Web Design Highlight

5 Ways to Create More Money in RSS

2008-01-05T20:14:00.002-08:00

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, and it is now attracting serious money. RSS is a format used to publish someone’s content on another person’s website. It allows you to receive free feeds from innumerable number of blogs and news services. Thus, RSS keeps your website up-to-date for the public’s consumption. RSS is allowing people to earn money on information.

I have listed five simple and easy steps in creating more money in RSS .
1. Make sure that your RSS feeds are readily available to the general public. The users must easily notice your RSS content. Your RSS must hint the users of its general nature.

2. You must have an extensive promotion of your RSS. Try to post your RSS on popular mainstream websites and be creative in doing so.

3. You must offer continuously unique contents through your RSS feeds so that user will return over and over again. Make sure that your contents are not found anywhere else. See to it that you are always one step ahead. So start pumping you creative juices.

4. Make sure your RSS content are always fresh. Users do have an appetite for freshly updated RSS content so keep them posted.

5. Lastly, try to always enhance your RSS . With the unlimited resources over the Internet, try to modify your RSS so that users will have an impressive time while visiting your RSS .
With these simple ways, you are now ready to make more money on RSS . So what are you waiting for? Discover what RSS can do for you and you business and take advantage of it!

By Sean R Mize

3 Reasons Why PHP Message Boards Rock

2008-01-05T20:14:00.001-08:00

f you are web designer, chances are you include forums on at least some of the sites you manage. If you haven't explored PHPBB2 you are missing out as this type of message board offers to designers a forum that is well supported, easy to manage, and above all else: free! Let's see why PHPBB2 is a hit with so many web designers.

Compared to some web designers, I am relatively new to the business. I created my first forum with MSN groups in 2002 then, six months later, I made the move over to EZBoard. Sure, it did not have all the bells and whistles of vBulletin and other corporate developed boards, but it did the trick for me. That is, until EZBoard was hacked and my livelihood nearly disappeared in moments some two years later!

In search of something different, I considered the move to vBulletin, but I was quite frankly not wanting to shell out license and upgrade fees on a regular basis. At the time of the EZBoard incident, I was running six forums, so I knew that I would eventually have about that many when I completed my transition away from EZBoard.

So, why PHPBB2? For three reasons:

1. It is free. Yes, absolutely! Since it is "open source" code, developed by the developers, it is offered as a free download to whosoever will. Believe me that is a big appeal and, apparently, many designers around the world feel the same way as over 200,000 people are members of their support forum.

2. It can be used across platforms. Whether you work in Windows or Linux, IIS or Apache PHPBB2 is usable and fully functionable.

3. Highly modifiable. Open Source extensibility is evident with the incorporation of PHP, HTML, CSS, and MySQL into the forum.

For the novice, PHPBB2 does take some getting used to especially since you are responsible for installing, maintaining, backing up, upgrading, and modifying your own forum. For your benefit you can access onsite Flash tutorials which are a great way to walk your way through the installation process too. As with any software it is vulnerable to outside attacks, so take care to make sure you regularly back up your forums and familiarize yourself with the security procedures.

In all, PHP message boards really do rock and at a price that cannot possibly be beat!

By Matthew Keegan

Should I Learn PHP and MySQL or Not?

2008-01-05T20:14:00.000-08:00

I've had quite a few people ask me this question: "Should I learn PHP and MySQL?".

The answer is never easy. It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Are you looking to be involved in your own website? Is it being run on PHP and MySQL? What would you like to do with your website?

There's a million questions you can ask yourself. I, personally, believe that anyone who wants to become more involved with their own website or run their own Web Design and Development Company should, at the minimum, learn the basics of PHP and MySQL.

Why should you? Well, let's take a few examples...

Maybe you want to create a Members are on your site and you want to be able to offer downloads, use a more interactive Contact script, show information dynamically for your customers (i.e. Time and Date, Their personal information, the information they searched for last, Billing information, Download history, username and/or password, etc) to make it easier for them to browse through your site.

Maybe you want to be able to use PHP for your Search Engine Optimization needs? Needs such as 404 Redirects, 301 redirects, etc.

Maybe you need to create a built in search system for your e-commerce site? Maybe you're looking to simply redirect people to an Affiliate program?

See the many, MANY ways you can use PHP? It's a very valuable tool to know and understand. Imagine yourself having the knowledge to take a product like Wordpress and fully customize it to your own, personal, needs?

Think you can make money off of one of your Wordpress Plugin Ideas by knowing PHP? Think you can build a better Content Management System than what's currently available? What about a new Social Networking Script - OR Community?

Companies like PHPFox have made a killing with their php knowledge. Likewise for companies such as Mambo, vBulletin and various other scripts that you can purchase.

So the next question would be HOW you can learn PHP?

There's a million ways to learn but I try to explain to everybody that watching Videos and DOING the coding practices they ask you to do is how you'll learn quickly.

Sure... lot's of people have learned PHP by reading books. But I find the problem with books is a lack of support. You're always going to learn more by seeing and doing rather than reading and doing. Luckily there are solutions to this problem.

You can also visit popular forums such as Sitepoint, Digitalpoint and other Webmaster related forums or communities that allow other members to help with questions and answers.

No matter what you choose to do - just remember that DOING is how you learn. Practice without reading or watching. Just take the little knowledge you have at the time and make it grow with practice.

I hope you figure out what you need to accomplish and good luck!

By Clint Lenard

What Makes A PHP Web Hosting Companies Perfect

2008-01-05T20:12:00.001-08:00

Most of us know PHP has revolutionized web designing and dynamic web programming since its public release in 1995. Main reason behind this is its stability, fast performance and FREE availability. With its ready to use source code, powerful core libraries, it has become one of the most popular scripting languages over the years.

We'll try to find out here some of the best companies supporting PHP web hosting.

Following are few points which must be looked into before going for any of the best web hosting company.

Reliability of the company

Disk Space offered

99.9% Uptime

Customer support

Data transfer / Bandwidth

Scripting support - CGI, PHP, ASP

Control Panel

FTP access

Multiple Domain and sub domain support

From our research and analysis, we've found out few companies offering the best web hosting in the market.

We've taken example of three companies among the web hosting providers 1.BlueHost, 2.GoDaddy and 3.HostMonster.

BlueHost offers $6.95/month (2 year) package which includes 300GB web space, host unlimited domains, 2500 e-mail accounts, e-mail forwarding and autoresponders, unlimited subdomains, 50 MYSQL databases, 50 postgre sql databases, CGI Support, Site statistics, Support for PHP and Flash, Additionally Blog, guestbook and mailing list and CMS (Mambo and Joomla) support, Streaming video and audio support, OS Commerce and SSL secure server support, FREE search engine submission.

GoDaddy offers $5.59/month (2 year) package (Deluxe plan) which includes 100GB web space, 1000 GB transfer, 1000 e-mail accounts, unlimited domains, 25 MySQL databases, unlimited e-mail forwards, support for forum, blog and photo galleries. Additionally offers $25 google adwords credit, $50 Microsoft adCenter credit.

HostMonster offers $4.95/month (2 year) package which includes 300GB web space, 3000GB transfer, unlimited domains and subdomains, unlimited e-mail accounts, forwarding and autoresponder support, CGI /PHP Support, 100 MySQL Databases, 100 PostGreSQL databases, Web statistics, Audio and video streaming support, Flash support, Real Audio and video Support, $50 yahoo credit, $50 google credit and search engine submission for your website.

If we carefully compare the packages offered by these companies, we can see that HostMonster offers the best package with $4.95/month for 2 years. You can follow the same guideline for choosing other best web hosting packages available out there.

By Ben Huang

Speeding PHP Using APC PHP Cache

2008-01-05T20:12:00.000-08:00

If you look at a PHP source file you will notice one thing. It's a source file. Not particularly surprising, but think about when you deploy a PHP application, what do you deploy? PHP source files. Now for many other languages; Java, C, etc when you deploy an application you deploy the compiled file. So, the question that you want to ask yourself is this, how much time does a PHP application spend compiling source files vs running the code? I'll answer that for you, a lot.

There are advantages to being able to deploy source files though. It makes it easy to do on the fly modifications or bug fixes to a program, much like we used to do in the early BASIC languages. Just change the file and the next time it's accessed your change is reflected. So, how do we keep the dynamic nature of PHP, but not recompile our files every time they are accessed?

A PHP cache. It's surprising to me that this concept isn't built into the base PHP engine, but perhaps that's because some company's can sell this add on to speed up PHP. Luckily for us, some companies/open source projects provide this plug in to PHP at no charge. These plug ins are generally known as PHP accelerators, some of them do some optimization and then caching and some only do caching. I'm not going to pass judgement on which one is the best, any of them are better than nothing, but I decided to use APC, the Alternative PHP Cache. I chose this one because it is still in active development and is open source and free.

Alternative php cache can be found at php.net, just look down the left column for APC. It comes in source form, so you will need to compile it before installing it, don't worry about that part. If you're using Red Hat 4 or CentOS4 I'll tell you exactly how to do it. If you're using something else, you'll need the same tools, but getting the tools might be a bit different.

1. The Tools
Do you know how many web sites, forums and blogs I went to with my error messages before I found the answers as to what I was missing when I was trying to install APC - Alternative PHP Cache? Two days worth, but I finally found the correct combination and it's really quite obvious as is everything once you know the answer. There are three sets of dev tools that you will need.

1a. You'll need a package called "Development Tools" this will include all the important dev tools like the GCC compiler, etc.
1b. You'll need a package called php-devel which as you might guess are development tools for PHP
1c. You'll need a package called httpd-devel which of course are dev tools for Apache web server.

On Red Hat or CentOS getting these should be as easy as the following 3 commands:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install php-devel
yum install httpd-devel

You'll do these three one at a time and follow any instructions (usually just saying yes).

Now it's time to follow the instructions contained in the APC package. Since these may change over time I'm not going to go through them. They are very complete. If you follow the instructions and get an apc.so file out of it, then you're all set, just modify your php.ini file and you're good to go.

There are two problems that I encountered that you may encounter too. The first is an error when running phpize. I ignored this error and everything succeeded okay, but not before I spent hours looking for the solution to this error. Here is the error.
configure.in:9: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_WITH_PHP_CONFIG

run info '(automake)Extending aclocal'

or see http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal
configure.in:32: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_BUILDDIR
configure.in:33: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_DIR
configure.in:34: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_SRCDIR
configure.in:35: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_ALWAYS_SHARED
acinclude.m4:19: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_PROG_RE2C

People would have had me updating my PHP version from 4.3.9 and everything else under the sun to get rid of this error, but in the end it didn't matter. My APC compiled and installed nicely and I am good to go.

The other slight problem that I ran into was the location of php-config. The install instructions wanted me to do the following:

./configure --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs
--with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config

However my php-config is in /usr/bin/php-config. Making that change allowed this part to work.

So, have at it, once it's done you can expect to see huge improvements in your web site response times and reductions on your CPU load. One more quick note, My server hosts about 20 web sites, but only 3 or 4 are really busy. To reduce the memory footprint of caching everything for all 20 sites I used the apc.filters property. Although this property is slightly flawed for non qualified includes, it worked nicely for my Serendipity blogs. Your mileage with this property will vary according to the software you are using and how it does it's includes.

By Jon Murray

How to Use an RSS Feed to Provide Content for Your Website

2008-01-05T20:06:00.000-08:00

Search engines love websites that are continuously updated with fresh content. As a website owner, if you want to achieve or maintain a good search engine ranking, then your goal should be to continually provide updated keyword–based content on a regular basis to your website. Naturally, if you're providing the content yourself, this takes a lot of work. Let me show you how you can get fresh, keyword-based content updated on your site on a daily basis with no work on your part using RSS feeds and PHP, and most of all, the search engines will love it!

RSS is an acronym that is short for Really Simple Syndication. It's a type of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that is used for syndicating content. XML is used to describe data and is basically a markup language – like HTML.

Before I go into the list of items that are needed to make all of this work, I will mention that the details outlined in this article apply to websites that support PHP. PHP is a popular server-side scripting language that is used to create dynamic website content. If your website is running on a Unix-based operating system (like Linux), chances are your web server supports the PHP scripting language. Check with your web host to be sure.

Now, I can make this a long drawn out article on the technical details behind RSS, XML and PHP, but that would result in a boring article that hardly anyone would read! Instead, I'll just layout the necessary details for an entrepreneurial minded individual to setup a website using these technologies in a quick and least confusing fashion, I hope.

Task: Let's say we run a website on gardening and we want to use an RSS feed to add changing content to our site on a regular basis without us having to do any work.

Our goal is to make this new content readable by the search engine spiders. In order to do that, the content needs to be returned via server-side scripting – not client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript). This is a mistake that a lot of websites that use RSS make.

You see, JavaScript is executed by the client; PHP is executed on the web server. When a search engine spider comes across a JavaScript 'script' tag, it stops spidering until it moves beyond the closing 'script' tag. On the other hand, PHP converts the script to HTML on the web server and sends the results back to the client (browser). So when a search engine spider comes across a web page that uses RSS with PHP, the spider only 'sees' the returned HTML – as if the PHP script were never there. So, PHP with RSS is definitely the route to take for SEO conscious website owners.

Here's what we need to accomplish our task:
1) An RSS feed link
2) An RSS Tool (PHP script) that can convert an RSS feed into HTML
3) An HTML output-template

Getting an RSS feed link...

A good place to start looking for an RSS feed is 2rrs.com, where you can execute an 'RSS Search' for the keyword 'gardening'. You'll likely see a bunch of results. Click on any of them. You'll now find an RSS2HTML link under the 'Details' section - which is your RSS feed link. Copy the full HTTP path to this link; we will need it for configuration in later steps.

Now we need to get an RSS Tool (PHP script) that can convert an RSS feed into HTML, and we also need an HTML output-template…

So, we need a method to take our RSS feed and convert it into HTML so we can insert it into our web page. The best way to do this is to use an awesome little PHP script called rss2html.php.

You can download this script here: http://www.feedforall.com/more-php.htm (Choose Option two -> Download)

Unzip the download file and you'll find a sample HTML output-template file called sample-template.html and an rss2html.php file. These files will eventually need to be moved to your web server, but before you do that, let's configure everything...

The PHP file is the work horse and does the RSS XML to HTML conversion, so there are some configuration settings within this file that need to be set. Open the file in a regular text editor (like Word Pad) and make the following 3 configuration changes:

Configuration change #1:
Find the following line of code: $XMLfilename = "sample.xml"; Change it to: $XMLfilename = "Your-RSS-Feed-Link";

The above line of code tells the PHP script where to get your RSS XML feed (file). Remember, the RSS XML feed contains the content which you are trying to add to your website. The website that you get your RSS feed from will update this feed as new content becomes available from the website. (Note: be sure not to download the XML file and specify a local path to it – this will result in your website always using the same XML file – which means your website will not be updated with new content from the RSS XML source.)

Configuration change #2:
Find the following line of code: $TEMPLATEfilename = "sample-template.html"; Insert your HTML output-template name in place of sample-template.html.

The rss2html.zip that you downloaded from the feedforall link above comes with a sample-template.html that you can use. However, the template from feedforall encompasses the entire HTML code for the entire webpage (from the opening 'html' tag to the closing 'html' tag). If you're inserting this content into your pre-existing webpage, then you'll likely only want to use the HTML code between the opening 'table' tag and the closing 'table' tag. This will allow you to insert a table into your webpage where each row represents an article from your RSS XML feed source.

Configuration change #3:
Find the following line of code: $FeedMaxItems = 10000;

The number '10000' above represents the number of items that you want to retrieve from the RSS feed – which works out to be the number of rows in your HTML table from the previous step. You can leave this setting as is, or you can change it to any positive number your like. For example, if you change it to 5, then the PHP script will display the top 5 RSS feed articles from your RSS feed source.

When you're done with these configuration settings you can upload these files to your scripts directory on your web server and add the following line of code to your website's HTML file where you would like the RSS feed content to appear:

include ('path_to_scripts_directory/rss2html.php');

Make sure to prefix the above line of code with a 'less-than' symbol followed by a question mark, as well as, postfix it with a question mark followed by a 'greater-than' symbol. Also, remember, if your webpage was initially an html file (i.e. filename.html) then you will want to change it to filename.php in order for the web server to know how to handle the above PHP script.

There you go... an easy way to add changing content to your website without any extra work on your part.

Sincerely,

By Michael Ellis

PHP Redirect - How to Send Someone to Another URL With PHP

2008-01-05T20:02:00.001-08:00

When designing a web site, it is occasionally necessary to redirect a user to another URL to the one they have tried to access. This can normally be accomplished using HTTP redirect, however sometimes they just are not applicable or you would prefer to do it with PHP, for example:

1. If a page is undergoing some maintenance and you wish to redirect users to an error page.

2. As part of a PHP conditional IF statement you want to redirect to another page, perhaps you want to check if a user is logged in yet and if not redirect to the login prompt.

I am sure the are many other reasons that escape me at the time of writing for why you may wish to do this.

Fortunately PHP does provide a means to allow web designers to take this control. This task is accomplished by manipulating the header of a web page before it has been served. In order to redirect a page to an alternative URL replace the contents of the file with:

Note that if any output has been written to the browser (including HTML tags) this approach will not work, it must be either the only or the first output in the file. Therefore if you want to use it as part of a conditional logic test put that at the start of the file, for example:

OPEN PHP

IF(loggedIn == TRUE){

CLOSE PHP

…HTML output can go here

OPEN PHP

}ELSE{

header( 'Location: http://www.yourURL.com' ) ;

}

CLOSE PHP

In order to view the code correctly in this article the OPEN PHP and CLOSE PHP tags are used instead of the actual start and end tags for PHP code - to run the code you need to substitute them for the correct open and close tags.

This technique is an easy way to control the flow of control in a browser based PHP application. Generally if you wish to always redirect one URL to another you should use a HTTP redirect, but a PHP redirect is also an option.
Dave Hodgson is a technical consultant by career and a website designer for fun. He has spent time working for large systems integrators, small consultancy firms and on individual freelance projects. The articles written by Dave are in the nature of tricks and tips he has learned through his career and interactions with clients.

By Dave Hodgson

Using PHP and MySQL to Develop a Simple CMS - Version 1

2008-01-05T19:59:00.000-08:00

In this article I'll try to describe how to develop a very simple Content Management System (CMS). I've chosen PHP as the server-side scripting language and MySQL as the database management system purely because I think they are fairly easy to use and they do the job very well.

I won't spend any time describing CMSs, what they are, or why you should or should not use them as there are plenty of excellent articles on this site that describe them perfectly well. I'll just explain one way of developing one.

