Link-Building Policy for Bing

It’s easy for everyone to get caught up in obsessing about how to optimise your site & build links for Google, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google totally dominates the search market. But, there are still other search engines that some people are using, so it is wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too!

Obviously the other two engines are Yahoo and Bing and whilst Yahoo is seemingly declining fast, Bing is actually gaining a market share. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway. With the muscle of Microsoft behind Bing, you can be sure the search engine won’t be prepared to play second fiddle to Google for long!

However, unlike Google, we don’t hear much about what Bing wants out of a site for decent rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don’ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for complying with Bing’s policies, does not differ too much from the advice that Google would give you. It is however, still always nice to hear what they think, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,” says DeJarnette. “You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time.”

What You Should Do!

DeJarnette shared some tips for getting more quality links. The following are Bing’s tips for effective link building (paraphrased):
1. Develop your site as a business brand and brand it consistently
2. Find relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media folk, and make sure they’re aware of your site/content
3. Publish concise, informative press releases online
4. Publish expert articles to online article directories
5. Participate in relevant conversations on blogs/forums, referring back to your site’s content when applicable
6. Use social networks to connect to industry influencers (make sure you have links to your site in your profiles)
7. Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content
8. Launch a blog/forum on your site
9. Participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
10. Strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry, while promoting your site

What You Should Not Do!

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:
1. The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
2. Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
3. Using hidden links in your pages
4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web
5. Linking out to known web spam sites

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction,” says DeJarnette. “If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalised with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any experienced search marketer is not already aware of, but it can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and not to do, to help webmasters get better rankings.

in reference to:

"Link-Building Policy for Bing"
- http://www.freshwebz.co.uk/blog/ (view on Google Sidewiki)

Google Sidewiki entry by SEO Expert

Banners have been a major part of the World Wide Web world since its early days. Copywriters burn the midnight oil looking for new designs that will grab the visitor’s attention and compel him to click on their banner. This article discusses some of the most successful banner designs.

Teasing your curiosity

“Do Not Click Here”. How many of you have seen this slogan in a banner? What did you do when you first saw it? If you are like most people, when you first saw it, you clicked on it. What makes this simple sentence so powerful that it compels the visitor to click on it? The answer is curiosity !!!

Copywriters and web designers are always looking for ways to arouse the website visitor’s curiosity. As banner designers their goal is to attract the visitor to the banner, usually completely ignoring the other elements on the web page that are more important to the website owner. However, because the “Do Not Click Here” slogan tells us nothing about what is on the next page, it arouses the visitor’s curiosity and makes it almost impossible not to click on this banner to see what’s behind it.

Simple integrated design

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin first introduced their product, “Google”, to potential investors, they mentioned Adwords as a backup option in case they didn’t make any money. We all know how lucky they were that they eventually needed to use that backup plan. What made these “boring” ads such a great success?

Unlike other ads, Adwords neither arouse the visitor’s curiosity nor disturb the main flow of the web page. In fact, the opposite is true. Adwords are meant to look like part of the search results giving the user the feeling that those ads are there because he asked for them. No one has any doubt that this simple design helps Google to promote both their search engine and the Adwords advertising program.

Take part in the action

Banner designers wisely used interactive technologies like Flash to develop type of banners that invite the user to take part in the action. Drawing the user into the action can be accomplished in many creative ways. Some web designers use popular old games elements as part of the scene. You all know the famous game pacman. One of the banners that I like the most is the one where the user is allowed to let pacman “eat” few dollar signs. At the successful completion of this mission, a nice slogan is revealed asking him to open a saving account that will earn money with a fixed interest rate. The idea behind those interactive banners is simple: Let the user take part in the action and then at the right moment when his mind is less resistant, show him the sales message. Those interactive banners proved to be very efficient. Their biggest disadvantage is that most webmasters will not allow that kind of banner because it distracts too much from the web page content.

Back to Black and White

Website designers are always seeking to be different with their design ideas. One banner fashion trend that can be found lately is Black and White banners. Although research shows that blue and yellow are the most efficient color to use in a banner, Black and White banners have been seen a lot lately. It’s probably something that will eventually vanish, but the idea behind it is to be different and to make the user wonder what’s up and hopefully click on the banner to find out.

Get Out of the box

Have you heard about the mrfdesign.we.bs If not, check out this website before continuing to read this article. This website has proven that creative thinking not only can bring you money but also create a whole new trend. Right after the milliondollarhomepage.com got the internet community’s attention, many designers used this idea to deign a banner on which they sell a 10x10 pixel area. Like the original concept, this banner design had its impact. Advertisers are investing money on these ad spaces while at the same time visitors are curious enough time after time looking at those unorganized pixel banners to click on them.

What about the next trends

What the

in reference to: The White House (view on Google Sidewiki)

eCommerce Website Design

250 Free Business Cards

eCommerce websites have their own unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple task – make an online purchase. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website. In this article we will try to take a look at some of the major design aspects that you must have in an eCommerce website.

Many of you are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They all need to be attractive, well organized and use the right colors that fits the website spirit and so on. Your instincts are good. However a close look at some successful eCommerce websites will reveal the conceptual differences that are typical in a successful eCommerce website.

An eCommerce website needs to follow certain selling principles:

1. Give the user a pleasant experience during his online shopping.
2. Make certain you provide sufficient information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.
3. The website must be easy to use. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to your competitor.


Those principles are not new. We all know those basics from our day to day experiences in the mall, shopping center and every other market place that is waiting for us to open up our wallets. The big challenge for a web designer is how to translate those conventional marketing techniques to the virtual world of the internet. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that in most supermarkets the bread stand is placed at the far end of the building, yet you can smell the fresh bread at the entrance (sometimes they even use a special air duct to carry the smells). That has been done deliberately. Marketers use our sense of smell to draw us through the store where we are exposed to all sorts of tempting goodies as we go to get our loaf of bread.

How do you draw an imaginarily path in a web page? A path designed to lead the visitor to do what you want him to do…make an online purchase. Unlike the supermarket our website has no smell. In a website the distance from one point to the other is pretty much the same, so the exit is always right there. In a website you can try to order the “shelf” in the way you think will best expose the visitor to many of your products, but there is always a chance that he will find a short cut to another page that can also be the way off your site.

As can be see, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult.

A good eCommerce website design will lead the visitor to the right page in one click or two at the most. Sometime web designers will use techniques that would never be considered for non-eCommerce websites. Everyone has seen at least one sales letter website. On these web pages the only link is to the order form. Sales letters are not the most typical eCommerce website because they usually sell only one product. That allows the web designer the ability to exaggerate the one click principle and make it an advantage. All the facts about the product have been presented to the user is a smart way while every few lines he has the option to click on the order form. If he is not yet convinced he will have the option to continue to read more facts and testimonials about the products. Believe it or not, those sales letter websites are actually selling.

“What about online shops?” Online shops have to deal with more then one product. Of course, the greater number of products increases the complexity of the website. Sophisticated eCommerce websites use a variety of personalization technologies in an effort to determine the best selection of products to offer to the visitor. Personalization technologies are a major part of advanced eCommerce websites. However this topic is beyond the scope of this article. The cleverness of an eCommerce website’s personalization technology has a major influence on its design. The first to use such technology was Amazon.com who decided

in reference to: The White House (view on Google Sidewiki)

Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design

Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design
by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

I was recently asked by a visitor to thesitewizard.com to take a look at her company's website, designed by a university student. I will not give the URL for that site, partly to protect the innocent, and partly because by the time you read this, it'll probably have been modified.

