Choosing A Content Management System For Your Website
Currently, there are many content management systems (CMS)out there to help you with your website building. Examples include Wordpress and Joomla. All of them have different strengths and weaknesses. Hence if you are planning to launch a website, it is imperative that you choose the correct CMS. Without the right tool, you are likely to waste much time setting up and maintaining your site in the long run.
So what should you look out for?
1. Ease of Installation
Whichever system you choose, it should always be easy to install. Nowadays, it is usually not a problem as many web hosts are now providing automatic script installers such as Fantastico. These installers usually offer an automatic installation of CMS and with it, you should be able to set up your site within minutes of installation.
2. Ease of Use
The CMS you choose should allow you to quickly and easily build and manage a website. Many web-based open source content management system (CMS) such as Joomla, Plone, Drupal and Wordpress allow you to do just that. In fact, the core purpose of many of these CMS is to allow non-technical individuals to build and organize the content of their website with great ease. Most CMS enable a user to edit the site directly in the browser window. The user can add pages, edit pictures, change links and perform other web-designing tasks very easily. Their user-friendly administrative interface is represented by graphics and even a person who has no knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc. can understand it within a short span of time. When a website owner decides to add pages or alter his site, he can do so using easily without needing to seek the help of a programmer or a designer.
3. Able to Build Great Looking Website
This is a no-brainer. Not many webmasters would want to build a plain website that would not attract any attention or traffic to the site. Many of these tools feature a huge range of aesthetic templates that can make a website look like it was designed by a real pro and the best thing is that many of these templates are offered free over the internet.
4. Open Source
Many of these CMS are open source tools which mean that any interested developers can add components to them. Presently, there are many talented developers who do that and they kept adding interesting components to these CMS.
You may not realise that the biggest advantage of all is that most of these powerful CMS are actually FREE. So do consider these powerful tools before building your site. I do not think you will be sorry if you do.
Discover the secrets of making a killer website in less time. Learn how to build a Joomla website today at http://UseJoomla.net
How To Make Your First Web Form
If you have recently established a website for your first internet business, adding a simple web form to your website, such as a feedback form, contact form, or other online form, can be a tough task. Most programming novices create their first website using pre-developed templates and have no advanced knowledge of HTML programming. As a result, creating a simple web form that can email the form responses to the webmaster can be a difficult and frustrating task.
If you just posted a new website, but you do not have a web form uploaded and you need to quickly provide a way for your visitors to contact you, then you should simply post your email address on your Contact page. However, if you want to create a sophisticated online form to collect information from your visitors and respond to their questions, you need to know something about HTML and another programming language called PHP.
Installing the online form on your website is the easy part. If you are not familiar with how to create the code for a form, there are many different online tutorials that can teach you how to create the code. After that, you will need to create a file that will process your form after someone fills it out and send the answers to you via email.
The code used to process a HTML form is often referred to as Formmail. Formmail is written in a programming language called PHP, which is more advanced than HTML. There are many websites where you can download the Formmail file for free. Formmail has been used to process and email the results of web forms since 1997.
When you download Formmail, make sure it has code that prevents spam from being sent through your online form. There are many different versions of Formmail floating around the internet, and some have built-in spam protection while others do not.
Many times, inexperienced programmers will put a form on their website that does not include code to at least try to prevent spammers from utilizing the form to send spam to hundreds or even thousands of people. As a result, those who have been spammed complain to their internet service provider, who then directs the complaint to the hosting company that handles your website. This can be a huge problem.
If you do not have the patience to create your form yourself, there are more than a few form creation services on the internet that provide a simple way for you to create a form without doing any programming. These third-party form creators usually do not provide you with the PHP code you need to process the form. Instead, they process it for you on their own servers.
If you are comfortable with programming, you might want to try to create your web form yourself with the help of some online tutorials. If you do not have the patience to do the work, use an outside service that creates the form for you. Either way, it is important to have an online form so that people can contact you directly through your website.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form
Why Is XQuery Important?
The advent of wireless internet access has made web design a very complicated matter. Previously, all web browsers were created equal. HTML was the only language used to create web sites, and it was only possible to go online with a desktop PC.
Since the turn of the century, cyberspace has changed. It is now possible to surf the world wide web using a wide variety of wireless gadgets, such as cell phones, palm tops, laptops, computer screens in automobiles, etc. As a result, new programming languages and specifications that are more versatile than HTML have evolved to create websites that can be displayed on the new web browsers utilized by these various devices.