This CMS consists of a single web page (index.php) that can have its contents updated by use of a standard form (updatePage.htm). The contents entered via the form are stored in a database, and are accessed and displayed by the web page. Although this CMS is too simple to be of any real use, it could be used as the starting point for a real life CMS solution. In subsequent articles I'll look at various ways to extend the CMS to make it more useful.

There are four files in this project:

cms.sql
updatePage.htm
updatePage.php
index.php

cms.sql
This file creates a database called cms, and creates a table in that database called page. It also loads some intial data into the table. You only need to use this file once.

updatePage.htm
This web page contains a simple form that can be used to enter the contents displayed by index.php.

updatePage.php
This is the form handler - the script that processes the data (entered in updatePage.htm) and inserts it into the database table (page).

index.php
This is the web page that displays the data held in the database table.

You can download a zip file containing these four files from http://www.computernostalgia.net/downloads/cms_v1.zip

cms.sql

1. CREATE DATABASE cms;
2. USE cms;
3. CREATE table page (
4. pageID integer auto_increment,
5. contents text,
6. primary key (pageID)
7. );
8. insert into page (pageID, contents) values ('1', 'dummy text');

Line 1 creates a database called cms in the MySQL database management system.

Line 2 tells MySQL to use the database for the subsequent commands.

Line 3 creates a table in the database.

Line 4 creates a column called pageID, which will contain integers, and which will be automatically incremented as new records are added to the table. As we only have one web page (index.php) in our imaginary website, we will only have one record and therefore one integer: 1. If we added additional pages to the table, they would be automatically numbered (2, 3, 4, etc).

Line 5 creates a second column called contents, which will contain text. This is where the editable contents displayed by index.php will be stored.

Line 6 sets pageID as the primary key, which you can think of as a reference for the table. As we only have one table, which will contain only one record, we won't make any use of the key. I've included it though because it's good practice to do so.

Line 7 simply closes the bit of code that was started in line 3.

Line 8 inserts some intial data into the table: 1 as the first (and only) pageID, and 'dummy text' as the contents of the first record.

updatePage.htm

(Note that for display considerations, I've inserted spaces into the HTML tag names, otherwise they would be processed as HTML code.)

1. <>
2. <>
3. <>Really Simple CMS< /title >
4. < /head >
5. <>
6. <>Really Simple CMS< /h1 >
7. < name="form1" method="post" action="updatePage.php">
8. Enter page content:<>< rows="10" cols="60" name="contents">< /textarea >

9. < type="submit" name="Submit" value="Update Page">
10. < /form >
11. < /body >
12. < /html >

This is just standard HTML, which probably doesn't really need explaining. All it does is present a form, the contents of which are sent to updatePage.php when the 'Update Page' button is clicked.

updatePage.php

1. < ?php 2. $contents=$_REQUEST['contents']; 3. mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "password"); 4. $result = @mysql_query("UPDATE cms.page SET contents='$contents'"); 5. mysql_close(); 6. ? >

This is the form handler, that's to say, the script that processes the data entered into the form (in updatePage.htm).

Line 1 signifies the start of a PHP script.

Line 2 requests the contents that were posted from the form. We could have written
$contents=$_POST['contents']; instead if we had wanted to.

Line 3 connects to the MySQL database server, setting up the host name, which I've assumed to be localhost, the database user, which I've assumed to be root, and the password needed to connect to the database. I have no idea what this would be for your system so I've just written the word password.

Line 4 updates the page table in the cms database with the new contents.

Line 5 closes the database connection.

Line 6 closes the PHP script.

index.php

1. <>
2. <>
3. <>Home Page< /title >
4. <>
5. <>Home Page< /h1 >
6. < ?php 7. mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "password"); 8. $result = mysql_query("select contents from cms.page"); 9. while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){ 10. $contents = $row['contents']; 11. } 12. echo $contents; 13. ? >
14. < /body >
15. < /html >

This is the web page that displays the contents from the database. It's called index.php rather than index.htm because the web page contains PHP code. If the page was called index.htm, the PHP preprocessor, which is part of the web server, would not know that the page contained PHP code, and would therefore not try to process the script part of the page (lines 6 to 13). This would cause the script itself to be displayed in the browser rather than the HTML generated by the script.

Most of the lines in this web page are pretty straight forward and don't need explaining. Lines 6 to 13 contain the PHP script that extracts the contents from the database and displays (echos) it in the browser.

Installing/Running the CMS

To use the CMS you need to copy the files onto your web server into the area allocated for web pages. Your web server needs to support PHP and MySQL; if it doesn't, the CMS won't work.

You also need to use the correct database connection names and passwords (those used in the mysql_connect lines in the PHP scripts).

Exactly how you run the cms.sql file to set up the database and database table will vary from web server to web server so it's difficult to give precise instructions here. If you have a phpMyAdmin icon or something similar in your web servers control/administration panel you should be able to use that.

Once you've set up the database and table, you can simply browse to the updatePage.htm web page and update the database contents. You can then browse to the index.php page to view the updates.

If you have any problems or comments regarding the CMS, please email me at johndixon@computernostalgia.net and I'll be pleased to assist you if possible.

By John Dixon

PHP : A Functional Tool To Create Dynamic Web Pages

2008-01-05T19:53:00.001-08:00

You can use PHP on almost every operating system and platform including: PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS.

PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd.

PHP uses procedural programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them. PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting; command line interface and writing desktop application.

Server-side scripting is the most traditional use for PHP. To use PHP for server-side scripting you need a PHP parser, a web server and a web browser. You enter PHP codes with the parser on a web server and it is translated into a PHP page that you can view on your web browser. However, it is also possible to make PHP script run without a server or browser. All you need is a PHP parser. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks.

While PHP is not the best language to use when writing a desktop application, it is possible. With PHP you can create a desktop application with a graphical user interface. If one is familiar with PHP and would like to use its features, there is PHP-GTK. With PHP-GTK you also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. However, PHP-GTK is an extension to regular PHP and not available in the main distribution.

While PHP websites are treated by web browsers as ordinary HTML pages, they are superior from regular websites in the sense that they have more features.

With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP allows for the outputting of images, PDF files and even Flash movies. You can also output text in almost any form such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP auto generates these files, and saves them in the file system, instead of printing it out. This forms a server-side cache for your dynamic content.

PHP supports a wide range of databases including Adabas D, InterBase, Postgre SQL, dBase, FrontBase,SQLite, Empress, mSQL, Solid, FilePro, Direct MS-SQL, Sybase, Hyperwave, MySQL, Velocis, IBM DB@, ODBC, Unix dbm, Informix, Oracle, Ingress and Ovrimos.

PHP also supports ODBC, the Open Database Connection standard which allows you to connect to any other database supporting this world standard.

PHP also has support for talking to other services using protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (on Windows) and countless others. You can also open raw network sockets and interact using any other protocol.

PHP has support for the WDDX complex data exchange between virtually all Web programming languages. PHP also has support for instantiation of Java objects and using them transparently as PHP objects.

PHP has text processing features. For parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP 4 supports the SAX and DOM standards, and you can also use the XSLT extension to transform XML documents. PHP 5 standardizes all the XML extensions on the solid base of libxml2 and extends the feature set adding SimpleXML and XMLReader support.

Between its functionality and its ease of use PHP is one of the best ways for anyone- be they a beginner or a veteran - to create a dynamic and interactive website to share with users of the World Wide Web.

By Mikhail Tuknov

Practical Uses of PHP

2008-01-05T19:42:00.000-08:00

It almost goes without saying that you will want your business website to be compelling, interactive, and secure. All of these characteristics will make your website more effective at bringing in and keeping customers. But how to go about it in a way that is stable, cost-effective, and easy to manage? One popular solution is to use the server-side scripting language PHP to help you solve those problems.

What is PHP?

Created in 1995, PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Page", however it is now generally understood to mean "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". It was originally designed to create dynamic or more interactive web pages. It is a widely-used, open-source, general-purpose scripting language. PHP is a "high-level" language, meaning that it's generally more human-friendly (and easier to learn) than other programming languages such as C, ASP or ASP.net.

PHP was originally designed for use in Web site development, but rapidly grew to become a much more robust language. PHP's primary use is as an "embedded" scripting language, which means that the actual PHP code is embedded in HTML code. When used in this way, PHP enables your web server to process web pages before they're displayed in the user's web browser.
Benefits of PHP

PHP is popular because it can be embedded directly into HTML coding.

PHP can be used on all major operating systems and is supported on most web servers.

PHP's main focus is development for the web, so it has a quick development time and can solve scenarios much quicker than some of the other web design languages.

The latest version of PHP is a very stable and mature language used for web programming much like Java and Microsoft C#.

It is open source so it is free!

Database: It is very easy to write simple scripts which allow your Web site to interact with a database.

Cross-Platform: Both the PHP engine and the PHP code can be used on almost any platform, making it extremely versatile.

Development Tools: You only need a text editor to work on PHP; you do not need any development environment or compilers.

What can you do with PHP?

PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output, however you can also use it for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP is an extremely versatile language which enables you to create high-end, stable Web sites with plenty of bells and whistles. Here are just a few of the things you can do with PHP:

Make HTML Web Forms

Store Information in Databases

Remember Web site visitors (cookies and sessions)

Work with Arrays

Work with Files (File Management and downloads)

Parsing and Generating XML (also useful for large quantities of products on e-commerce)

Check which browser your visitor is using

How does PHP Work?

As its name ("PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") suggests, PHP derives its power by "preprocessing" hypertext on the server side. This generally means that when the PHP script (saved as a .php file) runs on your web server, it performs the programmed actions, and returns HTML code that will then be sent back to your customer's web browser. The PHP script itself is not included in the HTML that is sent to the browser, so the PHP code is invisible and secure to the user.

For example, let's consider the following simple PHP statement. (This example is merely to show the basic syntax of PHP in action. Any detailed discussion of PHP code is beyond the scope of this article.)

In this statement, is the closing tag, and echo is a PHP instruction that tells PHP to output the text that follows it as plain HTML code. The PHP software processes the PHP statement and outputs the following:

<p>Hello World

This is a regular HTML statement that is delivered to the users browser. The PHP statement itself is not delivered to the browser, so the user never sees any PHP statements.

Using PHP to Improve Your Website.

PHP has many capabilities features designed specifically for use in Web sites, including the following:

1. Securing Your Website.

PHP can be used to secure your website (or certain areas of your website) so that your customer must enter a valid username and password. This can be used to reward preferred customers and to build an exclusive "membership" component of your business.

2. Working with Web Forms.

PHP can display an HTML form and process the information that the user types in. This can be an excellent way to learn more about your customers by asking them to provide profile information, and to collect information about their specific interests.

3. Communicate with Your Databases.

PHP is particularly adept at interacting with your databases, and storing information from the user or retrieving information that is displayed to the user. PHP handles connecting to the database and communicating with it, so it's not necessary to know all of the technical details for connecting to or exchanging messages with the database. You tell PHP the name of the database and where it is, and PHP handles the details. All major databases are currently supported by PHP.

4. Customer Loyalty Functions.

You can also use PHP to create a number of different functionalities on your website that will further help you to build customer loyalty, including interactive polls, a guestbook, and a message board.

The popularity of PHP continues to grow rapidly because it has many advantages over other technical solutions. PHP is fast (because it's embedded in the HTML code, the time to process and load a Web page is relatively short), PHP is free (it is open-source software), and PHP is versatile (is runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and most Unix variants).

Perhaps most importantly, PHP is a very well-established language. There are many user-run Internet communities that make very large amounts of information (and scripts) available. With so much experience behind it, using PHP for certain dynamic features can be a cost-effective and low-hassle way of increasing the stability of your website.

by Jeremy Gislason

Basics Of Php

2008-01-05T19:14:00.001-08:00

Practical Uses of PHP

It almost goes without saying that you will want your business website to be compelling, interactive, and secure. All of these characteristics will make your website more effective at bringing in and keeping customers. But how to go about it in a way that is stable, cost-effective, and easy to manage? One popular solution is to use the server-side scripting language PHP to help you solve those problems.

What is PHP?

Created in 1995, PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Page", however it is now generally understood to mean "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". It was originally designed to create dynamic or more interactive web pages. It is a widely-used, open-source, general-purpose scripting language. PHP is a "high-level" language, meaning that it's generally more human-friendly (and easier to learn) than other programming languages such as C, ASP or ASP.net.

PHP was originally designed for use in Web site development, but rapidly grew to become a much more robust language. PHP's primary use is as an "embedded" scripting language, which means that the actual PHP code is embedded in HTML code. When used in this way, PHP enables your web server to process web pages before they're displayed in the user's web browser.
Benefits of PHP

PHP is popular because it can be embedded directly into HTML coding.

PHP can be used on all major operating systems and is supported on most web servers.

PHP's main focus is development for the web, so it has a quick development time and can solve scenarios much quicker than some of the other web design languages.

The latest version of PHP is a very stable and mature language used for web programming much like Java and Microsoft C#.

It is open source so it is free!

Database: It is very easy to write simple scripts which allow your Web site to interact with a database.

Cross-Platform: Both the PHP engine and the PHP code can be used on almost any platform, making it extremely versatile.

Development Tools: You only need a text editor to work on PHP; you do not need any development environment or compilers.

What can you do with PHP?

PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output, however you can also use it for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP is an extremely versatile language which enables you to create high-end, stable Web sites with plenty of bells and whistles. Here are just a few of the things you can do with PHP:

Make HTML Web Forms

Store Information in Databases

Remember Web site visitors (cookies and sessions)

Work with Arrays

Work with Files (File Management and downloads)

Parsing and Generating XML (also useful for large quantities of products on e-commerce)

Check which browser your visitor is using

How does PHP Work?

As its name ("PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") suggests, PHP derives its power by "preprocessing" hypertext on the server side. This generally means that when the PHP script (saved as a .php file) runs on your web server, it performs the programmed actions, and returns HTML code that will then be sent back to your customer's web browser. The PHP script itself is not included in the HTML that is sent to the browser, so the PHP code is invisible and secure to the user.

For example, let's consider the following simple PHP statement. (This example is merely to show the basic syntax of PHP in action. Any detailed discussion of PHP code is beyond the scope of this article.)

In this statement, is the closing tag, and echo is a PHP instruction that tells PHP to output the text that follows it as plain HTML code. The PHP software processes the PHP statement and outputs the following:

<p>Hello World

This is a regular HTML statement that is delivered to the users browser. The PHP statement itself is not delivered to the browser, so the user never sees any PHP statements.

Using PHP to Improve Your Website.

PHP has many capabilities features designed specifically for use in Web sites, including the following:

1. Securing Your Website.

PHP can be used to secure your website (or certain areas of your website) so that your customer must enter a valid username and password. This can be used to reward preferred customers and to build an exclusive "membership" component of your business.

2. Working with Web Forms.

PHP can display an HTML form and process the information that the user types in. This can be an excellent way to learn more about your customers by asking them to provide profile information, and to collect information about their specific interests.

3. Communicate with Your Databases.

PHP is particularly adept at interacting with your databases, and storing information from the user or retrieving information that is displayed to the user. PHP handles connecting to the database and communicating with it, so it's not necessary to know all of the technical details for connecting to or exchanging messages with the database. You tell PHP the name of the database and where it is, and PHP handles the details. All major databases are currently supported by PHP.

4. Customer Loyalty Functions.

You can also use PHP to create a number of different functionalities on your website that will further help you to build customer loyalty, including interactive polls, a guestbook, and a message board.

The popularity of PHP continues to grow rapidly because it has many advantages over other technical solutions. PHP is fast (because it's embedded in the HTML code, the time to process and load a Web page is relatively short), PHP is free (it is open-source software), and PHP is versatile (is runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and most Unix variants).

Perhaps most importantly, PHP is a very well-established language. There are many user-run Internet communities that make very large amounts of information (and scripts) available. With so much experience behind it, using PHP for certain dynamic features can be a cost-effective and low-hassle way of increasing the stability of your website.

by Jeremy Gislason

How to Learn PHP and MySQL as Quickly as Possible

2008-01-05T19:14:00.000-08:00

Learning Programming is a tough subject, no matter which language you choose.

It took me months to figure out php and MySQL enough to build real, quality, Websites that were "good enough".

Eventually I figured out the easiest way to learn. It took me MONTHS to figure it out... but I did.

So what does it take to learn a Programming Language such as PHP?

"Doing" is what it takes. 90% of the people who try to take on such a task end up feeling "dumb" or "slow". This usually is NOT the case. I've found that, like myself, most people try to learn PHP from reading and going through code to "understand" what it means.

I was the same way until I was told "just do it". My mentor must have been the most patient man on the face of this earth - because I was constantly telling him I could not do it. But he kept on me telling me the same line I'm telling you: "just do it".

What does this mean? It means trying to create your very own scripts, whether small or of decent size. Start out with printing out the date to the browser. Continue with Loops. Create scripts that create mathematical equations. Print out your name, last name, etc.

Once you figure out the basics, make sure you continue to learn by doing! You will never be able to take your skills to the next level just by reading.

I also stress to other newbies that they need to learn by watching as well. Writing code can become quite a task and it's better to see someone else do that, if possible (which it is by watching videos).

It's quite easy to get caught up in bad practices while writing code if you do not follow good programming standards. Sloppy (spaghetti) code seems to be the evil of the programming world that occurs from newbies who read online tutorials by so called "programmers". Most of these "programmers" are NOT what they claim to be. So be careful of whom you choose to learn from.

PHP and MySQL (database) go together like peanut butter and jelly. I cannot tell you how important it is to learn these two languages together. MySQL may not be the "best" Database in the world but it is very easy to learn and very capable of building large scale applications.

So remember: if you're not "doing", you're not learning. Start learning PHP basics and make sure you're following along and trying to code your own small scripts when starting out. I know, I know... it LOOKS like it's too hard. It's not. This is not something you're going to learn overnight, but it's quite possible that you can learn enough to do what you need to do in just a matter of weeks!

Keep learning and continue doing.

If you're looking to become a PHP programmer - you need to see these videos!

By Clint Lenard

How To Spice Up Your MySpace Page

2008-01-03T02:34:00.000-08:00

Let's get started with some music, my personal favorite. You can go to your edit profile page and delete your original song choice if you want to get a player. There are several sites to visit to get a music player that will hold more than the one song. I will introduce you to a project playlist song list creator. I think the players are sleek and the song choices are varied and numerous. Open a separate browser window (the tab up under the address bar) and search for song lists, players, or play lists, choose a playlist builder or song project site.

Welcome to the playlist creator site. Click on the my account tab, then 'click here' to create a free account. Follow the fields on the page, click create new account. Step 2 is a short free offer section that you can fill out or click no thanks, continue to my account. Now, we log in and let's make a playlist. You can come back to this page another time and upload a photo, and set up your profile page. It will be great practice, so save this page as a favorite.

