Webmaster 101

A lot of webmasters like using flash on their websites because they feel that it makes the site look professional and up to date.  However when Flash takes too long to load, it really serves no purpose because no browsers have very little patience when it comes to the internet. You can use the following techniques to make the Flash load faster on your website:

Generally though Flash works fine with raster graphics, it isn’t really the preferred choice of graphics. Vector graphics are much preferred. Raster graphics use formats like BMP, JPEG and GIF which are basically pixels of color.  Vector graphics on the other hand are essentially mathematical equations which produce graphics that don’t add too much to the size of the file. Vector graphics are also completely scalable. Thus although raster graphics are okay occasionally, try to stick to vectors.

Try to optimize your images as far as possible.  Use the modify- smoothen, straighten and optimize commands on the menu bar to refine the shapes and lines.  This may also help you reduce the original size of your image.  You can use these commands till you are satisfied with the level of optimization of the graphic.

There is also a trace bitmap command in the modify menu.  This command converts a bitmap into a vector image though the quality of the conversion depends on the complexity of the image. Generally .gifs convert better than .jpgs. You can always play around with commands to see how it affects the graphics.

Thus there are ways that you can improve the speed of Flash as it loads on your website. It is very essential for it to load fast otherwise there isn’t much use of putting it up there. More tips on how to improve your website next week.

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A lot of people put a lot of effort into their websites but some of them remain extremely inaccessible. However it isn’t all that tough to make it accessible to all including people with color blindness or those who are slightly visually impaired. There are a few things that you need to follow:

First and foremost you should be very clear about the language that you are using on your website. Very often people may have content on their website that is in a vernacular language, so you need to specify which language it is in or readers will waste quite a bit of time trying to figure it out.

You should try to get your content on the top of the page. This is important in more ways than one because it is a useful tool in SEO and also it often a technique used to make your site more accessible. Putting your content at the top of the page means that the reader does not necessarily have to browse through the entire site before he gets what he’s looking for.

Another important thing is to color your site is such a manner that it makes things easier for the readers. Flag your links clearly and use easily distinguishable colors. Avoid using light color text on a white background or dark text on a dark background. Such things only drive visitors away from your site.

Another important thing where many people go wrong is the font. People either use text that is too small or something that is too large. Use relative font units so that the size is adjusted with the size of the browser units.

When you design your website keep in mind that there are other who are going to read it and make sure you don’t make things more difficult for them.

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Lots of people spend tons and tons of money to spread the word about their business. However though many options are employed people are still skeptical about the effectiveness of e-mail marketing. But e- mail marketing can be very effective if it is done correctly.

E-mail can be an excellent tool to retain customers and keep their loyalty where it is- with you. E-mail can prove a very effective tool if you want to create a readership with your customers. Through e-mail you are calling a person back to a place he is already comfortable with.  And of course it is very important to convey what you want conveyed.

Basically it is very important to have a list of people which is based on consent. You want to be mailing people who are interested in your company and its products and not someone who will send your mail to the trash immediately.

The next thing is to send out an e-mail that is relevant. This means that the products you are talking about in the e-mail should be the kind the recipient of the e-mail is interested in.  Divide your target group into smaller groups so that the correspondence addressed to them is of the highest importance.

The next thing to be careful about is the importance of your company. To keep the customer from deleting your e-mails it is necessary that they are relevant and continue to be so over a period of time.

E-mail can be an effective strategy through which to market your products but there are a few ground rules which need to be followed so that you get the maximum benefit out of it. That being said, getting the desired result is not all that hard. All you need to ensure is that you keep it relevant and do not go about advertising all your products to people who might not be interested.

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There are a lot of web applications that are released everyday but not a lot of them are worth writing home about. These are 3 applications that meet all the expectations users have:

Basecamp: There are many project management things on the internet but Basecamp is probably the cream of them all. It has more than a million users and the price structure is pretty decent.  It is fairly business ready so you can get things done quickly. It has something called a Writeboard which lets people cut and paste text so that documents can be formed in collaboration.  It also has e-mail reminders and also has RSS custom feeds.  You can also download your dates to you calendar so you can’t claim that you forgot.

Remember the Milk: If you are the kind who forgets to send out instructions or reply to client’s mails then this is the application for you. It is a to-do list that fits into your Gmail inbox so that you can’t put off sending that reply anymore. The website interface lets you map the items to different locations, record things etc and all this is available for $ 25 a year. Not a bad deal, I say.