Languages such as XML, XHTML, XSL, and a host of other programming innovations were developed because web sites coded in basic HTML were not being displayed properly on the browsers installed on all these neat gadgets. XML is a language that enables data to be displayed across all platforms because XML is a simple text file that merely defines data, it does not tell the web browser how to display the data. XSL and XHTML were created so that XML could be transformed into a web page.
Now that you have a basic understanding of how and why programming has changed, you are ready for a brief introduction to the main topic of this article, XQuery. XQuery was invented so that there was a way to query data stored in an XML document, much the same way SQL is used to query a database.
XQuery uses simple functions to query a document. An XQuery function looks a little like a javascript function in that it uses parentheses containing an element that is to be the object of the function. With XQuery, the element in parentheses is typically the name of the document or file to be queried.
To find what it is looking for within that file, XQuery narrows its search by using path expressions that look a lot like the path for an ordinary file stored on your computer, with the various subsets of data within the XML file separated by backslashes. The predicate is the final component of an XQuery function. The predicate tells the function exactly what information, data, or range of data within a particular subset is to be extracted and returned to the user.
For example, an XML file for a dating website would contain a list of men and women who have posted their profiles on the website. Some of the people in the XML file might be classified as single, while others might classified as divorced. The XML file would also contain the age of each man and woman.
If a woman were to visit that dating website and perform a search for profiles of only single men who are over the age of 30, that search request would be converted into an XQuery function that would contain a path that would tell the function to search through the list of men who are classified as single, and the predicate would instruct the function to return only the profiles of the single men who are older than 30.
Learning how to use XML, XHTML, and XQuery is of critical importance to every web designer or programmer. There are now so many ways to connect to the internet using computers that run on different platforms that are no longer compatible with many elements of the HTML programming language. Web designers need to be conscious of this and start designing web sites that utilize XML and XQuery.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form
Why Should You Use VBScript?
If you are creating a web site for the first time, then you probably have some knowledge of the HTML programming language. HTML is a fairly simple language to learn, and most beginning web designers are usually self-taught when it comes to using HTML to create a simple web page. HTML provides the style, structure, and formatting for a web site.
However, HTML does not actually do anything. It is a static programming language. It does not process anything or make your site interactive, it just sits there and tells the browser how the site should look. So, other programming languages have been created to improve site design and make sites more interactive for the user.
One such language that has become extremely important and widely used is VBScript. VBScript is a scripting language. Scripting languages are used to connect diverse pre-existing parts to accomplish a new related task without compiling. Also, scripting languages are interpreted, and are executed faster than a compiling language.
VBScript is very versatile and can communicate with other languages effectively. VBScript is a variation of Visual Basic, an event driven programming language invented by Alan Cooper, and later bought and expanded by Microsoft.
VBScript is like Javascript in that they are both scripting languages, but at the same time these two languages are indeed different from one another, and most of the syntax is not similar. To use VBScript, you need to put any and all VBScript code in between script tags, with the attribute for the opening script tag being the VBScript text type. This tells the web browser that that code contained within the script tag is VBScript and not ordinary HTML.
You can place VBScript programming code in either the head section or the body section of your webpage. VBScript functions are to be placed in the head section so that the functions are loaded before called upon in the body section of the page. VBScript code that is involved in displaying certain elements of the web page immediately upon the loading of the page would go in the body section of the page.
As with Javascript, you can define values for certain variables that you plan to use in your VBScript procedures and functions. These would be placed in the head section of the web page.
You can also define variables as an array using VBScript. An array would be a variable that has more than one value. When defining each value of a single variable with an array, the name of the variable stays the same, but each value is defined with an index number that is placed in parentheses. Here would be an example of an array for a variable called Random having 3 different values:
Random(1) = 12
Random(2) = 72
Random(3) = 45
VBScript has two different types of basic procedures. There are sub procedures and function procedures. Sub procedures can process data and perform an action, but they do not return a value. Function procedures process data and do return a value. There are four different types of conditional statements that VBScript uses. These include if/then, if/else, if/elseif, and select case statements.
There are 3 basic looping statements that are utilized by VBScript, including for/next, for each/next, and do/loop. All of these statements are easy to learn and create. Conditional and looping statements are the logic, or the brain behind VBScript.
So, if you are new to web design and have become proficient in developing artistically sound, static web pages, you should now move on to creating more complex, interactive web sites with VBScript. You need to create sites that not only display information but react to input received by the user.
