ComiCafe is a new comic book shop opening up very soon in Shelbyville, KY.  Judging by the stock I’ve seen on the opening order, this is looking to be one of the better shops in the area.  Not only will the selection be grand, the collectibles be begging me for my wallet, but this particular shop is also a full fledged cafe (clever shop name, eh?), meaning that while I’m geeking out, I can also grab my newly acquired graphic novel, sit at a table and pound down some of the industries strongest coffee.

To end this little plug, if you’re in the area check ‘em out.  Definitely going to be one of my regular stops.

The Wireless Takeover of the 21st Century

Just seeing who’s paying attention.  Not too long ago the hype was all about the GB wired LAN connection, the fact that cell phones were able to take pictures as good a quality as a cheap digital camera, the XBox Live network or the PSN where you could finally play console games online, or even the Snuggie ‘thing’ which is nothing more than a backwards bathrobe.

Not to distract myself from the topic at hand, but I couldn’t resist finding a picture of a Snuggie while I e-bash it.  Allow me to carry on.  Wireless has been around almost as long as the personal computer in the form of RF.  It didn’t really get it’s jump into networking, however, until the inception of 802.11b.  From past experiences, I was lucky to maintain a 10mb connection to my LAN, and as far as internet connections go, forget about it.  Perhaps I was served the short end of my routing stick, but I wasn’t a fan.  Even the 802.11g series didn’t earn my respect, even though it was ALMOST as speedy as the favored CAT-5 cable.

Look at the way things have become.  I’m not complaining, I love it, but I’m just saying…look at it.  If only for a minute.  Modern day technology has evolved to a point where it revolves around wireless connectivity over your typical wired LAN.  PS3, XBox360 Slim, any notebook or netbook  or any mobile device for that matter cell phones included all include some variety of wireless capability, and with the new(er) 802.11n wireless protocols, there is a good reason why.  I can compare my wireless networking experiences of today with yesterdays networks connected to a 1024MB routers.

What will this bring tomorrow?  I don’t know but I can’t wait to find out!

The future of desktop hardware seems to be focusing around GPU computing.  Large software suites including several Adobe products, Browsers such as Internet Explorer 9, and even medical imaging software are all being written and optimized to graphics processors as opposed to the classic ideal of a central processing unit or CPU.  By the sounds of things, this isn’t completely changing everything, but will severely lighten the load on your CPU. From the article I’ve been reading over, the performance boost is an equivalent of driving a 4 cylinder automobile and then jumping to a jet engine.  I can’t help but be slightly skeptical, considering some of the marketing hype I’ve seen in previous years.  I was at one of the unveiling conferences that AMD demonstrated their new 64-bit processors several years ago, boasting that the processors would demonstrate a 30% increase in performance versus their 32-bit predecessors.  The upgrade is minimal at best.  I just hope that the new architecture that the major GPU conglomerates release (nVidia / ATI) fulfill the hype.

Memory Support:

About

This article is dedicated to newer and inexperienced webmasters but should be considered as a good read to experienced administrators alike. This article is written for Drake Technologies and The Admin Zone exclusively, but if you would like to use this for your website, be sure to leave a source link.

This article will be broken down into several sections and I will attempt to organize them chronologically in the order of items you should put into consideration first on the planning stages of developing your website. This is written by Joshua Drake, a freelance developer and web enthusiast with over a decade of experiences building, buying, selling, and flipping web sites.

Section 1 – Defining Your Niche

niche   [nich] noun, adjective, verb, niched, nich·ing.

–noun

2.

a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one’s niche in the business world.

3.

a distinct segment of a market.

4.

Ecology . the position or function of an organism in a community of plants and animals.

–adjective

5.

pertaining to or intended for a market niche; having specific appeal: niche advertising.

Every website, regardless of what it’s about, has a defined niche, and if it’s been online for more than a year, the webmaster has typically succeeded in making their website define said niche.

When you are planning to start your website, the first thing you need to decide is your niche. This is something that once you are out of planning, MUST be set in stone. One of the worst mistakes a new webmaster can make is changing their target niche and generalizing their content, diversifying their audience and crippling their traffic. Typically, if you have an idea for a website, this part is already taken care of, but as I just mentioned, you must be dedicated to your niche if you want to maintain any authority with your website down the road.

For this article, I’m going to use a generic niche, gaming. Should we make a gaming site? That’s a rather vague topic and has been done 3 million times over by individuals and private businesses alike with funding far greater than ours, so to make this a more feasible idea, lets specify further. We are going to carve our little place on the internet and make a name for our website as an authority on XBox 360 gaming!

Section 2 – Defining Your General Audience

Now that we have an idea of a website that we want to make (Xbox 360 Gaming), we need to determine who our audience would be. This step is important to make before setting anything up for several reasons. It allows us to take a closer look at the competition, it allows us to make generalized predictions of what our website wil look like in time, it will give us ideas of keywords to focus on, and it will give us ideas on how to market our website in the future.

