AT&T DSL broadband has been migrating customers to their "new", "improved" mail servers... 3rd party, Yahoo. While Yahoo is a fine company, this move was another terrible step in AT&T's continuing downward spiral of not being in-tuned with their customers.

My business, while growing tremendously, has a home office. I want to be able to send emails with my business email account name, regardless of the ISP I use to connect. Up until my account was migrated, this was easy. AT&T (formerly Bellsouth) used my ISP email account to transparently verify the account as legitimate and allow mail to be sent. My "to", "from" and "reply to"'s could be anything I wanted... honeyhousedesigns.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.

So when a recipient got an email from me, they saw my business email address in the from and reply to fields and could reply through that business account.

NO LONGER! NOW... Any AND EVERY email sent must have my AT&T email address as the from AND the reply to. So, the recipient will receive email branded with AT&T's email address (note, one I don't use at all...ever). If the recipient just hit reply, the email goes to that account, not my business account. And according to AT&T, that is just the way it will be. Tough noogies on me for using a home office with "residential" DSL.

GET THIS THOUGH! For triple the monthly DSL fee I pay now, my DSL can be "upgraded" internally at the office to allow me to have the functionality I want. No line changes, no new installations, just pay them more money and they will come through with the goods. But for how long until the next "gotcha"? Seems more like extortion to me than a "new improved" service.

As a small business, we at Honey House Web Designs consider telecommuting and home offices an excellent resource to keeping overhead low and being able to pass that savings along to customers and be able to employ more people. But our business is important enough that we want to brand it with OUR name, not Ma Bell's.

So, we begin the process of finding a provider who will provide us with what we need at a reasonable price. Bye-bye Bell

In this economy we are all focusing on growing our business and maintaining an adequate revenue stream. Many consultants and web designers are lowering prices to better serve clients. And clients are more than ever shopping around for the "best deal".

However, remember, "you will always get what you pay for". Focusing on price alone as the indicator of which Web Design company receives your project ignores your own business needs. You want a professional site that reflects your business style and saavy. You want a site that peaks your customer's interest. You want value.

Value, is your business's total worth. It is the intangible benefits your business receives by having a great website and it is the potential for that site to bring customers to you. Value does supersede price. Always be willing to pay a fair price for quality work. You will get more than you pay for when price is not the sole consideration for a website.

This is the time to get back to the basics of running a business. Value, service, integrity, and quality are basic to your business success.

Project Seven has great products for increasing the pinache and functionality of any website. Their Image Gallery creates a slideshow of images in a 'filmstrip' type of gallery. When HHWD created this for Aiken's Makin's website, it was instantly a huge hit.

Another client, with a CF8 website wanted the same functionality with their home tour. But it needed to be able to pull photos from two locations and build the image gallery on the fly.

Here is how to do this (after you first buy IG from P7):
1) In the page to build the Image Gallery, first create a 'dummy' image gallery, by allowing the code to set up a gallery using 2-3 images of your choice. This lets the P7 base code and CSS to be set up.
2) Update the code as follows. Since I needed to be able to display image, description, and alt tags, I first built an array of structures containing the image information to be displayed.

(first thing: before creating your image gallery and customizing it set a variable rowpernum = the number of tnails per row)

The idea is to determine the number of thumbnails per row, know the ending tnail for the current row (and if it is at the end of the array/recordset -- variable i) and know the actual tnail number you are on (-- variable j)

Attributed to: Charlie Arehart

Excellent quote used in today's Adobe Online CFUG to describe issues and nuances unique to the Internet and individual connections. I had never actually of the word before

After watching Bill O'Reilly talk use obscure, and new words, I was struck funny with this phrase.... as describes the web perfectly....

How about:
"Vagaries of Browser Standards"
"Vagaries of Politics"
"Vagaries of School Lunches"
"Vagaries of the fuzzy Tupperware contents in the Fridge"
"Vagaries of BBQ hash"