You can begin to learn VBScript fairly easily through online tutorials, but it might be a good idea to enroll in some courses at a local college or computer programming institute, or perhaps buy a VBScript textbook from a local bookstore. However you learn it, using VBScript effectively is essential for every web designer.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form
Issues With Formmail
If you are a webmaster interested in adding an HTML form to your website, then you are going to need a PHP file commonly known as formmail.php. This file processes the HTML form and sends the results to you via email. However, there are a number of things you need to be aware of when creating and installing it on your website. If you have never created an HTML form before, then you really need to pay close attention.
To create a Formmail file, you can either write the PHP code yourself (which is impossible unless you are experienced), or you can download the code from one of the many sites that have made Formmail available for download. After you download it, you will need to modify the code in order to adapt it to the form you have created.
The first challenge you will face is changing the code, if need be, so that it automatically checks to make sure that all required fields from your form have been completed. Some versions of Formmail automatically include this code, some do not. If it does not include this code, you will need to hire a programmer to create it, or visit some free programming message boards and ask someone to help you with it.
The next challenge you will face is writing the code that will create the email message containing the answers to the form and send it to the email address you specified in your HTML code. This is extremely difficult to do if you are not familiar with PHP. Again, you will need the help of a programmer if you can not do it.
Also, you will need to make sure that included, somewhere in the code, is protection against spammers who will try to send spam through your form by altering the recipient field. To prevent this, you need to create a variable that only authorizes the email address you are using as the recipient. For example, if you have set up your form so that the results will be sent to your Yahoo email account, then you need to insert some code into the Formmail file that prevents the form from being submitted unless your Yahoo email account is the recipient. If you do not this, people will be able to send spam right through your form, which brings us to another important point.
Because it is possible to send spam through a form if the Formmail file is not created properly and does not authorize only one email address as the recipient, several web hosting companies do not allow their customers to run forms on their sites. Or, they use their own PHP files to process your form, which gives you less flexibility. The bigger, better web hosting companies all allow forms and allow you to create your own formmail.php file to process the form. The better web hosting companies also have extensive firewall protection built into their servers to prevent spam if a form is vulnerable.
I hope this information has shed some light on what you need to consider when installing Formmail to process your HTML form. Call your hosting company and ask them if they currently have your site hosted on a server that can process forms. If they do not allow their customers to process forms or have certain rules that restrict your flexibility, you should switch to a bigger, more experienced hosting provider that will give you the ability to do you what you want.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make free HTML forms.
Web Design And Development Tips To Maximize Your Site
Web design is a very important part of operating your online business. Since there is not an actual store for people to walk into, the set up of your website will determine if they stay long enough to make a purchase or if they will got to another website. With so much competition in the e-commerce world, the consumer has the upper hand.
Getting people to your website is the easy part. Making it attracting and easy to navigate is much harder. The connection speed for your website will make or break the deal. Most internet users are not very patient when it comes to waiting for pages to open. On average you have six seconds before they decide to go somewhere else. If cool graphics on your website take time to open, you are better off without them.
The website should be appealing, but not overwhelming. The layout should have tabs to make the website easy to navigate. Some good tabs to include are products, shopping cart, about the company, contact information, and frequently asked questions. You can design your tabs to fit the product or service you are offering.
Customers generally don’t make a purchase on their first visit to a website. They often like to think about it as well as do some comparing. Offering a wish list is a great way for a consumer to save what they want to come back to finish the purchase at a later time. Sending an email to the customer at that time thanking them for coming to your website is a great way to keep your product fresh in their mind.
The checkout process needs to be very simple as well. Consumers don’t want to have to click many places to make a purchase. At the most it should involve three clicks. Set it up so that many payment options are possible to meet the needs of various consumers. It is good customer service to provide a confirmation number so that the consumer knows their purchase has been made.
There are many tools you can use to improve your website if sales aren’t going as well as you would like. For a very small monthly fee, you can use a web hosting service. They provide you will tools to compile data. You will need data to see what is going on with your website, and then analyze the data to make it better. You will want to compile data telling you the number of visitors to your website on a daily basis. Then you will want information telling you where in the order process they are leaving your website. If most leave at the same point, that indicates something needs to change like the price or the checkout process.
Once you have compiled and analyzed the data, you can start making changes. Most web hosting services also provide you with the necessary tools to improve your website. This can include colors, graphics, and even the set up of the website. Most have great online tutorials for your convenience. If you don’t have a lot of experience in the area of web design, you can use the customer service representatives from the web hosting service to walk you through the process.
The checkout process is one of the most challenging areas for good web design. Consumers become very frustrated if this doesn’t move quickly. Some individuals are not comfortable giving out the bank account number or their credit card number even with security being in place on the website. You can offer other options including Paypal and C.O.D. The more options you give them, the higher amount of sales you will generate.