The site was heavy in its use of graphics with images adorning most parts of the page layout, to provide curved borders (to replace the sharp corners in enclosing boxes), different background images for different parts of the page, etc. It had a top navigation bar, driven entirely using JavaScript. The navigation bar mimicked the sort of menu bar you find in computer programs - there is a horizontal menu bar with different items listed. When you move your mouse over one of those items, the menu will automatically expand vertically. As you move the mouse cursor down the pop-up menu, the item beneath the pointer is highlighted. Click it, and you will be delivered to another page on the site.

In general, that site is typical of the kind of sites produced by newcomers to web design. It scores well in terms of prettiness and gadgetry (although only under one browser, it doesn't work well under other browsers), but fares dismally in terms of usability and search engine readiness. In fact, the reason my visitor wrote to me was because the website suffered a significant drop in the number of visitors after it was redesigned in its current form.

This article uses that site as a starting point for discussing some of the issues that a web designer needs to consider when creating a website that must exist and compete in the real world (as opposed to a site that is created merely to fulfill the course requirements of a school or university).
1. Appearance is Not the Most Important Issue

Over the years that I have dealt with newcomers to web design, it is my observation that they tend to focus excessively (and sometimes almost exclusively) on the appearance of a website. The site I mentioned earlier is a case in point: the designer tried hard to make the site look beautiful (and, if I may add, succeeded too - the site does indeed look pretty). However, as hard as it may be to believe (if you are a newcomer), appearance isn't the most important thing to look at when you are planning and creating your site.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying that appearance is of no importance. Far from it. However, in this article, my intention is to address the excessive importance newcomers place on beauty. In fact, if you belong to the other extreme, discounting the value of the appearance of a website altogether, you might want to read my discussion of Two Common Web Design Myths at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/myths.shtml

Having said that, your site can still survive (or even thrive) if it is a plain-looking site like Google. This is not necessarily the case if you overlook the other important issues in web design.
2. Usability is Important for You to Achieve Your Purpose

All sites are created for a particular purpose. Some were created so that their owners can sell something. Others are information resources (like thesitewizard.com). Still others are designed to showcase their owner's talents (such as sites displaying the owner's resumes and portfolios).

The usability of your site is important to help you achieve that purpose. The basic question that you need to address when dealing with usability is: can your visitors easily access the information they need so that they can do the stuff that you want them to do? There are quite a number of things involved in this question.

1.
Information Availability

Is the information that your visitors need to make informed decisions available on your site? For example, before they can buy a product, they will want to know more about that product. A brief one-line summary about your product's features may work for your main page, but you will probably find that you get more buyers if you can p

in reference to: The White House (view on Google Sidewiki)

Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design

Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design
by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

I was recently asked by a visitor to thesitewizard.com to take a look at her company's website, designed by a university student. I will not give the URL for that site, partly to protect the innocent, and partly because by the time you read this, it'll probably have been modified.

The site was heavy in its use of graphics with images adorning most parts of the page layout, to provide curved borders (to replace the sharp corners in enclosing boxes), different background images for different parts of the page, etc. It had a top navigation bar, driven entirely using JavaScript. The navigation bar mimicked the sort of menu bar you find in computer programs - there is a horizontal menu bar with different items listed. When you move your mouse over one of those items, the menu will automatically expand vertically. As you move the mouse cursor down the pop-up menu, the item beneath the pointer is highlighted. Click it, and you will be delivered to another page on the site.

In general, that site is typical of the kind of sites produced by newcomers to web design. It scores well in terms of prettiness and gadgetry (although only under one browser, it doesn't work well under other browsers), but fares dismally in terms of usability and search engine readiness. In fact, the reason my visitor wrote to me was because the website suffered a significant drop in the number of visitors after it was redesigned in its current form.

This article uses that site as a starting point for discussing some of the issues that a web designer needs to consider when creating a website that must exist and compete in the real world (as opposed to a site that is created merely to fulfill the course requirements of a school or university).
1. Appearance is Not the Most Important Issue

Over the years that I have dealt with newcomers to web design, it is my observation that they tend to focus excessively (and sometimes almost exclusively) on the appearance of a website. The site I mentioned earlier is a case in point: the designer tried hard to make the site look beautiful (and, if I may add, succeeded too - the site does indeed look pretty). However, as hard as it may be to believe (if you are a newcomer), appearance isn't the most important thing to look at when you are planning and creating your site.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying that appearance is of no importance. Far from it. However, in this article, my intention is to address the excessive importance newcomers place on beauty. In fact, if you belong to the other extreme, discounting the value of the appearance of a website altogether, you might want to read my discussion of Two Common Web Design Myths at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/myths.shtml

Having said that, your site can still survive (or even thrive) if it is a plain-looking site like Google. This is not necessarily the case if you overlook the other important issues in web design.
2. Usability is Important for You to Achieve Your Purpose

All sites are created for a particular purpose. Some were created so that their owners can sell something. Others are information resources (like thesitewizard.com). Still others are designed to showcase their owner's talents (such as sites displaying the owner's resumes and portfolios).

The usability of your site is important to help you achieve that purpose. The basic question that you need to address when dealing with usability is: can your visitors easily access the information they need so that they can do the stuff that you want them to do? There are quite a number of things involved in this question.

1.
Information Availability

Is the information that your visitors need to make informed decisions available on your site? For example, before they can buy a product, they will want to know more about that product. A brief one-line summary about your product's features may work for your main page, but you will probably find that you get more buyers if you can p

in reference to: The White House (view on Google Sidewiki)

Is Your Website Design Driving Away Your Customers? Some Basic Usability Tips for Commercial Websites

Following my article on Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Friendliness in Web Design where I discussed the importance of looking at the usability and search engine visibility of a website, I have received countless messages from visitors to thesitewizard.com asking me to review their website. While I do not have time to answer such requests individually, I decided that an article outlining some glaring usability flaws that I have found in a number of websites in general would be helpful. This article thus deals with the myths and fallacies commonly believed when designing a website to sell a product or a service.
Make It Easy for Visitor to Check Your Price List

Some websites try to hide the price list for their products. Some of these sites only display the price of the item after you hit the "Buy" or "Order" button, or worse, only after you have created an account on their site. Others have a price list, but bury the link to the price list somewhere deep in their site in a place not easily accessible from the main page or the products page.

I'm not exactly sure what the reason behind this is. Possibly, they think that if the customer does not see the price until they click the "Buy" or "Order" button, they will be more likely to buy the item. This reasoning is fallacious.

There are many types of visitors arriving at your site. Let's take the case of the window shopper. If they see something noteworthy on your site, they may make a note of the price so that they can return later if they want the item at some point in the future. If the price of the item cannot be easily found on your site, do you seriously think that they will thoroughly search the site just to find that elusive price tag? Or do you suppose that such a visitor will click the "Buy" button, just so that they can find the price tag at the end of the process somewhere? Or will they go through the bother of creating an account, revealing their personal particulars, just to find the price of an item?

Like the serious shopper, if they cannot find the price, they will simply go to another site. Remember: this is not a brick and mortar store we're talking about, where you need to take time and put in effort to travel to another store. On the Internet, your competitor is only a click away. And the search engines are more than happy to yield thousands of other sites selling the same type of goods or services as you. I realise that there are some brick and mortar stores (usually small concerns) who think that if they don't put a price tag, the customer has to find out the price from a sales person, who will then have the opportunity to persuade him/her to buy that item. Whether or not that is a good idea for a brick and mortar store (and I can think offhand of some types of customers that you will lose even there), it is a bad idea for a web store.