To define your general audience, you need to look at it in a demographic point of view. Who plays Xbox 360 games? Who looks online for more information about your expertise? Who goes online wanting to discuss information they’ve accumulated?

To answer these questions, it’s time to use our friend, Google. Simply start searching for phrases as if you would be trying to find information you are wanting to release. In our case, we will be looking up the keywords ‘Xbox 360′. Look at the forums and community based results you find such as blogs, galleries, etc. Look at the obvious for information, such as member counts, post counts, guest counts, or if publically visible statistical demographics. How many individual websites do you see on your google search that are specifically geared towards your niche?

By looking over the clues provided, we can determine that our website would be viewed by primarily American males between the ages of 13 and 40. This small bit of information tells us more than you think. The accessibility rating of the website due to the ages of our general audiences is incredibly low, meaning we can customize the site nearly any way we want. We can design for high resolution if we want, we can use darker colors that wouldn’t normally be used, etc. Not to mention, with the information acquired, we know WHO is best to market our website to!

Now we have our niche (xbox 360) and have determined our target audience (young American males), it’s time to move onward to the next step.

Section 3 – Choosing Your Domain Name

This is a very important step, because it is something that you will unlikely not be changing. Ever.

When deciding a domain name, there are a small amount of things that you need to keep in mind. I will address several. Who is our registrar? What are some ideas of what our domain will be? Is it already taken? Do I want a .com, .net, .info, etc?

One at a time, who is our registrar? To answer that question, the first thing that needs to be explained is WHAT is a registrar. Registrar, as defined by the english language, is simply a record keeper. The kind of registrar we are looking for, however, is a very specific record keeper who we pay to record our domain name. To put it simple, we register a name, the registrar takes that name and matches it to an IP address that our host provides (we will get into that later). Hopefully that makes sense, if not just ask, but for brevity I have no intention of writing a book to more details of what a registrar is. For this article, we will use one of the more popular registrars available, GoDaddy.com.

So we have selected our registrar (GoDaddy), now we need to decide what name we want to give our Xbox360 website. Obviously names like XBox360.com will be unavailable at this point, so we are going to have to be more creative than that. Not only that, but we will need to come up with several in the event that the one we want the most is taken. I’m not going to come up with any for this article, and will just refer to the site as an Xbox 360 site, but I’ll still be giving some tips. During this stage of development, I would advise to come up with anywhere to 4-8 names to research. The name of your site isn’t typically important, but it’s always best to come up with something that correlates with your niche and is also highly memerable. Several years ago I closed a website named Cursedprophets.com, which was an art community. This is where I learned the importance of a good domain name. While the name was ‘cool’, it might have been memorable, but it doesn’t correlate with the sites content, so it doesn’t leave a proper imprint in the guests mind matching a name with a face (metaphorically speaking).

Next, we register our name with GoDaddy. Going through our list of potential names, start with your favorite and work down. If the name is taken, go to the next. After that, it will ask if you want to register as a .com, .net, etc. Ideally, you want to go with a .com as I personally find those to be the most memorable.

So now we have our domain name figured out, it’s time to move on to the next step in developing our website.

Section 4 – Choosing Your Structure

So we know what kind of website we want, we know what our domain name is going to be, but what are we going to put on our website? Is it strictly going to be a content driven site? A user-based blogging site? A forum driven website? While this kind of decision can change throughout the life of the website, it is important to have the structure in mind for the long haul, because if you make any changes, even changing the directory from ‘blog’ to ‘blogs’ can completely reset your backlinks with major search engines unless you leave a proper redirect, which if you have 1000′s of pages of content, can be far more tedious than it is worth. That in mind, it is best to decide what we want to start with now.

For this example, we want some sort of content management system (or CMS for short), with a user based blog, photo gallery, and forums for personalization. This in mind, we want the base or ROOT of our website to be the CMS. If we were using a seperate software to control each task, we would have seperate directories for each function, such as /blog, /forums, /gallery, etc. For this example, however, we will be using a software suite that can handle all of the above, vBulletin.

Section 5 – Choosing Your Software

Just because I’ve already decided what we are going to use for this example doesn’t mean this step should be discounted. You want to know what software you are using for whatever task before you get started, because changing your mind in the future might or might not be an option. That said, you might want an individual software platform for each task, such as Joomla for your CMS, WordPress for your blogging solution, Coppermine for your gallery, and MyBB for your forums.

Section 6 – Choosing Your Host

This is probably one of the more difficult decisions you will have to make, but lucky for you it’s something that you can and should change as your needs progress. There are, however, several aspects you need to look at. While price is always an issue, there are other matters to look at. Look, for instance, at the requirements the software suite we will be using has. vBulletin requires a server with PHP support, which means we will typically be looking for a web server with a LAMP setup, or Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. It’s important to look for that particular setup, because if you get a Windows IIS server, it’s almost definite that the server will not allow PHP, but ASP and ASP.net in its stead (which won’t work for vBulletin).

So you’ve found you a server with a LAMP setup, what next? To get started, you should be focused on cheap, namely a shared hosting solution. Go ahead and shop around for something cheap that offers enough space and bandwidth (or transfer) to suite your needs. The host I personally use (and have for years) is Site5 as they maintain reliable uptime and offer packages substantial to hosting multiple websites with one package.