Wufoo: This one is extremely interesting. It helps you do the stuff that you’ll probably find yourself incompetent at.  You can draft a petition online, make an RSVP invitation in AJAX style.  There a whole host of colors and templates to choose from. It organizes all your data so you can manipulate and filter it to your content.

These applications actually make the grade and are highly innovative. These 2.0 web applications are a league apart from the mass of applications that are released everyday and can make life a whole lot easier for people whose lives circle around the internet.

 

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What I’m going to tell you about today is very important specially if you manage your own website. Have you ever though how your website looks in a different browser or a different browser? Does a Windows user have any idea how his site looks through a Mac or vice versa? Probably not.

A real site owner who cares about what he is doing would be very concerned to know how his browser would look through different browsers and OS.  It is very important to know how your website looks through every different browser and Operating System. The page may get realigned and the text boxes you want and the top may go down and the picture at the right side of the page may go elsewhere. So when you have designed and run your own website you should also know how it looks.  

Test how your site looks through different browsers. Test it in the popular ones like Internet Explorer & Mozilla and also on the lesser used ones like Opera, Safari, Sea Monkey, Galeon etc. Don’t think that by testing it on the popular ones you’ve done your job. You haven’t. A great number of internet users use other browsers and you do not want them to visit your site, find that it doesn’t work properly and be let down.

As a site owner it is your job to cater to all sorts of customers and not be restrictive. If you ignore certain kinds of browsers you are only lessening the number of visitors to your site. Also don’t be under the impression that no one uses these browsers because they do. Probably not a huge number but together if you ignore all of them you’ll lose out on quite a bit of internet traffic on your site.

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Wordpress is one of the most popular and commonly used blog publishing systems and is used by millions of people all over the world in several countries.  It is one of the many things that works on PHP and is backed by a MySQL database. Wordpress was created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little and made its debut on the internet in 2003.

Wordpress is the official successor to b2\cafelog which hosted around 3000 blogs when Wordpress was created.  Wordpress offers a number of features which make blogging an easy and fun experience including:

Categories so that you can fit your articles into separate slots according content

·         Templates

·         A permalink structure which is detected by search engines

·         Multiple authors per blog

·         Typographic filters that allow you to properly format and style your text

·         Tags

·         Integrated link management

·         The facility of storing a user’s IP address

·         Blocking an IP address

Wordpress releases are named after famed Jazz musicians.  The secong version 1.2 was released soon after Wordpress was first unveiled, following which version 1.5 came out in early 2005. In December of the same year Wordpress 2.0 was released and a year ago, in January 2007 Wordpress 2.1 called Ella was brought out. In May version 2.2; Getz was released which supported a host of features including widget support for templates, updated Atom feed support and speed optimizations. Dexter, which came out in September has a taxonomy system for categories, update notifications, improvements in the interface and certain security issues have also been dealt with.     

Wordpress blogs have certain security concerns as almost all of them are exploitable through codes that can be introduced in the form of a back door. A Wordpress exploit has also attacked blogs with AdSense and some Search Engine Optimization blogs.

 

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phpBB is an internet forum which has been developed using the PHP programming language and is an abbreviation for PHP Bulletin Board. Like its parents, phpBB is a free software. It was started by a person called James Atkinson who intended it to be a forum for his own website in 2000 and a fully functional version was released on the 1^st of July, 2000.

There were a number of improvements made on phpBB and the final version 1.x was released in November 2001. phpBB 1.x is no longer used on websites nor is it supported by PHP.

The second version, phpBB 2.x was developed starting in February 2001 and has been supported by more and more advanced versions of PHP.

Thereafter phpBB 3.x  came about towards the end of 2002. In March 2007, the server shut down temporarily for maintenance but the server then crashed and phpBB.com was shut for more than a week.  Thereafter the new phpBB site was launched which came as a surprise as it was not supposed to be launched till the release of the phpBB. 3.0.0.

The current version is phpBB3 and it just went gold less than a month ago. The latest version does not allow HTML tags due to which administrators have to either keep their existing links or upgrade to the new software, a very hard to make decision.

It features support for multiple data systems such as MySQL and others and also supports unlimited number of sub forums. It has the ability to create custom-defined BBCode and also to create custom profile fields.  PhpBB3 has higher security levels than its predecessor phpBB2 and it was completely rewritten to have a more secure code base. After a large number of websites were destroyed and the latest version keeps receiving security audits.