Choose click here to search for music and type in the bar an artist name, song title, a combination of both, or even just a word to get a variety of ideas for song choices.

Once you find a song to add to your playlist, check to make sure it plays nicely by clicking the green arrow. If you are happy with the sound, click the plus sign. If you forget to check the song, you can always play it here. This will take you to 'click here to create a playlist' and success, you have added your first song! Click continue if you would like more songs. Just keep with the steps, type an artist or song, view, listen, add, continue.

When you have added all the songs that you want, click go to my playlists instead of continue. Click on the name of your playlist. Here you have the option to arrange your songs, delete them, or add to your list. Make sure to save changes when you move the song order around before you go to delete or add a song or you will have to rearrange your list again. There are options below your playlist for sharing your playlist. Choose generate code to copy and paste your playlist into your MySpace edit profile section under any empty box you have, or choose post to MySpace. Follow the instructions listed there. You can post any of your playlists to many other sites, by choosing the post to MySpace option.

When you start adding more than one item code in each box of the edit profile section, take care. Always be sure to leave spaces between the codes. And with a code for a graphic, player, video, any code that will take up a limited space, not your profile code and not a contact table code, but any code that is going to create an image in a set area, you will type at the very end a small HTML code to create a space break. This is done with no spaces, touching the very last character of your source code. I am going to type this with spaces because it will not show up on an HTML compatible screen as the type, but it will actually create a space and it no longer shows up. OK, type <> all together with no spaces touching the last of the code like a tail. Preview your profile to check and view if there is enough room between the shown items. If not, go back and add one more set of <>. Then, save and view your profile. This will help you add two or three separate codes and items in each one of the edit boxes but keep your page uniform looking, not all bunched together. Also, some items if run together will not function. If you come across a malfunction, try to put the new item near something else. If two items are animated or interactive, they may not sit well together. Spacing these items in separate boxes is the best plan to prevent any future problems. If you ever forget which code goes where, go view your profile, and see where they are and count the number of items per the section, if it is the second item, delete the second code, again, this is a great reason why you left spaces between the codes.

Now that you have a good sized music selection, let's visit sparkle tags. There are over 4000 images and 83 different categories of images on this site. Again, feel free to use your search engine for MySpace images, but this is a great site to get going with. I will walk you through posting a Thanks For The Add comment to post on your new friends comments area on their profile. First, choose one of the categories for Thanks graphics. You might get an ad showing but you have the option to skip it. Scroll down and find the one that you would like to use, on this site just moving your cursor over the code will highlight it, and right click and copy. This is becoming quite comfortable now, isn't it? Go to your MySpace page, click on the friends picture to go to their profile page, scroll down to the add comment link, click it, place your saved code in the add comment box by either Ctrl v or by right clicking and pasting. If you want to add text as well to your comment, type it either before or after your code, being sure to leave spaces between the text and code. Click post comment. You will then view the comment you wish to post to be sure it is the one you wanted, and click to post again. Some pages you will need to complete the "capcha" box. View your friends profile and see what you have posted, now some friends will wish to approve the comment before it gets posted, with these friends you will need to wait until later to view your own comment, but be excited for yourself that you now can post to all of your friends comment boxes with graphics instead of just typing text. Also, a heads up, some friends have their comments set to only accept text. Not much fun, but some comments can slow a pages loading time.

On to polls, clocks, and generally nifty graphics. There are a few very good sites to find these items. For all of the clocks and generators of all kinds search myspace generators. They are listed under generators because they are animated but they are put on your site exactly the same way as a graphic. No worries for you!

Bulletins and Blogs are two very different types of postings. A bulletin is a posting that you will send to your entire friend list. A blog stays right on your page and each friend has the option to either come to visit your profile and read it or subscribe to your blog postings and get notified as you post a new one. Read others bulletins and blogs to see what others do here.

I saved the very best thing to add to your page (next to music, of course) for last. The almighty Guestbook! This is the most fun for you because every time you view your own profile, you can see the pictures and comments your friends put on your now signed guestbook. Go to slide.com, sign up for a free membership, and click on make a guestbook. You can also create a slide show here to post on your site! Slide has brilliantly generic and basic instruction from this point, I do not even need to say it here. Follow the instruction from Slide and from our steps of copy and paste before and you have got yourself an awesome way for friends to leave a bit of themselves on your page forever! Comments get bumped down by newer ones as time rolls on.

Well, I am proud of your page without even seeing it yet! Awesome job, look me up or Google me, make me a long time friend and let me know if I can help out with your pages. You are well on your way to mastering HTML, even though you think you have just learned one small code, you have been seeing them. Getting comfortable with the look of an HTML code is half the battle. My next article will cover basic HTML codes. Stay tuned for "Basic HTML Codes With Tips and Tricks".

by Stephanie Haile AKA Wavecritter AKA Surfcritter

Basic HTML Code For Your Blog

2008-01-03T02:17:00.000-08:00

Hyper Text Markup Language - that's what it stands for. Its a way for Web browsers to present text and graphics. A code if you like. To get a better idea of what it is, click on your View menu and then Source or View Source and that will show you how a page of text is formatted in HTML (It'll also show you the keywords used in the Meta tags which can be helpful in getting your page ranked higher on Search Engines - but more on this later).

Basic Knowledge of HTML

Before we go any further let me tell you that I'm rather new to all this. I've only been into computers for the last couple of years. Oh sure I'd used computers in my work before that but only as far as word processing. I was using AppleIIs back in the early Eighties to write magazine stories but apart from knowing how to boot the machine up and format a word processing document I didn't have a clue about computers. And I still don't have much of a clue. I probably couldn't explain the difference between ROM and RAM to save my life. But I know enough to get me by - I have a Basic Knowledge of HTML codes and commands. I don't have a head for programming or writing code or any of that stuff. In fact you're talking to a guy that didn't even finish high-school. I went straight from school into the Advertising business at the tender age of sixteen. So I'm a dummy. And I'm a real dummy when it comes to complicated computer language coding and algorithms - all that egghead stuff. So if I can have a Working Knowledge of Basic HTML code and links - trust me, you can too.

So here we go. From the top...in a logical progression. It might help to open another browser window and pull up the View Source of my Welcome to Wallyworld page (you'll find a link at the bottom of this article) and follow what I'm looking at.

The HTML Code starts with "DOCTYPE" (meaning document type) html "PUBLIC" and then some other stuff including "XHTML". This is just the new improved version of HTML code. Don't worry about it for now. I haven't written the code for this page - it's done automatically by my host and they are formatting in HTML, XHTML, Javascript and some other stuff like Textile and Markdown which I don't even begin to understand. All I want from knowing a bit of basic HTML code is how to do simple stuff like Bold, underline, Hyperlinks and h2Headings in Basic HTML.

Coming down the page a bit you'll see the document begins with html enclosed in less than and greater than arrowheads and then if you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll see the very last bit of code is html but this time closed off with a forward slash. That's the way HTML works - you enclose the command within the arrowheads, write your text and then close it off with a forward slash.

After the html commands we have the head which contains everything in your title. You'll see the term "Robots" which is a command to the Search Engine spiders to start reading the information coming up next. And that information is the Meta Tags - both to describe what your site is all about and to give the keywords. You'll notice I only have a Meta Description here - HOW TO: Increase Your Traffic, Boost Your Google Ranking, Optimize Adsense to Make More Money, Keyword Optimization Tips, Work Online as a ProBlogger" etc. This is because my host is convinced that the major search engines no longer rely on keywords in the Meta Tags. Apparently that's true for Google but Yahoo and the others take them into consideration. So I've just added some keywords at the bottom of that section under Meta keywords.

So the head section contains the title and information on style sheets and scripts. After that we have the body which contains the markup with your content - your article/story/table - whatever you're putting in there.

That's about it. Not hard is it? All you have to do now is learn some of the HTML Tags.

The first ones you need to know are the heading tags and they're easy to remember. h stands for heading. h1 puts your words in the biggest size through to the smallest h6.

The underline tag is written with a u. Paragraph with a p. Line break with a br. Italics with an i.

Probably the most useful piece of code is the Hyperlink - that's a fundamental of blogging - the sharing of information. Clicking on this one will take you to a site with lots of Useful HTML Code including how to write hyperlinks.

You can also turn an image into a hypertext link so that when you click on the image it takes you to a page or site.

Use HTML to Wrap Text Around Adsense

One of my favourites uses for Html is getting the text to wrap around the Adsense - the Adsense Gurus reckon people are more likely to click on the Ads if they are buried in the text. Whatever. But I reckon they look neater than having them displayed in block form.

You Wanna Make a Hit List?

You can easily format lists with HTML. Like this bulleted list using the ul and l tags.

* The Number One Villain

* Number Two Villain

* Number Three Villain

Voila - like I said before, if this dummy can do it, you can too - Basic HTML

By Malcolm Lambe Malcolm Lambe is an Australian blogger/vlogger based in Paris. His main site is http://www.welcometowallyworld.com where he pontificates on a diverse range of subjects.

How to Copy and Paste Adsense Code Correctly

2008-01-03T02:13:00.000-08:00

After getting approval from Google, here's come to your first step to earn money from it. What should one do in order to display Adsense ads on his/her sites? It is quite simple and straightforward. Adsense Ads are solely HTML code, just link those that make up a website. So, with the use of a simple HTML editor, you can easily paste such HTML code into any place you want in your website.

First, you need to get the HMTL code for a specific product. There are various products from adsense. And I will not put too much emphasis here on that. After selecting the desired product, just pick up and copy the HTML code in the box at the bottom of the page.

Afterwards, you can use any simple HTML editors (e.g. Frontpage, Dreamweaver etc.) and paste the code to your desire position. According to Google, Once you've generated your ad code by visiting the AdSense Setup tab and following the steps to choose an ad type, format, and colors, you'll need to add the code to your web pages. In the final step of the setup, you'll see your code in the Your AdSense Code box. This is the code that you will cut-and-paste directly into your web pages.

Because every HTML editor is different, and because only you know how you like to build your web pages, we can't give exact instructions on copying the ad code into your pages. We can, however, give you a few tips:

- Make sure to paste the ad code into your source without making any changes to the code. This is important, as changing the code in any way can cause errors on your page (and is against the AdSense program policies) - Copy the ad code between the body tags of your HTML - If you're using a WYSIWYG editor (such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver) it's a good idea to paste the code into the Code or Source view. Pasting it into the layout view will often result in HTML tags being added to your code, and will result in errors - If your page uses Frames, make sure that the code is pasted into the frame that contains your page's main content. We use this content to target ads

When you're all done, save your web pages and upload them to your server. If you have questions about uploading files to your server, we suggest contacting your web hosting company directly. After pasting the code in your site, the ads will be shown immediately, no matter it is relevant ads, irrelevant one or the PSA (public service advertisement). Initially, the ads that you see may be Public Service Ads and won't be targeted to your page. We have to crawl your page's content before we know what kinds of ads to send your way - this can take up to a few hours, but usually occurs within minutes. Once our crawler has visited your page, you should see ads that are highly targeted to your content.

By C.K. Li

How To Design a Website

2008-01-03T02:04:00.000-08:00

Every day, more and more people are learning how to design their own websites. In this article, I'll show you how to design a website the right way to ensure that you get something as close to your vision as possible.

Before you decide how to design a website, you have to know what options are available. This means you need to be familiar with the different ways people build websites. The only way to do that is to do some background research. Do you know the difference between HTML, CSS and PHP? It's important to understand how these different codes relate to building a website. By being aware of the different options that exist, you will have a better idea on what you will need to learn.

After you have an idea of the various different ways websites are built, it's time to decide what the purpose of your website is. Do you want to do business or does your website of a more personal nature? Is it something you plan on updating regularly, or will it have more static elements? You need to sit down and really ask yourself what the ultimate purpose of your website is and what you want it to do for you. Once you do this, you will be able to understand the scope of what you need to know, as far as how to design a website goes to get your finished product.

Finally, after you know what you want, then it is just a matter of going about achieving it. If you want something simple, like a blog, then you might start looking for website templates you can download for free, and simply modify. Or, if you need a site with only a few pages, you shouldn't have to study more than the basic HTML to achieve that. By having your vision, and coupling it with the different tools that are available to you, is probably the smartest way to go about designing a website.

There are also various tools that can help you on how to design a website. Typically these are web design software programs, most commonly known as WYSIWYG editors. WYSIWYG stands for -- "what you see is what you get". These are great tools that help you with your coding, so you can edit your website visually, as well as through coding language.

By Steven P. Ross http://www.best-web-design-software.com

How To Take Advantage of Remote Site Syndication (RSS)

2008-01-03T01:59:00.000-08:00

For starters, RSS is more easily understood when the separate components are defined. RSS feeds use a language called XML, similar to html. XML has the capacity to identify structures in a document due to their special mechanisms. The structures determine how the content will be arranged within the document. RSS is widely used within big news websites. The RSS files create data feeds that can deliver headlines, links or almost any other bit of information to a news reader (a.k.a.channel viewer application).

The feeds are monitored by readers that will notify the user when any new information is presented. This can be readily applied to your marketing efforts. One of the most popular ways to use RSS feeds is to replace email marketing.

Despite claims from many marketing experts that say email marketing is still a good strategy, with the increasing spam filters combined with scares of opening up a virus, people are becoming a lot more skeptical of even opening your email. Even though you've got a long list of email addresses, the odds of them being opened are low, which makes for a strategy that isn't likely to get you anywhere.

RSS works differently, and is a great advantage over email marketing. You'll have a much greater chance of being opened because your messages won't be filtered. This means that there's an increasing chance that your messages will be read, which is effective for the results you're looking for. Another great aspect of RSS is that autoresponders can be used.

One way to use the advantage of the search engine is to include feeds on your blog or content site. These feeds allow you to have content that is constantly updated, which is just what the search engines are looking for. Thus, more traffic is directed toward your web page.

Other popular ways include using RSS feeds to increase traffic to your blog or sales site or by making it possible that your messages and information are seen on thousands of websites, blogs and desktops online.

If you're serious about using RSS to expand your marketing strategies, the best way is to create your own feed. This opens the door to a wealth of opportunities for your business. By creating your own feed, your information gets published on every site that uses your feed to gather the supplied information. Consider using automated software to make your work a little easier. It has the capacity to supply the feeds to marketers by submitting your RSS feeds to a variety of directories.

RSS is becoming increasingly popular among Internet marketing businesses. It's a great opportunity to help advance your efforts. Take advantage of this new technology before it's yesterday's news.

By Jason Pearson Jason Pearson is an online marketing expert who wants to share his secrets with the world.

Come and Explore How to Create A Website

2008-01-03T01:54:00.000-08:00

A Website is the basic need for all the business and for personal use in this innovative world where each and every thing is globalized on Internet. It is the easiest way to communicate, do business, find business, find a friend, play games, chat, make payments and for each and every basic need. Today we are just got addicted of Internet, so, the basic need of website is generally getting higher for each and every aspect of business and life.

To develop a website there are various facts to be utilized and I have tried to give the basic instances "How TO Build Website"

Your Basic Needs for Building a Website

Domain Name

This is a name for identifying a computer or computers on the Internet. It is a component of Web site's URL (Uniform Resource Locator). So, creativ-eras.com is an example of domain name.

It is the name given by the Domain name registrar after the process of registration is done by the client. It is also called as registered domain name and web addresses.

These Domains are also attached with its extensions. Domain name extensions are of different types:

The Top 3: These are the basic domains widely used by the customers worldwide and are one of the top domains till date

.com

.net

.org

Country-Level Top Domain: Every country has their own matching top level domain names, some examples are

.in (India)

.co.in (India)

.fr (France)

.co.uk (United Kingdom)

And there are many more domain also like

.edu

.gov

.tv

Free Websites

There are various sources on internet which provide with an option to host your website for free. But these types of resources should not be considered healthy, reason for it is that they are unstable in nature and you never own your website and you never receive true domain name. The main domain will be of third party and it will look like http://site.yourdomain.com/ In some cases, it can even be longer than the example shown above.

Web Host

Web hosting is a service which allows the individuals and organizations to provide there own websites accessible over www (World Wide Web). Web hosts are the companies which provide the space on servers which they own for the use by their clients and provide internet connectivity. Web hosting is a paid service, usually monthly or yearly.

Website requires space on server to be used by the individuals. No website can exist without web hosts.

Building Website

In this part we are going to explore various tools and editors present for building a website. There are many software and tools available for building a website in easy and efficient way. It's important for you to find out about them before you use them.

Macromedia Dreamweaver, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Front Page, Aedix, UPOhtml, Alleycode HTML Editor, Aptana, Arachnophilia, BBEdit, Bluefish, CSE HTML Validator, EditPlus, Evrsoft 1st Page, HTML-Kit, Adobe HomeSite, NoteTab, PSPad, Quanta Plus, SAPIEN PrimalScript, SCREEM, Siteaid, skEdit, Taco HTML Edit, TextMate, TopStyle, Notepad++, Weaverslave are some of the web editing software present and used by the people for creating and maintaining sites.

I used Macromedia Dreamweaver for creating my website http://www.creativ-eras.com/

If you are not using any of the software then you have begin from the scratch and have to learn how to code HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). All you have to do is open Text editor (Notepad) for example and then write the HTML code which will create your page. It is pretty easy to learn and use.

Then you have to save the file you are working on with the file name.html and then upload it to the server (Web Host).

If you are finding it difficult to code in HTML, then I would strongly recommend you to get it done by any website design company or any software program which I've talked about above to edit and create your website. These companies are working day and night for its customers. There are so many web designing companies and you have to find one of the best from them to serve.

There are many websites will provide free website templates (awesome premade sites) ready to use.

Products

In your site you are showing information about company, its products, its expertise, its services, its vision & goals, patrons and feedback etc.

The main part is of products of the company. The importance of products is due to the out result of company. Every company wants to sell its product, uses various forms and methods. Website is also one form of on line presence of the company for selling products online.

For selling its product online you have to take orders online from your website? The best way is to sign up with paypal.com. They are the merchants; they accept credit cards for you and take a small percentage for the order. It is very convenient and easy to setup.

All you have to do is specify the price for each and every item or product you are selling and paypal will provide you some HTML code which you have to paste it in your website and it will automatically create the payment button and its interface for you.

Paypal uses secure methods and handles all the transactions which are done through credit cards. It's very easy to transfer the funds from your paypal account to any other account electronically.

Other Features

There are various other features which you can implement in your website like gaming, gambling, chat and guest book where visitors can play game, chat and leave message for you on your site.

It is very hard for you to think of these features, but as internet have matured, it's getting easier and easier for you to use and implement these features on your site.

For getting any kind of interactive feature on a website requires some kind of script. Script contains a bunch of code that tells the browser how to behave.

