CSS - Easier Coding and Better Website Access

By Clara Ghomes

The rapid development of internet has result in constant advancement in web designing and coding. HTML has emphasized more the content of a web page rather than its aesthetics. However, times have changes and immaculate web design is a key to a website's reach and popularity. CSS has now become a key element which addresses the presentation of websites.

Know the Idea

The idea of CSS stems from the need of eliminating the frequent use of similar tags in HTML while on the same page. The initial idea was to have one file which will define all the values for the repetitive similar tags. All the other ensuing pages could then check this single file and get formatted accordingly. This would result in lesser work load and HTML coders can leave out a majority of formatting tags in HTML. They can focus on using structural elements link paragraphs, links etc.

What It Stands for?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. These style sheets works as an accomplice to HTML coding by addressing the issues of color, font, layout and even the entire look and feel of the website. To change a look of a particular website, all that is needed is to modify the single CSS file and every concerned HTML page will automatically display in a different manner. This makes website maintenance quick and easy.

The List of Benefits

CSS has made the entire process of coding and recoding faster and easier. It takes the hassle of defining and redefining the same things on every HTML page. The benefits of CSS translate into these:

o With the use of CSS, web pages take lesser time to download. The time gets reduced by as much as 50% in some cases.
o HTML coders now have to type less code and the web pages are concise and look better.
o CSS helps in maintaining a consistent look of the entre website as the pages read from a single style sheet.
o The amount of errors while coding gets reduced dramatically as coders do not have to type the same code many times over.
o Site maintenance and updating the website's design is much easier.

Ushering the Future

CSS can prove to be difficult for beginners. If one urgently needs to convert PSD to CSS or other services like table-less XHTML, XHTML slicing among others, it is better to seek professional help. However, the effort of leaning it is more than worth it as it is a well designed and neat language. It is a key element in the development of future design and has been a welcome change from the days when coders would have to contend with frequent usage of presentational HTML tags.

CSS provides for greater accessibility and visibility of a website's content. It facilitates the working of the website in many of the popular browsers and even provides for website access through devices like PDAs etc. It also comes with many powerful formatting options and presents vast possibilities which were missing in the case of HTML.

To convert PSD to HTML or PSD to CSS would need the abilities of an experienced coder. Crazyxhtml offers quick PSD files conversion which includes hand coded, browser compatibility, W3C valid, commented and table-less XHTML coding. They provide all the latest technologies that make a website more accessible, faster, functional and interesting.

CSS: The Definitive Guide (9780596527334): Eric A. Meyer: Books ISBN: 0596527330 ISBN-13: 9780596527334

CSS Pocket Reference: Visual Presentation for the Web (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) (9780596515058): Eric A. Meyer: Books ISBN: 0596515057 ISBN-13: 9780596515058

Common Mistakes While Creating a Web Design

By Peter Kerl

An effective web design is the one that goes beyond aesthetic visual perspective and works as an effective marketing tool in the virtual world. There are various aspects of a web design that contribute to the success of the website. However, there are a few common mistakes that most web designers make while creating their website. These are discussed below:

While designing a website, it is important keep it simple and organized. This concept should be applied while selecting the fonts for the web content. It is essential to cater to human visitors while creating the website. The fonts must be simple, uniform and easy to understand. Therefore, one must avoid using fancy, flashing and small fonts on the website.

Visitors get easily bored of long paragraphs which may look like dissertations. Therefore, the content must be essentially broken down into bite sized pieces to grasp the attention of the reader. The content can be effectively broken down into bullets or numbered lists.

The first few seconds that a visitor spends on the website are very crucial in retaining the potential customer. Therefore, the web design should be able to communicate to the visitor what the website is about. In other words, a first glance at the web design should give a clear understanding of the website.

It is advisable to avoid lengthy and fancy introductions which are time consuming. Visitors have a very little attention span, and therefore it is best to get to the point, and let the visitor easily navigate to the product they are looking for.The few steps between landing on the site and what they are looking for, is the best option here.

Auto playing music can put off many visitors as the music that one may want the web design to incorporate, may not be appealing to all visitors. If the visitor is surfing from his place of work, sudden blast music from the website would be a definite give away.

It is not advisable to inculcate detailed audio video presentations as these slow down the loading time required for the web page.And one may have to wait before a presentation loads on the website.