No matter how you look at it, every customer and potential customer will need to know the price of a product. Even the corporate customer buying for his/her company works to a budget. Making it difficult for your visitor to find the price list is a quick way to drive a potential customer away. As has been observed by many usability experts - the average Internet user has the attention span of a flea. If they can't find what they want within the first few seconds of glancing at your page, they will leave. And your competitors will be more than happy to attend to them in your place.
Provide Descriptions and Pictures for Your Products

I realise that the new web designer is beset with contradictory advice about how best to design their site. One set of such conflicting advice is the requirement to be brief and to-the-point so that you can catch that Internet visitor who will only give your web page a few seconds glance before deciding whether to stay or go elsewhere. Contradicting that is the requirement that you describe your products in depth and place pictures of your product, or screenshots if yours is a software product.

The best way to resolve this, I think, is to take a leaf from Amazon.com's book. For ev

in reference to: The White House (view on Google Sidewiki)

Seven Easy Ways to Annoy Visitors to Your Website: A Satire

1.

Place some (or all of) your content in a small frame and force your visitors to read the content through that window. Don't worry about what constitutes "small" here, since most of the time, even if you create a big frame, it'll be considered too small by most visitors. This trick has a high annoyance value since your visitors have to view the information through that small little box and scroll continuously to see the text while the rest of the browser window is filled with information they don't really want to read at the moment. With this strategy, visitors cannot resize or maximize the window to make their reading more efficient or pleasurable. This method will allow you to frustrate those hapless souls and, as a bonus, make them leave your site.
2.

Disable the right click menu of the browser. Nevermind that people need the right click menu for many purposes, and that they can access the same functions through the main menu bar even after you've disabled it. After all, if your aim is to annoy, you might as well make their visit to your site as unpleasant as possible.
3.

Play background music when they arrive at your page. If that's not enough of an annoyance, make sure you loop the music so that the visitors are plagued by it continuously while they are on your page. If you're feeling particularly sadistic, place automatically-playing music on many (or even all) pages of your site. You don't have to worry about choosing a horrible tune - choose your favourite piece if you like. Since one man's meat is another man's poison, any sort of music tends to annoy most visitors.
4.

Make every link on your site opens in a new window when your visitor clicks on it. That is, put a target="_blank" to every link. This will annoy visitors since every time they click on a link in your site, a new window or tab will open. Another benefit of this technique is that it makes your site look amateurish.
5.

Force your visitors to navigate your website using Flash. That is, place all your content in a Flash file - text, pictures, links, etc - even if Flash is not ideal for such content (a straight HTML page is best for those types of content). Make sure that visitors who don't have the Flash plugin enabled or installed cannot see anything or do much on your website. This effectively drives away all mobile users, a group of users that is growing in size, as well as cripple your visitors who have come to expect certain facilities to always be available in their browsers (such as the BACK key and the ability to bookmark specific pages) when they visit websites. Now they will be forced to work through the more limited Flash plugin of their browser with whatever subset of features you deign to provide. In fact, exclusively using Flash for your site content might even help you to drop to the bottom of search engine listings too, thereby reducing the number of visitors to your site. After all, if you don't have visitors, you don't have to think of new ways to annoy them.
6.

Load your site with pop-up windows that open when your visitor reaches your page as well as when they leave the page. In fact, if you want to annoy them even further, open a pop-up window when they click on links on your site.
7.

Reduce the navigational usability of your website. Don't put site maps or navigation bars with shortcut links to pages that your visitors will usually want to go such as the "Download" page if you're a software author. If you can annoy your visitors by forcing them to read whole pages of your text before they can find a link to move on to do what they really want to do, so much the better.

in reference to: The White House (view on Google Sidewiki)

How to Use Different CSS Style Sheets For Different Browsers (and How to Hide CSS Code from Older Browsers)

In an ideal world, you only need one set of CSS style sheets for your website, and those styles will work with every browser currently being used. This, as every webmaster soon finds out when he/she uses CSS, is a pipe dream. The modern browsers all have uneven levels of implementation of the CSS standards. As though this isn't bad enough, their implementations are often buggy - and they don't share the same bugs! And when you have solved that tricky bit, you find that your site has certain visitors (often your best customers) who, for various reasons, are using older browsers that have only rudimentary support for CSS.

What most (if not all) CSS-using webmasters want is a way to specify that a certain style sheet is to be used by such and such a browser and not others, as well as to hide other style sheets from older browsers.

The Good and Bad News
The bad news is that there is no standard documented method to include or exclude style sheets from being used by every browser still being used on the Internet.

All is not lost however. The good news is that there are a number of tricks, workarounds and even non-standard but documented methods available that you can use to have your style sheet included by some browsers and not others. The workarounds often rely on known bugs in certain versions of specific browsers.

On the other hand, even with these workarounds and tricks, you will probably find that there are certain browsers that you want to code for but do not have any reliable means to detect and work around. However, at least with the help of the tips listed here, you should be able to design a CSS-based website that works with the most commonly used browsers

Preliminary Tips for Coding
Before you start coding your site using CSS for specific browsers, here are some tips that hopefully will make your life easier.

Design From Scratch
Most webmasters who have had to convert their existing website to CSS say that they find it easier to design their site from scratch in CSS than to try to find a way to reproduce their old layout in CSS.

Another reason for designing from scratch is that CSS allows you to do many things not possible using the old tables paradigm. Rethinking your entire design allows you to take advantage of the new possibilities.

Code to Follow the CSS Standards First
Many of the web designers hanging out in webmaster forums have found that it is far easier to develop their CSS code for a highly standards-compliant browser like Firefox first, and then only later add the workarounds to make their code work on IE, than to code for IE and then try to make it work for Opera, Konqueror, Safari and Firefox.

It is also logical to write for a more standards-compliant browser first: sooner or later, Microsoft is bound to issue a newer version of IE that will have the existing CSS bugs fixed. When they do so, all you have to do is to remove the workarounds which you created and you're done. If you write your main style sheet with styles that are coded in a non-standard way to deal with IE bugs first, you will wind up having to rewrite everything when Microsoft fixes the bugs.

This is not to say that Firefox does not have its own share of CSS bugs. As such, my personal recommendation is to code with the two (supposedly) most standards-compliant browsers first, ie, Firefox and Opera, while at the same time periodically making sure that your CSS code validates with the W3 Consortium's free style sheet validator. You can add the workarounds for IE later.

(If you are not sure what validation means, or how you can get it done, check out my article on HTML and CSS Validation: Should You Validate Your Web Page? at http://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/htmlvalidation.shtml

Use External Style Sheets and Take Advantage of the "Cascading" Aspect of Cascading Style Sheets
One way to handle the bugs and omissions existing in different browsers is to put all your standards-compliant CSS code in a separate (external) style sheet file that is loaded by every browser.

Then, when you find th

in reference to: Google (view on Google Sidewiki)

10 Strategies To Make Your E-Commerce Website A Success

E commerce websites have come of age. As customers realize the ease and benefits of online shopping, the popularity of e-commerce websites have soared like anything else. However, with the increase in the number of Ecommerce websites vying for attention, it has become important for them to devise strategies to be better than the competition and attract more traffic. Here are some new trends and techniques that can help your Ecommerce processes.

Focus on User Experiences

Often we concentrate so much on improving the usability of the website that we completely forget about the user experience. The way users feel on the website goes a long way in influencing their purchase options as well as their general perception of the website. Therefore, try to connect with the visitors on intimate level and then build up your branding through strategic marketing techniques.

