I thought I would add a quick blog post which follows on from our post back in September 08 entitled How to capture windows screens to make a video.

I know that some of our blog readers will use a Mac, I recently saw a blog post on the Umbraco open source content management site which looked really good and it used a product called  ScreenFlow.

Today I had a phone call from a client who wanted to know how to mail merge a document using AvaPA . Although this is something described in the AvaPA help file, I can understand that some people may find that a little complicated to follow, so I thought I would create a simple "How-to mail merge " to show the process from creating a new template all the way to doing the actual mail merge, I hope some of you find this useful!

Many of our clients have their own websites and I am sure a lot of people who read this blog post will also have their own websites, but my question for you all is how standard compliant is your website?

The reason I thought I would blog about ensuring your website is standard compliant is because of the pletheral of web browsers that are now available and all the different potential client devices that might be accessing your website, have you tested your website with Opera on a Nokia Phone, or Safari on both an iMac and an iPhone?

Most of us don't have time to test that our websites work on every browser and client device under the sun, but if you ensure your website has at least conformed to the basic XHTML standards then you at least have a good chance that any modern browser will correctly render your site.

There are lots of really useful tools available and I thought I would list a few that you might find useful:

For those of you who have not heard of (where have you been hiding?) or have not installed Firefox, that would be my first recommendation as there are a lot of very good browser plugins for firefox that will help in your quest for the perfect website.

Download Firefox

The following Firefox plugins are very useful:

Firebug - The ultimate developers companion that allows you to edit your code and see the changes live in the browser, this is invaluable if you are a budding developer

HTML Validator - This plugin is good for everyone, techie or not as it will highlight when you have errors in your code and you can then call your web developer to update your site if it's not you.

Screen Grab - This enables you to easily take a screen shot of your website

Finally a useful website for testing your website across multiple browsers is Browsershots , you simply give them your website URL and then they take screen shots across many platforms and different browsers, so within a few minutes you can see if you have any errors on other platforms, very cool!