A content management system (CMS) gives users the flexibility of changing the content of the website themselves. However, lay man with no experience in image processing will generally face some difficulties in the picture updates. This is because, like it or not, the CMS administrator has to possess some simple image editing skills for a CMS to be useful.

Based on feedback from many of our CMS users, the most common graphic editing functions needed are:

• Resizing & Cropping an image to an exact size (i.e. 80 by 80 pixel)
• Stripping a picture of its background

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Recently, I’ve been getting requests on how to analyse the statistics of our websites. That is a great sign as it shows that our clients are not just putting up a website for show, but studying it intently to see how its effectiveness can be fine-tuned.

Fortunately for our customers, our system has a web statistics component. It is an open-source web statistics tracking product, called Webalizer.
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As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Many a times, during the mockup phase, our clients will like to tell us to do certain changes to the design. However, we often phase a limitation on what can be expressed on words…

In such instances, I will recommend our clients to download the software, Snag It, and use it to illustrate the necessary changes. Click here to download Snag It!

Snag It basically allows you to make comments and annotations on the design effortlessly. It saves you a lot of time in expressing your preferences to us. Commenting on our design using Snag It will take less than 5 minutes.. but it is definitely worth more than a thousand words to our designers….

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After the completion of their Content Management System, clients will then be struck with a big problem - cropping and resizing of the images until they are of the right size for the CMS. For the picture to look good on the web, it has to be cropped and resized to the correct dimensions.

Generally, for the systems developed by us, we will provide the appropriate image dimensions. If your pictures do not fit those dimensions, you will need to resize and crop it till it fits. This article will explain:

• resizing of pictures
• cropping of pictures

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Generally, an Outsourcing Partner is a long term commitment. As such, it is important to choose a good partner. It is generally very tiring to keep changing partners for different projects as you have to get used to each others’ working style and expectations all over again.

So generally, what do we need to look for in an outsource partnership? Well, after doing some research around a few sites, we came to the following checklist:

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199Web was started with a vision of helping new start-ups which did not have much capital to invest on a simple website. As the year progresses, it seems that we started to handle more complicated projects like Content Management Systems (CMS), Ecommerce and Database Driven Applications.

Recently, there seems to be a trend for companies to outsource their web design work to us. They may be printers, graphic designers, event mangement companies or even accounting firms…. most of them will have the need to design a web pages for their clients every now and then… do they turn down the clients’ request… alternatively, they chose to look for us…

Honestly, we feel that it is a great WIN-WIN business decision!

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Recently, we just completed a Content Managment System project for R-One Trading Pte Ltd. The company is involved in the retailing of thousands of communication equipment. A lot of their customers are from overseas. As such, they needed a web presence to showcase the multitude of products. More importantly, the system must be dynamic enough to allow the owner to upload new products.

Upon the completion, the owner was so proud of our system that he agreed to our request for a video testimonial!

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