Provide Customized Messages to Specific Audience Segments

The chances of sales increases when the audience is more targeted. When you segment your audiences, you know about their general common preferences and likes. This will also give you an idea about what segments are useful and most profitable. In turn, you can customize your sales message and make sure they receive more relevant and personalized information and offers.

Create Compelling Content

Content is the only source of direct communication with your website audiences. Therefore, make it as compelling as you can . The main objective of your product page should be sales conversions. Include product images and videos along with content that convinces them to hit the 'Buy' button.

Eliminate Unnecessary Page Elements

A majority of Ecommerce websites carry a bulk of undue weight because of unnecessary page elements like blinking banners, rotating graphics and annoying flash-animations. Attention grabbing works best on subtle levels. Also make sure the information you provide on the website is short and crisp.

Include Videos on the Website

Videos are an emerging source of product promotion with more and more website embedding videos on their websites to promote their businesses. You can upload videos that provide demonstrations of your products and show how they work, exhibit their different features and show how users can benefit from their use. Moreover, video inclusion has certain search engine benefits as well.

Involve your Website Audiences

The three main elements of a successful website are - Content, Communication and Commerce. You need to involve your audiences and make them feel that they are a part of the website. Include a form on audience interaction on your website. Provide them with an option to review the products and participate in forum discussions etc.

Provide Free Shipping Options

A little known secret of the e commerce industry is that shoppers often shy away from buying a product because of the additional shipping costs that are involved. Thus if you decide to waive of the shipping costs, you'll have more sales. If its not a profitable option individually, provide free shipping options for bulk orders.

Optimize Products for Local Searches

While it is great to business on a global scale and cater to international customers, you can get huge visitor traffic with localized search engine marketing. Promote the products on your website on domestic search engines. You can also customize your product descriptions, tutorials, public relations and ad campaigns to suit the tastes of the local markets.

in reference to: Google (view on Google Sidewiki)

How To Enhance The Usability Of Your Homepage Design

The homepage of your website is the face of your online presence. It is what makes the first impression on online audiences about your company and business. When people type in the URL of your website, they reach your homepage. The homepage, should therefore present a brief introduction about the website and lure visitors to browse further within. The homepage is perhaps the most important page of the website and thus you need to take adequate measures to enhance its usability. Here are some tips to ensure the same.

Include a Crisp and Catchy Tagline

Draft a tagline for your website homepage that informs about the company and business in a simple sentence. When visitors enter the homepage, they should know what the website and the company is all about just by reading the tagline. In fact, by drafting a catchy tagline you can catch the attention of your visitors and make sure they don't forget you.

Draft a Meaningful Title Tag

The title tag of your homepage should have your company name followed by a very brief description of the website. Avoid using words like 'Welcome' or 'The' that just populate the space and do no value addition. Instead, try to include your relevant keywords and phrases in the title tags.

Cluster All Corporate Information

Website visitors generally don't bother reading about the company. However, there are times when they decide to do business with you only after they are convinced about the company. In such scenarios it is important to have good corporate information on the website. Create an About Us page on your website that is dedicated towards informing visitors all about your company and business and provide a link to it from the homepage.

Focus on Key Tasks of the Website

The homepage of your website should act as a guide for visitors and help them find a browsing route. It should provide a clear starting point to do what they want to do i.e. there should be clear links to the main areas of the website where visitors might be interested in going.

Include a Search Box

The search box is indispensable for any website. Internet users are an impatient lot and they love anything that cuts short the action steps. Search boxes enable visitors to search for the exact information that they need by just entering a query instead of browsing through categories to fins what they need. Make sure your search box is at least 25 characters wide so that it accommodates multiple queries.

Offer Snapshots of Inlying Content

The homepage of the website is where you can showcase things and lure visitors to further explore the website. A good idea is to place snapshots or post the topics of important content within your website. Whether it is a recent article or a report that you have on a certain web page, offer a preview on the homepage.

Use Meaningful Design Elements

The homepage of a website is important and should welcome visitors. However, that doesn't mean you can load the page with useless design elements and flash animations that offer no value but only increase the file sizes.

Kabir Bedi is the senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a reputed offshore web development company that provides an extensive range of web design services and web Development services. He has completed several international web design projects for international clients.

in reference to: Google (view on Google Sidewiki)

Here's a different way to generate forms using PHP, and to take care of all the required field validation too. It might help someone:

array(
"type"=>"select",
// attributes are an associative array
"attributes"=>array(
"mr"=>"Mr.",
"ms"=>"Ms.",
"miss"=>"Miss.",
"mrs"=>"Mrs.",
),
),
"first_name"=>array(
"type"=>"text",
"size"=>40,
"required"=>true,
"onclick"=>"alert('test');",
"style"=>"border:2px solid #CCCCCC; padding:4px; font-size:15px;",
),
"last_name"=>array(
"type"=>"text",
"size"=>70,
"required"=>true,
),
);

$errors=array();

if($_REQUEST['save']){
// do sql here...
$sql = "INSERT INTO foo SET insert_date=NOW()";
foreach($elements as $element_name => $el){
if($el['required']&&!$_REQUEST[$element_name]){
$errors[]="Required field missing: $element_name";
}else{
$sql .= ", `$element_name` = '".addslashes($_REQUEST[$element_name])."'";
}
}
if(!$errors){
// call sql:
// $res = query($sql,$db);
// $member_id= mysql_insert_id($db);
// redirect after post back
header("Location: example.php?member_id=$member_id");
exit;
}
}

global $elements;
function fb($elem){
global $elements;
$el = $elements[$elem];
if(!$el['name'])$el['name']=$elem;
if(!$el['value']&&$_REQUEST[$el['name']])$el['value']=$_REQUEST[$el['name']];
switch($el['type']){
case "textarea":
?>
$val){ if($key=="value")continue; ?> ="" >

$val){ ?> ="" >

$val){ if($key=="attributes")continue; ?> ="" >
- select -
$val) {
?>
selected >














Salutation:

First Name:

Last Name:





First name and last name are required fields. Try clicking save without filling them in.









View cod

in reference to: required field validator in php - Google Search (view on Google Sidewiki)
Online Coin-Op Game
Play Online Computer Game
Online Kids And Teens: Gam
College and University
Art Voices
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News and Media
Yard, Deck, and Table Games
Hand-Eye Coordination
Paper and Pencil
Online Developers and Publi
Online Women in Gaming
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Research Groups and CentersOnline Bibliography
Open Access Resources
Knowledge Management
Ask an Expert
Online Questions and Answe
Trains and Railroads
Newspapers
Internet Broadcasts
Museums and Archives
Colleges and Universities
Online Headline Links
People and Society
School Time
Teen Life
Health Care
Your Family
Sports and Hobbies
Apartment Living
Do-It-Yourself
Online Home Business
Personal Organization
Online Rural Living
Online Domestic Services
Online Personal Finance
Online Healthcare Industry
Online Support Groups
Environmental Health
printed project
Spread Artculture
Watercolor Artist
Famous Magazine
Focus: Fine Art Photography
Nature's Best Photography
Team Handball
Autographs
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Video Games: Sports
Water Sports
Lifestyle Choices
Language and Linguistics
Consumer Goods and Services
Antiques and Collectibles
Beauty Products
Office Products
Online Shopping
Home and Garden
Earth Sciences
Online Software
Online Employment
Birds And Blooms
Dogs Today
Feline Wellness
Modern Dog
Traditional House Plans
Print Design Annual
India Art Collector
Design Issues
Gallery Guide
Google Home
Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual
Online Play-By-Mail
Online Gambling
Online Web Hosting
Play Online Video Games
Global Exec Women
Women's Health
Science and Nature
Online Jewelry
This Old House
Modern Painters
sandiya

Website

A web site is a collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that is

hosted on one or more web servers, usually accessible via the Internet.

