Website Design and Development, 101:
Every business needs a website because websites are the only open internet technology available to everyone
with a computer or smart phone. People shouldn't need to sign into Facebook and share their home
address and where they will be tonight with the local burglars in order to find a good restaurant, but if you are a business putting your money
and time into a Facebook page rather than making a website your priority, that is exactly what you are asking your customers to do.
Although Social Media is receiving the attention, there is a lot going on in website technology. Although a plain HTML website is still sufficient
for some businesses, HTML5 and ASP.NET make a lot of things possible. Like any other technology, the bar rises and those businesses that clear the
bar prosper while those that don't crash and burn. We think an understanding of the technologies we use will be helpful:
- HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is a way of describing the textual components of a website.
For example you are currently looking at an unordered list that has a "<ul>
<li>text here</li> <li>more text here</li></ul>" format. UL stands for
Unordered List and LI stands for List Item. Every HTML command should be closed,
which is done with the slash. HTML5 is the latest version of HTML and adds
a lot of nice features that were very difficult to do before. For example, go
to the Shade Palapas website
and look at the transparency and the rounded corners on the sections. This
is very difficult to do with older versions of HTML and makes this website stand
out from the crowd. Unfortunately some browsers do not fully support HTML
and a good website designer will need to test an on all current browsers, IE9,
Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Please look at the Shade Palapas in IE9 if you
have it, and then in any of the other browsers listed; there is a substantial
difference in the appearance of one section because IE9 technology is not as
good at HTML5 as all the others. See if you can spot the difference.
- ASP.NET (ASPX) is a Microsoft technology that competes with PHP and allows
logic and sophisticated controls to be put into a website. ASP.NET is a
server based technology and the website hosting server makes logical decisions
based upon what the website visitor does. A good example is our Contact
page, the website visitor can send an e-mail to me without knowing my e-mail
address. Because I don't want 100 e-mail an hour from India, I use a form
on the contact page on my websites so no one can see my real em ail address on my
websites. Another example is the tabbed control on the Services page.
This tabbed control would take months of my time to design if I did not have
the latest technology from Microsoft and Developer's Express. One of the
goals of a website designer should be to reduce the amount of scrolling that a
visitor should have to do. This tabbed control allows someone who is only
interested in WPF to view the WPF information and ignore SEO. It makes
this website more user friendly. Friendliness is good, right?
- BLOG technology allows people to interact with a website. They can add
their own opinions, reviews, etc. People love a soapbox and if your
website is in some way controversial, a Blog style of component can attract a
lot of visitors and keep them coming back. There are 3 primary ways of
designing a blog website:
- WordPress templates
- Blogger
- Custom Code
WordPress and Blogger require people to log in in order to post their comments
but then pretty much allow them to write whatever they want. Visitors use
the same WordPress usercode and password on all WordPress websites and the same
is true for Blogger (Blogger is a Google technology and a visitor's Gmail
account login is used). This may not be what you want though.
Supposing you are a restaurant owner; you don't really want the world to know
that a stressed employee made a mistake and offended a customer today, do you?
if you have a WordPress or Blogger website and you don't check your website
every day, their comments about your employee are out there for the whole world
to see. Custom Code allows you to approve or delete every comment before
anyone except you can see it. At CIT, we support all 3 options.
- Video gives a website a personal touch. There are several options to putting
video onto a website including a plugin from YouTube. Generally we prefer
to use Flash Video, examples are on the Video pages of this website. Of
course this does not work on an iPad or iPhone but Flash video is great on PC's,
Mac's and most Android devices. If you expect your visitors to be using an
iPhone or iPad and your video is a central part of your website, there are HTML5
solutions.
Thanks for visiting, I hope this was informative and if you have questions, contact me!
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