A good web design is simple organized and straightforward. Therefore, too many banners, badges, association labels may confuse the visitor. So, one must try to stay focused on the objective of the website and make a clear communication with the visitor.

The web design must require very little or absolutely no scrolling. The entire age must be available on loading and must not require any vertical or horizontal scrolling.

Therefore, there are many factors that contribute to the success of a web design. The above list of guidelines while creating a web site for a company can go a long way in avoiding pitfalls and making its online presence a success.

http://www.exclusiveweb.co.uk

The Web Designer's Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide To Themes, Trends & Styles In Website Design (9781600610646): Patrick Mcneil: Books ISBN: 1600610641 ISBN-13: 9781600610646

Create Your Websites With Adobe Dreamweaver to Make Website Design Fun Again

By Chris Pine

Adobe Dreamweaver is an extremely popular website design software. More than 80% of web designers use it to design their web sites. This is partly due to the fact that Dreamweaver runs on both PC and Macs. Dreamweaver is definitely the #1 web development software on the market, and for good reason.

One of the reasons that Dreamweaver is so popular is that is allows you do design either in HTML or using its WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) coding interface. This means you can drag and drop graphics, text, and other media right on the page, and then tweak your page via HTML if you need to. Dreamweaver even has a dual view, so if you make a change on your web page, you can see how that affects your HTML code, and vice versa.

Another great thing about Dreamweaver is that it always accurately produces code that is compliant with HTML and XHTML standards. You no longer need to worry about whether your HTML, JavaScript, or CSS will produce complex coding issues that may cause problems in browsers or with Google's bots. Dreamweaver also easily integrates with other Adobe programs like Fireworks and Contribute CS4. This is great if you like playing around with graphics but aren't a seasoned web designer.

Adobe has made quite a few improvements to the latest edition of Dreamweaver (Dreamweaver CS4). The best of these may be the integrated support for CSS, server-side scripting, JavaScript, and accessibility standards-compliant code. It is also much better at utilizing the different scripting technologies like ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JSP, and PHP. Integrating XML with either the Spry framework or XSL has never been easier. Dreamweaver CS4 is also much better at communicating with the MySQL database, and the overall coding environment is much improved.

It truly is a pleasure to create websites with Adobe Dreamweaver. Most of the powerful new tools available are accessible through the Preferences dialog box, so you never have to look very far to find what you need. I have tried several of the top coding environments, and Dreamweaver is definitely the most powerful and funnest that I have used. If you are still deciding which web site software to use to develop your web sites, you should give Adobe Dreamweaver a try. If 80% of programmers use it, it's a fair bet that Adobe is doing something right.

Chris Pine is a freelance writer who has a passion for reading and writing about science, philosophy, nature, and humanity. He also creates high quality websites for clients such as Kitchen Trash Can and Stainless Steel Trash Can.

Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual (9780596522926): David Sawyer McFarland: Books ISBN: 0596522924 ISBN-13: 9780596522926

Why Joomla!

By Mark S Kelly

Joomla has numerous advantages:

What are some of the advantages to using Joomla! to create websites?

Cost

This very well may be the biggest draw to Joomla!. It is a top-notch Content Management System (CMS) and it is free. Joomla! is comparable to other CMS's, some of which can cost thousands of dollars.

Site Updating and Maintenance

Joomla! makes it quite easy to keep your site updated as well as add new content quickly. Due to it's ease of use and layout, time otherwise lost trying to find where or how to make a change, is gained by allowing the webmaster to concentrate on the content itself.

CMS Review - PHP Nuke

By Ryan Bailey

Today we are going to review the PHP-Nuke Content Management System (CMS). PHP-Nuke is best used for a community website, or a website focused on different information (including articles, guides, etc.) that users can interact with.

Simply put the main focus of PHP-Nuke is to manage your web site's pages through the use of modules. There are many different modules available, and as PHP-Nuke is open source many people create thier own module and release them (there is also a new feature on the PHP Nuke Website, where users can sell custom modules).

In this article we will dive deep into PHP-Nuke and explore some of the various features available in this free Content Management System.

Before we continue on the requirements for setting up PHP Nuke should be stated. Firstly you will need some type of web server (Apache is recommended), along with some time of SQL database (MySQL is standard and best used with PHP Nuke), you will also need a PHP version of at least 4.