Section 7 – Keeping SEO In Mind

SEO, or search engine optimization, is vital to the success of every website. It is an ongoing process from the inception of your website until the day (if ever) it closes down. I’m not going to really give details of what to do, other than advise you to research articles and guides to SEO as that is a topic far to large for the scope of this article. You can find several items on what to look at at The Admin Zone and there will be some soon here at Drake Technologies. Keep in mind that improving your onsite SEO and increasing backlinks and exposure are things that need to be constantly on your mind. Every day. For the rest of your life (or your websites, whichever dies first…)

Section 8 – Building to Expand

It’s no fun visiting a website, coming back in a year and see that its the same as when you left it. It’s also not very fulfilling to build a website and not have anything left to do after the day of inception. That being said, you always want to build your website with the ability to expand. Lucky for us, our software suite does that for us by allowing us to create catagories to expand in content, or building site sponsered galleries, etc.

Section 9 – Choosing Your Staff

As a website grows in content, traffic, and in our case users, not all content on your website will be created by you. Visitors, however, view all discussions on forums, all content on blogs, EVERYTHING as a reflection on YOU, the webmaster. That in mind, user driven content will need to be moderated that way items that shouldn’t be viewable by your typical guest WON’T be (at least won’t be for long)

After a while, it can be troublesome and possibly impossible for you to manage everything by yourself. This is a good time to employ staff members. These should be people that you trust the image as well as the site itself to as they will be volunteering their time to help you with something they care about. This should also give you a little extra time to market your website and improve upon what you have.

Section 10 – Setting Milestones

Now that we have successfully planned out and excecuted the creation of our website, there is one more important detail to look at, were we go from here. A good idea is to set milestones for your project, or measurable goals to hit before you move to the next stage of your operation. As an example, once you hit 500 registered users you can consider deploying a new, more professional and expensive design that is more pleasing to your guests? Or even create a fundraiser for such? Another exmple would be that once you average 2,000 or so visitors on a daily basis to monetize your website a little to cover some of your costs or perhaps make a profit.

It’s important to keep such goals in mind, and even more important to act on them. Keeping these goals will be very good in motivating you and will also encourage you to keeping the ideas on your website new and fresh.

Conclusion

This will be the first of a series of articles (and probably the least specific), and I hope it helped out at least a few people. If you have any questions or perhaps what to give some pointers to add to my series of ‘Getting Started’ series of webmaster resources, feel free to send me a message either at The Admin Zone or send me an e-mail.  Please be sure and add the title of the article in your subject line.

Back to Resources

About

Welcome to another article written in effort to right the typical wrongs of new webmasters as well as blog/forum administrators. In this slight introduction, I’m a long time webmaster with nearly 13 years of experience under my belt, working with several top notch websites along the way. I’m in no sense an expert because I believe that in everything there is always room for improvement within yourself as well as new things to learn, but hopefully my own endeavors can help others in being successful in their projects.

As always, I’ve split this article into several sections to define several of the problems that I’ve seen new webmasters make, as well as mistakes that I’ve made in the distant and recent past. Keep in mind that these are my personal opinions, but I would consider all scenarios mentioned something to pay attention to.

A lot of these scenarios are strictly forum based, but several of them can be reanalyzed and translated into a blog scenario or even a static content driven site.

This article is exclusive to Drake Technologies and The Admin Zone, but if you would like to use this article for your own website be sure to leave a source link. I hope this is an enjoyable read, as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

Section 1: The Unseen Webmaster

This will be a forum scenario, as the website/blog scenario is covered rather in depth in sections to come. So, turn on your forum mindset. Have you ever browsed a forum and noticed the online list to see several active users and zero staff? Browsed the forum team and noticed that only a small handful of them have even logged on in the past week? I’ve seen it far too often when I was a forum reviewer at TAZ, but considering I had to be friendly; I was never able to mention it. Considering I am a good man, I’m not going to mention the forums I’m talking about either.

To keep this on track, I want you to look at this scenario in the eyes of your guests. How well maintained is a site that’s staff isn’t even maintained? A lot of new forum owners tend to have the impression that once they have a few members and some staff in place that they no longer have to be there. You couldn’t be any more wrong. The owner is the most important person in terms of activity, and should display the MOST activity of any user. The remaining staff should be a close second. Again, when I go to a forum and see no activity from the staff, I question myself several questions. How much spam am I going to run into? If I run into a problem and send staff a message, will I get a response within a few hours or a few months? Are these guys really an authoritative source of information to the topic they are covering?

If you are a forum owner and you follow my beliefs on this, good for you. However, if you have staff that could be described as ‘unseen’, get rid of them. They are destroying your image. If you don’t want to be mean about it, send them a private message discussing your concerns. If they don’t respond within a few days, get rid of them. If a staff member needs a little time of leave, create a usergroup that is hidden from the staff listing and drop them in there until you can welcome them back.

