Web designers have long been using CSS to customize font size, style, family, backgrounds and layouts across a site. CSS3 brings a much more powerful feature set to those designers, including:

Text shadows, borders, shaped borders, boxes with shadows. No longer will you have to fancy up fonts as graphics files and embed them. Also, because of the detailed specifications for shaping a border, gone are the days of struggling with rounded corners. You can set the radius for each corner and voila!

Web fonts. Yes, you can now specify the font you want to use in CSS3, and the browser will auto-download it if it’s not already installed. No longer are you at the mercy of the fonts your users have installed.

CSS3 also offers transitions for dynamic effects such as changing the size, color or positioning of text by hovering your cursor over it. Move over Flash and JavaScript effects: CSS3 has got these animation-like features covered.

The current version of Opera already supports parts of CSS3, while support in Opera 10 will be even greater. Opera 10 beta should be available in the next few months.

Lie also showed me an e-book designed entirely using CSS3. The CSS took care if all of the intricate printing layout details, like pagination, that would normally be handled by something like Adobe InDesign. Fascinating.

Opera, Mozilla and Safari will all fully support CSS3 in the future; indeed, they have all had partial support for the standard for a while now. The lone party pooper is IE, of course. Lie is hoping web developers will rally together to ignore IE in their development strategies and, “free yourself from the IE prison.” A noble cause, but probably not realistic just yet. Personally, I haven’t used IE for eons (especially as a Mac user). However, many of my clients  are still adamant that IE is their visitors’ most popular browser.

Check out this live video demo of CSS3 by Lie at SXSW:

Håkon Wium Lie from Opera Software Demos CSS3 from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

What are your thoughts on CSS3? And how likely do you think it is that we’ll be able to banish IE from our web design work in the future?

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Targeting your professional development, however, in a preemptive rather than reactive way, is not always easy. Usually freelancers and consultants just roll with the punches and learn what they have to depending on client requirements. A little forethought, though, can go a long way to making you the applicant of choice before any contracts are awarded.

Skill 1: Working Knowledge of HTML and CSS

This is an oldie but goodie, and it will become even more important as companies start to streamline their IT departments. It happened to traditional freelancers and consultants when they were expected to bring desktop publishing skills to the table along with their analytical abilities, and it will happen with online workers as well. For employers, it’s simple math: fine one who’ll do the job of two. Here’s a useful free resource to start with.

Skill 2: Transparent Reporting

When spending is the key deciding factor behind any and all business decisions, good reporting practices can make all the difference. Show your prospective client that you have a solid, consistent reporting process that’s simple, straightforward, and transparent, and they’ll thank you by awarding you more contracts. Things to think about are the level of detail you put into your activity logs, what increments you use to account for your time, how you list and back up your expense claims, etc.

Skill 3: Twitter Networking

You may be a networking whiz, with all the LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace contacts one person can handle, but that doesn’t translate into instant Twitter success. That’s because Twitter’s a different beast altogether. Case in point: the overwhelming majority of my Facebook contacts have never even heard of Twitter, yet it boasts among its members the most powerful and successful people working online today.

Succeeding here means learning to converse instead of broadcast, giving people a reason to follow you beyond your portfolio, and treading the thin line between self-promotion and spamming. Check out Darren Rowse’s Twitip for some help getting started, or refining your Tweet-Fu.

I’m sure that as the year progresses, many other valuable skill sets will emerge, but you can bet that these three, at least, will continue to be relevant well into the future.

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Here are some tips on how to get good results out of W3Schools.

Try Hands-On Examples. Recently, an old friend contacted me about wanting to change styles and layouts on his web site, but he didn’t know exactly how to go about it. I directed him to W3Schools’ CSS tutorial, found here. It lets you build your own CSS examples and publish them to see how your results will look. For example, here is an example of script for changing background colors, where you can enter your own variations. This allowed my friend to get what he wanted done without learning everything about CSS. W3Schools has hands-on tutorials like this for AJAX, PHP, JavaScript, and much more.

Look For Cutting-Edge Tutorials. The tutorials at W3Schools get regularly updated, and you can even find tutorials on development tools that are working revisions of existing standards, such as this one on HTML 5. You can also validate any pages where you may feel you don’t grasp all of the underlying tools you’re using, as seen here. The examples at the site also get updates. You can find many good AJAX examples here.