A Web page is a document, typically written in (X)HTML, that is almost always

accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the Web server to

display in the user's Web browser.

All publicly accessible websites are seen collectively as constituting the "World Wide

Web".

The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a common root URL called the

homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server. The URLs of the pages

organize them into a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the

reader perceives the overall structure and how the traffic flows between the different

parts of the site.

Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples

of subscription sites include many business sites, parts of many news sites, academic

journal sites, gaming sites, message boards, Web-based e-mail, services, social

networking websites, and sites providing real-time stock market data. Because they

require authentication to view the content they are technically an Intranet site.
History

The World Wide Web was created in 1990 by CERN engineer, Tim Berners-Lee.[1] On

30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone.[2]

Before the introduction of HTML and HTTP other protocols such as file transfer protocol

and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server. These

protocols offer a simple directory structure which the user navigates and chooses files

to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files without

formatting or were encoded in word processor formats.

Overview

Organized by function a website may be

* a personal website
* a commercial website
* a government website
* a non-profit organization website

It could be the work of an individual, a business or other organization, and is typically

dedicated to some particular topic or purpose. Any website can contain a hyperlink to

any other website, so the distinction between individual sites, as perceived by the

user, may sometimes be blurred.

Websites are written in, or dynamically converted to, HTML (Hyper Text Markup

Language) and are accessed using a software interface classified as an user agent.

Web pages can be viewed or otherwise accessed from a range of computer-based and

Internet-enabled devices of various sizes, including desktop computers, laptops, PDAs

and cell phones.

A website is hosted on a computer system known as a web server, also called an HTTP

server, and these terms can also refer to the software that runs on these systems and

that retrieves and delivers the Web pages in response to requests from the website

users. Apache is the most commonly used Web server software (according to Netcraft

statistics) and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) is also commonly used.

Website styles

Static Website

A Static Website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the same form as

the user will view them. It is primarily coded in HTML (Hyper-text Markup Language).

A static website is also called a Classic website, a 5-page website or a Brochure

website because it simply presents pre-defined information to the user. It may include

information about a company and its products and services via text, photos, Flash

animation, audio/video and interactive menus and navigation.

This type of website usually displays the same information to all visitors, thus the

information is static. Similar to handing out a printed brochure to customers or clients,

a static website will generally provide consistent, standard information for an extended

period of time. Although the website owner may make updates periodically, it is a

manual process to edit the text, photos and other content and may require basic

website design skills and software.

In summary, visitors are not able to control what information they receive via a static

website, and must instead settle for whatever content the website owner has decided

to offer at that time.

They are edited using four broad categories of software:

* Text editors, such as Notepad or TextEdit, where the HTML is manipulated directly

within the editor program
* WYSIWYG offline editors, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver

(previously Macromedia Dreamweaver), where the site is edited using a GUI interface

and the underlying HTML is generated automatically by the editor software
* WYSIWYG Online editors, where the any media rich online presentation like

websites, widgets, intro, blogs etc. are created on a flash based platform.
* Template-based editors, such as Rapidweaver and iWeb, which allow users to

quickly create and upload websites to a web server without having to know anything

about HTML, as they just pick a suitable template from a palette and add pictures and

text to it in a DTP-like fashion without ever having to see any HTML code.

MRF Web Technologies
Mrf Web Design
Web Management India
Web Design Devlopment
Web Solution Tools

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked

hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view

Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate

between them using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, the

World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at

the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In

1990, he proposed building a "web of nodes" storing "hypertext pages" viewed by

"browsers" on a network,[1] and released that web in 1992. Connected by the existing

Internet, other websites were created, around the world, adding international

standards for domain names & the HTML language. Since then, Berners-Lee has played

an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup

languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his

vision of a Semantic Web.

The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an

easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of

the Internet, [2] to the extent that the World Wide Web has become a synonym for

Internet, with the two being conflated in popular use. [3]

How it works

Viewing a Web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL

of the page into a Web browser, or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource.

The Web browser then initiates a series of communication messages, behind the

scenes, in order to fetch and display it.

First, the server-name portion of the URL is resolved into an IP address using the

global, distributed Internet database known as the domain name system, or DNS. This

IP address is necessary to contact and send data packets to the Web server.

The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request to the Web server

at that particular address. In the case of a typical Web page, the HTML text of the

page is requested first and parsed immediately by the Web browser, which will then

make additional requests for images and any other files that form a part of the page.

Statistics measuring a website's popularity are usually based on the number of 'page

views' or associated server 'hits', or file requests, which take place.

Having received the required files from the Web server, the browser then renders the

page onto the screen as specified by its HTML, CSS, and other Web languages. Any

images and other resources are incorporated to produce the on-screen Web page that

the user sees.

Most Web pages will themselves contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps

to downloads, source documents, definitions and other Web resources. Such a

collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links, is what was

dubbed a "web" of information. Making it available on the Internet created what Tim

Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (a term written in CamelCase, subsequently

discarded) in November 1990.[1]

Berners-Lee has said that the most important feature of the World Wide Web is "Error

404", which tells the user that a file does not exist. Without this feature, he said, the

web would have ground to a halt long ago.

Berners-Lee has also expressed regret over the format of the URL. Currently it is

divided into two parts - the route to the server which is divided by dots, and the file

path separated by slashes. The server route starts with the least significant element

and ends with the most significant, then the file path reverses this, moving from high

to low. Berners-Lee would have liked to see this rationalised. So an address which is

currently (e.g.) "http://www.mrfweb.we.bs /document/pictures/illustration.jpg" would

become http:/uk/co/examplesite/documents/pictures/illustration.jpg. In this format the

server no longer has any special place in the address, which is simply one coherent

hierarchical path.

History

History of the World Wide Web

This NeXT Computer used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server.

The underlying ideas of the Web can be traced as far back as 1980, when, at CERN in

Switzerland, Sir Tim Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE (a reference to Enquire Within Upon

Everything, a book he recalled from his youth). While it was rather different from the

system in use today, it contained many of the same core ideas (and even some of the

ideas of Berners-Lee's next project after the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web).

In March 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a proposal[4] which referenced ENQUIRE and

described a more elaborate information management system. With help from Robert

Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal (on November 12, 1990) to build a

"Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3")[1] as a "web of

nodes" with "hypertext documents" to store data. That data would be viewed in

"hypertext pages" (webpages) by various "browsers" (line-mode or full-screen) on the

computer network, using an "access protocol" connecting the "Internet and DECnet

protocol worlds".[1]

The proposal had been modeled after EBT's (Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off

from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University)

Dynatext SGML reader that CERN had licensed. The Dynatext system, although

technically advanced (a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to

Hypermedia within HyTime), was considered too expensive and with an inappropriate

licensing policy for general HEP (High Energy Physics) community use: a fee for each

document and each time a document was charged.

A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first Web server and also to

write the first Web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee

had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:[5] the first Web browser (which

was a Web editor as well), the first Web server, and the first Web pages[6] which

described the project itself.

On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the

alt.hypertext newsgroup.[7] This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly

available service on the Internet.

The first server outside Europe was set up at SLAC in December 1991 [8].

The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the

1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University--- among

others Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam--- Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and Douglas

Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by

Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex," which was described in the 1945 essay "As

We May Think".