In conclusion to this scenario, a well rounded and active staff will do wonders for your image, making those guests view you as a serious player and consider your site worth their time to register and post at.

Section 2: The Thousand Pixel Banner

If you learn anything from me, learn this: if a guest has to do any scrolling at all, left to right or top to bottom, without seeing any worthwhile information, they WILL leave.

It is a common principle in web design to put the most important items on your page at the top left, with the least important in the bottom right. It’s a rather lax idea, but important nonetheless, so pay attention. Make sure that you have at LEAST one item within the first 600 pixels of your website that is relevant to why your guest went to your site to begin with. I’m fully aware that resolutions are getting larger and larger making it easier and easier to display a lot of information in a small amount of space, but another concept important in web design is to make your website viewable in all medias if not most. This being said, you should always design your site for 1024×768 resolutions. I use this resolution because it is still the most common resolution, and most sites designed for it still look reasonably good in 800×600 as well as higher resolutions such as 1280×1024 or even widescreen resolutions like 1366×768.

To be fitting to the title, and to create an entertaining scenario, picture a website where all you can see from first glance is the spectacular banner and perhaps some sort of conceptual navigation (that probably failed as well). You might be able to see what’s going on when browsing on a 52 inch plasma screen monitor, but what about the poor guy browsing with his 13 inch laptop? I recommend having your websites banner be no larger than 200 pixels, and to some people even that is too large to be considered elegant (my designs are usually not considered elegant either, I’m afraid). Going past your banner or whatever you are using as a header, you need something to display that you have what your users are looking for. Look at the top of Drake Technologies for example. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m advertising myself as being a webmaster looking to teach other webmasters, and right at the very top of the pages you see two large links that raise attention. Tutorials and Resources.

It is a concept THAT simple, but still is missed by a lot of new webmasters. I’ve made the mistake a lot myself during my digital artistry days, but I’ve watched my websites slip into obscurity as well. If you are experiencing those 0s-30s users being your mass majority, this is probably an issue you need to look into. Forum based websites seem to have this issue the most, and in this case, move the categories most important to your niche to the top so that those forums are easily viewable as well as accessible.

Section 3: The Wall of Advertisements

This section is rather similar to the previous section in some sense, but a completely different point needs to be made. That being said, I’m not even going to explain why you shouldn’t have 30 ads before you can even get to the content. And yes, I’ve seen it. A lot.

So, to create this scenario in your head, you are posting on a forum that you frequent and notice one of the posters has a link in his signature of his new site. You follow the link and come across 5 different Google AdSense ads in very auspicious places with hardly any real activity or content for that matter. Considering you know this person, you’re still going to try and see what he has to offer, but what are you going to think as an actual guest other than, “Jeez, this guy doesn’t want to offer a service or present information, he’s just trying to get paid!”? I don’t have the exact statistics but I know for a fact there are a lot of people who refuse to sift through a lot of ads to get to information that is almost certainly not even there.

The lesson is simple. Don’t put too much effort or even stock in monetizing until you have a good amount of steady traffic. I don’t want to list an exact amount because it is largely within personal preference, but I’ve heard a lot of people suggest close to 1,000 unique daily visitors (Some will refer to this as u/v’s). Also, another misnomer some inexperienced webmasters believe is that if the ad sticks out it will get more clicks as it is noticed more. This isn’t true by any means, and just makes your website look hideous and unprofessional. To maintain that elegant feel you’ve been striving for, your ads need to match your website and not get in the way of what is actually important, your content. Keep your ads looking professional within your site and your traffic will improve (versus having ads that stick out like a thumb in a bad carpentry accident), which will increase revenue. Remember, more traffic = more POTENTIAL revenue and you don’t want to do anything that will hinder potential traffic.

Section 4: The Out of Control Forum

This is one of those items that will seem a bit confusing, as I have right here a section about being strict, while having a section later down the line about being lenient. I’m catching this potential quandary early before anyone gets lost in my rants about administrators who are complete and utter jack holes. Lenient yet firm will be the phrase of choice in both this section, as well as section 6 below. You’ve been warned.

One thing that will drive guests away from a blooming forum that is just ready to burst at the seam with activity is poor control. When a user looks into a forum and has to sift through nearly a page of spam just to get to a worthwhile conversation, it’s an obvious problem. Since it has made my list, it should be assumed this is a problem I see far more often than I wish.

In today’s market, spambots are everywhere and are smart. Damned smart. It’s become an increased problem over the past 5 or so years as our favorite programming languages have evolved and has been a pain in a webmasters rear ever since. It is important for us as webmasters, forum administrators or blog mediators to pinpoint and eradicate them. Obviously you can delegate some of these responsibilities to your staff, but when all is said and done, it is still your website that is falling into spam covered obscurity.

Keep in mind, however, not all spammers are programs written to advertise medicine to enlarge your libido, people can just as easily be spammers to either deface your site or for the simple fact that they are new to forums and don’t know any better or are…well…young. It is your responsibility to know how to handle these situations accordingly, and to make your staff understand how you would want it handled.