For this article we will assume you are using a shared hosting account with FTP enabled, although if you have an Apache server on your computer the same steps are used. Below is a summary of the installation instructions as stated on the PHP Nuke website, if you already have nuke installed you can skip this section.

First of all you are going to need to download a version of PHP-Nuke, you can download the latest version on the official web site. Now if you are using a shared hosting account you will need to unzip the PHP-Nuke package, and upload via FTP to your server. You can put PHP Nuke inside your document root or create a directory such as 'nuke' if you only wish to use PHP Nuke for a sub area of your web site.

If your server is on a UNIX of Linux platform (shared hosting most likely is, if unsure ask your host), you will need to edit the file permissions. I will not go into detail here but, files will be set to chmod '644' and directories will be set to '755'.

You will now need to create the appropriate database structure for PHP Nuke, the easiest way to do this that requires little MySQL knowledge is to use the PHP Nuke database creation package file, nukesql.php.

Now before we dive into working with your newly installed PHP Nuke site you just need to edit the config file. You will need to enter your MySQL database information, it should be easy to see where to enter the information via the comments in the file.

We now go to the Home page created by PHP Nuke, and there is a little message there with a link to create a superuser (an admin with all the admin powers, is referred to as a superadmin). After the user is created login to the admin page (yoursite.com/admin.php) using your newly created superadmin: god with the password 'password' (you should change theses immediately, and remember to use a complicated alpha-numerical password).

You now have a PHP Nuke website setup and ready with a superadmin account setup for you. You might now want to check out the following sections on the official PHP-Nuke website to get some basic concepts on your new content management system:

• The Add-Ons download section. Here you can browse the different categories for add-ons that may interest you.
• The Themes download section. Choose a different theme to make you PHP Nuke website more attractive.
• Questions. A selection of questions and answers relating to PHP-Nuke.

PHP-Nuke comes built in with a statistics module, it shows some basic stats of your website such as the number of registered users or the the number of posts made. But also shows a breakdown of what operating system and internet browser you visitors have used.

Probably the module you are likely to use first, is the pre-installed News module. Using this you can add news items under different categories and this news is sorted on the front page of your website by date. There is also a great archiving feature which allows for easy indexing by search engines and users. You can see an example of the news module on the front page of your PHP-Nuke installation, the news items are edited via the admin page. Users are also able to submit news which is moderated by admins and decided upon whether it will be added to the website.

Built into PHP Nuke is also a surveys module. Using the admin control panel you can create new polls which can be answered by visitors to your website. When a new survey is created the previous survey is then sent to an archive where the results (in graph form) are browsable.

The different modules are usually positioned on the left and right side of the page, and the order along with which modules are active is set using the admin panel on the modules page.

Finally is our review on the PHP-Nuke content management system. For an overall look we would rate PHP Nuke 6/10, it is coded well and looks professional but the entire them is missing the whole Web 2.0 look. For features and modules we give a rating of 7/10 as there are many different features and add-ons available to make the site perform specific activities. For an overall review of PHP Nuke we give a rating of 5/10 as you have to create special skins (themes) for PHP-Nuke and it is hard to incorporate it into an existing web site.

If you are interested in learning more on PHP-Nuke along with documentation and how-tos then please feel free to visit the official PHP-Nuke web site.

This article was written by Ryan Bailey, an experienced Web Developer.

Building Websites with PHP-Nuke (9781904811053): Douglas Paterson: Books ISBN: 1904811051 ISBN-13: 9781904811053

Joomla PHP Tips

By Geraeldo Sinaga

As Joomla is a great application to build all sorts of websites, you can be able to mix and match PHP code with the rest of the Joomla code. Here are some Joomla PHP tips to help you create your own website. Firstly, you should check the limit of your PHP memory limit and then change it to the higher one. You can follow the instructions at Joomla tutorials blog. After that, you can create PHP in this ways which later can make you have the fast loading Joomla website.

Starting a Social Networking Website From Scratch

By Joe O Farrel

You've seen MySpace, you've heard of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and all the other ones. What do these websites share? They are very popular social networks. Would you like to give it a shot also? In that case, this article will point you in the correct direction.