You can get these scripts depending what you want on your website. Script can be found on internet for that you have to go to your favorite search site (Google) and search for the appropriate script. Some scripts are free and some are paid as well.

It is important for you to check that your web host supports the kind of script and functionality you want to implement.

So, this was the full explanation on how to create your website.

By Amit Sood http://www.creativ-eras.com

Basic HTML How To

2008-01-03T01:24:00.000-08:00

You can use basic HTML in many ways and in various places. You can change simple things by making your font bolder, bigger, or smaller by using the simplest of codes. You can create page breaks and separate your paragraphs or thoughts. Change the color of your font, create a text link, or place a picture or graphic image on your web site.

If you have not yet copied and pasted a graphic or background lay-out onto a web page or a social network site such as My Space, give that a try. It will show you a great example of what an HTML code actually looks like. Study it for a few minutes to get a good look at the tweaks that could be made to any code to change just a bit of the end result.

We use HTML at social networks, on web pages, and in solo advertisements for business marketers.

Basic HTML will make your page or advertisements stand out from the crowd. Get noticed and learn a bit of HTML.

To change your font and make it show a bit of your personality or to make it jump out of the page, you will need these basic HTML codes. I will be putting spaces between the characters here to be able to post this on an area that uses HTML. When you type this, leave no spaces between the characters. Making your font bolder only requires you to type <>. Typing in multiple sets will create an even bolder font. At the end of the word or phrase you wish to be bold, type. This code will close the bold print.

You can make your font bigger or smaller as well by using the code <> or <> and then closing it off with or . That is the extent of it. It is really this easy to do.

If you need a separation between ideas, thoughts, or paragraphs then use the code <>. If you would like a double space between the text, type two or more in a row, all touching with no spaces. This is best used with graphic images and photos, or banners and music players. It prevents the images from running together and creates a much cleaner page view.

Another neat little trick is changing your font color. Red jumps right off the page, blue is a very mellow and calming color, and yellow when used with a combination of red and black makes a very bold statement. This code is very simple and looks like this, <>. Now, with this code, you can either just type the color name into "the color" area or do a quick search for HTML font color codes and replace "the color" with the actual color code number given on the site you find. Close the color with.

How about adding a text link to your web site or social page? Again, simple once you see it a few times. This is what it looks like. You will need to replace the yoursitehere with your web page link and TextLink with whatever you want to show as your link text.

< href="http://www.yoursitehere.com/">textlink< /A > Again, I have created spaces where there should be none to ensure readability. If I posted this on an HTML compatible page it would not show anything except the useable link called textlink. The only space needed in this code is the one between the first A and the HREF. That one is an important and essential space.

There is an easy shortcut to image codes. Uploading a stored photo or image from your computer to a site called Tiny Pic will get you your image code straight away. Just copy and paste into your project. The easiest by far. The wealth of information on and about using, viewing, and learning the basic HTML code is a search engine away. My goal is to enlighten you and show you that you can do it too. That it isn't as difficult as we all may have thought it was and doing it correctly is within reach.

Stephanie Haile AKA Wavecritter is a 43 year old wife, mother, and business owner who enjoys spending time with her family at the beach, at a great movie, or with an awesome novel. Google Wavecritter and say hello. Check out the web sites below to find out how to become a part of the team.

By Stephanie Haile Copyright © Stephanie Haile, http://www.wavecritter.com, http://www.berrycritter.com

The Five Basic Elements of Web Design

2008-01-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

The basic elements and principles involved in web design are true for all other types of design. These principles will show you the most effective way to put together the various design elements to come up with a good and effective site. A good web design company emphasizes the fact that web design is not simply about slapping all those HTML tags on the page, but it involves the use of web design principles to build a pleasing and useful web design. Your web design company will need you to make the most aesthetically attractive and effective web design, so make sure you keep these elements in mind:

Web Design Balance

Web design Balance is the equal distribution of the heavy and light elements on a singly page. Balance in your web design is concentrated in your page layout. You must achieve visual balance in your web design all throughout the page, not only in the initial view. You web design company might commonly suggest you to center the text and all the other elements on your page. It is also very common to set your page on an invisible grid system to create the balance that you need. There are three types of balance that can be achieved when designing a page.

 Symmetrical. This is achieved by placing all the elements in an even fashion - a heavy element on the left is matched with another on the right. Be careful with symmetrical balances as you do not want your site to look flat or plain boring.

 Asymmetrical. These are more challenging to build, but there are strategies to achieve this which can include the varying texture, color and image positioning and size to arrive at a pleasant looking page.

 Discordant. Web sites that are off-balance suggest action or motion, so you can create a discordant design on purpose. This type of designs make viewers uncomfortable or uneasy, so they are best used for sites that are intended to make people think.

Web Design Contrast

Web design contrast is more than just about colors and black or white, but also involves contrasting shapes, sizes and even textures. You can take full advantage of contrast by changing font size, weight and family to provide textual contrast and varying sizes of images and elements. However, be careful not to blast your readers or scare them off with contrasting colors which are way too loud. The links on your content should be contrasted well to draw most attention.

Web Design Emphasis

Web design emphasis involves the main points where the eye is drawn into in a design. One of the mistakes that your web design company may warn you not to make is to have everything in the design stand out. Keep in mind that if everything in the design has equal emphasis, the entire page will tend to appear too busy for comfort and may end up unappealing. What you should focus on instead is to create a visual hierarchy in the web design - to put emphasis only on the right elements. You can use semantic markup to provide emphasis even without the use of styles; change the font size of image size in order to emphasis or lessen emphasis on them; or you can use contrast in colors for added emphasis.

Web Design Rhythm

Web design rhythm, also known as repetition, brings the much needed internal consistency into your web site designs. Almost all elements in your design can be repeated in order to create pleasing rhythm into your design. For instance, you can repeat your headline a few times for more emphasis, repeat the same image across the page, create a background that is tiled and patterned with repetitive elements, or repeat a particular style to provide site design consistency. It is also a good idea to repeat the navigation elements in your site design across the pages of your web site.

Web Design Unity

Web design unity, also regarded as a site's proximity, is the what keeps all the similar elements in the site alike and those diverse further apart, and pulls everything together into one integrated whole. Unity when it comes to web site design is mainly achieved through the proper placement in your layout. You can implement this in many ways. You can, for example, adjust the layout of your elements to put them close or far away from each other. In the body of your page, you can change the spacing around the text in your page contents. You can further achieve unity by playing around the box properties and change the margins and paddings.

A good web design company keeps in mind all the basic design elements with each and every page they design and collaborate with. This way, you and your web design company will come up with web sites that are pleasant looking, effective and attractive. As the web designer, it is important that you keep these elements in mind and apply them appropriately to your page web design.

by: Semul Johnson

Why Free Web Hosting May Not Be A Bad Thing

2008-01-01T14:30:00.000-08:00

There is paid web hosting and there is free web hosting. Most people tend to steer clear of free web hosting as they tend to believe that “there is no free lunch”. Free web hosting must have its catches?

Well, that really depends on your purposes and your position.

Why purpose?

If your web hosting is for your website which is for commercial purposes, such as an ecommerce web-store, you need absolute reliability and uptime. Every second of downtime is lost revenue. While some free web hosting providers guarantee uptime, you cannot hold it against them if their services do not meet expectations and cause your business to lose hundreds of dollars of revenue. Why? Because most free web hosts will have a clause in their terms that state that they do not guarantee uptime at all because they are a free service. Now, most free hosts will not even guarantee any uptime and those free web hosting services are provided on a best effort basis. You cannot risk hosting your crucial business website on such a free hosting plan.

However, for most individuals who are experimenting with building websites, free web hosting is the ideal choice as there is no monetary commitment and no lost for both parties. Everyone deserves a chance to learn and what better way to learn than to do it? Free web hosting plans from free hosts are the ideal platform for aspiring webmasters to start their web-building careers. Of course these free hosts may require something in return: visiting sponsors, displaying ads on hosted pages, reading emails, and lately, participating in online communities of the free web-host. This last option may not be a bad thing as online communities allow the users to interact and learn from each other.

There is also a last category of users who just want free web hosting for a personal site which they do not find the need to be up all the time and do not see the need to pay for it and do not see the need to do anything for it. There are some free web hosts out there who offer free hosting for nothing – just a simple sign up. Therefore, a clear purpose for using free web hosting is important. If the purpose is critical and there is no tolerance for problems, then free webhosting is not suitable. Other than that, free web hosting is not a bad thing.

Why position?

Web hosting plans are relatively affordable these days (some plans as low as $1 a month) that almost any working person can afford it for their websites. Therefore, paying for web hosting should not be a problem for those who have an income, or some savings to spend on developing their websites further. Also, any working adult should be able to afford using a Paypal account that most web hosts will accept as a form of payment. On the other hand, students and young people do not have much to spend, much less a Paypal or Credit Card with which to pay for hosting. For this group of people, free web hosting plans are the obvious alternatives if they wish to set up websites without paying anything for them.

To conclude, free web hosting may not be a bad thing for selected groups of people who have a specific purpose. For students and people looking to learn about developing websites, free web hosting is a good thing.

by: Dax Christopher

How To Design Your Site Effectively

2008-01-01T14:29:00.001-08:00

You decide you want to have a web presence. How do you design your website in a way that is effective? How do you effectively create website in a way that makes your clients want to come back? A client or visitor to your website may not want to come back if their experience on your website is tedious and cumbersome. Here are some tips to keep in mind when designing your website:

- Don't use a lot of animated graphics. In fact, don't use any at all because it makes the site look unprofessional.

- Don't use frames to design your website. You will be in for a lot of code redundancy and it causes the page to load slower.

- Use graphics at the lowest density possible. This allows the page to load faster.

- Try to get most of the content on one page preventing the user from having to scroll down to get the important information that your first page needs to prevent.

- Use links to navigate to the various sections of the site at the top, side, and bottom. Doing this allows a visitor can get to anywhere in the site from anywhere in the site.

- Always have link to get back to the home page on every page of the site.

- Use tables to lay out the sections on the site. This way, when one adjusts the size of the browser window, it does not alter the positioning of the paragraphs or sections on the page.

- Use headers and footers common to all pages and include that header or footer each time a new page is rendered. This way, if you have to change header or footer information, you only have to change it once.

- Use a white background for the main content of your page. The reason is that it looks much more professional and it is easier to read.

by: Andrew Smith

Web Hosting Reviews - Can You Trust Them?

2008-01-01T14:27:00.000-08:00

The market is filled with web hosting services providers of all shapes and sizes. In this jungle of hosting companies, how do you make a good choice? Should you trust the sites offering web hosting reviews?

Imagine doing a search on Google for "web hosting company", and coming up with around 1,700,000 hits! How can you possibly find the best web hosting plan for your needs among all those? You may look at the prices, thinking: "I will get a good deal by looking for the cheapest web hosting plan".

Well, not a good idea IMHO. Because of the fierce competition between providers of web hosting services, they often try to cut costs by cutting down on support, and also by vastly overselling hardware and bandwidth resources. The result: poor support and poor reliability. Simply put: your website goes down, and nobody listens to you when you try to tell your hosting company about it.

What you want and need is not a cheap web hosting plan, but a good web hosting plan that fits your budget. Having realized this, you start looking around for advice on good web hosting. Now, chances are you will then stumble upon some web hosting review site, which is happy to tell you that xyz.com is the very best web hosting provider in the world! Fine, you think, now my problem is solved thanks to that piece of valuable information.

Wrong again - most likely. The truth is, that many web hosting companies pay very generous commissions to those who refer new customers to them. It then becomes very tempting to set up a "web hosting reviews" website which is actually nothing but a billboard for the best-paying web hosting services providers, with no regard for their actual merits. And so it goes. I have personally looked over about a hundred of those web hosting reviews' sites, and in most cases they are just that - billboards. Often, they strongly recommend web hosting companies that are actually known to have a very poor customer reputation. Thus, they are really spreading misinformation and confusion instead of offering good advice.

The only reliable way of telling if a web hosting company is worth doing business with, is to see what their customers are saying about it. Such customer posts can be found here and there on various web sites, but you have to know where to look. A few of those web hosting reviews' sites does actually collect and post such customer opinions; and you can also find authentic posts by searching on large web hosting forums such as WebHostingTalk.

Needless to say, you should NOT bother with the "customer opinions" posted by the web hosting companies themselves on their own sites. Often, those "reviews" are fabricated, or simply copied from somewhere else.

by: Kai Virihaur

Web Design Tips

2008-01-01T14:24:00.000-08:00

When someone sees a beautiful web design, he or she can’t help but fall in love with it and wonder how it was done. However, designing a web would take more than just your knowledge in color, texts and images. It involves codes. But you can learn those in no time so there’s nothing to worry about. Moreover, there is a science behind web design and the following could help you be more scientific with your designs

Usability Testing

The secret here is to let someone who is not familiar with your site have a look at it. As much as possible, be in the room while they are testing your site. Take note of the things that they click on and the things that they ignore so you will know what to improve.

Browser Testing

Do not make the mistake of thinking that your web page will look good at any other browser because it looks good on your favorite one. Remember that the same browser could be used on another operating system and it may not look the same. What you need to do now is to check your page on every possible combination of OS and browser.

Use Log Files

Including log files can be very tiresome, however, it can also be very useful. It helps you know where viewers go from your homepage, what they mostly click on and what pages are least visited. Using log files can help you gather information that can help you modify your site and eventually lead your viewers to the page where you want them to go.

Don’t be afraid to recreate

One of the biggest advantages in web designing is the freedom to change web pages and layouts. Don’t be afraid to change designs that don’t work. Designing a web can be a lot of fun and involving science and structure into your designs will surely attract your viewers.

Use accurate titles for every section

Web browsers tend to scan pages and sections so make sure that your page or section titles are consistent and accurate. In this way, they can be sure that they are being led to the right section of the site.

Avoid ‘Click Here’

Links are very important in web pages. However, avoid using the text ‘click here’ when leading your viewers to another page. Instead use a descriptive and more appropriate text .

Improve Readability

Now is not the time to show off your collection of fonts. What’s important is for your customers to be able to read what is written on your site. Therefore, use attractive but readable texts to attract readers and customers of your site.

Proofread

Even the most excellent writer makes grammatical and spelling errors. You wouldn’t want your site viewers to think you’re an amateur, would you? What you have to do in order to increase trustworthiness is to proofread everything that is written in your site. Remember, less mistakes or lack of errors can add to your reliability points.

by: Hunter Blyth

Principles In Web Design

2008-01-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

In web designing, design is more than just using HTML tags on a web page. The principles outlined below will help you create a more useful and effective website.

Balance

One of the most basic principles in web designing is balance. It is the distribution of the light and heavy elements on a page. It shows one to layout web pages so that they will work effectively. It is also a visual interpretation of design gravity. Remember that darker and larger objects appear heavier than lighter and smaller objects.

Balancing designs can be done in three ways:

Symmetrical Balance – done by placing elements in an even manner

Asymmetrical Balance – more challenging to design because they don’t have elements that match across the designs centerline

Discordant or off-balance – designs that suggest more action and motion

Contrast

When people encounter the word contrast, color is the first thing that comes to mind. However, contrast is more than just a difference in color. There can be contrasts in shapes, sizes and even textures. It is an accentuation of element differences in a design. When you apply contrast in a web design, think beyond or more than just colors. Think about how you can attract your readers in terms of contrasting font sizes, shapes, images and text styles.

Moreover, contrast in web design can be done in four ways. It can be done by

Changing of fonts
Providing links
Using different sizes of images and elements
Using contrasting colors

Emphasis

The eye is drawn to what is emphasized in a design. Though it is very tempting to give emphasis on everything in your website, as a designer you should determine element hierarchy and apply emphasis accordingly based on the hierarchy.

With emphasis, you make the most important element stand out in your design. To include emphasis or dominance in your design, try doing the following ways:

Use semantic mark up that will provide some emphasis even when there are no styles
Changing of fonts or images
Use of contrasting colors

Rhythm

Rhythm is also called repetition. It allows the design to build an internal consistency which helps the viewers to understand it easily. It is said that the whole design can only be understood once the brain has recognized the pattern in the rhythm. Furthermore, rhythm instills a sense of order in the design because it seldom occurs on its own. Due to this, viewers become attracted and therefore tend to investigate further.

To include rhythm in your web design, you can repeat actual HTML texts, add images several times, use background-repeat property and repeat navigation elements of your design.

Unity

In design, unity is also termed as proximity. It is the method of keeping same elements together and keeping different elements apart. It provides cohesiveness to designs and is said to pull elements together. It is primarily achieved through layout placement but can also be accomplished with the use of padding and margining of the elements.

Unity can be implemented through adjusting the layout of elements, changing the text spacing and playing with the box properties to influence the padding and margins.

by: Hunter Blyth

Web Design Facts

2008-01-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

Fact 1: We can’t deny the fact that when browsers enter a site, they look for something that is relevant to their needs. If they ended in a particular site through advertisements, then they would expect to see something related to that ad.

Fact 2: On the other hand, when a search engine scans a site’s contents, it looks for contents which are useful enough for other sites to reference. It expects to locate a content that is consistent with the keywords.

Fact 3: Moreover, visitors who go to a shopping cart would expect to find photos with high quality, a variety of applicable views and lastly, a concise and clear description and costs. They also expect that the cart should work in all types of browsers.

But sad to say, some viewers do not find what they need in a website or sometimes they have a hard time going around the site. The following things should make you aware on the things why web sites fail.

One fact that web designers must know is that people wouldn’t enter your site unless they know their way around it.

Due to this concern, web designers must take into consideration that they need to conceptualize user friendly and easy to understand websites. For most customers or viewers, very extravagant design won’t matter as long as they don’t get lost in your site.

Your competitors are just a click away

When designing your web site, think very carefully on things that could give you a plus over your competitors. Think of the things that you can offer your customers in order for them to stay on your site and choose you above all else.

People hate slow websites

Designers must understand that searchers can be very impatient when surfing through sites in the Internet. Therefore, designers must find a way to minimize the slowness of websites and at the same time offer viewers with quality contents.

Searchers look for relevant information

Dr. Jim Jansen of Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology said, “A web site has to be relevant to a searchers needs. Otherwise, by the time three minutes have elapsed, 40 percent of searchers will have moved on. While some may have found what they wanted, others may simply have given up and move to a different site." When designing web pages, designers can’t help but become graphic artists with the aim to make your site look great but sometimes lacking in information. Therefore, remember that while it is important to make your site attractive, it is equally important to place in your site the information that visitors need.