Remember though, just because someone’s behavior is a little bit off and sways the rules, do what you can to mold them into a good member instead of simply discarding them. Keep in mind, the more active posters you have, the more consistent content you have flowing. If you feel that no matter what you simply cannot get this user to supply quality posts over the garbage they keep producing, then it’s time to take more drastic measures.

Your image is one of the most important aspects, I cannot stress this enough. Users posting useless nonsense or overly abrasive messages makes your whole site look bad, not just that particular user. As I will mention later, being overly strict will make you look bad too, therefore you will have to find a balance. More later, we need a break from this particular rant.

Section 5: The Abyss

This is one that I see on almost every new forum. I’m asked (usually in a rather unprofessional way, I’ll leave that topic for another article) to check out this new forum and register and make a few posts. When I follow this link, I find a forum with anywhere between 12-24 forums with possibly 2 posts, usually something not even related to the core focus of the website itself.

This gives me, as a guest, the impression that the owner of this new site is using the “build it and it will come” mentality that has sunk many new webmasters. This brings me to issue number 1 of this scenario. As a site in its infancy, you always want to start things off by throwing in at least 1 thread in every forum. If the particular forum is about your niche, make sure they answer a question that is commonly asked and seldom answered. If it is in a generalized forum, leave it with a question to bait people into registering just to give their opinion. Never just leave it blank because 9 times out of 10, it will stay that way, as will the rest of your forum.

As for the second problem in this scenario, you have too many forums for your content to manifest in. If you have a lot of content to provide off the bat, more power to you, but the idea of starting off with 2-3 pages worth of forums leaves the guest with far too many clicks to get to far too little content. One tip that I love to give new forum administrators is the extensive use of subforums. Subforums allow you to have 12-13 forums while only displaying 5 or 6, consolidating somewhat like items but keeping it far more organized. It actually adds to the clicks your guests have to go through, but it makes it more organized, making it look better to organic traffic. Also, if you feel that your forum is growing enough to support that subforum to become an actual forum; it is just one click away as opposed to browsing every thread in one forum and splitting it with another. The lesson to be learned here: start out small and develop your forum with your community. If you can’t start small, consider subforums because at least they won’t make your index look cluttered. On the flip side, keep in mind that the fewer clicks a guest has to make to get to some good quality content, the longer s/he will spend on your site. A 30 second user is far less likely to go through the registration process than a 10 minute user.

Section 6: Fascism Takes New Heights

Do you remember how I made that comment about the ranting I was going to do over jack hole administrators? Here goes.

One thing that turns off anyone, not just a guest, not just a user, but anyone, is someone who overly exerts their authority. If you have to play a little rough, do it where users can’t see it, such as private messaging or e-mail. Also, be sure to treat everyone as an equal. If user A does one thing and user B does the same, you can’t punish user A just because you like user B or vice versa. Your members WILL pay attention. Keep in mind, behind the forums, behind the computer screens, we are all human. We instinctually have hankering for drama.

I’ve already worked myself up a little bit, so I have to end on an angry note. Anyone who feels they are special because they have administration / moderation privileges need to grow up and pull their condescending head out of you know where. Brad Pitt knows best, you are not a unique snowflake.

Point being, be fair, be nice, be professional. You are the tourniquet either keeping people from gaining information or making sure they get it with enjoyment. The way you handle yourself and your staff will directly affect the outcome of your website. When you use your power incorrectly, anyone looking at your website will bear witness, and will remember. People like drama, and the first sign of it will cause people to either flee or try to provoke more. I’m hoping the repetitiveness is getting through to SOME types of people (not pointing fingers).

Section 7: Subtlety is a Godsend

Another one of those things I see new webmasters doing is throwing their URL everywhere, as if there is nothing better to talk about. I’m not some crazy naysayer saying that advertising is a bad thing, but there is a point where it looks bad from not only an SEO standpoint, but also on a personal standpoint. Face it, when I look around on a webmaster forum or website and see the same person posting the same crap message, it doesn’t tell me “Hey, come check out my website, it’s the best!” like you are wanting it to, it is literally screaming “I’m desperate and quite possibly pathetic”.

To correct some of these issues, I have some advice to give. Never advertise yourself as being the best of the best of whatever, because more often than not, you’re not. Never sell yourself as being more or less than what you really are. If you are working on a startup, advertise it as such. If you are running a 2 year long website and are still only pulling in 30 unique visitors daily, simply say “Be sure and check out mysite.com, a friendly place to get unique information on whodathunkit”. You want your promotions to have a catchy yet subtle message behind them, not 3 statements of pure rubbish that you can’t back up.

In closing for this short section, if you are on a forum, allow your signature to be your prime source of advertisement if the staff allows it. There’s no need to post an advertisement every other week. Typically, forums with advertising sections for people to post their URL’s are ONLY browsed by other site owners, and the only reason they are browsing them are to post their own.

I have an article in the works strictly about advertising, so I’d rather not waste more of my time, or yours, on items that I’ll be repeating within the next several weeks.

