Web Hosting

Once you have a domain name, you need a place on the web for your domain name to point to. Essentially, you need a folder that web browsers (like Firefox or Explorer) will look in when someone types your domain name into the browser's address bar.

Statistical Analysis

Many websites have a "stats" page which displays a variety of statistics on how many visitors a site has, what pages visitors go to, how long visitors stay, what search engine key words led people to a site and many other useful and interesting bits of information.

Ask your webhost how to view your sites statistics page. You may find that you are sitting on an undeveloped goldmine or perhaps that your expensive website is not getting any visitors. These statistics will help you improve your sites design to get people to see what you want them to see.

Database Driven Web Sites

While they can take many different forms, some of the most common uses of database driven web sites are:

The fundamental elements of a data base driven web site are a database and a program which turns the data in the database into webpages. One of the most common combination of technologies for creating database driven website is the Linux operating system running Apache server, a MySql database and the PHP programming language (also known as LAMP).

E-commerce

It's not difficult to find effective E-commerce tools and services. What's difficult is deciding which tools to use from the large variety of shopsite/ e-commerce related applications and services. SunPoweredProductions recommends ZenCart, an open source application with a wide variety of features

Monitor Resolutions & Different Browsers

One of the more daunting challenges for web designers is creating web sites that look and act the same in different browsers on different computers. The first problem is monitor resolution. While most computers sold after the year 2000 have default resolutions 1024x768 or greater, there are still a few legacy systems running at 800x600.

Since very few websites require scrolling to the sides, it is important not to exceed the users display width. Websites with important navigation or content placed anywhere past ~800 pixels horizontally risk some visitors never noticing those parts of the website. Unfortunately, higher resolution displays are more and more common, so designs which are sized for old displays, look rather small on newer computers. One remedy is to design websites that "move". The graphics and text on a page can be made to position themselves relative to the size of the browser window. However, on some web pages, the movement of text and graphics is not an option.

While there are hundreds of different browsers, the majority of web surfers are users of one of the following:

Microsoft's Internet Explorer - By for the most common browser in use today, Internet Explorer is the source of a great deal of controversy. Though Microsoft made many great advances during the early years of the internet, since they gained a monopoly on the browser market, they have been criticized for making very few improvements. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization which develops and standardizes most of the programming languages used to build webpages, including HTML, XHTML, and CSS. When web designers refer to "standards compliant" web sites, they are referring to the standards developed by the W3C. In the last several years Microsoft has produced versions of Internet Explorer which do a poor job of following the standards of the W3C, creating a situation where web designers are forced to use hacks, alternate style sheets or various "work around's" in order to get web sites to work on both Internet Explorer and other browsers. Particularly poor are the IE version 5 browsers, which do an embarrassingly poor job of displaying CSS layout.

Mozilla Firefox - Desperate for a way to compete with Microsoft, Netscape asked the international programming community at large to cooperatively contribute to future versions of their code. In exchange, Netscape released the code under the GPL open source licence. Years later, while Netscape lingers at the fringes of browserdom, the Mozilla project is an icon of open source success. The flagship browser of the Mozilla project, Firefox has been consistently gaining ground and making an ever greater dent in Microsoft's browser monopoly. While Firefox is more commonly used by technology savvy power users, statistics vary from %30-%12 of the overall browser market. The Firefox 2.0 browser has some excellent features and a host of great "Add-ons". Most importantly, Firefox does a very good job of adapting the standards created by the W3C. As a result, web designers love Firefox for interpreting their code the way it is suppose to be interpreted and requiring few if any hacks and workarounds.

Macintosh Safari - In 2003 Macintosh released the Safari browser which quickly became the most popular browser used on the Mac. Microsoft had formerly controlled the Mac browser market, but failed to produce any updates for the Mac after IE 5.0. However, Firefox is available on the Mac and provides Safari with its main competition.

Netscape - Netscape was the dominant browser during the webs formative years (1994 -1997). After being out done by the Microsoft giant, they spawned the Mozilla project shortly before being bought by AOL/Time Warner. They have since barely focused on browser development, instead reinventing themselves as a social networking site similar to the popular digg.com. Some speculate that AOL was squashing Netscape on Microsoft's behalf.

Opera - Founded in 1995 in Oslo, Norway, Opera has continued producing a little known, but often very competitive browser ever since. Their 9.0 browser released for Windows, Mac and Linux in 2006 has many features absent from other browsers and relatively good support for W3C standards. Their company has been aggressively pushing its browser for use on mobile phones, webTV and game consoles.

While we have just read a brief bio of these five major browsers, bare in mind that multiple versions of each of these browsers have been released. The difference in the way IE 5.0 and IE 6.0 display a web page is often more drastic than the difference between the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. The great difficulty this creates is that your website might look very different and potentially very wrong, not just in the different browsers, but in any version of any browser. Combined with the quirks of different operating systems, different fonts users may have installed and a multitude of browser and display settings, the potential for some percentage of visitors to your site not seeing the site as you intended is very likely. There are two strategies for creating web sites which display consistently across the many computers.

While both these strategies are valid, workarounds are usually the quickest and most cost effective solution. Browser sniffing techniques usually amount to designing a different web site (or style sheet) for each browser. Since hacks often rely on exploiting errors in the way certain versions of browsers incorrectly interpret code, while future editions of browsers may cause major problems. (For instance, no more "Holly" hack for IE5 after IE7) While there are still many competing browsers, there is a rapid movement to greater adoption of W3C standards and greater cross browser compatibility.