Sites should have clear abstracts

The first thing that appears on the result page as an answer to a search engine query is the site’s abstract. The abstract explains everything about your site. According to a study done by Penn State, more users or searchers can be drawn to a site with the use of an abstract. That is if the abstract is informative enough and gives relevant and enticing information about the site. Dr. Jim Jansen said, "For site developers, if you want to be looked at, it is absolutely critical that the abstract be crystal clear about the purpose of your Web site."

by: Hunter Blyth

Web page buiding for beginners

2008-01-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Making a web page is a simple job that can be done in minutes by anyone with no previous experience, so I will refrain from going in that direction as much as possible. The first thing an inexperienced webmaster should learn is search engine optimization, before ever making a page. The reason for this is simply because if they learn it after the page is made, it will cause them too much extra work that could have been avoided.

Keywords are the basis of all optimization, and all pages should be named for at least one keyword the webmaster expects people to use when trying to find their page. If your last name is Dupuie and you want relatives to find your family reunion website, then Dupuie will definitely be a part of the page name. If each page is about a different relative then their first name can serve the twofold purpose of helping in the search engine optimization (SEO) and making it easier to find the page on your hard-drive at home, if you are using a page builder such as Microsoft Front Page. Finding a particular page can be difficult when searching for a particular page to change a picture or just fixing a link.

So let’s stick with a website used as a family reunion announcement and catchall, to keep the examples easy to understand. Depending on the server being used for the website (you do not have to understand that statement yet) you may be able to name a web page dupuie-ted-cousin-1982-picture.html but you may only be able to use the name dupuie-ted.html because some servers do not allow as many long names as others. Mostly this is with free web servers that already have long extensions. I personally like the use of free web hosting, but many of them have pop-ups or banners that deter from a decent business site. I still use them because SEO is dependent on links that come back to your site from other sites.

The title of your pages should reflect whatever you want the keywords to find in another person’s search for your site. If your pages are each named dupuie-family-reunion-michigan and each was also numbered, then I would expect you to be hoping for people to be searching for a family reunion that is in Michigan and is for the Dupuie family. Note that there is a hyphen between each word so the robots can read each word individually instead of them seeing dupuieted or dupuie_ted and thinking it is one word that does not exist. Also note that everything is written in small caps. This is essential, as much as the home page must be named index.html even though any other page can be called whatever you like.

Links back to your site are counted by search engine robots and they are very important to where your pages end up in the database that they use. Some sites will never be put in the database, so can never be found by a searcher. I own www.saquoyah.com as well as www.homewriters.com and www.free-diet.biz and writing this article is not only good for the reader, but also for the writer as it gives one more link back to the sites.

Some family sites have thousands of pages with each page linking back to the index page, and they will be your competitor if their last name is also Dupuie. This could leave your site back to 685 on Google or Yahoo or even out of the first 1000 or so that they put up on a search. It is also important to note that when you link out to other sites, you lose favor with the robots. What you want is many incoming links, and very little outgoing links.

This article can be copied and reprinted anywhere as long as it is intact and includes the author’s bio.

by: Ted Dupuie

Tips for a Successful Website for Any Organization, NGO or GO

2008-01-01T14:03:00.000-08:00

Most NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) don’t understand these important aspects of a successful website. Even many governmental organizations (GOs) could improve their sites by following these tips.

1. Everything should be viewed and evaluated with the eyes of the visitor: "What’s in for me" as the main benchmark for a successful website. That is pertaining to the copy and to the content what ever directed to members or non-members: "You will here find ...." is a better and more inviting statement at the home page, than: "We are the main organisation of ......"

2. Most visitors on the Internet are searching for information, so please provide them with that.

3. Concentrate content on themes, because that will give you an easier way to the attractive top search positions at the main search engines and to be included in some directories, (Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Open Directory, AltaVista etc.). Site-Build-It is probably the best approach to fulfil that requirement.

4. Make navigation easy and transparent on all pages.

5. Have a search facility, best on all pages. www.FreeFind.com offers a free and useful service. I use it on a number of websites, for example about photos: www.azfotos.com. In addition to the search facility for the visitor it gives you a record of what people have actually been searching for. In that way you can prioritise the stuff available for people on your website when you revise your pages. Google is also offering a search box, but only with the pages they have indexed, and you cannot get any record of the searches.

6. Try to organise the content of your website quite "flat", meaning the visitor does not have to dig too deep into your website to find what he/she is searching after. Most visitors will at best not go further deep than to the 3rd level. This is the same with "spidering" bots of search engines.

7. Have your contact information visible on your home page (first page), including address, phone, fax, email, may be even postal giro, bank account etc. - All to make it more easy for people to find the kind of information they need about your organisation. Avoid to write the email address, use a script to hide it from email harvesters and spammers.

8. Make it easy for visitors to find information on people, their phone numbers and email address and keep them updated. Do the same for departments of the organisation.

9. Keep each resource in only one place and make many links to them around on other pages.

10. Make it visible when you have provided new material at the website.

11. Make your website SIMPLE and quick loading. Avoid heavy graphics, flash movies etc. They will not help your visitors, but only help them click away. If you use graphics, you have to optimise them for the smallest amount of file size. GifBot, http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm, can do it free and online. Else use one of the picture editing programmes available with the function like ‘publish picture on the web’.

12. Keep your web copy short e.g. use a new paragraph for every 4th line. Make bullet points. files.

13. Manage to have at least your entrance page with a simple domain name, like www.iucn.org or www.ensi.org or www.nature.org.

14. It is not enough to have a good virtual address by having an intuitive domain name on the internet. You also have to be registered properly in search engines and directories. The best way is to have other important sites to link to your site. In some months your site will be picked up by the spiders of search engines. For the directories it is best to do it manually, start with dmoz.org and yahoo.com

15. Make it easy for people to link to you. Provide them with a variety of text links, banners and logos and with simple instructions concerning the html code.

16. Encourage visitors to bookmark your site.

17. Exchange links with other relevant organisations. Include your important key words in your link text you ask them to use.

Implement these 17 tips and in half a year you will have many more visitors and they will be much more happy to come back to your organization’s website.

by: Soren Breiting

Making your Website look Like a Butterfly

2008-01-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

A well designed web-site is like a butterfly , it is beautiful and you have an irresistible urge to watch it, check it out see if you can fathom its meaning.. That is your goal in building a website.

You have to come as close as you can to creating that feeling when potential customers look at your first page , you want, you need to have them take a good hard look at your site.

So Sarah , How do I do that ? Well I am going to go over the basic but I also Have free resource you can just pop an email to me with he subject title Web Mastery and will Send you a free E-book that goes into a fair amount of detail on how and what you need to accomplish but the basics are here.

Before you get started you have several tasks and items to procure or obtain, you will need a

· Domain name
· Hosting company
· Either a WYSIWYG editor
· or An all in one package such as bravenet.com
· A course on HTML
· Decide if you are going to build your site your self

Once you have decided on these very basic first issues you then have to decide on how your ste4 will be built as a minin site one or two pages , A content site like this one about ten pages or a full fledged affiliate site with multiple tens of pages.

Then what is your niche? what appeals to your customer base - this is when you need to do lots and lots of research to get it clear in your mind as to what will best suit your market niche.

On Items 1-6 I would recommended that you bite the bullet and really learn how to build a website - that means you buy a product like FrontPage or XsitePro and you use the WYSIWIG editior (what you see is waht you get) If you are going to be in this business then be in it and take the time and invest the energy to learn at the very least how to build a site

IF you select either package you do not need any sort of html editor, it is built in to the e package as far as cost goes XsitePro is approx 249.00 I purchased my copy of front page form surplussoftware.com for 89.00 I have seen it as low as 59.00

I purchased a Book from Barnes and Nobel that came with a great cd tutorial for 24.95 so I could have been building my site for approx 85.00 not bad.

Now you need to buy a domain name and I strongly suggest you buy it from or through your hosting company- if not you will be stuck for 60 days before you can transfer the name to another host company , A really good hosting company is hosting revolution - Their 20..00 per year plan is more than adequate to get you u and to run your first several sites.

The first thing to remember is that your website is a reflection of who you are and your target market. Before you can begin the process of building a website you will need to get a registered domain name and a host company to put your site on the internet. You then have to decide how you will accomplish the sometimes arduous task of constructing the site.

Something you should be aware of because I was not when I started this process. I purchased domain names from one provider who will call Company A, (I shopped for low price) I repeated the process of looking for a low priced alternative for hosting. We will call them company B.

I then tried to transfer my new domain names from company A to company B. Well they tried for several days to accomplish the transfer and they were repeatedly told the domains were locked by myself and I spent several very frustrating days working with Company A to transfer the domains. Then I found out that when you first buy or renew a domain name with a specific registrar the domain has to stay with them for sixty days.

If someone had been able to inform me of that before I shopped for the best price and thinking just how intelligent I was then I would have saved myself over two weeks of working on nothing but the transfer of these names.

That's how I did it the first time My total investment was less than 150.00 and I built my first site with FrontPage and the tutorial.

by: Sarah Anne Thompson

Create a High-Quality Website – Quickly!

2008-01-01T13:58:00.000-08:00

If you are a business owner and want to expand your clientele and market-share, and create a place where potential and current customers can go to learn more about your company and easily find contact information, what you need is a website. If you are a small start-up looking to begin an online venture, you need a website. And most likely, you want to achieve your business goals within a reasonable timeframe and for a reasonable price, without skimping on quality. After all, you need more than just visitors to your website. A successful business requires visitors who turn into paying, repeat customers and trust your company. The best way to do this (in addition to offering a quality product or service) is by producing a professional website.

In the past, online businesses were given little choice when it came to creating a high quality website. You could either hire an expensive professional web designer or web design company to make the entire site for you or you could produce the website on your own. The first choice would cost you big bucks – anywhere between $50 and $200 for only one web page! The second option required at least a small knowledge of HTML and design elements as well as a large chunk of your time – something most business owners don’t have.

Luckily the times have changed and web entrepreneurs have a lot more choice when it comes to creating a professional website with or without all the bells and whistles (depending on the type of site you plan on having). In fact, a growing trend in website design is the use of ready-made website templates.

What exactly is a template?

Website templates are basically ready-made web pages that you can download from a template design company. The HTML code is ready to go – all you have to do is choose a template that suits your business and customer base, download it and then edit according to your specifications. Most companies showcase all the available designs on their site for you to preview before downloading, so you’ll know exactly what you are buying beforehand.

A website template is almost like a hybrid creation, perfect for online businesses because it is so flexible. With a template you have the best of both worlds – the professional image and functionality that normally come from a website designed by a hired designer coupled with the affordability and flexibility of a DIY web design project. One such website template company that offers reasonably priced, quality templates is http://templatedogma.com/.

Once you have the basic design in your hands, editing is a cinch. Editing involves adding your own content, logos, pictures, graphics and more to the template to make it unique. Keep in mind that a template will not usually come with ready-made content or other features, as this is something that must be created afterwards. Good website templates can be edited with a variety of popular HTML editors, so make sure you purchase website templates that mention the editing programs with which the templates are compatible. Search for website templates that can be edited using software such as DreamWeaver, FrontPage, GoLive and Photoshop. Most people either already know how to use these simple, user-friendly editors or can learn very quickly.

Another option is to have someone edit the template for you. If you really have no clue when it comes to web design, even with a prepared template, most website template companies also offer a custom design service. This keeps the cost down, which is the main benefit of utilizing a template in the first place, while still letting you enjoy the perk of having someone else do the editing.

The Price is Nice

Arguably, the most popular selling point of website templates is the price. For as low as $20-$40 you can purchase a template that looks just as good or better than a “professionally” designed site costing you much more. Many web designers charge thousands of dollars for website creation that simply isn’t that good. And working with a designer takes a lot more time – hence the hefty price tag. You have to work back and forth over a period of several weeks just to come up with a design that works best for your company. Website templates are much more cost-effective to produce, which is how the prices are kept so low. And of course, you save time as well as money. You can literally have a website up and running – earning you revenue - within a few days or less. Website templates make setting up your online business as easy and efficient as possible.

Flash Websites

What if you require more than a simple, straightforward website? Perhaps you want a flash-based design for your site? No problem – flash website templates can also be purchased for a decent price without sacrificing quality, simplicity and usability. Many template designers offer a wide range of template styles, so don’t fret if you require something a little more complicated than the average website. Website template designers offer the consumer a lot of choice, making it easy to create a website that will work for your business.

In addition, businesses that want to buy a template no other website will use in the future (a unique site) should purchase a copyrighted template. When you opt for a copyrighted template you receive all rights to the site design and can be sure it will not be re-sold to another business. On the other hand, the rights of non-copyrighted templates remain with the template company, and as a result, anyone can buy the same one. If this won’t interfere with your business buy non-copyrighted templates and save some money, but if you want an entirely unique site, spend a little more for a copyrighted site that won’t be found anywhere else on the web.

Whatever you decide to choose, website templates are the future of web design. You can’t go wrong – nothing could be more cost-effective or simple.

by: Andrew Maidla

Working with Shockwave and Flash

2008-01-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Many website designers now take advantage of Shockwave and Flash to add multimedia effects, such as animation with sound, to their websites. Both Shockwave and Flash are Macromedia technologies that let web designers add multimedia elements to web pages. Shockwave movies are the resulting files exported from Macromedia Director that display animation, special effects, and other types of applications for the web. Flash movies are animations and other types of interactive web elements exported from Macromedia Flash.

-Web designers add Shockwave and Flash files to web pages for several reasons, including to make web pages more interesting and interactive, to add colourful navigational components, to enhance a site visually with animation, multimedia, and special effects, and to add more complex components such as online games.

-Most Shockwave and Flash movies require a special plug in that is easy to obtain since many browsers and operating systems include the plug in. You can also export Flash and Shockwave movies such as Java, which does not need a plug in to view.

-Although they are similar in some features regarding multimedia, Shockwave and Flash do differ in several important ways. Director Shockwave Internet Studio is a full featured multimedia authoring program that lets you create business presentations, cd-rom/dvd-rom works, games, and other interactive applications, in addition to web content. Flash's main focus is multimedia animation for the web and is easier to learn than director.

-Flash and Shockwave offer web site designers many advantages, such as they both make web sites more interesting and interactive, both offer versatility, as well as cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. Although some Flash and Shockwave movies require a plug in, Flash and Shockwave offer options for playback without a plug-in that you can export as Java. Flash has a short learning curve and you do not need to do any programming to create Flash movies. Flash movies offer streaming content for fast downloads. Flash and Shockwaves disadvantages include their requirement of a plug in for viewing, possible long download time for some Shockwave movies, Macromedia Director's high learning curve, and difficulties editing Flash movies with large amounts of text.

-To create and add a Shockwave movie to a web page, you need to obtain the necessary artwork for your project (whether it may be using clip media or creating your own artwork), create your Shockwave movie using Macromedia Director, export the file to the proper Shockwave format, and embed the resulting file into an html file to view with a browser.

-To create and add a Flash movie to a web page, you need to obtain the necessary artwork for your project (whether it may be using clip media or creating your own artwork), create your Flash movie using Macromedia Flash or freeware equivalent, export the file to the proper Flash format, and copy the code Flash generates to embed the resulting file into an html file to view with a browser.

-Adding Flash and Shockwave movies to a web page is relatively easy, but some knowledge of Lingo programming concepts may be required for Shockwave's advanced techniques.

Now, go forth and CREATE!

by: Mike Adley

Why Flash?

2008-01-01T13:46:00.000-08:00

Many possible technologies exist that can power web based games. Php, HTML, CGI and Java amongst them, but the most common plugin used to design browser games by far is Adobe Flash, previously known as Macromedia Flash. One of the biggest reasons for this is that Flash has become a definite web standard.

Many PCs come with the Flash player installed. It is compatible with Linux, Apple Mac, BSD, cellphones, PDAs and a whole host of other devices. Over 520 million unique installations of Flash have been recorded, and it has been around since the days of Windows 98. This statistic accounts for approximately 95% of all Internet users.

Flash Player is also a free download, so if the user does not have it, it's only a few seconds and negligible bandwidth away, no matter the platform. Likewise, Adobe Flash is a comparably cheap product for the developers, and time input required is minimal to create simple games, compared to using other technologies.

A powerful but often overlooked feature of Flash is that it makes small files. For ten megabytes, in Flash, you can get a full featured game. This helps Flash to appeal to dialup or slower broadband users where Java or C couldn't. Flash can also use database connectivity to save scoreboards, progress and account details, which is rare in a format so smooth.

Flash is efficient, applets made in it tend to run on computers that you'd be hard-pressed to find outside of an antique shop. It is the empowering technology of choice on a certain well-known pet site, which almost certainly has users on dialup and on poor computers.

Something to remember is that Browser Games have a completely different TA (target audience) than that of AAA list games. Browser games are made for the casual player, someone who wants to play immediately and at his/her convenience, as such it must load fast, play fast and keep the user's interest. Developing a successful Flash game is very difficult, because generally if a user becomes disinterested, one or two clicks will take him/her to a completely different game.

So, what about monetizing a Flash game? Well, the standard is based on the shareware model. You have a teaser version of a game on a website and then allow users to download a 'Deluxe' build for a set fee. Often the producer will allow lots of sites to list their 'teaser' games; this is a clever form of viral marketing.

Possibly the most solid reason to use Flash is that it would always be fairly easy to find people willing to draw in the Flash SWF vector format. Other technologies would require external animation but with Flash, the motion, the drawing and the script can all be done in a single interface.

Graphical objects within this interface can have specified alpha values, positionings, angles of rotation, explosion effects and many built in motion tweening effects. It is this versatility and built in function that makes it a real joy to work with.

Flash is fast-becoming the only standard for browser based gaming, because it requires no real programming knowledge. The scripting language is very well explained on several websites, and in the included tutorials.

But the main reason? Simple. There are many very dedicated sites out there which will effectively get your product out for free. Even if all the other points in this article didn't exist, it is the only format with true open distribution.

by: Jonathan White

Applying Flash to your Web Site

2008-01-01T13:43:00.000-08:00

Nowadays, Flash design is a very common thing used throughout the World Wide Web. From all the moving ad banners and little video clips to animations and presentations, most of these great features are created with Flash. Of course using Macromedia Flash has its advantages and set backs, but I think we can all agree that it is an effective and simple program.

When using Flash, designers are capable of adding music, sound effects and motion to their webpage HTML sites. Also, using flash permits you to have greater interactivity with your public, which they usually enjoy. This software can simply be used to add specific features such as animations and presentations to your HTML website or it can be used to design an entire interactive webpage. The various things a web designer can pull off with Flash is virtual limitless.

But like I said before, Flash has its advantages and disadvantages. The following listing will give you a few facts and tips about applying Flash to your site that you may find helpful.

1. Flash can capture the attention of the general public very well and can leave a great first impression for your business.

2. Flash can be used to create and design countless features.

3. Sounds, music, animations, etc. can be integrated within your page to better explain your product or business in a interesting and interactive manner.