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PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor and is a side-server scripting language. It is used to create dynamic web pages and in addition to being used as a side-server scripting language it is also used in stand alone graphic applications. Latest and upgraded versions of PHP continued to be released frequently and it is free software which is available for common use.

PHP was first written in C Programming language by a Danish programmer who wrote it as a set of Common Gateway Interface to replace the Perl scripts he had been using for his personal webpage.

PHP is a commonly used scripting language which is used in Web Development and can be embedded into HTML. It runs on a web server and uses PHP as its input and releases a webpage. It can be used on almost all web servers and operating systems and platforms at no cost.

The main focus of PHP is side-scripting and many applications like Wordpress also use PHP and over 19 million webpages are hosted by servers using PHP technology.

PHP can also be used for command line scripting and is used to develop shell and desktop applications and for other system administration tasks. It is a very popular alternative to Microsoft’s ASP and Sun Microsystems JavaServer Pages

Object oriented programming was brought into PHP in the 3^rd version and there have been constant updates since then. The feature set has been constantly expanded which has enhanced and optimized performance. It allows people to write extensions in C language which can then be compiled into PHP or loaded dynamically at runtime. Developers can also analyze PHP code and detect software bugs and bottlenecks that may crop up from time to time like APD and Xdebug. There are many code generators which automate general programming tasks and save time and reduce the risk of errors and bugs.

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Buying and selling products over the internet and other computer networks is referred to as e-commerce. With the spread and rapid technological advance associated with the internet the volume of e-commerce has also grown substantially. While most transaction on the internet are conducted for the transfer and exchange or commodities there also exists a market where virtual commodities are sold such as access to content on a website, use of certain hardware etc.

The term e-commerce has evolved significantly for the past 30 years and has come to involve many more things. In the 1970s e-commerce referred to the electronic transfer of documents such as purchase orders and invoices and later on encompassed the facilities of credit cards and telephone banking.

Soon after the popular inception of the World Wide Web in 1994 dealings over the internet began after certain necessary security protocols came into place. The boom in e-commerce happened during what was known as the ‘dot com era’ that occurred between 1988 and 2000 where purchases and sales happened over the internet with concepts such as e-shopping carts and transfer of funds via an electronic medium. Although many such companies went out of business after the dot com crash in 2001 many otherwise traditional enterprises took on e-commerce as a way of further improving and expanding their businesses. Successful online retailers include Hewlett Packard computers, Dell, Amazon and a few others and the things that are most commonly traded online are consumer electronics including computers because as far as electronic goods are concerned there is a wider variety available on the web.  The earlier barriers that deterred many from taking up e-commerce have been lowered and now it is easier for small proprietors and business concerns to begin trading via the internet. Many sellers like Dell computers also prefer this method as it eliminates the unnecessary cost and inconvenience of having a middle man.

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RSS is basically a collection of web feeds that are used to display information about frequently updated websites such a news sites, blog pages etc. RSS or RDF Site Summary as it is formally known may contain an excerpt of the site or the entire site itself and keeps people updated upon the newest additions to various websites.

RSS is the first attempt at syndication which had been tried many times before since 1995. The first successful attempt was made by Ramanathan Guha a  member of the RSS-DEV Working Group in 1999 for My.Netscape.Com portal who eventually created 1.0 version on his own and in 2002 Dave Winer who had earlier worked on a version forMy.Netscape.Com portal release the 2.0 version of RSS after which it began being known as Really Simple Syndication.

However since neither RSS-DEV Working Group nor Winer had Netscape involvement on their final creations they could make official claims on RSS.

Both branches of RSS have extension mechanisms that make it possible to track changes in the other branch which leads to the other branch soon developing the same feature. The major compatibility issue that both branches had is HTML markup. Both branches were not able to filter out HTML markup from feeds.

RSS feeds have proved quite convenient and have begun to be used quite often and have become very popular. Indeed even social networking sites like Orkut show feeds and latest updated sites. 

For a person who is in the habit of browsing the internet for latest news and development this tool is the perfect thing. It saves the user the problem of going to each site to see whether it has been updated or not.

Though the RSS mechanism needs to evolve a bit more keeping in mind its incompatibility problems and shortcomings, it is still the best of its kind and keeps the average internet user quite happy.

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