Section 8: No News

This section is going to be different, because this is not a complaint I have with new webmasters, but usually highly seasoned ones. In this scenario, I’m going to look at a website that has already been established for say…a year. I lose this site in my list of bookmarks for a few months and come back to it only to notice that there is absolutely NOTHING new added or updated. This is usually from the webmaster losing interest. As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, regular customers are the core to any business, and the internet is no different. Sure, you will still get traffic from the content you already have, but it will be more likely that you see a decline on visitors instead of an increase. You need to always keep in mind that every day, new websites are being published with new information. While it might take a while for that new information to take over your own as your value degrades, it will happen eventually. New techniques will come become available, new trends will be set, and the next thing you know no one is looking at your site because there is an updated one readily available.

Now that I’ve drilled that in, let’s consider the obvious solution. Keep your websites up to date. This is referring to both the content as well as the design. It is important to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and standards, and it is equally important to make sure your content is fresh and there is new content being published on a regular basis.

Think of it this way. You have one article that is netting you $2 a day. A year down the road, you’ve kept your site within the current standards and haven’t been slouching on SEO, it’s going to dip down a little. Add another article, now you have something else making money while the original article continues to drop in value. As far as a homepage, however, you are far more likely to maintain repeat visitors by keeping fresh content on your website, making your homepage that much more valuable. Websites like Penny Arcade didn’t see success by only publishing one comic.

Section 9: Purple with Pink Polkadots

Luckily no one will understand the inside joke behind that title, but regardless. This scenario is based around design. Impractical designs, designs that fall out of standards, the works. I see them all on a regular basis, even from webmasters using pre-written open source packages such as Joomla or phpBB.

Will all of these scenarios, I want to put this in the guest perspective. Even if you are following all of the advice I have given in previous sections, I’m still not going to last but 30 seconds on a site that’s design is so hideous or so flawed that I can barely comprehend it. This isn’t to say that all websites require near artistry to pass as a good website, but the design at least needs to be clean and legible, with a color scheme that isn’t too outlandish. Colorful isn’t a bad thing, but make sure that the colors used at least complement each other.

It is also important that all text be in the proper language your site is in. I’m referring to using good grammar and punctuation. If you are running a forum and some of your users are obviously either lazy Americans (I’m American myself so I’m allowed to say that, wink wink) or if English is obviously their second language, it’s no big deal. The staff themselves, however, needs to set the example by doing the best they can. I’ve had staff members of many different origins work for me, and while some couldn’t speak English to save their life, they could write it more elegantly than I can.

Allow me to offer another small point of advice when referring to the language barrier. There are two types of English. British English and American English. Keep in mind that while most American English speaking people can understand British English, British English speaking people might not understand our latest slang or poorly thought out catch phrases. American English is considered the hardest language to learn for a reason, and you should respect those who spent the time to make it their second language by making your website easy to read for them by not using words that would fail your dictionary based spell checker.

Another common issue with design was somewhat brought up earlier in sections 2 and 3. Structure is very important, so important in fact that HTML is now ONLY supposed to be used as such, with CSS taking over style or appearance (for any veterans who remember, it wasn’t like this 10-15 years ago). Perhaps on a later date I’ll write out an article based primarily on design (a book perhaps…), but my beliefs on design are concepts followed by professionals. Those people who design those multibillion dollar companies adhere to these concepts and so does Google when it crawls your to index. As mentioned previously, the most important is at the top left, with the least important to the bottom right. Never create a website that requires a user to scroll from right to left, only up and down. Always make your website accessible to as many people as possible, design around a 1024×768 and design fluidly (using percentages) over statically (using exact pixel counts) so that it looks good on larger resolutions. Always use alt text for images using key words or brief descriptions. This not only allows search engine spiders to understand what it is looking at, but it allows blind people to view your website with text to speech technology.

Hopefully that’s enough to get some people started on what to look for.

Section 10: Why Flash is Terrible

I’m incredibly pleased to say that our last scenario on our list isn’t a highly offended one like the previous ones. This concept is still being broken today however so it has to make my list. Does anyone remember the days before XHTML took over as the standard and a lot of websites were made rather Flash dependant? I do, and every time I looked at those sites I remember saying, “It’s so beautiful, but this designer is an idiot”.

There are two very serious problems with have an excessive amount of Flash (.fla) files embedded in your design. A little here and there for feature purposes such as a video player isn’t necessarily terrible, but to create your whole site or important items on your site such as navigational bars entirely out of Flash is a travesty. I’ll go over both reasons in detail.