4. Flash can give an impression of professionalism to your clients, giving your page a look that your site is up to date on technology.

5. Studies show that a ratio of 95% of internet users are capable of viewing Flash features, leaving only a small percentage of the population that cannot.

Although all of this sounds very tempting, applying Flash also involves more work. Websites involving Flash features require extensive planning and programming. But in the end, if your website is designed beautifully using Macromedia Flash, you won’t regret it.

by: Brian Lee

Is FLASH Appropriate in a Business Web Site?

2008-01-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

by: David West

The short answer is maybe. The long answer is that the question might be better asked, “Is a 100% FLASH web site appropriate in business?.” The answer to this question, in my humble opinion is, absolutely not. In fact, we have had several clients come to us this year who have 100% Flash web sites that are going to completely remake their web sites because they simply do not work for them. They are having issues with search engines and with clients who can’t see their web sites.

Of course, they do work in terms of visuals. If you visit a Flash web site you will see it. Just because a visitor can see the web site doesn’t automatically mean that the web site is working for your business.

What is Flash?

Flash is technology developed by Macromedia, a leader in web development tools. Flash movies are a compilation of many images, elements and text that is then compiled into a nice, tight little digital file that then gets put on the internet. Some designers build entire web sites using this technology. Graphic designers quite like the technology because it gives them a great opportunity to show how talented they are by developing interactive, moving, and quite honestly some very entertaining web sites. Remember though that the purpose for your business web site is to communicate with your existing and prospective clients, not to show everyone what a talented designer you hired.

What is Flash Good For?

Flash is great as an add-on element for some graphic components of a business web site. Recently the ability for web masters to compile digital audio and video into flash movies has been simplified and using flash to stream a video is a great example of a perfect use for Flash in a business web site.

Another example of where Flash is well used and well received is on web sites that are about presentation and not information. For example a rock band, kids web sites with little games, a photo gallery, a movie clip are all places where Flash is particularly well suited.

Does Flash have a place on the internet? Absolutely it does, but as a web site purchaser though, you have to ask yourself the question, “does Flash have a place on my business web site?”

Can Everyone See Flash

The short answer is no. Although widely available and a component of most web browsers when they are installed, not everyone has flash installed with their web browser. If a visitor who does not have a flash plug-in on their PC visits a site that requires the Flash plug-in, their web browser will prompt them to install it. PC and web savvy visitors will likely go ahead and do it, but some users (like my mother) panic if a pop-up window asks a question and they walk away, or surf away, thinking they just infected their PC with the latest doomsday virus. All of that said, a large percentage of people can see Flash without too much anxiety.

Things to Consider

The Intro Flash Splash

Flash is commonly used for “splash” pages or “entry pages” into web sites. We have all seen them, the animated movie or commercial that leads us into a more traditional marketing web site. Have you ever wondered why the Flash designer almost always places a “skip intro” link on this page? I believe it’s because they know that if they don’t allow people to skip the Flash splash screen that they are going to lose the visitor. Remember that most internet surfers are impatient and they are usually looking for information, not another commercial. Get people to your main web page and do it fast.

The trend of using ‘splash’ pages has declined in the past couple of years as the internet has matured. It is my belief, and widely shared, that if your web site is about good information, then an entry screen is just a road block to your visitors.

The Search Engine

Search engines send out automated robots called “spiders” that crawl through the internet and create massive databases of web pages. People then search for web pages based on key words that are embedded in to the web page in hidden tags as well as in the text that is on the web page itself. If it is important to you that people find your web site then it is important to you to create well written text and links on your web pages that the search engines can find, read and follow. Search engines can not see the text in a Flash page. Search engines can not see hyper-links on flash pages and therefore can not follow the links. Your web page will not seem very important to most search engines because to a search engine your web site will consist of one page and the only relevant information that the search engine will see is your meta-tags if they exist.

Having said all of that, there are arguably ways to get a Flash site indexed and catalogued by a search engine. It simply is not the easiest thing to do and you will likely require a Search Engine Optimization specialist to assist you.

Reciprocal Linking

If you are kind enough to put links on your web site for other web sites then you are providing them with a “vote of confidence” in terms of search engine rankings. The more web sites that link to a web site, in the eyes of the search engine, makes the linked web site more important. Taking that a step further, the more important the web site that links to you the higher the potential ranking your site will get. Likewise sites that provide you with a reciprocal link are in effect giving you their “vote of confidence” and in turn making your web site more important.

Remember what I said earlier? Search engines can not see hyper-links when they are embedded into flash. So although the links are appreciated they will not contribute to the search engines perception of how valuable your web site may be to the world and as a result all those “votes of confidence” are going to waste.

Make sure that people who provide you with a link from their web site to your is not embedded into a flash page. Links should be in pure HTML or Hyper-Text MarkUp Language. If you provide links to other web sites on your site, the same applies to you, use HTML.

Don’t Break my Back Button

Web-browsers all have a back button. As software users, and more specifically as web surfers, we use the back button as a matter of course. It is a good practice as a web developer to not ‘break the back button’. Unfortunately because of the nature of Flash, the back button doesn’t work for backward navigation in the flash web site.

Create a Bookmark if You Can

People like to bookmark pages on the internet so that they can quickly return to them later on. Web surfers do not always bookmark the index page, or the main page, of a web site. For example if you site has a nifty currency converter or a great mortgage calculator on it, people may simply want to bookmark just that page. You can not bookmark an internal page within a Flash site. You can only bookmark the main page. Try it. Visit a 100% Flash web site, surf around a bit, then try to bookmark the page you are looking at. It doesn’t work, because you literally haven’t changed pages from when you first arrived at the site, you have simply “played the animation” which made it appear as though you went to different pages.

Cost

The cost to develop a traditional marketing web site using standard design graphic, HTML and text is in most cases less expensive than using Flash. If you designer proposes to use Flash, ask the question, “how much would it cost to do the same thing without flash?”.

Making Revisions and Updates

If you have your web site built 100% in Flash, you have subscribed to a certain skill-set in your designer. If you want to make revisions you will always need to use someone who can work within Flash. The same theory applies if your web site is images, HTML and text. The distinct difference is that there are far more web masters that work with the later than in Flash. It also typically will take longer to make revisions to Flash sites and as a result your cost of maintenance can be quite steep.

The Source Files

Flash source files are the heart of a flash movie, element or web site. The file will be names something like mywebsite.FLA. This is the native un-compiled source file for a Flash file. Once the designer is ready to deploy the Flash to the web server the file is compiled into a different format. The compiled file in our example would be called mywebsite.SWF.

So to clarify, the original artwork and design is worked on in the .FLA format and the final file that goes on the web server is .SWF.

I see it time and time again where the designer does not provide the client with the source file for their flash elements or web site. They protect the .FLA files, and guess what, you have to go to them for updates and revisions. It does not matter how talented your new web master or designer is, if you do not have the source file with the .FLA extension for your Flash site you will not be able to update it. You should ask your designer to provide you with this source file if you decide to use Flash elements on your web site.

A Final Note On Flash

Please do not interpret my remarks here as me being “anti-flash” the fact is, it really is a great media technology. If you have the budget and want to develop your web site using 100% pure flash, there are some things you can do to mitigate some of the pitfalls that I have described here.

Use a javascript to detect the browser capabilities of the visitor and ensure that they have Flash plug-in to support the Flash on your site. If the result of this simple test is ‘no they do not support Flash’ then the right thing to do is direct them to an alternative HTML based web site with your content. So, although you can overcome the missing Flash plug-in you have to have two web sites designed (the Flash one and the HTML one).

In Summary

Flash is a great design tool to add elements to your website to ‘spice it up’.

Flash is great for delivering rich media like audio and video.

Use the theory, add flash to your web page, don’t add your web page to flash and you will deliver a great experience to your visitors.

If your web site is about delivering information, make the information first and the design second. Web sites that provide great content do not need to wiggle, giggle, blink, click and buzz.

Why use Content Management

2007-12-30T15:01:00.000-08:00

Content management, broadly defined, covers everything from a legal pad to a library to YouTube — all the many ways of organizing information to make it useful. The rise of computing and the Internet, in particular, have brought forth vast new quantities of information as well as new ways of sharing and managing it.

What are content management systems?

By content management system (CMS), we mean software that enables users to organize, store, search, and retrieve different kinds of information online. The information can exist in varied formats — straight text or hyperlinks, sound files or graphics, videos or flash animations — and the online delivery platforms can include Web pages, blogs, wikis, videos, social media and other online outlets.

Managing a static Web page and a blog or two is pretty easy. But companies today have opportunities to leverage their knowledge much more effectively, and to do so they require more robust systems to create and manage content — continuously, at any time, as the organization changes.
Knowledge lies within

How can a company get great timely content onto its sites? One of the best ways is by tapping the experience and wisdom of employees. A business leverages that human capital when it enables employees to create content and publish it directly.

A well-designed CMS permits virtually anyone to manage online content in ways that once required advanced design and technical skills. This distributed content creation is something new in business, allowing companies to enlist wider layers of employees in developing and publishing information. Some examples:

• After a new product gets the green light, the project manager uses a CMS to publish the news on the company’s Web sites. In a matter of minutes he uploads a press release, screen shots, products sheets and a video, and then updates the company’s pay-per-click ads.

• A company wins a big contract on the eve of a trade show. The marketing director writes an article, posts it to the Web site, and runs down his CMS list. With a few keystrokes he changes an obsolete phone number on one page, adds an address field to another, updates a graphic elsewhere, and even sends the news article out for translation to French and Spanish.

• “Hello, IT? Is there a mistake here?” The east-coast plant manager says he’ll run short of frames if his scheduler follows the online manual. Other plants will be calling tomorrow — but the programmers rewrite a sentence and post the revision. Notifications and version control flags flow automatically, and production lines keep humming.

• The new-hire admin in HR knows Word but no HTML. On his first day, he uses a CMS to build a Web site for the blood drive — a multipager with graphics and flash, drop-downs and forms, a video from the CEO. And with his knowledge of Word, he gives the site a noticeably professional look.

What these employees have in common is the ability to strengthen their companies’ online impact quickly and directly. Some work internally, others externally, but in each case the content they post draws visitors, directly and through search engines. And these visitors use the content they find to advance the company’s goals.

Fresh content is king — just ask Google

The companies that leverage the Web most effectively are those that maintain dynamic, up-to-date content on their sites. One of the main reasons is that such content attracts search engines. Google, for example, publicizes its preference for informational sites over commercial ones.

That doesn’t mean a Web site can’t be used for advertising. But in addition to short, sharp taglines and ad copy, companies should include substantive content — white papers, FAQs, knowledge-base articles, and so on — that give the site an informational character.

And it’s not enough to fill a site with information and then leave it alone. Search engines also favor freshness. Google knows its search customers want relevance and currency, so its search algorithms assign higher rank to pages and sites whose content is frequently updated. In addition, sites with fresh content are more likely to grow link partnerships with other sites.

The benefits of a content management system

More timely and effective communication. It’s a universal best practice in business. Give employees clear instructions and they’ll perform tasks more efficiently. Focus sales force messaging, and sales will begin to align more closely with strategy. Target an audience closely, and the marketing machine will find, pitch and convert more customers.

Increased search engine traffic. Content is search-friendly, because search engines rank sites to satisfy their own customers — searchers who prize fresh content over marketing claims.

Stronger collaboration. Building a culture where employees truly share knowledge is a big undertaking, and every company that embarks upon it finds out that sharing generates content. To reap benefits, this content must be easily accessible to those who need it.

Reduced disruption from employee churn. By systematizing and diffusing individual knowledge, a CMS helps to minimize the effects of employee comings and goings.

Reduced costs. A CMS can free up IT resources from maintaining Web content. It’s not longer necessary to devote skilled, $70,000-a-year employees to writing routine HTML, sizing graphics, cutting and pasting, creating standard forms, and reporting site statistics.

What to look for in a CMS

Many Web products advertise “content management” features, but sometimes these amount to little more than marketing claims. A company’s first look at any CMS should focus on three areas that combine into a true system:

Ease of use. Is the interface unique, or does it correspond to widespread standards? To put employees to work creating content, not learning new formatting rules, go for convention. If the CMS offers a variety of templates and an intuitive, what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface — especially one based on Microsoft Office — anyone can access familiar tools easily. This gives every employee the comfort of knowing they too can create new content with some typing and a few clicks.

Functionality. A CSM should let users manage different media — text, images, flash animation, sound, video. And look for functional site tags, so users can easily create interactive Web pages with drop-down menus, forms for gathering information, and online transactions. Adding passwords, search, print, rating and discussion functions to a page should be easy, and language conversion should be built in. Don’t forget stats and path analysis, the more granular the better, so you can understand how visitors use the site.

Integration and scalability. A CMS should let users easily link content and features on the same site and elsewhere. And it should integrate readily with key business processes in marketing (including pay-per-click campaigns), sales, accounting and operations. But robust doesn’t mean all or nothing. The best CMS designs are modular, allowing a company to grow its online presence — adding video features, for example — on its own schedule.

Key elements in a CMS implementation

Nail the business case first. Content management systems share some basic principles, but they are far from identical. Every business is unique, so understand your goals and expectations. How will you measure progress and define success?

Define the stages. Universities devote whole curricula to content management. For an online CMS, these are the basic stages:

Workflow: business rules, procedures, ownership Creation: authoring responsibilities, single-source tools, editing Storage: file systems, version control, access rights, archives Publishing: channels, personalization, usability testing

Manage change. Hidden knowledge is an orphan, but transparency raises new issues of ownership — not to mention review processes, security and access. Audit trails become more important: Who touched what, when? You’re not just training people on a system, but on business processes, thus increasing productivity and business profitability.

What about IT?

Some IT organizations are mired in busy work — creating and recreating similar forms, translating press releases and documentation updates into HTML — and they will welcome technology that frees them up for core missions of systems support, security, and delivery of business intelligence.

But a robust CMS can meet resistance in some shops— especially when it succeeds, and management begins to apply it more widely. Before long a new administrative assistant is creating and managing multiple and complex Web portals, and an IT fiefdom may be threatened.

Content management isn’t an alternative to IT. Rather, it’s a powerful tool for employees in marketing, corporate communications, accounting, and virtually every other function — including IT. A well-designed, properly implemented CMS helps each department organize, exploit and share the full depth of its knowledge, thus strengthening its contribution to the company’s forward progress.

A well-implemented CMS improves IT productivity. At the most basic level, it helps IT employees focus on operational reporting and business intelligence instead of content management and HTML generation. It helps this critical department rise to its strategic task of enabling business, rather than creating, supporting and hoarding complex systems that have been rendered obsolete.

If you’d like to know more about content management, and how your business might benefit from it, InterScape Inc. has the experience and expertise to show you the ropes and provide CMS solutions with the Knovial Platform. 1-866-DEV-7766 or visit us at http://www.knovial.com.

by MATT FRANCIS

Preplanning Your Website, The Secret To Success

2007-12-30T14:38:00.000-08:00

Before you start to design a website you need to do some checking and planning so that your site will meet both your needs and the needs of your visitors. I've known several people who put together a website, and within a month or two had to do major redesigns and rewriting of the copy. They wound up spending twice as much time as was necessary just because they didn't preplan. I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of time.

First, you need to decide who your target market is. Will your site be geared toward kids, adults, business executives or some other group? It's essential that you know this so you can design a site that will not only meet the specific needs of that groups, but will look right for them. You wouldn't show secretaries and business meetings on a kid's site any more than you'd show clowns and cartoons on a business site. A site must have the proper look to make your visitors feel welcome. Kids want to have fun, be entertained and have the needs of their high-energy lifestyle met. Business executives will want a site that looks professional, knowledgeable and be a source of information that will help them advance in their company. So knowing the needs and expectations of your clients will let you create a site with the proper layout, graphics, features and services.

by JEFF COLBURN

I'm in the process of redesigning the website design portion of my site for this same reason. I'm going after clients in a very specific market sector, so I'm creating new graphics, website templates and changing the copy on my site to be more focused on this group. The whole process may take a couple of months, but it will be worth it.

You also need to consider how your visitors access the Internet. Are they using high-speed or dial-up connections? This will let you know how graphic intensive your site can be.

I've read a variety of surveys on this topic, and no one puts the number of high-speed users in the United States above 52%. I know people who live in housing tracks of multi-million dollar homes who can get only dial-up because the high-speed companies don't provide service in their area. So don't assume that because your clients have money that they have high-speed connections. If they are located in major cities, they may well have high-speed, but if they're in smaller towns or in the suburbs, they may only be able to get the slower dial-up service.

Try and find out how experienced your clients are with computers and the Internet. The more experienced they are the more complex your site can be. However, I always recommend that a site be designed for the lower end of your user group. So I feel a site should be easy to use and load quickly for people who have dial-up connections and minimal computer experience. By minimal computer experience, I mean don't create a site that requires people to locate and install the latest version of some software program, or make them hunt down a codex.

Next you need to decide what you want the site to do for you. Do you want to sell things on your site, have potential clients call you, sell a subscription to a service you offer? Whatever it is you want the site to do, have a very clear picture in your mind as everything you do will be focused on this. You can take a tip from scriptwriters. Every script must be able to be expressed in a Log Line, a one-sentence description that explains the entire script. If you can't do this with your site, then you don't have a clear enough picture of what you want from your site. When you write out your Log Line don't cheat by making a sentence that's a page long. Just one, short sentence.

Another thing to consider is if you will be offering a service to your visitors that is time consuming for you. If this is the case you should try to find a way to automate it to make things easier for you.

On my site, I have forms that people fill out to send me information about their upcoming events. I have these forms set up so the information is in the sequence I want, and a format that makes it easy for me to add them to my site. For more complex items, you may want to have information go directly to a database. The only problem with using a database is that they must be done just right in order to work properly. If you have this outsourced, it could easily add $10,000 to $20,000 to the cost of your website creation, even for the simplest database.

If you have articles on your site that you want people to use, set up an autoresponder for each article. Then, if someone wants the article they click on a link and the article is automatically sent to them. This saves you the time and hassle of sending out the articles one at a time whenever someone wants one.

Now that you have all of this information, break out the paper and pencil. What you need to do is design the layout of your site. Some website design programs, like Adobe GoLive, let you design the layout on your computer, but I prefer to do at least the first draft on paper. As you decide where each page will go, and what other pages it will be connected to, remember all the information about your users. Be sure everything is easy to find, and don't make them drill too deep into your site to find things. I strongly recommend that you design your site so that any page can be reached with no more than three clicks. Making a user do more work than this will result in a lot of lost clients. Always make everything as easy as possible for the user, even at your own expense.

