When someone goes looking for a website to be made, often one of 3 words comes to mind; web designer, web developer and webmaster. The term that probably has the most usage is 'web designer'. So, what is the difference between the 3? Typically, the web designer is the person who makes the design uses as HTML editor like Dreamweaver or carves out a Photoshop PSD file for conversion. The web designer is the style behind the project. The web developer on the other hand, is the person who takes the original style and makes a functional website by applying custom coding. The website can be a simple one page HTML file with style tags, or it can be an elaborate CMS with a SSL shopping cart. Finally, the webmaster is the person who oversees the project from beginning to completion and works with everyone in the design and development process. For small companies, the web designer, web developer and webmaster can be the same person. Alternatively, the web designer can be one entity while the otehr person is the web developer / webmaster.

To make this unclear, most companies have their own specifications for web design and web deveoper positions. The web designer may be expected to hand-code and know CSS and PHP.

And since there are so many platforms for which one can use to build an elaborate website, the web developer could be anything from someone who hand codes in XHTML /CSS and PHP to someone who is flexible and can be efficient using PHP / MYSQL, Joomla, Drupal,  Ruby On Rails, XOOPs, DotNetNuke and .NET.

 

Although there is a lot of hype and a lot of media about mobile devices used for web surfing, the stats don't seem to promising for mobile devices for general web surfing. In a nutshell, the phone, IPhone or Blackberry are good tools for some web apps; like Google maps, but when it comes to getting the general web experience, it just does not cut it. According to Google analytics, many websites receive significantly less than 1% traffic from a mobile device.

Is that enough traffic to build another website just for mobile viewers?

 

Sound capturing is taking the sounds that are being played on your computer, and turing them into wav or mp3 files. 

 

A simple and free method to capture sound and audio is to use the software Audacity. The downloads are free from Audacity's website. The downloads are straightforward. But, setting it up could be short and sweet or it could take a few hours. It will need to be custom configured so that sound will sound perfect when it is captured. To make an example of these past statements, I installed Audacity on two partitions of the same computer; Windows Vista and Windows XP. It took 4 hours to install Audacity on my Windows Vista partition while it took 25 minutes to be recording perfectly in Windows XP. The differences were that I had to install and test various encoders and more. It was also quirky. But, with XP, I only had to install, try a couple test configurations, and it was good to go. Nevertheless, it is a fantastic product that allows you to record that song you want, especially your own rare tracks that may be on Youtube for which you lost your mp3 file, but not available freely on Limewire or other download services.

 

In recent years, the monitor size has grown and grown. Now, when you go to your local electronics shop you find monitors that look larger than big screen tvs. 

 

Years ago, this would have been a nightmare to web designer / web developer. However, nowadays,  browsers like Firefox 3.x and Internet Explorer 8 do a fantastic job at holding decent resolution when someone zooms in on the webpage. In Explorer, the commands are Page >Zoom >Pick a Setting and in Firefox View >Zoom >Pick a Setting.

 

Therefore, designing pages these days to look proper in various computers is quite a challenge. But, still, it normally is broken down into two parts. The severe minorities that use phones, Blackberrys, Iphones to surf the web and those that use a laptop and a desktop. The portable devices normally are less of a concern because browsing the net with those devices and typing is a real pain and an eyesore. I bought a top of the line phone for this reason and have downgraded its usage only for checking email and perhaps MSN messaging on the fly. Otherwise, it is totally the wrong tool for web surfing unless you are into the social media thing that caters to chatty this and chatty that. Anyone that is dedicated to surfing would use a laptop or desktop. The extra price is worth every penny.

 

Catering to the larger screens is still quite a mission. What size should that website be? Well, a safe size is to fit tight into  15" monitor and fit into everything above. You could go narrower. As far as length goes, if the top half looks good in everything (like a well figured woman), the fact that the bottom lingers a little off the page and must be seen by scrolling is fine; at least in terms of style. A site could be made short in length if you want all the page to fit into any monitor. However, the short page will look a little tiny to the big spender with the large monitor. This is really a matter of choice at this point, but after looking at laptop sizes in the stores over the last two years, the sizes 15-17-inch still seems to be the most common sizes. A laptop larger than 17-inches is a little bulky to carry around.  Consumers have been quite happy with the common sizes that have tendd to dominate the market in 2009.

 

Generally speaking, writing more words allows for more phrases to be picked up by the search engines. Often enough, these phrases can exist in the content without being listed in the title. However, keywords and phrases in the title will get better rankings than those that are nested in the content. 

 

In a nutshell, more is not always better in the article itself, but more articles is always better. The simplest way to achieve this is to have a blog or a content management system with all sorts of categories, sections and content. 

 

Even though small articles and blog posts can be very effective, quality will always count. People are not dumb. If they are smart enough or have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to read, they will normally know the difference between the good writing and the bad. Also, your writing on your website will be a maker or breaker for repeat visitors. 

 

A blog is an invaluable resource for any website that is concerned with SEO. A blog is like writing freelance articles that will become titled, keyworded and indexed with search engines; especially the most popular one 'Google'. Unlike other menus and content management, a blog allows unrelated and related articles to be displayed in an order; such as the time they are made. For example, a blog for an autobody shop may have articles about car care, car maintenance, car painting, how to notice bad drivers, and have articles about trends in car painting.