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book

Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage

between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities,

but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the

process, he developed a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web

and elsewhere: the Uniform Resource Identifier.

The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that

were then available. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional

ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by

the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing

Web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the

chronic problem of link rot. Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide

Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients

independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.

On April 30, 1993, CERN announced[9] that the World Wide Web would be free to

anyone, with no fees due. Coming two months after the announcement that the Gopher

protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and

towards the Web. An early popular Web browser was ViolaWWW, which was based

upon HyperCard.

Scholars generally agree, however, that the turning point for the World Wide Web

began with the introduction[10] of the Mosaic Web browser[11] in 1993, a graphical

browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at

the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen.

Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications

Initiative, a funding program initiated by the High Performance Computing and

Communication Act of 1991, one of several computing developments initiated by

Senator Al Gore.[12] Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed

with text in Web pages, and its popularity was less than older protocols in use over the

Internet, such as Gopher and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical

user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left

the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October, 1994. It was

founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science

(MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

(DARPA)—which had pioneered the Internet—and the European Commission.

Standards
Web standards

Many formal standards and other technical specifications define the operation of

different aspects of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and computer information

exchange. Many of the documents are the work of the World Wide Web Consortium

(W3C), headed by Berners-Lee, but some are produced by the Internet Engineering

Task Force (IETF) and other organizations.

Usually, when Web standards are discussed, the following publications are seen as

foundational:

* Recommendations for markup languages, especially HTML and XHTML, from the

W3C. These define the structure and interpretation of hypertext documents.
* Recommendations for stylesheets, especially CSS, from the W3C.
* Standards for ECMAScript (usually in the form of JavaScript), from Ecma

International.
* Recommendations for the Document Object Model, from W3C.

Additional publications provide definitions of other essential technologies for the World

Wide Web, including, but not limited to, the following:

* Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which is a universal system for referencing

resources on the Internet, such as hypertext documents and images. URIs, often called

URLs, are defined by the IETF's RFC 3986 / STD 66: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI):

Generic Syntax, as well as its predecessors and numerous URI scheme-defining RFCs;
* HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), especially as defined by RFC 2616: http://1.1

and RFC 2617: HTTP Authentication, which specify how the browser and server

authenticate each other.

Privacy

Computer users, who save time and money, and who gain conveniences and

entertainment, may or may not have surrendered the right to privacy in exchange for

using a number of technologies including the Web.[13] Worldwide, more than a half

billion people have used a social network service,[14] and of Americans who grew up

with the Web, half created an online profile[15] and are part of a generational shift

that could be changing norms.[16][17] Among services paid for by advertising, Yahoo!

could collect the most data about users of commercial websites, about 2,500 bits of

information per month about each typical user of its site and its affiliated advertising

network sites. Yahoo! was followed by MySpace with about half that potential and then

by AOL-TimeWarner, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and eBay.[18]

Privacy representatives from 60 countries have resolved to ask for laws to complement

industry self-regulation, for education for children and other minors who use the Web,

and for default protections for users of social networks.[19] They also believe data

protection for personally identifiable information benefits business more than the sale

of that information.[19] Users can opt-in to features in browsers from companies such

as Apple, Google, Microsoft (beta) and Mozilla (beta) to clear their personal histories

locally and block some cookies and advertising networks[20] but they are still tracked

in websites' server logs.[citation needed] Berners-Lee and colleagues see hope in

accountability and appropriate use achieved by extending the Web's architecture to

policy awareness, perhaps with audit logging, reasoners and appliances.[21]

Security

The Web has become criminals' preferred pathway for spreading malware. Cybercrime

carried out on the Web can include identity theft, fraud, espionage and intelligence

gathering.[22] Web-based vulnerabilities now outnumber traditional computer security

concerns,[23] and as measured by Google, about one in ten Web pages may contain

malicious code.[24] Most Web-based attacks take place on legitimate websites, and

most, as measured by Sophos, are hosted in the United States, China and Russia.[25]

The most common of all malware threats is SQL injection attacks against websites.[26]

Through HTML and URIs the Web was vulnerable to attacks like cross-site scripting

(XSS) that came with the introduction of JavaScript[27] and were exacerbated to some

degree by Web 2.0 and Ajax web design that favors the use of scripts.[28] Today by

one estimate, 70% of all websites are open to XSS attacks on their users.[29]

Proposed solutions vary to extremes. Large security vendors like McAfee already design

governance and compliance suites to meet post-9/11 regulations,[30] and some, like

Finjan have recommended active real-time inspection of code and all content regardless

of its source.[22] Some have argued that for enterprise to see security as a business

opportunity rather than a cost center,[31] "ubiquitous, always-on digital rights

management" enforced in the infrastructure by a handful of organizations must replace

the hundreds of companies that today secure data and networks.[32] Jonathan Zittrain

has said users sharing responsibility for computing safety is far preferable to locking

down the Internet.[33]

Web accessibility

Many countries regulate web accessibility as a requirement for web sites.

Java

A significant advance in Web technology was Sun Microsystems' Java platform. It

enables Web pages to embed small programs (called applets) directly into the view.

These applets run on the end-user's computer, providing a richer user interface than

simple Web pages. Java client-side applets never gained the popularity that Sun had

hoped for a variety of reasons, including lack of integration with other content (applets

were confined to small boxes within the rendered page) and the fact that many

computers at the time were supplied to end users without a suitably installed Java

Virtual Machine, and so required a download by the user before applets would appear.

Adobe Flash now performs many of the functions that were originally envisioned for

Java applets, including the playing of video content, animation, and some rich GUI

features. Java itself has become more widely used as a platform and language for

server-side and other programming.

JavaScript

JavaScript, on the other hand, is a scripting language that was initially developed for

use within Web pages. The standardized version is ECMAScript. While its name is

similar to Java, JavaScript was developed by Netscape and has very little to do with

Java, although the syntax of both languages is derived from the C programming

language. In conjunction with a Web page's Document Object Model (DOM), JavaScript

has become a much more powerful technology than its creators originally

envisioned.[citation needed] The manipulation of a page's DOM after the page is

delivered to the client has been called Dynamic HTML (DHTML), to emphasize a shift

away from static HTML displays.

In simple cases, all the optional information and actions available on a

JavaScript-enhanced Web page will have been downloaded when the page was first

delivered. Ajax ("Asynchronous JavaScript and XML") is a group of interrelated web

development techniques used for creating interactive web applications that provide a

method whereby parts within a Web page may be updated, using new information

obtained over the network at a later time in response to user actions. This allows the

page to be more responsive, interactive and interesting, without the user having to

wait for whole-page reloads. Ajax is seen as an important aspect of what is being

called Web 2.0. Examples of Ajax techniques currently in use can be seen in Gmail,

Google Maps, and other dynamic Web applications.

Publishing Web pages

Web page production is available to individuals outside the mass media. In order to

publish a Web page, one does not have to go through a publisher or other media

institution, and potential readers could be found in all corners of the globe.

Many different kinds of information are available on the Web, and for those who wish

to know other societies, cultures, and peoples, it has become easier.

The increased opportunity to publish materials is observable in the countless personal

and social networking pages, as well as sites by families, small shops, etc., facilitated

by the emergence of free Web hosting services.