I know that doing all of this preplanning is tedious, especially when you're itching to start designing your site, but it's worth it. I hate wasting my time by going back and redesigning a site and redoing links because I started putting together a site without having all the pertinent facts. In the long run, this information will let you create a better site that will meet your needs, and the needs of your clients. This makes everyone happy and when everyone's happy your website will be a success.

Help Your Company Soar With Professional and Dynamic Web Site

2007-12-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

In today's cyber era, it is mandatory to have a professional website. Gone are the days when companies could choose not to make a website portal of their company. In recent times a customized official website is as important as registering your company. From large multi national giants to small time firms, every company has a registered official website.

Now, there are lots of factors that need to be acknowledged for a classic web site. Some of them are as follows:

The real motive for having a website

Are you a successful business firm? Or are you an independent businessman? Are you one of those college enthusiasts wanting a website to show off all your family photos? Now if you are part of a hardcore company, then the website must be official, informative and client-friendly. And in the case of informal fun websites there is no need not follow rigid rules and dictums.

Company symbol

If you are designing a website for your company, then it may have a company logo or emblem that marks your company. That emblem should be necessarily included in the official web portal. If you are handing the work to some web design company then see to it that all necessary contents and photographs are given to them beforehand. Even the choosing of a domain name can be in relation to the company logo.

The Number of WebPages

All the websites have a main home page, a contact us page and several link pages, it is for you to decide how many pages your company site should have in total. It is vital that your visitors get a fair idea of your firm and the business you conduct. For example if your company involves extensive market research, then a feed back column is essential.

Similar web sites

You may want to design a contemporary and dynamic website for your company, and for this purpose you may need to look at all the other competitive websites. A professional ecommerce solution group may need these types of vital pointers as it helps them understand your needs and demands so that they can work on a pattern that suits your unique taste. The selection of colors and shades that match with your ideas and your company may help the professional web design group to create an attractive and vibrant website, and in turn gives you the virtual advantage of having superior ecommerce packages.

To build a successful ecommerce web site design, you need a creative group that understands your company like the back of their hand, for developing an interactive, practical and professional web solution, it calls for great skill, efficient and attentive designers who are expert in creating classic web pages that boost your company sales and profits. These experts listen to all your ideas and manage to create a website that is highly professional yet interactive with the visitors. A web design company can literally make or break your business and success rates.

by Anne Catherine

Choosing Page Names For Your Web Site

2007-12-30T14:23:00.000-08:00

In this article I would like to comment how to choose web site page names to achieve best possible visitor's experience and search engine ranking.

Firstly one needs to understand the difference between static and dynamic URLs.

Dynamic Pages

Dynamic website page names are used to send variables to a script file in order to perform a task that usually generates dynamic results. Dynamic URLs always contain question mark that separates file name from sent variables. Example name "do.php?a=1&b=2" would pass variable a=2 and b=2 to "do.php" script file that generates some response.

Such technology is very useful for web designers but it down performs in search engine listings. Search engines prefer static URLs that are less likely to change over time.

Static Pages

To explain static page naming we are going to use two example URLs: "about.htm" and "about.php".

Classic example of a static page name consists of name and extension. Page name extension indicates technology ("htm" says that page uses HTML technology) or a programming language ("php" extension indicates that page was generated using PHP server side scripting) used.

Many consider that pages with extension other than "htm" or "html" are worth more than those with server side scripting language indicators (like PHP, ASP and others).

If you will try to search for "search engine optimization" in Google and look at domain names of first 20 web sites, you will notice that URLs with many extensions are present. This indicates that search engines don't really care about extension as long as the page represents useful information for the visitor.

Friendly URLs

Friendly URLs are static page names with no extension at all. Friendly page names are very useful to the user as they are easy to remember (E.g. help, shop, contact …). Page name extension that refers to scripting language/technology used in the page. Extension-less construction protects page names from becoming obsolete if different web technology is going to be used to generate / present them in the future. Such names can be achieved only using URL rewriting technology.

URL rewriting

Rewrite engine is a special service on the server that modifies URLs before they are processed by scripting language. It is used to convert dynamic page names to static ones:

Dynamic page:

index.php?page=news&item=34

Can be changed to static page:

news/34.html

Or simply

news/34

Rewrite engine is very helpful to maintain static page names for complex database driven websites, where parameters have to be sent to generate results. Dynamic pages are usually not cached by web browsers so by using rewrite technology to generate static pages one increases overall web site performance.

Apache web servers have built in component called "mod_rewrite" which allows setting up rewrite engine by uploading RegExp (Regular Expression) commands to ".htaccess" file. For those who use Windows IIS web servers - Free IconicIsapiRewrite plug-in can be installed to achieve URL rewriting.

by LINAS BARI

All You Wanted to Know About Proxies

2007-12-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

Though a common term in the computer age today, it needn’t bring out doubt in users. We all know what a proxy is, something that’s used instead of the real thing, especially when it comes to dubious deals where you send a proxy to carry out an intended act instead of the real person. Similarly in the world of servers, proxy servers are fast gaining popularity. A closed proxy can be accessed by limited people and permits using someone else's computer to conceal your identity and/or location. An open proxy refers to a proxy server that can be accessed by anyone who uses the Internet.

By and large, a proxy server permits users in a particular network group to accumulate and further internet services such as DNS or web pages. Consequently their bandwidth usage is lessened and controlled. In case of any open proxy, however, every user on the Internet can avail of this forwarding service.

The open proxies, also known as anonymous open proxies, allow users to hide their true IP address from the service they access. In fact the use of proxies has at times been intended to abuse or disrupt a service. This obviously includes breaking its terms of service or the law. For such reasons open proxies have been viewed as problematic from time to time. They have been under severe scrutiny because school children, as well as office staff have been known to use it time and again to access restricted sites during work hours.

The use of proxies can work to your advantage as it ensures that no one can take advantage of you in this visual world. This is very true in reference to users who use social forums on a daily basis. Users may be getting onto such sites to gain knowledge, learn about latest developments or also increase their social networking base, but there are always those who are on the prowl to find the vulnerable and easy targets. And just incase you’re targeted your life could be a mess. Your credit card accounts could be tampered with, someone would know all your details and you could be stalked or blackmailed and worse still you’d find yourself visiting sites and forums which you never have. You could even be made the next porn star. For your identity to be protected and enhancement of online security, the use of proxies works just fine. This permits you to access facebook, hotmail, youtube, and others without a worry. These may be popular as fun sites, but they also promote educational needs, helping you learn along the way or even have a secure social networking group you can depend on. Along the way you can make alliances that can assist you in getting a job, help make business or even make a friend. The opportunities are endless, as long as you keep yourself safe from prowlers.

A computer can be run on an open proxy server without the owner knowing this. This is possible because of misconfiguration of proxy software used in a particular computer. Malware, viruses, trojans or worms are all used for this purpose. Open proxies are slow, as slow as 14400 baud (14.4 kbit/s), or even below 300 baud. At times they could keep alternating between fast to slow every minute. PlanetLab proxies are quicker and were deliberately put in place for public use.

Despite the popularity of proxies, because of the controversies surrounding them, there are systems in place that don’t permit their usage everywhere. IRC networks routinely test client systems for identified open proxy types. Mail servers can be configured to routinely check mail senders for proxies with the help of proxycheck software. Mail servers can also consult various DNSBL servers that block spam. Such servers also list open proxies and help in blocking them.

Nevertheless, anonymous open proxies have also been hailed because they enhance ambiguity, in other words security when browsing the web or engaging in other internet services. The use of proxies conceals any users’ true IP address. This is a boon because your IP address can be used against you. It can help miscreants construe information about any user and accordingly hack into his/her computer. Open proxies are being looked upon as the next big thing when it comes to dodge efforts at Internet censorship by governments and concerned organizations. There are various web sites that make available updated lists of open proxies on an ongoing basis.

by BENICIO BROWN

Interesting Web Design Will Surely Make Your Business Shine

2007-12-29T14:55:00.000-08:00

If you are a serious online entrepreneur and want to have a website that sends the right message to the visitors, you must know that there are some web design techniques simply inappropriate for a business website. While search engines will not care about web design but people will show no interest if your website is indistinctive.

In order to magnetize traffic to your site you need to make websites that fulfills two common and important factors and they are: 1. Rich with useful content 2. Must be search engine friendly Beside these two factors there are several other factors that should not be underestimated. They may be of minor importance but even those factors of little importance will help you to achieve success just as vitamins are required of our cell metabolism in tiny amount and deficiency of even minor quantities or overdose may cause problems. There are many elements of web design that are harmful for a business website that needs to resolved. One of the worst web design techniques is to use Flash instead of text, which increases the size of the page, and it is not search engine friendly. Flash which has become a fashion and a common persuasion for the Webmaster does no good to all the websites except for few that are associated with music bands, movie sites and other sites. It is really astonishing to see business websites with flash that are useless. But if you are among the flash lover and you have a strong desire to have flash on your website, then create a non-Flash version. There is nothing worse than a website that uncomfortable to your eyes with a bunch of flashy banners, disagreeable small text, buttons and useless pictures.

A professional web design firm will not have a fashionable website but conceive a design a standard, classic design, with simple navigation and plain text on a white background in addition to these it will also let you know how a website will increase revenue, reduce expenses, bring more customers and so on. You will even find the graphics too are in perfect harmony with the content with proper ALT attributes.

Creating websites that are simple, logical and easy to use actually sell. Simplicity in web design should not by synonym with unpleasantness but it could be well-designed with other important benefits for instance fast to upload, easier to scan and navigate, quicker to design, build, redesign, maintain and they require less server space and bandwidth, less expensive and more traffics. Lastly it can be concluded that interesting web design will surely make your business shine.

by BRAD SMITH

Web Site Design & Development

2007-12-29T14:50:00.000-08:00

Do you crave for a rock solid web presence to promote your business aspirations? Have you ever realized what a quality web site can do for you? Well, designing a good website can do wonders for your company and you can reap the profits after that.

There are many web development and web site design companies that will convert your dreams into reality. These specialized companies offer a variety of solutions that are best suited to organizations across the world. In addition, these companies can help you to increase your market share and gain confidence and trust into this fierce growing market. You can also enjoy satisfying your clients to the best and gain monetary benefits in return.

Being a part of a quality web designing & development company, you can promote values of your business and can attract customers than better. Also, you will be able to find numerous competitors over the internet and you can match your pace with them. Therefore, a quality web design & development can be a true bless for a company striving to make its mark in this growing world.

Quality of a good web site design & development company A good web site design company can relish your dreams and you can achieve your dreams conveniently. A good web site design company before making a web site go through a series of activities to ensure your requirements and help you to realize what is needed and how the desired can be given to your ultimate customers. They will make sure that your website reflects a unique visual appeal, are cross-browser compatible, and search engine friendly.

A good web site design company possesses skilled professionals who hold a command on various techniques and software to construct a user friendly website conveniently. Also, you can add your creativity into the making of the website by providing your inputs in it. You can give you suggestions and ideas for the visualization and see what these professionals can do foe your requirements.

A good website design company also makes sure that your websites looks flexible, interoperable, and can retain its attraction for a long period of time. Websites are constructed in such a way that it provides the best benefits of the internet to the fullest and your company gets the maximum exposure to establish itself with its ultimate users. In short, a web design & development services have helped global organizations reap the benefits available on the Internet.

by EDITOR 123

Tips and Informational steps for seo oriented web design and web development

2007-12-29T14:47:00.000-08:00

This article tells you information about various tips and steps for seo oriented web design. After reading this article you would be able to find some of the best online solution for web design and seo services compatibility. Here is some important steps for seo oriened webdesign.

1. Quality Content - Search engine spiders, crawl the net to find - Content! website has information that owner want the spiders to see and include in their index. By the creation and publication of quality content, can give the search engines more reason to return. Anyone should be finding creative ways to get content noticed and viewed as well as finding creative ways to publish fresh content on a regular basis.

2. Images Size - Image size is another important thing to design a SEO Oriented website. Choose a shorter sized image whenever an image needed so it will not take more time to browse a website.

3. Meta Tags - Choose appropriate Title, Description and Keywords according to content of that web page.

4. Avoid Flash and JavaScript - Problem with the two technologies is that the spiders can't index through them because these take long time to browse a website. Avoid or limit use of these technologies.

5. Articles - Use article content that will not be similar with other website content. It will harmful for business purpose website.

6. Heading tags - Heading tags from H1 to Hn having importance, most of search engine spider can easily index content of web page that having appropriate heading tags.

7. Bold or Italic keyword - Choose important keyword or links or content of a page as bold or italic or emphasized. 8. Anchor tags - Choose anchor tag for particular outbound or inbound links from a web page.

9. Alt tag for image - Use alt tags and title tag for images that is like as description of a image.

10. Link Exchange - Back links are a popular way to increase your rankings fast in the search engines. There are two types of links in SEO Services in India

a) Reciprocal Link Exchange In reciprocal link Exchange if any one webmaster will give a link from his site to other site then other webmaster have a responsibility to give a back link from website link pages. Give a hypertext for links pages from web site's home page so links can be easily reciprocate from those links pages.

b) Non Reciprocal Link Exchange In Non Reciprocal link Exchange there is no need to give a link back to a site in response to his link.

by HARSH SHAURYA

Web Design Company India

2007-12-29T14:37:00.000-08:00

Ever thought why some websites look better, beautiful and more readable and why others do not? Well the difference lies in their design. Yes web design does play one of the main roles in making a website look good, legible, and therefore rank well in various search engines. At Mosaic we understand this importance and therefore the design and development team here works really hard to make designs for your website that not just look good to your eyes, but also to your customers' eyes as well.

Mosaic Services is a leading web design company in India, which has just the right diagnosis for all kinds of websites catering to different fields. Our design and development department is a group of highly skilled, creative and talented young professionals. They are qualified with the right attitude and aptitude required in making the perfect designs for each website. Together we make a successful web-design firm which has produced satisfactory results for each of our clients. With our new fangled ideas and unique sense of creativity, we have made substantial contributions in today's web design of India.

We do not adhere to age old designs. We believe that if we flog the horse dead, it would not lead to a livelier and vivacious website. Therefore, our endeavor remains to provide you with such web designs that would make your website not just stand apart, but also be reader friendly. Our designs have proven to be a paragon to other web design company in India. And not just India, we have been appreciated and imitated by people the world over. Our work and customer satisfaction is the proof of our work quality.

We believe that possessing the right skills and sense of design is a must for designing a website. Not all web design company in India can give you the design that fits with your kind of website. Having worked with a number of customers from diverse fields, we have gained hands on experience about the target customers, their likes and dislikes, their preferences and styles in various fields. Therefore we know exactly what your target customers would like and after a thorough analysis of your website and your customers' preferences, we come out with just the design that you are looking for.

When it's your website, you would not like to take chances. So trust the masters and get the best of web designs that would cut through the clutter and make its mark.

by RUCHIRA SHARMA

Designing A User Friendly Website

2007-12-29T13:57:00.000-08:00

Summary - Here are some points to be kept in mind while designing a website that easy to browse through and serves its ultimate purpose of providing information. Legibility.

Content is the king, this is not to be forgotten ever! Any user coming to your website is there to get some information. If that information is hard to get, user will leave your website and go to Google to find out an alternate source.

Legibility of text is one of the most important things to be kept in mind. Selection of appropriate font-size and keeping adequate contract between text and background are too things that should always be kept in mind while making a website template.

Some researchers even claim that restricting font size by using CSS (where the design specifies a fixed font size value) is another thing that irritates users who like to customize the font size as per their visibility preferences.

Always keeping target user segment in mind while deciding the font-size.

Standardize navigation
• Always distinguish hyperlinked text from normal body text. Don't forget to differentiate visited and unvisited links. • Include some of the key information-carrying terms in the anchor text itself to explain what users will find at the other end of the link. This will also aid in search engine optimization (SEO).
• Try to avoid opening pages in new windows. A lot of PC owners have their pop-ups blocked, while the ones who don't, feel lost when a new window opens.

Use of Media Elements

Flash and other media elements such as video, MP3 etc. should be used only when there is a need. Flash can be used to emphasize key information or better still to demonstrate some functionality. The latest version of Flash is has amazing features to add functionality to a website.

So, the idea is to use media elements sensible and if-and-when required. Despite such good intentions, most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won't recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.

Browser compatibility

This must be the most annoying task for a web designer. Although a lot of browser incompatibility issues have been taken care in past 2-3 years, but even now we see some minor disagreements between the leading web browsers.

You like it or not, web users choose to browse web on the browser of their choice. So rather than turning them away just because they use a different platform, it is a must to design a website that performs reasonable alike on major web browsers (IE and Firefox for sure)

Form Pages

Try to keep your forms short and to the point. Big forms, featuring too many unnecessary questions and options tend to irritate a user. Try top cut all the questions that are really not needed. For example, do you really to know the first and last names in separate text boxes? Get your website analyzed for FREE to know what additional functionalities can be added to it. If you already know what functionality the web site requires, request a FREE quote now to get a detailed proposal.

by RUCHIRA SHARMA

Benefits of Using Content Management Systems

2007-12-14T19:51:00.001-08:00

The entire life cycle of a document or multimedia file needs to be managed. This includes tasks such as storage, tracking of changes, archiving and clean up.

Content management systems can do all this and also offer:

Collaboration during content creation: This is often an extremely critical feature because there is plenty of scope for chaos during collaborative content development. It is useful to have a system that facilitates and simplifies the process by ensuring correct versioning and providing alerts to developers when content is changed.
Easy management of versions: The management of various versions of a file, from creation to publishing, with all the editing required during the workflow, can be daunting. With reliable content management software, the risk of the wrong version reaching the final stage is greatly reduced.
Access to mission-critical content: A good content management system ensures a business can access its mission-critical content whenever it needs to. This can increase the efficiency of the department or organisation that needs it.
Guaranteed publication to target audience: The system will ensure that the appropriate content is published to a location where the relevant audience can access it easily when required.
Security of sensitive information: A management system will help ensure that the information is available only to the appropriate audience. This ensures that sensitive internal information does not reside in public spaces. The content management system also provides the means for tracking any malicious activity.
Adherence to regulatory standards: In today’s regulatory environment, it is critical for a business to ensure compliance in every aspect. Content management systems can ensure that all documentation complies with the necessary criteria.

by SEGUN OSU

Content Management and Document Management Systems

2007-12-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

A content management system is an application that can be used to organise, publish and manage large amounts of content. This content can be images, documents, and other types of multimedia files.

Content management systems typically offer:
•#Ability to import and develop content
•#Control of different versions of files
•#Detection of system users and assignment of roles
•#Alerts for developers if the content is altered
•#Publication of relevant content to a specific storage area These systems are also intended to handle the logistics of collaborative document development.

