DEMO: Web Development Theme

Tell me what your website does!
 by: Trenton Moss

You know exactly what your organisation does and what your website offers its users. This information has probably become second nature to you, but first-time visitors to your site won’t know this. As such, make sure you don’t forget to tell them what you do.

As soon as new site visitors arrive at your website the first thing they need to know, before anything else, is what you do. You can talk all you like about how great you are, but unless you spell out what you actually do, they won’t even know what you’re so great at! This oh-so-overlooked yet such basic of information can be communicated to your site visitors in a number of different ways:

Page title

Don’t just use the page title to tell me who you are; tell me what you do too. If your company is called Bloggs Ltd don’t only place the words, ‘Bloggs Ltd’ in the page title as there’s plenty of room for more information. If Bloggs Ltd sells widgets, a good page title might be: ‘Bloggs Ltd - Buy widgets online’.

Your Website Hurts My Eyes: 7 Reasons to Tone Down Your Advertising
 by: Dina Giolitto

So you’re on the computer, as usual. Your eyes are smarting. Your back hurts. You want to jump in the car and sail down the highway with all the windows down and your hair flapping in the wind. But before you call it quits for the day, you have to look up just one more thing. Maybe it’s web marketing, maybe you want to buy some artwork to hang in your office. Off to Google you go.

You type in the magic words, whatever they are, and watch as a list of websites flows down the page. You click on the first one, and it’s an instant assault on your eyeballs. Ten glaring banners, flashing like Vegas at midnight. One of those annoying hover ads that follows you as you scroll and won’t let you read anything until you click the corner. Some sparkly things “snowing” down the page. Frantic messages screaming things like BUY NOW! LAST CHANCE! INSTANT SUCCESS CAN BE YOURS. A picture of a grinning guy who reminds you of your creepy Uncle Lester.

How You Pay More for Unused Web Space and Traffic
 by: Subhendu Sen

“2GB web space with 50GB traffic for $5.95 per month!”

A luring ad—definitely. In fact this ad makes many small business owners feel cheated by their present web hosts.

This is how the small business owners, who have taken small amount of space (say, 5, 10 or 25mb) calculate and feel that they are paying more :

“If 2000MB (2GB) costs $5.95 per month, then 5MB should cost (5.95 x 5 / 2000) = $0.15 only! But my web host charges me $1! A 700% profit!! Oh…I am losing so much money!!”

So, if a small business site shifts to the advertised web host, he should get better value for his money. Right?

Wrong.

Let me explain how :

As a small business owner, how many HTML pages do you have in your web site? 5, 10, 15, 25?

Experts say that you should not have a page of more than 100K including images. Normally the file size of a starndard HTML page is around 10-15K.

Creating Personal Web Sites
 by: Ashish Jain

This is a two-part article about creating a web site on the web and the tools that you need to do that.

During the last decade we have truly entered the information age. More and more people are becoming a part of the ever growing and wondrous community called the Internet. It was just over a decade ago that ‘Internet’ was just another new concept that a lot of people were skeptical about. Today however, it would be difficult to imagine living in the world without this amazing phenomenon. It really has enabled humans to reach new heights.

Some basic terminology that you should take a look at before proceeding further:

Web Page: A document that contains information created with the help of HTML.

Web Site: A collection of web pages on a particular subject.

HTML: Also known as Hyper Text Markup Language, this is used for the creation of web pages. Information is written in between HTML tags ( ) to instruct the web page as to how information will be displayed. You can also put images into the web page by using this language. Some other languages like JavaScript, VB script, ASP, ASP.NET etc. are also used to display dynamic content on web pages and for performing user driver events.

How a Business Can Benefit from a Website
 by: Brad Seefeld

With over half of all U.S. households shopping online, the internet has become a massive market for small businesses to sell their products and services to consumers. The Internet is quickly becoming the “world’s market place”. Businesses benefit from websites because it saves money and time, reach a wider consumer market, gives customers what they want, and it will help keep up with competitors. Customers will enjoy better support, not be hindered by store hours, and a sense of professionalism from your company. In today’s age, all businesses that want to go somewhere should have a website.

A small business web site can save a company money and time. Real-world advertising today often costs thousands, or millions for television ads, of dollars to produce and distribute to the intended audience. Internet ads are usually free or less than $25. This means that businesses can advertise more, spend less and ultimately make more money by getting new customers to see ads. Ads that are placed on the Internet usually last forever too. This makes online advertising far superior than real-world advertising.