The first reason is accessibility. As far as accessibility goes, Flash has two major flaws, one of which isn’t quite as important in today’s market, the other still is. When using Flash, you are cutting off about 1/4th of your potential users due to their operating system or web browsing software (or both), and you are cutting out another large percentage with connection speeds. Your typical Apple user will NOT be able to use Flash, or view Flash files embedded into your website. A lot of cell phone browsers don’t handle it very well either. That being said, you are cutting your potential market down a rather hefty percentage, which is just foolish. Accessibility is a huge deal in web design; you want your design to be viewable on EVERY platform. The flaw that isn’t quite as prevalent today is load times. Back when 56k modems were the highest used method of gaining internet, Flash websites were a pain to load simply because they were so big. Dialup users are still out there today (scarcely), so keep this in mind. You don’t want a webpage that takes more than 1 second on broadband (personally, it’s better to be in the millisecond range), because you can only imagine the poor dialup user spending 2 minutes to load your page. Back in those days the standard was to not allow your webpage to require more than about 200kb of loading. Nowadays, it’s closer to 800-1200kb. It’s still important, because you want your site as fast as it can be. When I load up a site that loads sloppy or even choppy due to how huge it is because the designer doesn’t understand how to compress images, I leave. Even if I’m on a T1 connection. Most guests won’t hesitate to do the same. Us web users are very impatient people.

The other reason is even more important. Search engine spiders DO NOT crawl embedded items, and the only thing they crawl on images are alt text. Too much alt text is also considered as spamming to spiders, so you want to make sure that your images are used for design purposes and not content purposes, if you ever want to be found on that huge thing we call the internet that is.

Conclusion

Well, this concludes my long article over my top 10 pet peeves when browsing a website. I don’t mean to sound egotistical, but surely there are a lot of people out their visiting websites who feel the same way. Some of these things might seem like common sense to you, but you would be surprised how many websites there are that still break several of these concepts, and how many websites that get launched per day that break these concepts.

I’m not on a mission to clean up the web from poor web design or bad or unprofessional administrators, I simply want to give those newer webmasters who WANT to learn how to succeed the opportunity to make their favorite project a pleasant experience for everyone, including themselves.

I was once a short-lived member on The Admin Zone’s review team, but couldn’t manage my time in a fashion where I could give detailed reviews on individual forums. It is really somewhat of a pity to me and something I intend to do again in the future. In the meantime, if you are looking to get your website reviewed, allow them to do it, and please don’t send requests to me as I don’t have the time presently.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message either at The Admin Zone or send me an e-mail. Please be sure and add the title of the article in your subject line.

Introduction

Welcome to the 1st installment of Diving into Development. This is a free online ebook or workshop written by Joshua Drake in an effort to teach those who are willing how to be a multifaceted web developer. As this is an individual project, it will take me a long time to reach completion, but I hope everyone will follow along and learn something. In this series, I will be jumping back and forth between languages (have no fear, I will remain highly organized with this) in an effort to demonstrate the best tools for the job in my opinion. Throughout this project, I will be supplying sample code to copy / paste, downloadable snippets, as well as demonstrations.

These articles will all be accessible to The Admin Zone community, my personal tutorial / resource site Drake Technologies, as well as Good-Tutorials.com and possibly others. If anyone has any questions, feel free to leave a comment. This is considered a ‘workshop’, so I’m expecting comments, concerns, questions, everything.

This particular article will serve as a crash course, teaching you how to install the software you will need to start with. With all of these articles, it is assumed that you have a basic knowledge of HTML, as these concepts will be very lightly demonstrated throughout. Within this article, expect to learn the following items right off the bat:

• Installing PHP / MySQL for testing purposes
• Inserting PHP snippets into HTML code
• Displaying text using PHP
• Commenting
• Basic Predefined functions
• Variables
• Concatenation
• Constants
• Operators
• Precedence
• Conditionals
• Loops
• and more…

This will be the easiest tutorial of the PHP part of the series. Just remember, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me. If anyone has any corrections or disputes with the information, feel free to comment as well. Now let’s get started!

Setting Up Your Environment

Apache / MySQL / PHP Setup

Some PHP books or guides will go over setting up a complete LAMP/WAMP setup, but I feel if you want a complete test environment this approach is not only unnecessary, but a waste of time when you are trying to learn. Not that it isn’t something you shouldn’t be concerned with once you are up to speed and creating advanced programs and need to fully test system functionality and resource usage, but for now, and for the scope of this guide, it is unwarranted. For this guide, I will recommend you setup XAMPP.

To setup an installation of XAMPP, you should head to their website and download the latest copy. Then, as an administrator, run the installer as shown in figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 – Running the installer

As the installer loads, the very first thing it will ask you is where you would like to install it. For the purpose of this tutorial, we have selected the root of your hard drive, or for Windows users (this tutorial is being written using my server, with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise as the operating system) the root would equate as C:\. Refer to figure 1.2 for details.

Figure 1.2 – Setting the installation directory

Now that that’s taken care of, go ahead and click install. After the installer has installed all of the necessary files, it will bring up a DOS style prompt asking a few questions. I recommend selecting ‘y’ to allow desktop shortcuts (for ease of access to the XAMPP Control Panel), ‘y’ to locate the XAMPP paths correctly, and ‘n’ to not make portable drives. The last option is entirely up to you, but for the scope of this guide it’s not necessary. Refer to figure 1.3 to see what I’m talking about.