Document management systems are one subset of content management systems. These can be used by organisations to trace and warehouse both electronic documentation and scanned versions of paper-based documents. These systems aim to simplify document retrieval, security, file management, archiving, distribution and workflow.

by SEGUN OSU

Custom Logo Design For Your Company

2007-12-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

Just open a new company & looking for custom logo design for your company. Just decide your budget as your logo is the most important thing for your company it's your corporate identity for your company the clients will remember your identity to your logo. Just simply check how many designers are working for your logo & are they experienced to do logos. It is the most critical component does your business. If you don't have good logo it's will not create a good mark over your customer’s minds. You should have a good idea in your mind for your custom logo design the logo should be simple; a complicated logo will fail to engage your audience. The logo should speak something for you it should engage the audience the logo should be able to talk with your customers & give a message about you to the company. The logo your are purchasing will be keeping the target audience & the kind of products you will serve to the customers. Also make sure that you don't have to change the logo more often than not, especially the startups companies should be very careful about the business. At the same time your should be able to change the logo if you are catering to different markets. The logo should be a memorable one for your customers it should be easy to remember and create a permanent mark in the minds of your customers. At the same time the logo should get customers to start thinking in terms of about your products or services that you offer. Colors play an important part in the logo design process make sure to choose your colors wisely & also do a good market research to make sure the styles does your industry uses. That will give you a good impetus for you to start with. A good versatility of your logo will pay you rich dividends for image. At the end of it make sure you get the require file formats for your logo to use both in web & print for your marketing purposes. At the end choosing the logo design firm is the important decision you have to make for you’re to choose. Before ordering look at the portfolio are you happy with the kind of logos they have done till now. Are they versatile in their designs, are the logos look good in web & print. Check the customer testimonials do they represent different industries. The prices of logos do they match your budget as logo design will be reasonably costly yet they should fulfill all your expectations as you are paying the money for your logo design.

Development of the Design

2007-12-14T19:34:00.000-08:00

Marketing tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, often through market research.

When it comes to advertising, the internet is the most preferred and the most powerful tool in marketing. The internet is considered to be an international market that offers a wide range of audiences locally and abroad.

The key success in marketing on the internet is the company’s website or web page. A website or webpage is where all the information and business transactions of a company are stored. But aside from that, a website must also be capable on attracting the right customers and clients. Website must be able attractive and user friendly, which is why internet marketing firms such as the OPTIMIND Technology Solutions’ Web development Singapore and Web design Singapore are here.

The OPTIMIND Technology Solutions is a company firm that specializes on internet marketing that offers clients Professional and User-friendly Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, Free .com, .org or .net domain name, Free website maintenance and Free web hosting with its Web development Singapore and Web design Singapore teams.

Web design Singapore team handles the website’s designs and concept. Web design Singapore team first analyzes the company’s profile, on what kind of company it is, or what the company handles. The Web design Singapore team then creates or designs an appropriate design of the website that can surely attract its target audience.

Web Web development Singapore team handles the website’s programming and system that can be very a helpful way on minimizing a company’s business transactions. Web development Singapore team first makes a feasibility study of the way a company does its business transactions. Then after much observation and research, the Web development Singapore team will then develop a web system that can surely make the business transactions more easily for the client and for the company.

With the combined talents of Web development Singapore and Web design Singapore teams, a website can become more than an advertisement but it can also become a stand alone company that can handle the day to day business transactions.

For more information about the Web development Singapore and Web design Singapore teams of OPTIMIND Technology Solutions, then visit www.myoptimind.com.

by CHRISTINE LAYUG

Site Build It Review: Does It Live Up To Expectation?

2007-12-14T19:33:00.001-08:00

One route to take is to pick up some webpage building software such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver and learn how to put webpages together. There can be a steep learning curve with this approach if you're not at all familiar with HTML or how websites are built in general.

Another option is to hire a web developer. However, if you're on a small budget, then this is an expensive option as all the knowledge remains with your developer and you'll need to rehire them to make changes to your website.

A third option is Site Build It!. I'd heard of Site Build It (SBI) and was finally recommended to use it by a friend who'd started building her own site through it.

Now I've build websites for over 10 years using nothing more than Notepad. I've always found that the software to create webpages gets in the way, one way or another, and I've always had to delve in elbow-deep in HTML to get a webpage to do what I want.

So I was curious as to how different and whether it would be easier to build a site using Site Build It!'s point and click interface. While, for me, it was a bit of an adjustment not being elbow-deep in HTML code...

The tools provided are emimently simple and anyone (and I do mean anyone) who can click a mouse can build a website...

...and if you follow the Site Build It! philosophy, your website will make some money too!

Site Build It Philosophy

Site Build It! provide a 10-step program that guides you through setting up a profitable website, one that's based on content rather than being all bells and whistles, so that it's useful to those who come visiting.

It's what I used to build my Great Landscape Photography website.

As traffic increases, you can then start signing up with affiliate programs and making sales of items that relate to the subject of your website (they tell you how to go about all this).

It's a point-and-click solution to building websites and handles all the intricacies of email forms and responders and newsletter signups and mailings.

What If You're Already A Webmaster?

Ok, Site Build It (SBI) seems to be targeted at newbies, so why should an experienced webmaster be interested in SBI as a solution?

It has to be said that Site Build It is aimed at the "Ordinary Joe" and not experienced webmasters who may find the point and click interface somewhat clunky.

FTP access is through an webform interface rather than through an FTP application (SBI are very security conscious). If you're uploading or updating a lot of files, the amount of clicking you need to do may get tedious.

Also, there's no support for PHP, so if you're building webpages whose content, in part, is made from RSS feeds, or relies heavily on scriptiing, then Site Build It probably isn't for you.

Site Build It (SBI) is all about content-rich (and unique) websites.

ith that said, Site Build It stands head-and-shoulders above the competition in quite a number of respects. SBI is not just a website building system. It's a complete package that includes:

* web-hosting
* inbuilt autoresponders
* it regularly submits your website and newsletters to all the major search engines (and others as well) which improves your rankings in the search engines (better rankings means more visitors) - this is usually a service that people pay extra for
* it helps you optimize your webpages for the search engines
* detailed traffic stats are available
* park your unused domain names
* it provides a 10-step course on how to create a profitable website that's designed for people who haven't an idea about how to go about building one
* it lets you research and brainstorm website ideas so you can find out if your idea will be a profitable one before you go off and spend time and energy building it
* convert your RSS files into perfectly formatted blogs
* finds link partners for you in the SBI network (which is huge) so you can swap links and increase your link popularity (and search engine rankings)
* ...the list goes on.

Once I'd built my website, I pretty much had to leave it on autopilot due to other commitments. So I was very surprised when I came back to it some months later to find that the number of visitors had been steadily increasing and it had a Google PR rating of 5! This really was a website on autopilot. Not to mention the money I'd earned from Adsense in the meantime (a few hundred dollars). In fact, my Site Build It site earns the most Adsense revenue (about $10) per day of all my sites.

Site Build It! exceeded my expectations. It truly is a one-stop solution and from personal experience, I know it works. You really can't find any simpler or better solution to building a website anywhere!

Conclusion

Site Build It (SBI) has been around for a number of years. Yet in all that time, no other website building/hosting company has offered a creditable competing package. Site Build It are definitley doing something right and doing it better than anyone else. And they have a well-deserved reputation for getting websites that are hosted with them into the top 3% (i.e. the most visited) of all websites, worldwide.

by GARY NUGENT

Power of Rich Internet Applications

2007-12-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for desktop, web applications and your web browsers can enhance their productivity by helping to build Ajax applications. Create and deploy RIA; RIA can be built using AJAX and Flash technologies.

Though the RIA concept is old the term Rich Internet Application was introduced in March, 2002. RIA is a web application with features and functionalities similar to desktop applications. It provides good user interface, transfers processes to web clients and retains bulk data on the application server.

Implementation of Ajax RIA can enhance value of service oriented systems. Open source developers can combine and leverage the powerful capabilities of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with Rich Internet Applications technology. Developers can use many available free components, flexibility to use layouts, data management tools.

Dealing with number of people in business ride is actually a roller coaster ride to retain your business and customers; RIA provides flexibility to users, developers, companies who ever want to roll out. Good RIA can switch between the web and desktop. Traditional RIA had its own limitations:

Traditional RIA followed client-server architecture and client is used to display static content where as all real processing is carried on the server. Server is the channel through which client instructions are executed only by receiving response from the server. These drawbacks lead to revamping of RIA and current RIA has proved.

RIA does not require software installation and run safely in a web browser. Locally run in tight security environment ‘sandbox’. Scripting should be enabled in the web browser else it will be difficult for RIA developers to work. Since, RIA is network connectivity dependant at times it is really difficult if you are offline. Also, these are not search engine friendly and makes difficult for search engine crawlers to index these web pages, ultimately affecting the visibility of your website. Older and newer version of RIA share a common feature that is both have an intermediate code layer called client engine that runs in between user and server. At the beginning client engine is downloaded at the client side and as we progress and according to your application requirement more codes are added on the way; client engine is programmed to perform application functions that will improve aspects of user interface. Client engine provides several benefits to enjoy: rich user interface; more responsive as client engine is downloaded on the client side at the beginning itself. Other performance benefits include: client server balance, workload on the web server is reduced, and resources set free are assigned other client sessions simultaneously. Prefetching and asynchronous communication speeds up the response time. This helps RIA users to move data between the client and server easily. e.g. Google Maps. Network load is reduced as client engine is application specific and before downloading data.

As the client engine is application specific, codes are moved from the web server to the client and chances of error occurrence increases, increasing the overall development processes.

We know that in a general each web page requires an individual download using HTTP GET request. But, RIA uses asynchronous communication for more responsive user interface bypassing web page paradigm of downloading the web pages. This makes difficult to measure the response time and reduces the packet sniffing approach.

RIA is java script enabled and uses XMLHTTPRequest for client-server communication, DOM scripting and latest CSS for rich user interface. Some products provide environment for development of RIA.

Yes, this is possible and also easy, all you need to add a code generated by that website for example yahoo here. Just insert java snippet i.e. code inserted in the body and any change is reflected dynamically. Custom widgets are available. Similarly you can read and know about the latest updates using RSS reader/RSS aggregator.

You can find few such widgets added in my blog, which are updated on daily basis, or as and when any change occurs.

At Icreon, based on the requirements of the clients, we combine AJAX and Flash with PHP to develop a variety of Rich Internet Applications. Rakhi, is a SEO copywriter at Icreon Communications Pvt. Ltd., an offshore software development company that offers web application development business services and solutions.

by RAKHI CHOWDHARY

Ajax Scripts code Technology

2007-12-14T19:18:00.000-08:00

Ajax basically puts JavaScript technology and the XMLHttpRequest object between your Web form and the server. When users fill out forms, that data is sent to some JavaScript code and not directly to the server. Instead, the JavaScript code grabs the form data and sends a request to the server. In other words, the JavaScript code sends the request behind the scenes; the user doesn't even realize that the request is being made. Even better, the request is sent asynchronously, which means that your JavaScript code doesn't wait around on the server to respond. So users can continue entering data, scrolling around, and using the application.Then, the server sends data back to your JavaScript code which decides what to do with that data. It can update form fields on the fly, giving that immediate feeling to your application -- users are getting new data without their form being submitted or refreshed. The JavaScript code could even get the data, perform some calculations, and send another request, all without user intervention! I will discuss implementing an Ajax-enabled scrollable table, in which rows are dynamically fetched from the server, as the user scrolls, without the whole page refreshing. This technique is unique and very expedient for implementing pages with a lot of dynamic content in a readable form; for instance, live news feed. As new items are added to the table, the vertical scroll bar will resize and the never-ending scroll will continue. The asynchronous fetching of the data is done with AJAX Scripts. The parsing and dynamic row insertions are done in JavaScript, the requests are done with the XMLHttpRequest object, and the table appearance is controlled by the CSS.This JavaScript object can send requests asynchronously and receive responses from the server, without page refresh. Many web sites currently participating in the Web 2.0 design methodology often use a lot of Ajax to offer rich client interfaces, the XMLHttpRequest is extensively used on such sites and content of the page changes dynamically based on the user action. The dynamic scroll is also possible in part because of the new CSS2 standards, which are supported by the main browsers as well. In the sample code, I will show how to implement scrollable table that occupies some part of the screen, but if CSS were not supported and only Ajax were, the dynamic table would scroll the whole page, and not part of it. Dynamic table on the Google reader site. Note that there are 100 items in the table on the first screenshot and, as the vertical scroll bar is moved down more rows appear, the number changes to 140, and the scroll bar also resizes. All other elements remain in the same positions on the page. Adding in some JavaScript
This is write Robert Williams will be dealing with Website Development as they were defined for the purpose of website promotion / web Page optimization and SEO Service India.

Backup Software Development Design

2007-12-14T19:08:00.000-08:00

In the most fundamental terms, a data backup is a copy of a file. You create it in case the unique is lost or destroyed. Too many people figure that tragedy will never fall into their laps. The longer you persuade fate, though, the chance that something terrible will happen increases. Backing up data is admittedly a ordinary task, and you might think you have bigger fish to deep-fry, but once you have a backup schedule in place, it really doesn't take much time to maintain. One of the first orders of business is determining exactly what information you need to back up. This for all intents and purposes comes down to deciding what you can meet the expense of to lose. Of course, there's no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but economic records, customer lists and purveyor contacts are obvious places to start. Beyond that, though, the list is highly individualized. You must determine how much data you'd be able (and willing) to re-create. And it's smart to err on the side of backing up too much: Depending on the situation, years of work can evaporate in a heartbeat. There are four main flavors of backups: full/initial, incremental, differential and discriminatory. Each is useful and applicable in its own right. However, the particular kinds of backups available to you will likely depend on the backup software you have.A full backup consists of a copy of your entire system; typical components include all of your data, applications, drivers, settings and your operating system. Your website is your link and representative to the world. A stylish building in a prime location of the city is a matter of pride for the owner. Location, design architecture, aesthetics and usability proportion of the structure go a long way in creating an overall intuition and consequence of the build. Your site on the web, as your envoy, should integrate the best of design, content, navigation and ease of understanding. Apart from all these, there are aspects of Website Development which need to be taken care of to costume your business needs. Functionality of a website is not just limited to building brand image but extends to being a tool of operating business. fundamentals of a website design will include an appropriate color scheme, navigation, display, graphics development using 3D and 2D software, brand building, content designing etc. Developing will incorporate programming may be even developing an operating software, if required. Website development takes care of aspects such as browser compatibility of your website.

Uniformity and quality of your website depends on weaving the various aspects of Web Design and Development together. The brand image should be consistently reflected in the content, color scheme, graphics and theme of the website. Content should be companionable for semantic indexing Google uses, this will bring most advantageous results for a search where there is a relevance for your product/service. Navigation and hyper linking is another essential aspect as these take care of user compatibility. Internal link building has to be done efficiently to retain a viewer's presence on the web page/site. Braintechnosys will take care of every small detail which will bring maximum results for your web site as here we understand the client requirements and our deliverables are tailor made to suit the special client requirements which may range from conceiving a unique URL or developing software for your website.

This is write Robert Williams will be dealing with Website Development as they were defined for the purpose of website promotion / web Page optimization and SEO Service India.

Web Application Development Concept

2007-12-14T19:07:00.000-08:00

Some years ago, if you didn't know XML, you were the unattractive duckling whom nobody talked to. Today, if you crave to acquire into the latest technology rage, Ajax is where it's at. However, Ajax is far more than immediately a trend; it's a powerful approach to building Web sites and it's not nearly as hard to learn as an entire new language. When you write an application today, you have two basic choices:
• Desktop applications • Web applications
• Desktop applications usually from time to time are downloaded from a Web site and install completely on your computer.

They might use the Internet to download updates, but the code that runs these applications resides on your desktop. Web Application Development -- and there's no surprise here -- run on a Web server somewhere and you access the application with your Web browser. More important than where the code for these applications runs, though, is how the applications behave and how you interact with them. Desktop applications are usually nice-looking fast have great user interfaces and are extremely dynamic. However, with the power of the Web comes waiting -- waiting for a server to respond, waiting for a screen to refresh, and waiting for a request to come back and generate a new page. Noticeably this is a bit of an overview, but you get the basic idea. As you might already be suspecting, Ajax attempts to conduit the gap between the functionality and interactivity of a desktop application and the always-updated Web application. You can use dynamic user interfaces and fancier controls like you'd find on a desktop application, but it's available to you on a Web application. Here are the basic technologies involved in Ajax applications:
• HTML is used to build Web forms and identify fields for use in the rest of your application.
• JavaScript code is the core code running Ajax applications and it helps facilitate communication with server applications.
• DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, helps you keep posted your forms dynamically. You'll use div, span, and other dynamic HTML elements to mark up your HTML.
• DOM, the Document Object Model, will be used to work with both the structure of your HTML and XML returned from the server. In a normal Web application, users fill out form fields and click a Submit button. Then, the entire form is sent to the server, the server passes on processing to a script, and when the script is done, it sends back a completely new page.

That page might be HTML with a new form with some data filled in or it might be verification or possibly a page with certain options selected based on data entered in the original form. Of course, while the script or program on the server is processing and returning a new form, users have to wait. Their screen will go blank and then be redrawn as data comes back from the server. This is where low interactivity comes into play -- users don't get instant feedback and they certainly don't feel like they're working on a desktop application.

This is write Robert Williams will be dealing with Website Development as they were defined for the purpose of website promotion / web Page optimization and SEO Service India.

Importance of Logo design

2007-12-14T18:58:00.000-08:00

A logo is the most impressive element in enhancing the customers of a company. It represents a company’s usability and trust as a brand, and brings an immediate recognition for a company. So, if your company does not have a quality and effective logo, you are missing something that will gives greater advantage to your business operation. Above all, a brand is basically used as a brand identifier for a company.

It simple means that logos form an integral part of a company’s branding process and thus it should be crafted in a way that would help in establishing your company as a brand and helps in short term and long-term business perspective.

It is not incorrect to say that logos serve as an effective and essential marketing tool for the businesses making their presence into innovative areas or dealing in unknown products/ services. Moreover, logos represent a new sense to establish line of products and services of a company. A logo is the simplest and the quickest way to spread brand awareness.

So, if you intent to design a customized logo for your company, you can hire a professional logo designing firm that will give you the best benefits of current market forces. But, this is important to see your logo should be designed appropriately to convey the correct message to the ultimate clients. Therefore, it is better to identify a well reputed logo designing company to provide you the best services.

Logo Design Services There are numerous companies offering quality logo designing works for commercial and other companies. These firms specialize in hiring well skilled professionals to provide you the bets of design structure for commercial players to distinct their identities from each other and felt an effective presence in the consumer market. Therefore, it is better to realize your needs and requirements and choose the company that gives the most fulfilling results.

by EDITOR 123