New book on Web design

I really enjoyed working on Learning Web Page Design with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3with Chris, Jen, and Peter at Emergent Learning. Most of the books I write are for beginning to intermediate level audiences, but this was only the second book for high school students I've written. This project was high energy and fun, involving interactive examples, e-commerce pieces, design theory, and much more. It kind of brings together everything you want to be able to do with Dreamweaver in the first six months or so (wish I'd had something like this when I was learning Web design!). And of course, it incorporates sections on integrating Flash and Fireworks into the Dreamweaver pages you're designing. (I absolutely loved working with Flash, btw. It's surprisingly simple when you consider all the cool things you can do with it.)

Follow the ChaCha bus!

I just love this. I was driving down to visit my son in college this afternoon (a cool, rainy afternoon), and lo and behold, ahead of me in traffic was the ChaCha bus. This is significant to me because ChaCha was one of my favorite clients in 2007...I wrote quite a bit of content for them (help systems, guide handbooks, and more) when they were going through a dramatic growth period. About a year ago they made the huge move from startup to big time company, and hired some great people in marketing and communications to take over the messaging tasks full-time. The people there are great--creative, fun, wonderful to work with (hi Ben, Bruce, and Kyle!). I was so excited to see the bus...how often do you get to see something like that? I thought I'd post it here and share it with you. If you get a chance, check out ChaCha.com. They've really got it going on. :)