Although the list may not have articles all about the same subject, it will not be noticeable when a Google search is performed. When someone searches on the search engine for a particular subject 'like maintaining new car paint', the page that shows up in the organic searches will only display the relevant page the person was seeking. Although the subject matter can be rather unrelated, it should fit in well with your website so that you land the surfer there and have a website that will keep his interest. If the topic was way out of whack like 'Pubs in Vancouver' on a website about horse grooming the reader may have a glance, see what the website is all about, then high tail it elsewhere.

Joomla has a number of various editors which can be used to create content for pages and modules. However, in most cases, they can arrange text, images and Flash to look precise. However, the editors are not the best choice for precise custom coding. For custom coding, an the extension Jumi can be used to create custom content in modules and articles.

With Jumi, custom content can be done with the various common coding scripts and languages; XHTML, CSS, PHP, CGIs and Javascript. With Jumi, you can take a page designed in a Photoshop PSD file and convert it to XHTML / CSS. Then, these files can be inserted into a directory. With the Joomla article manager, a new page can be made with Jumi for which will contain these files. When making the appropriate file with Photoshop, it should be sized properly to fit inside the page.

This matter about using custom coding is often discussed in many forums regarding Joomla vs Drupal. But, both can be used to add custom precise coding to any content page with proper coding and tagging. As far as ease goes, the timeframe to work with Jumi and custom tags from the login would be almost equal, and definitely within seconds. With Drupal you just add the php whereas with Jumi you upload a php file and write a tag so that it will run on the desired page.

 

There are various methods to generate revenue on your website.

1) Sell a product or service

 

2) Affiliate Advertising

 

Google Adsense

A simple form of affiliate advertising is to use Google Adsense. With Google Adsense, you sign up with Google and allow spots on your web pages for Google ASdsense. Then, when someone clicks an adword, Google records the click and pays you a percentage. Affiliate ads are more profitable when the keywords are pricey. Pricey keywords come with competetive Google Adword bids, unlike inexpensive adwords like '15th Century Volcano Explosions' or 'Jonestown was a peaceful place'.

 

Other Affiliate Ads

Other Affilate ads can be done with companies who allow you to place their banner on your website and track the clicks coming from your website. Then, if the click resulted in a sale, you receive a percentage of that sale. 

The percentages can run low and as high as 30% or more. Basically, if your website can generate plenty of traffic,  you can be a salesman without having to do anything more than opening the door to the company. The company makes the sale and handles all of the tech support. 

An example of affiliate advertising would be having a travel website and using Expedia's affilate program for flight booking.

 

A Business card website is the fastest way to make your presence on the web. A typical business card website could consist of one splash page with a logo, text, images and contact information. In other words, it would look a basic homepage like many websites.

Normally,business card websites are very fast to build because they have such limited content and do not link to other pages. These sites can be made very easily in any html editor or built in Photoshop and converted from a PSD file to compliant HTML / CSS. 

 

 

The video below shows how to make a custom Drupal Template with Adobe Photoshop.

 

 

Every CMS has procedures for installing an add-on componenet. If installation problems arise it could be that an XML file is not provided or named properly, the zip file is too large or the zip file needs to be unzipped first before installing more zip files.

 

 If the file is too large, it can be installed manually in some cases. For Joomla, you unzip the plugin, module, component or package of any combination and move it into a temporary directory. Then you install it from that directory.

 

Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress have add-ons that can be used to create websites that will do specific functions; like add a directory, classified ads, and streaming audio. In Joomla, they are called components, modules and plugins. In Drupal, they are called modules. In Wordpress, they are widgets.

 

Here are some features that can be installed in Joomla,Wordpress and Drupal to create a custom need:

 

* eCommerce Shops
* Directory systems
* Event calendars
* News system
* Document management systems
* Ads and Affiliates
* Statistics tools
* Polls
* Surveys
* Video streaming
* Youtube video sharing
* Flash banners
* Google maps
* Slideshows and galleries
* Subscription systems
* Online communities
* Blogs
* Forums
* Chat rooms
* Wikis
* Online surveys
* Custom forms
* Real estate listings
* Job listings/Job boards
* RSS readers
* Sitemaps
* SEO/SEF extensions
* FTP rooms

... and many many more!

 

After the component, module, plugin or widget is installed, it can be configured in the CMS backend to behave as desired. After that point (more often than not), the add-on must need further PHP and CSS editing so that it works as desired.

 

You can read blogs, documentation and stats about the competing frameworks to determine which technologies to use, or, you can see what others are actually using.

 

The following images compare ASP, ASP.net, PHP and Joomla. These three comparisons show that although there is a decrease in PHP (which is what Joomla and Drupal are written with) there is an overall upward trend with Joomla compared to others which look as though they are slowly decreasing. Although not shown, Drupal and Wordpress also show an increase to their usage against asp.net. These results are as of July 26/09 from Google Trends. We have all learned to use and trust Google, so are these stats about as accurate as we can get?

 

 Although it looks like PHP is on the decrease, the question would be why, when the big 3; Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal are on the rise. Could that be an obsolescence in other PHP scripts that had once been popular?

 

ASP.NET vs JOOMLA

 

 

ASP vs PHP

 

 

PHP vs ASP.NET

All images are from Google trends

 

Joomla and Wordpress are two php scripts that compete almost neck and neck. Below, are some stats to compare the usage of Joomla and Wordpress in the world, Canada and US.

 

World

 

 

Canada

 

 

United States

 

 All images are from Google Trends

 

The debate whether or not to use Joomla or Drupal goes on and on. However, popularity stats do speak for themselves. Here are a few examples of statistics from the world, Canada and the US.

 

World

 

 

Canada

 

United States 

 

All images above are statistics from Google Trends