The stars finally seem to be in a good constellation for web designers this month. Adobe shipped Creative Suite 3, CSS Edit was upgraded to 2.5 and we are seeing the first Alphas of Firefox 3. Iwas even more excited, when Steven F. commented on Panic’s 10 Year Anniversary:

“It is by a more or less random coincidence that on the day after our company’s tenth birthday, we will be conducting by far our biggest, most ambitious new software launch of all time. I hope you’ll come by to check it out, especially if you make web sites.”

What Panic released a few days later reminded me once again why a Mac is the best platform for developing websites: Coda is just the application I’ve been waiting for all my life. I’m not merely enthused, I’m seriously stunned.

Coda is a single, tiny application which handles all your webdesign needs. Editing (X)HTML and CSS, previewing, FTP (of course), Terminal access and a great reference book, all in one. The Panic team introduces Coda with the words:

“So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. ‘This could be easier,’ we realized. ‘And much cooler.’”

You can read more by Panic co-founders Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser. And John Gruber also has a nice review of Coda on his web site.

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Web 2.0 in style? Now it’s Web 2.5 in style! Macrabbit has released version 2.5 of their great CSS editor. And best of all, it’s a free upgrade for owners of the previous version.

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Miranda July has a new collection of short stories coming out in May, called No One Belongs Here More Than You. But not only July’s Book is a gem of unconventional storytelling: The book has a a stunning web site that is more creative than I’ve ever seen. The site has no navigation, except for forward / back buttons and consists of a series of images. No real text, just the images scaling to the size of your browser.

Of course, no serious webdesigner would ever consider making such a website for their client. The website is not accessible, doesn’t fall back if you can’t see images and is basically empty for search engines. It breaks every rule that contemporary web designers follow.

The intrguing thing is, it works. No, not just technically. The site works as a narrative that pulls the visitor along, a narrative that is also used in July’s book. I loved the website so much, I couldn’t stop clicking until I was through. And isn’t this the point of a website like this?

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“People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Take the survey and change all that.”

Since Eric Meyer asked nicely, I just took the 2007 Web Design Survey. It only takes 10 minutes and you get a nice badge and can even win a ticket to An Event Apart, an iPod or other nice stuff.

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Eric Meyer is looking for IE? expression-savvy webdevelopers to find a solution for IE’s lack of support for the inherit property. Go help him out.

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