Basic Rules on Page Layout and Color
 by: Granny’s Mettle

For one to be able to stand out from the rest, one needs to go out of the box, break the rules, and some other clichés that apply to breaking out from the traditional. But before breaking any rule, you have to understand first the basic and foundation of the rule itself.

First off, let’s talk about page layout.

The Rule - Too much boxes is bad for your health.

One designer said that a mark of a designer is when he or she starts to use boxes and rules in his or her pages. When you look at your page and realize the need to make something attractive and creative out of the boring stuff you’ve just made, and then decide to throw around a box or two or place rules between columns, then that’s the time when your creativity is getting out from confinement.

Before using all the box there is in your software, just remember to do it in moderation. Anything in excess is a bad thing. Sure, boxes and rules are a good way to highlight important information. But if you’re going to do it in all your pages, or put virtually everything in a box, then nothing will stand out from the crowd.

Basic Rules on Web Design
 by: Granny’s Mettle

In every design there are basic rules to consider. For a web design, here are a few of the rules which you can take or break for your projects.

1 > Viewers do not want to scroll horizontally.

As a personal experience, I find it really annoying to have to scroll the page to the right just to be able to read the whole content of the page. People should not be put to the task of having to pick their mouse and move the web page over to the right so as to see what’s hiding over there.

It’s easier to scroll down a page than to scroll horizontally. One designer suggests checking out your web pages at resolutions of 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768 to avoid scrolling the page to your right. It doesn’t matter that the majority of monitors nowadays come preset at 800 x 600. You never know when one of your audiences would have a monitor with the lowest denominator, and then have that potential client go to a competitor just because he or she also hates scrolling to the right.

What is SQL?
 by: John L

What is SQL? SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is the lingua franca in the database world. SQL is a standard that is used by all database vendors and programmers to define, extract and access the information that is stored in databases. SQL began life as an IBM creation but was standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ANSI/ISO SQL in 1988. Since then ANSI/ISO SQL standard continued to evolve. The ANSI-SQL group has since published three standards over the years:

1. SQL89 (SQL1)
2. SQL92 (SQL2)
3. SQL99 (SQL3)

SQL is a query language. It is English-like and easy to use. However, although there are more than 90 SQL reserved words, most programmers seldom use more than the following handful of commands - SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, FROM, WHERE, HAVING, BETWEEN, LIKE, OR, AND, NOT, IN, ORDER, GROUP and BY.

For example, if you had a database table named “employees” and you wanted to retrieve all records where the employee has the last name “goodman”, you would use the following SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM employees WHERE lastname = ‘goodman’;

10 Prominent Website Mistakes
 by: Maricon Williams

Nowadays, sites are getting better. With minimal design and highly maintained archives they continue to offer comprehensive services. However, prominent mistakes on several websites are still apparent.

Here is a list of the website mistakes that scares visitors away and ruins the business reputation.

1. The under construction sign. Putting an “under construction” sign on your website marks you as a struggling beginner. Websites are supposed to grow in time. If your site is not yet ready to be shown in public, then don’t publish it.

2. Visitor counters. Visitors generally are not bothered by the fact that many other people have visited your site. However, if the visitor counter shows a low number, that can be a psychological turn-off to people, if it’s too high, people might think that it’s fictitious. The best way to do is not to include in your website. If you really want to know how many visitors you have had, check your statistics.

3. Lack of copyright statements. Everything you write and create on the including your website is copyright-able. Make certain that you include copyright statements on every page, and appropriately update the copyright year.

Breathtaking Color Power!
 by: Maricon Williams

Colors convey character, emotion and intention. You are what colors you choose. Thus, your choice of colors should reflect the message or feeling you to hope to convey to the viewer.

Red - Red is hot color. It is an established color of love, urgency, courage, danger, passion, blood, intensity, aggression, and competition. It is best used as an accent color. This color does not usually blend well with greens or purples of the same intensity, so if you use red with these colors, modify the brightness or intensity.

Blue - Blue is a color of peace, tranquility and wisdom. It also conveys honesty, truth, loyalty, power, coolness, health, harmony, and confidence. Blue is a safe choice for most uses, and goes well with the majority colors. Don’t use blue if your site is food or drink related, since there are hardly any blue foods and drinks.

Beige and Gray - These are neutral colors. As neutrals, they can be combined with almost any color and still come across well. Both make for very readable backgrounds, but be sure to use glints of bright colors or the site will appear uninteresting. You can also accent beige or gray with dark colors. It will create an illustrious, professional look.