There are also many powerful tools that you can add to your website, to make it more user-friendly. On good example of this is Google’s Custom Search Engine tool, which allows you to create a custom search engine targeted to any niche or category you choose. This can help you offer your visitors a unique tool that they will return to your site to use.
Use the Web Development Search engine at http://www.finalwebportal.com/ to find resources to help you further improve your site.
What Is Javascript Used For?
If you are creating a web site for the second or third time, then you probably already have some experience with HTML. HTML is a fairly simple language to learn, and most new web designers learn to use it pretty quickly. HTML provides the style, structure, and formatting for a web page.
However, HTML does not actually do anything. It is a static programming language. It does not process information or make your site interactive, it just sits there and tells the web browser how the site should be displayed. So, other programming languages have been established to make websites interactive.
Of the non-static programming languages that are used to complement an HTML web page, Javascript is perhaps the most important. Contrary to its name, it has virtually nothing to do with the Java programming language. Javascript is a scripting language.
Scripting languages are used to connect diverse pre-existing parts to accomplish a new related task without compiling. Instead, scripting languages are interpreted, and are executed faster than a compiling language. Javascript is very versatile and can communicate with other languages effectively. It is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, and is compatible with every major browser on the market.
Javascript is most often used to handle certain events that might take place as the user interacts with the web page. For example, if the user is filling out an online form on the site and enters information that does not comply with a certain format, then Javascript can be utilized to check the format of the input before the form is submitted. If the input is invalid, the script can be used to prevent the form from being submitted and to tell the user what needs to be corrected.
When used, the script is ordinarily inserted in between the opening and closing head tags. In the head section, the programmer can create Javascript functions that can be executed if that function is called upon somewhere in the body of the page.
If a webpage contains an HTML form, the programmer may want to create a Javascript function to insure that the user enters his or her last name before the form can be submitted. To accomplish this, a function must be inserted in between the opening and closing head tags. Then, the function must be called upon within the opening tag of the HTML form.
Then, if someone attempts to submit the form, the Javascript function is called upon to make sure that the last name has been entered. If the last name has been omitted, then the submission is halted and the user is told to enter his or her last name before submitting the form.
The logic of these functions is often created using if/then statements. Uses for these functions include form validation, enabling cookies, displaying certain images when the user performs a certain action, and detecting what kind of web browser the user has so that the format of the web page can be adjusted to accommodate that particular browser.
Javascript is actually a fairly easily language to learn, because it is very logical and the syntax is not complicated. Even if you have never used it before, you can learn it fairly easily by searching for tutorials on a search engine. Using non-static programming languages will bring your web pages to life.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make a free HTML form.
Learn How To Use Formmail
If you need to add an HTML form to your website, then you are going to need a PHP file commonly known as Formmail, which processes the HTML form and sends the results to you via email. Before using formmail, you need to understand how it works and what you need to do before installing it on your website.
To create a Formmail file, you can either write the PHP code yourself (which is impossible unless you are experienced), or you can download the code from one of the many sites that have made the code available. After you download it, you will need to modify the code in order to adapt it to the form you have created.
The first challenge you will face is changing the code, if need be, so that it automatically checks to make sure that all required fields from your form have been completed. Some versions of Formmail automatically include this code, some do not. If it does not include this code, you will need to hire a programmer to create it, or ask someone on a programming message board to help you with it.
The next challenge you will face is writing the code that will create the email message containing the answers to the form and send it to the email address you specified in the code for your HTML form. This is extremely difficult to do if you are not familiar with PHP. Again, you will need the help of a programmer if you can not do it.
Also, you will need to make sure that included, somewhere in the code, is protection against spammers who will try to send spam through your form by altering the recipient field. To prevent this, you need to create a variable in the Formmail file that authorizes only the email address you are using as the recipient. For example, if you have set up your form so that the results will be sent to your Yahoo email account, then you need to insert some code into the Formmail file that prevents the form from being submitted unless your Yahoo email account is the recipient. If you do not this, people will be able to send spam right through your form, which brings us to another important point.
Because it is possible to send spam through a form if the Formmail file is not created properly and does not authorize only one email address as the recipient, a few web hosting companies do not allow their customers to run forms on their sites. Or, they use their own PHP files to process your form, which gives you less flexibility. The better web hosting companies all allow forms and allow you to create your own formmail file to process your HTML form. The better web hosting companies also have extensive firewall protection built into their servers to prevent spam if a form is vulnerable.