Statistics

According to a 2001 study, there were massively more than 550 billion documents on

the Web, mostly in the invisible Web, or deep Web.[34] A 2002 survey of 2,024 million

Web pages[35] determined that by far the most Web content was in English: 56.4%;

next were pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more

recent study, which used Web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web,

determined that there were over 11.5 billion Web pages in the publicly indexable Web

as of the end of January 2005.[36] As of June 2008, the indexable web contains at

least 63 billion pages.[37] On July 25, 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert

and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique

URLs.[38]

Over 100.1 million websites operated as of March 2008.[39] Of these 74% were

commercial or other sites operating in the .com generic top-level domain.[39]

Speed issues

Frustration over congestion issues in the Internet infrastructure and the high latency

that results in slow browsing has led to an alternative, pejorative name for the World

Wide Web: the World Wide Wait.[citation needed] Speeding up the Internet is an

ongoing discussion over the use of peering and QoS technologies. Other solutions to

reduce the World Wide Wait can be found on W3C.

Standard guidelines for ideal Web response times are:[40]

* 0.1 second (one tenth of a second). Ideal response time. The user doesn't sense

any interruption.
* 1 second. Highest acceptable response time. Download times above 1 second

interrupt the user experience.
* 10 seconds. Unacceptable response time. The user experience is interrupted and

the user is likely to leave the site or system.

These numbers are useful for planning server capacity.

Caching

If a user revisits a Web page after only a short interval, the page data may not need to

be re-obtained from the source Web server. Almost all Web browsers cache

recently-obtained data, usually on the local hard drive. HTTP requests sent by a

browser will usually only ask for data that has changed since the last download. If the

locally-cached data are still current, it will be reused.

Caching helps reduce the amount of Web traffic on the Internet. The decision about

expiration is made independently for each downloaded file, whether image, stylesheet,

JavaScript, HTML, or whatever other content the site may provide. Thus even on sites

with highly dynamic content, many of the basic resources only need to be refreshed

occasionally. Web site designers find it worthwhile to collate resources such as CSS

data and JavaScript into a few site-wide files so that they can be cached efficiently.

This helps reduce page download times and lowers demands on the Web server.

There are other components of the Internet that can cache Web content. Corporate and

academic firewalls often cache Web resources requested by one user for the benefit of

all. (See also Caching proxy server.) Some search engines, such as Google or Yahoo!,

also store cached content from websites.

Apart from the facilities built into Web servers that can determine when files have

been updated and so need to be re-sent, designers of dynamically-generated Web

pages can control the HTTP headers sent back to requesting users, so that transient or

sensitive pages are not cached. Internet banking and news sites frequently use this

facility.

Data requested with an HTTP 'GET' is likely to be cached if other conditions are met;

data obtained in response to a 'POST' is assumed to depend on the data that was

POSTed and so is not cached.

Link rot and Web archival

Main article: Link rot

Over time, many Web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are

replaced with different content. This phenomenon is referred to in some circles as "link

rot" and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called "dead links".

The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive Web sites. The

Internet Archive is one of the most well-known efforts; it has been active since 1996.

Academic conferences

The major academic event covering the Web is the World Wide Web Conference,

promoted by IW3C2.

WWW prefix in Web addresses

The letters "www" are commonly found at the beginning of Web addresses because of

the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services

they provide. So for example, the host name for a Web server is often "www"; for an

FTP server, "ftp"; and for a USENET news server, "news" or "nntp" (after the news

protocol NNTP). These host names appear as DNS subdomain names, as in

"www.mrfweb.we.bs".

This use of such prefixes is not required by any technical standard; indeed, the first

Web server was at "nxoc01.cern.ch",[41] and even today many Web sites exist without

a "www" prefix. The "www" prefix has no meaning in the way the main Web site is

shown. The "www" prefix is simply one choice for a Web site's host name.

However, some website addresses require the www. prefix, and if typed without one,

won't work; there are also some which must be typed without the prefix. Sites that do

not have Host Headers properly setup are the cause of this. Some hosting companies

do not setup a www or @ A record in the web server configuration and/or at the DNS

server level.

Some Web browsers will automatically try adding "www." to the beginning, and

possibly ".com" to the end, of typed URLs if no host is found without them. All major

web browsers will also prefix "http://www.mrfweb.we.bs/" and append ".com" to the

address bar contents if the Control and Enter keys are pressed simultaneously. For

example, entering "example" in the address bar and then pressing either Enter or

Control+Enter will usually resolve to "http://www.mrfweb.we.bs", depending on the

exact browser version and its settings.
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Web server

1. HTTP: every web server program operates by accepting HTTP requests from the

client, and providing an HTTP response to the client. The HTTP response usually

consists of an HTML document, but can also be a raw file, an image, or some other

type of document (defined by MIME-types). If some error is found in client request or

while trying to serve it, a web server has to send an error response which may include

some custom HTML or text messages to better explain the problem to end users.
2. Logging: usually web servers have also the capability of logging some detailed

information, about client requests and server responses, to log files; this allows the

webmaster to collect statistics by running log analyzers on these files.

In practice many web servers implement the following features also:

1. Authentication, optional authorization request (request of user name and

password) before allowing access to some or all kind of resources.
2. Handling of static content (file content recorded in server's filesystem(s)) and

dynamic content by supporting one or more related interfaces (SSI, CGI, SCGI, FastCGI,

JSP, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, Server API such as NSAPI, ISAPI, etc.).
3. HTTPS support (by SSL or TLS) to allow secure (encrypted) connections to the

server on the standard port 443 instead of usual port 80.
4. Content compression (i.e. by gzip encoding) to reduce the size of the responses

(to lower bandwidth usage, etc.).
5. Virtual hosting to serve many web sites using one IP address.
6. Large file support to be able to serve files whose size is greater than 2 GB on 32

bit OS.
7. Bandwidth throttling to limit the speed of responses in order to not saturate the

network and to be able to serve more clients.

Origin of returned content

The origin of the content sent by server is called:

* static if it comes from an existing file lying on a filesystem;
* dynamic if it is dynamically generated by some other program or script or

application programming interface (API) called by the web server.

Serving static content is usually much faster (from 2 to 100 times) than serving

dynamic content, especially if the latter involves data pulled from a database.

Path translation

Web servers are able to map the path component of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

into:

* a local file system resource (for static requests);
* an internal or external program name (for dynamic requests).

For a static request the URL path specified by the client is relative to the Web server's

root directory.

Consider the following URL as it would be requested by a client:

http://www.mrfweb.we.bs/index.html

The client's web browser will translate it into a connection to www.example.com with

the following HTTP 1.1 request:

GET /path/file.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mrfweb.we.bs

The web server on www.mrfweb.we.bs will append the given path to the path of its

root directory. On Unix machines, this is commonly /var/www. The result is the local

file system resource:

/var/www/path/file.html

The web server will then read the file, if it exists, and send a response to the client's

web browser. The response will describe the content of the file and contain the file

itself. ..........

Load limits

A web server (program) has defined load limits, because it can handle only a limited

number of concurrent client connections (usually between 2 and 60,000, by default

between 500 and 1,000) per IP address (and TCP port) and it can serve only a certain

maximum number of requests per second depending on:

* its own settings;
* the HTTP request type;
* content origin (static or dynamic);
* the fact that the served content is or is not cached;
* the hardware and software limits of the OS where it is working.

When a web server is near to or over its limits, it becomes overloaded and thus

unresponsive.

Overload causes
A daily graph of a web server's load, indicating a spike in the load early in the day.