Use the Reference Guides. W3Schools provides a lot more than just tutorials. You can find full reference guides to W3C standards such as HTML, XML and more. For example, even if you’re an HTML whiz, you may still appreciate this quick reference.  Or, take a look at this reference to PHP Array Functions.

W3Schools has thousands of tutorials, so it’s worth spending some time digging into many of them. I’ve used the site many times to quickly pick up a new skill or solve a problem on a site.

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Sitemasher

I wasn’t sure what to make of Sitemasher when I first heard of it. With Sitemasher, you can build a web site, manage the content, get analytics, implement basic SEO, and you get managed hosting to boot.

But at $99/month, I felt the kerpow of sticker shock. I knew that I had to think about Sitemasher differently to fully appreciate its value.

So after a demo with the company, here is what I’ve learned.

Web Developers Rule at Sitemasher

Sitemasher is really meant to be a tool for Web developers to help them provide integrated Web services to clients and either hand over the finished site to the client or continue to easily manage the site for the client. There are two views to Sitemasher:

Dashboard View: This is more for the marketer or business owner who wants to have some admin controls such as viewing site analytics, adding some basic SEO code into the site like easy-to-construct meta tags, and set user levels. Depending on a person’s role on the Web site development and maintenance process, their user access can be set up with limitations. The user roles tool allows admin to specify exactly what each person is allowed to do on the site – from edit to approve to publish. Tasks can be created and assigned.

Basically, Sitemasher lets the site admin turn features on and off based on the client’s needs and the workflow everyone wants.

Studio View: This is the heart of the Web developer’s domain. In Studio view, the developer can build the site from the ground up and tweak their development environment to their preferences. There is also a Style Sheet manager and a Database creator. So when a developer creates a form, for example, Sitemasher’s system automatically ties it to a contact database to manage the contact information.

Not being a Web designer myself, I didn’t grasp all the designer speak, however, I got the impression that even someone with my 1990s HTML and Web design skills would be right at home with the easy-to-use site building tools.

Back to the Price

After seeing how robust and feature rich Sitemasher was, I began to think again about the price. Would I, as a site developer, have to pay $99/month to build a site for my client?

The answer is NO. Web developers can use Sitemasher for free as their development tool for multiple clients. Each client gets private access into their site during all stages of development. Then, when the site is ready for debut, the developer triggers the site to publish it live.

Sitemasher analytics

At that point, the $99/month kicks in and this is a cost that the developer can pass on to the client. They could then choose to be done with the project as the CMS, analytics and SEO tools are easy enough for a non-programmer to use so a client could handle the site from then on. Or they can remain on hand – if the client has a capacity issue – and use Sitemasher to manage the site for the client. The client still pays $99/month for their site and all the features while the developer can charge for their time as webmaster.

Breaking down $99/month, I needed to remember that we’re talking about:

• a really powerful site builder (ex: Dreamweaver $399US);
• a detailed analytics tool (ex: Google Analytics which is FREE but something like WebTrends isn’t free);
• basic SEO (this could entail hiring an SEO expert for hundreds of dollars);
• simple CMS (this could be pricey – $1200/year); and
• managed hosting (this could range from $25/month to hundreds of dollars per month).

Frankly, just the CMS alone could make Sitemasher worthwhile to the business owner who doesn’t want to mess with code and also wants a good degree of autonomy from their Web developer.

$99/month is the Basic level where only 2 people can be users (Web developer and customer and then later could be switched to two customer staff members). The next levels, $249/month allows 5 users (with the ability to add), approvals, different user roles, and versioning while the $699/month gives you unlimited users on top of all the features.

NOTE: On October 8, Sitemasher announced the Sitemasher Website Design Contest which runs through March 1, 2009. Find out more about how you can enter. First Prize: $1,000; Second Prize: $500; Third Prize: $250 as well as a one-year subscription to Sitemasher Basic and a few other bennies.

Have you tried Sitemasher yet? What do you think of it? What other multi-featured Web development tool are you using and do you pay for it?

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