I hope this information will help you set up Formmail on your website to process your HTML form. Call your hosting company and ask them if they currently have your site hosted on a server that can process forms. If they do not allow their customers to process forms or have certain rules that restrict your flexibility, you should switch to a better hosting provider that will allow you to use Formmail.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make a free HTML form and download formmail.
XML is Transforming the Internet
When the internet was first introduced, all websites were written in HTML. HTML was the only programming language used to describe and display data on the World Wide Web. It was simple and fairly easy to learn. As time progressed, programmers started to realize that they were being stymied by HTML. Web designers wanted to be able to describe data more effectively. This need for a better way to deal with data resulted in the development of a new specification called XML.
What is XML? XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. So, just like HTML, XML is a markup language. A markup language is any language that is used to describe or define information and text. XML is not a substitute for HTML. It is to be used in conjunction with HTML.
HTML focuses on describing how data or text is supposed to be displayed. The XML language does something totally different. XML describes what the data is. So, XML is not something that is apparent on a web page, because it does not actually do anything. As information and data presented on the World Wide Web became more complex, XML was invented to effectively structure, store, and send this information.
What makes XML truly unique is that there are no predefined tags like we have with HTML. All of the tags used in HTML have already been defined, such as the paragraph tag, the header tag, and all the various style tags. XML is not defined. You can make your own tags!
So, the question is, why do we need XML? Why do we need a more versatile specification like XML to describe data? After all, HTML works fine if used properly, so why do we need XML? Well, the answer is simple. XML is a device independent, cross-platform language.
This is extremely important, because people are now using a wide variety of gadgets to connect to the internet, as almost every electronic device on the market now comes equipped with email and internet access. Cell phones, palm tops, computers installed in automobiles, they all have built-in web access. Each of these devices display text and graphics differently, and utilize different platforms and a variety of web browsers.
As a result, someone using a cell phone to access a certain web site may not be able to view the data on that website properly because the browser running on that cell phone might not be able to properly display the HTML. The platforms that run on some of these newfangled products and devices are simply not 100% compatible with HTML.
XML solves this problem by making sure that the most important data on your website can be displayed across all of these different platforms. This is what makes XML so valuable. The other important features of XML is that it enables data to be exchanged between incompatible systems, and because XML files are plain text files, basically anyone using any system can view the contents of the text file.
So, if you are a programmer, you need to learn to use XML for describing, storing, and sending data on the web. With so many different means available to connect to the internet, you should learn to use programming languages like XML.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make a free HTML form and download formmail.
Your First Web Form
If you have recently established a website for your first internet business, adding a simple web form to your website, such as a feedback form, contact form, or other online form, can be a tough task. Most programming novices create their first website using pre-developed templates and have no advanced knowledge of HTML programming. As a result, creating a simple web form that can email the form responses to the webmaster can be a difficult and frustrating task.
If you just posted a new website, but you do not have a web form uploaded and you need to quickly provide a way for your visitors to contact you, then you should simply post your email address on your Contact page. However, if you want to create a sophisticated online form to collect information from your visitors and respond to their questions, you need to know something about HTML and another programming language called PHP.
Installing the online form on your website is the easy part. If you are not familiar with how to create the code for a form, there are many different online tutorials that can teach you how to create the code. After that, you will need to create a file that will process your form after someone fills it out and send the answers to you via email.
The code used to process a HTML form is often referred to as Formmail. Formmail is written in a programming language called PHP, which is more advanced than HTML. There are many websites where you can download the Formmail file for free. Formmail has been used to process and email the results of web forms since 1997.
When you download Formmail, make sure it has code that prevents spam from being sent through your online form. There are many different versions of Formmail floating around the internet, and some have built-in spam protection while others do not.
Many times, inexperienced programmers will put a form on their website that does not include code to at least try to prevent spammers from utilizing the form to send spam to hundreds or even thousands of people. As a result, those who have been spammed complain to their internet service provider, who then directs the complaint to the hosting company that handles your website. This can be a huge problem.
If you do not have the patience to create your form yourself, there are more than a few form creation services on the internet that provide a simple way for you to create a form without doing any programming. These third-party form creators usually do not provide you with the PHP code you need to process the form. Instead, they process it for you on their own servers.
If you are comfortable with programming, you might want to try to create your web form yourself with the help of some online tutorials. If you do not have the patience to do the work, use an outside service that creates the form for you. Either way, it is important to have an online form so that people can contact you directly through your website.
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers create a free web form with the code to email the web form responses.