At any time web servers can be overloaded because of:

* Too much legitimate web traffic (i.e. thousands or even millions of clients hitting

the web site in a short interval of time. e.g. Slashdot effect);
* DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks;
* Computer worms that sometimes cause abnormal traffic because of millions of

infected computers (not coordinated among them);
* XSS viruses can cause high traffic because of millions of infected browsers and/or

web servers;
* Internet web robots traffic not filtered/limited on large web sites with very few

resources (bandwidth, etc.);
* Internet (network) slowdowns, so that client requests are served more slowly and

the number of connections increases so much that server limits are reached;
* Web servers (computers) partial unavailability, this can happen because of

required or urgent maintenance or upgrade, HW or SW failures, back-end (i.e. DB)

failures, etc.; in these cases the remaining web servers get too much traffic and

become overloaded.

Overload symptoms

The symptoms of an overloaded web server are:

* requests are served with (possibly long) delays (from 1 second to a few hundred

seconds);
* 500, 502, 503, 504 HTTP errors are returned to clients (sometimes also unrelated

404 error or even 408 error may be returned);
* TCP connections are refused or reset (interrupted) before any content is sent to

clients;
* in very rare cases, only partial contents are sent (but this behavior may well be

considered a bug, even if it usually depends on unavailable system resources).

Anti-overload techniques

To partially overcome above load limits and to prevent overload, most popular web

sites use common techniques like:

* managing network traffic, by using:
o Firewalls to block unwanted traffic coming from bad IP sources or having bad

patterns;
o HTTP traffic managers to drop, redirect or rewrite requests having bad HTTP

patterns;
o Bandwidth management and traffic shaping, in order to smooth down peaks in

network usage;
* deploying web cache techniques;
* using different domain names to serve different (static and dynamic) content by

separate Web servers, i.e.:
o

http://images.mrfweb.we.bs/
o

http://www.mrfweb.we.bs/

* using different domain names and/or computers to separate big files from small

and medium sized files; the idea is to be able to fully cache small and medium sized

files and to efficiently serve big or huge (over 10 - 1000 MB) files by using different

settings;
* using many Web servers (programs) per computer, each one bound to its own

network card and IP address;
* using many Web servers (computers) that are grouped together so that they act or

are seen as one big Web server, see also: Load balancer;
* adding more hardware resources (i.e. RAM, disks) to each computer;
* tuning OS parameters for hardware capabilities and usage;
* using more efficient computer programs for web servers, etc.;
* using other workarounds, especially if dynamic content is involved.

Historical notes
The world's first web server.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed to his employer CERN (European Organization for

Nuclear Research) a new project, which had the goal of easing the exchange of

information between scientists by using a hypertext system. As a result of the

implementation of this project, in 1990 Berners-Lee wrote two programs:

* a browser called WorldWideWeb;
* the world's first web server, later known as CERN HTTPd, which ran on NeXTSTEP.

Between 1991 and 1994 the simplicity and effectiveness of early technologies used to

surf and exchange data through the World Wide Web helped to port them to many

different operating systems and spread their use among lots of different social groups

of people, first in scientific organizations, then in universities and finally in industry.

In 1994 Tim Berners-Lee decided to constitute the World Wide Web Consortium to

regulate the further development of the many technologies involved (HTTP, HTML, etc.)

through a standardization process.

The following years are recent history which has seen an exponential growth of the

number of web sites and servers.

Market structure

Given below is a list of top Web server software vendors published in a Netcraft survey

in September 2008.
Vendor Product Web Sites Hosted Percent
Apache Apache 91,068,713 50.24%
Microsoft IIS 62,364,634 34.4%
Google GWS 10,072,687 5.56%
lighttpd lighttpd 3,095,928 1.71%
nginx nginx 2,562,554 1.41%
Oversee Oversee 1,938,953 1.07%
Others - 10,174,366 5.61%
Total - 181,277,835 100.00%


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Modern programming

Quality requirements

Whatever the approach to software development may be, the final program must

satisfy some fundamental properties. The following five properties are among the most

relevant:

* Efficiency/Performance: the amount of system resources a program consumes

(processor time, memory space, slow devices, network bandwidth and to some extent

even user interaction), the less the better.
* Reliability: how often the results of a program are correct. This depends on

prevention of error propagation resulting from data conversion and prevention of errors

resulting from buffer overflows, underflows and zero division.
* Robustness: how well a program anticipates situations of data type conflict and

other incompatibilities that result in run time errors and program halts. The focus is

mainly on user interaction and the handling of exceptions.
* Usability: the clarity and intuitiveness of a programs output can make or break its

success. This involves a wide range of textual and graphical elements that makes a

program easy and comfortable to use.
* Portability: the range of computer hardware and operating system platforms on

which the source code of a program can be compiled/interpreted and run. This depends

mainly on the range of platform specific compilers for the language of the source code

rather than anything having to do with the program directly.

Algorithmic complexity

The academic field and the engineering practice of computer programming are both

largely concerned with discovering and implementing the most efficient algorithms for a

given class of problem. For this purpose, algorithms are classified into orders using

so-called Big O notation, O(n), which expresses resource use, such as execution time

or memory consumption, in terms of the size of an input. Expert programmers are

familiar with a variety of well-established algorithms and their respective complexities

and use this knowledge to choose algorithms that are best suited to the circumstances.

Methodologies

The first step in most formal software development projects is requirements analysis,

followed by testing to determine value modeling, implementation, and failure

elimination (debugging). There exist a lot of differing approaches for each of those

tasks. One approach popular for requirements analysis is Use Case analysis.

Popular modeling techniques include Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and

Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a notation

used for both OOAD and MDA.

A similar technique used for database design is Entity-Relationship Modeling (ER

Modeling).

Implementation techniques include imperative languages (object-oriented or

procedural), functional languages, and logic languages.

Measuring language usage

It is very difficult to determine what are the most popular of modern programming

languages. Some languages are very popular for particular kinds of applications (e.g.,

COBOL is still strong in the corporate data center, often on large mainframes, FORTRAN

in engineering applications, and C in embedded applications), while some languages

are regularly used to write many different kinds of applications.

Methods of measuring language popularity include: counting the number of job

advertisements that mention the language[7], the number of books teaching the

language that are sold (this overestimates the importance of newer languages), and

estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language (this

underestimates the number of users of business languages such as COBOL).

Debugging
A bug which was debugged in 1947.

Debugging is a very important task in the software development process, because an

erroneous program can have significant consequences for its users. Some languages are

more prone to some kinds of faults because their specification does not require

compilers to perform as much checking as other languages. Use of a static analysis tool

can help detect some possible problems.

Debugging is often done with IDEs like Visual Studio, NetBeans, and Eclipse.

Standalone debuggers like gdb are also used, and these often provide less of a visual

environment, usually using a command line.

Programming languages

Main articles: Programming language and List of programming languages

Different programming languages support different styles of programming (called

programming paradigms). The choice of language used is subject to many

considerations, such as company policy, suitability to task, availability of third-party

packages, or individual preference. Ideally, the programming language best suited for

the task at hand will be selected. Trade-offs from this ideal involve finding enough

programmers who know the language to build a team, the availability of compilers for

that language, and the efficiency with which programs written in a given language

execute.

Allen Downey, in his book How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, writes:

The details look different in different languages, but a few basic instructions appear

in just about every language: input: Get data from the keyboard, a file, or some other

device. output: Display data on the screen or send data to a file or other device. math:

Perform basic mathematical operations like addition and multiplication. conditional

execution: Check for certain conditions and execute the appropriate sequence of

statements. repetition: Perform some action repeatedly, usually with some variation.

Many computer languages provide a mechanism to call functions provided by libraries.

Provided the functions in a library follow the appropriate runtime conventions (eg,

method of passing arguments), then these functions may be written in any other

language.

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