Save Time, Frustration with REW - Two Tips You Can't Live Without

Are you tired of writing long emails to your designer or programmer, only to receive a reply that looks like this?:

"It looks fine on my end."
or
"I'm not sure what you're referring to."

Well, no longer! Just read my amazing fourth blog post (below) and you'll swear you're sitting in the same office as your development team!

That's right - NO more wasting time and money on billable emails back and forth! NO more surly one-line responses from kids half your age!

Tip #1 - Clearing Your Browser's Cache

Often, your web developer will have made a change on your site and you can't see the change, so you complain that they are a quack and a charlatan, a bogus designer, and you want to talk to their production manager. Then they politely tell you to "clear the cache thingy" or something, and your self-confidence wavers. Here's the deal:

Your browser saves a copy (a "cache") of each webpage it visits, so that when you re-visit the page, the browser can show you the page again without having to take the time to ask the server to show the page again. Naturally, this means that the browser will sometimes show you an obsolete version of the page - you need to "clear the cache" to tell your browser to look again for the latest version of the page.

I'm not going to rewrite what has already been explained, so follow this link to find clear instructions on how to clear your browser's cache.

Clear the cache and then refresh the page. If you still don't see what the developer says you should see, it's time to take a screenshot (see below) and show them what you're seeing — or not seeing.

Tip #2 - Creating Quick Screenshots (aka "screen captures") to Put in Emails

This will take you about 5 minutes to learn — and then you're going to wonder why nobody taught you this before.

Most of us communicate by email and it's very limiting sometimes, because we assume we're both seeing the same thing on our screens. But there are MANY factors which can make your screen look different from mine, even when we're both looking at the same webpage (see "browser cache" above, for instance). By sending a quick image of what you see on your monitor, you can often get an "Ahhh!" response and a quick resolution.

Note: The following instructions are relevant to MS Windows. For instructions on getting a screenshot in MAC OS, see the first comment underneath this post. Thanks Jolenta!

1)
Taking a screenshot is easy. Look for a key on the keyboard that says "PrtScn" or something similar. On my keyboard, it's up top with the F- (function) keys. Press that key. Nothing will appear to happen, but you have just saved a copy of what your monitor(s) show, to your clipboard.

Hot tip: Thanks to Anthony for teaching me this one a moment ago:
If you use "alt + PrtScn", you will only capture a shot of the window (program) that you were "in" when you pressed "alt + PrtScn", as opposed to getting everything on the monitor.

2)
Open an image editor. If you don't know whether you even have one, just find an image on your computer and double-click it. I guarantee you that the image will open in a program. That program is your "default image editor".

(I use a program called Irfanview. It's free to download and it does everything I need. It's super fast for what we're talking about here.)

3)
Paste the screenshot into the image editor by pressing ctrl+v. You may need to click inside the image editor first. If nothing happens, or if you see some text that looks oddly familiar, it may be because your "F Lock" was turned on when you hit the "PrtScn" key, preventing the screenshot from being copied to your clipboard. Or, it may be that the screenshot DID show up in the image editor, but you're not realizing it's a screenshot! Try clicking on a link. ;)

If you see your screenshot pasted into the image editor, you're almost there!

4)
Crop the screenshot to only show the relevant part. If you put the whole screenshot into an email, the large attachment may cause the email to bounce, or your developer may be annoyed and tell you it bounced. By cropping the screenshot, you are following etiquette and also making your message much more clear. You are communicating exactly which part of the page you are referring to.

How the image is cropped, will differ with each image editor. In Irfanview, you just click and drag the mouse to select a rectangular space, then you hit "ctrl+y" to crop everything around it.

5)
Copy the cropped image back to your clipboard by pressing "ctrl+c".

6)
(Optional:) Edit the image if necessary. You may need to draw arrows or lines on the image to be absolutely clear in your instructions, and believe me, it pays. I have a shortcut to Microsoft Paint for this purpose (you already have Paint, if you don't have a MAC). When you're done editing, use Paint's "Select" tool (looks like a hash marked rectangle) to outline your image and hit "ctrl+c" to put the edited image back on your clipboard.

7)
Paste the cropped screenshot into your email message with "ctrl+v". Voila! Your designer will be amazed, and will have no more excuses.

Bonus Tip:

This is much quicker than the screenshot process described above, but it only works for pointing to individual images on the site. Remember, though, that there are often parts of your site which you don't realize are images. For instance, the headings overtop of your navigation menus in your side-bar are images - like this one:

In Thunderbird:

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird for email, you can simply drag an image like this right off of your webpage and into your email messages! Try it - start a new message and drag the image above into the body of the email (you may have to drag the cursor down to the task bar and onto the message window button to open it up, if the browser is hogging your monitor and you can't see both windows at once).

Am I not making sense? Check out this 10-second video I made:

In Outlook:

If you try the "drag and drop" option in Microsoft Outlook, you will only drag the image's path name into your email (which is almost as useful for our purpose). If you want to show the image in the email, though, you have to do this:

1. Right-click on the image in the web-page.
2. Select "copy image" (it is saved to the clipboard).
3. Go to the email message you're writing, and paste (ctrl+v) the image into it. Pretty handy!

This tutorial will have presented different obstacles and unanswered questions to different readers. Questions and comments (below) are encouraged. Thanks!

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