost of the upgrade package. They do not offer the upgrade package to educational institutions.

When CS3 was released, we picked up the Design Premium suite for around $300. The educational edition of the Design Premium suite is now selling for twice that price.

Do you think that this pricing structure is a result of the massive software pirating that occurs with Adobe’s products, or is it possible that it’s the other way around?

Curtiss Grymala is the full-time Webmaster for a community college in Virginia. In his spare time, he runs a freelance Web development company called Ten-321 Enterprises, is an active participant in the HTMLCenter Forums and offers small snippets of code and bug reports to the developers and modders of the YaBB Forum system. He has been developing Web sites and applications for nearly 15 years.

I am very excited to announce that CenterNetworks has a new look and a completely overhauled backend setup. We’ve been testing the new setup over the past week and so far it’s been solid. The goal was to simplify the frontend and create better content paths. With so much of our traffic going directly to an interior page, we worked hard to make sure that users would be able to see a top-line of what’s new across the site.

The left menu now features content categories and companies of interest. This list will rotate as topics and companies move up and down the hot list. Our awesome sponsors are now highlighted and NYC now has it’s own section. We provide more NYC Web coverage than any other site and we wanted to highlight the growing NYC Web scene. We’ve also added a list of contributors to the site. Some of our best posts come from our contributors and I felt this was very important to showcase. There’s a lot more, poke around and find all the goodies.

The new design was created by Mark Langeneck of CMPLT design. Mark is one of the most talented designers I know. He understands more about usability, architecture and the general Web than most of the other 200+ designers I’ve worked with in my career. His questioning of design strategy also strengthens the final product. Perhaps it comes from his love of Elvis. Whatever it is, he did an awesome job.

In case you are wondering about the backend of CenterNetworks, we use Drupal and mySQL. I spent many hours optimizing the heck out of the code to make sure the site loads as quickly as possible. In my testing, the new CN loads 5x quicker than the old CN.

This is just the start; we’ve got more exciting things in the hopper. Thanks as always for reading and engaging with CenterNetworks and thanks to all of our great sponsors (current and past) who help us continue our operations. If you are on the feed, this is a great time to stop by the full site. And please let me know if you find any bugs or have suggestions for improvement.

A quick update on this week’s conference coverage. I am here in Las Vegas covering Blog World Expo and PostieCon or IzraCon or WhateverItsCalledNowCon. I’ve got a headcam so you never know what might show up on tape!

Shannon Clark has been reporting on ad:tech in NYC and will continue through the balance of the week.

Rachel Clarke will be covering the Future of Web Design in NYC beginning tomorrow.

Till Klampaeckel is covering the NY Tech Meetup this evening which includes a presentation on Vimeo and Drop.io, two companies we covered in the past week.

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