Figure 1.3 – Configuring XAMPP post-install

Once this is taken care of, the DOS style screen should change to a more advanced menu. Simply select ’1′ to start the XAMPP Control Panel, then ‘x’ to exit. An example is in figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4 – Starting the xCP

Now that the control panel is up, click on the check boxes located next to ‘Svc’ alongside Apache and MySQL to run both of these as background services and click ‘OK’ to confirm. Next, start both of these services by clicking the ‘Start’ button. Refer to figures 1.5 and 1.6 to see what you’re looking for.

Figure 1.5 – Creating Services

Figure 1.6 – Starting services

As long as everything went as planned, you should be able to load up your favorite browser and load http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 and get XAMPP’s default start page as referenced in figure 1.7. Now, it’s a good idea to go to C:\xampp and create a shortcut of the ‘htdocs’ folder to your desktop for reference. This folder is the root to your private webserver and any folder you create will create a folder on your server. For example, if you create htdocs/test, and you load up http://localhost/test, it will direct you to any content in that folder.

Figure 1.7 – The finished product

WYSIWYG Editors

PHP can be written in any text editor, but it is imperative that the editor uses raw text (meaning no MSWord, etcetera). The editor I use on a day-to-day basis is Dreamweaver, but as many of you know it’s an Adobe product and it isn’t free, or cheap. For those simply learning, it’s much easier if you don’t already have it lying around (I was discounted through a student program many moons ago), use something open source (or free) such as Notepad++. It’s contextual, much like Dreamweaver, and does the trick. Just as a quick note, while Notepad++ is contextual, it isn’t considered a WYSIWYG editor, considering you still have to format your own code by hand.

Setting up this program is so easy in fact, that I only have one image (not that XAMPP was that much more difficult). Simply download the file from the website, and run the installer. After using the default settings, run your new application. The only thing you have to setup that isn’t in the defaults is go to Language, highlight P, then select PHP as shown in the image.

Figure 1.8 – Setting up Notepad++

While this lesson hasn’t really given you any information on how to code…well…anything, it is designed simply to get the software for the rest of the series into your skill set. After you have everything installed, go ahead and play around with it and get acquainted. Make a few sample pages or your own website using these programs using HTML.

As mentioned, feel free to leave comments with any questions, and I’ll get back to them as soon as possible. I’m going to begin preparing for the first real PHP lesson, “Creating Your First Page”, an introduction to the PHP tags, comments, and echo / print statements.

Until next time.

This was an introduction into a series / ebook I was working on that I had never finished. Hopefully, it will be completed and not a scrapped idea entirely.

This is a restored article from the original Drake Technologies website

While it’s been a while since I’ve updated over here at Drake Technologies with any articles, it’s also showing apparent (perhaps even more so) over at The Admin Zone.  As promised, my next article will be part of a large series, instructing new and experienced users alike on how to not only write simply web pages using the dynamic side of PHP, but also how to write fully functional programs, capable of doing whatever you, as the creator, set your mind to.

I’ll let everyone know now, I’m far from an expert at programming, although I have been doing it for quite some time.  While Drake Technologies and my other sites in the past have either ran on software that I’ve personally written or have modifications that I’ve personally customized, none of which are now to show any concrete examples of what I’m capable of.  However, you should be able to see from the examples, as well as the downloadable samples I’ll be providing and hopefully this will be an enjoyable and educational experience for all.

As titled, this is an introduction to the series I will be writing.  I should have my first full article up within a week or two depending on my work schedule.  Unlike my previous articles, these will be fully published around the internet as a free resource, and I’m hoping to get a pretty good amount of exposure from them to both my own websites as well as The Admin Zone, where I place most of my content.  Also, I feel it’s important that I note how I will be structuring these articles.  I will be starting from the beginning, from installing a test server using XAMPP and noting how to install a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor such as Notepad++ to get started.  Once we are ready, each article will include several lessons explaining in as natural a way as possible what the syntax means, as well as what it does or can do, and a project to end each article putting the lessons into effect to help with retention.  Also, comments will be freely accepted, and will be checked and replied to as soon as possible.

Until then, keep looking around, subscribe to this blog, do whatever you need to do.  It’s sure to be a lot of fun.

Joshua Drake

I’ll save some time for everyone and put this in an ‘about’ page, but just as a recap, DT started out as a simple blog, then evolved into a small-time consulting / web development / site flipping business.  I completely redesigned the website at this point, and that’s the way it stayed for quite some time.  After looking at some of the old posts fill throughout, I decided none of it was worth keeping at this point.  Yes, I was getting decent enough traffic and I just blew that right out of the boat, but oh well.  Shortly after hitting 2,000 subscribers, it was just time to start fresh with a blog that represents the up-to-date focus of what DT has become.

So what are the plans for the future?  Currently I’m looking to expand my organization from being an online blog and offering services to young and budding entrepreneurs to being an entrepreneur in itself.  I’m currently scouting clientele and will be selling PC’s and electronics, using not only top quality manufacturers such as Dell and Apple, but also manufacturing my own brand.  This website is designed as a support platform as well as a community driven reference to every day computing, including more advanced topics.

More to come shortly, I’ll keep you posted.

~Joshua