Internet Layout

Coming at the web from the perspective of a writer, it can be easy to despair. You might be used to writing for all sorts of media: newspapers, magazines, books, or even radio, film or television. The web, though, is different enough to what’s come before that it demands you sit up, pay attention, and […]

If you don’t want to deal with designers but you don’t want to design a website yourself either, there are plenty of websites that would just love to meet you. They sell templates, which are an easy way for anyone to buy an already-existing design and apply it to their website.
Free Templates.
A quick […]

A mistake often made by people who are new to web design is thinking that they shouldn’t pay any attention to what has come before: they’re going to design a website the way they think one should work. You have to realise, though, that there’s a difference between being innovative and being arrogant. In almost […]

Once you realise that visitors and search engines prefer regularly-updated content to static archives of never-updated articles, there’s a simple way to make this a reality: just put your content in a weblog format. Let’s take a look at some of the many advantages this approach brings.
No Need for HTML.
Weblog software will give […]

Every so often, you might see text on the web that appears to be corrupted in some way. It’s full of odd foreign letters to the point where it’s almost unreadable, and it took ages to load. Believe it or not, nine times out of ten the culprit is a program that many people use […]

It’s yet another plugin that users hate, and Java has an even worse reputation than most. Why? There are just so many reasons.
Microsoft and Sun.
Java is an open standard, and it’s one that Microsoft originally embraced. They made their own Microsoft JVM (Java Virtual Machine) part of Internet Explorer. This led to the […]

There are two ways that most people who create web pages do it: either they hire a professional web designer, or they use some visual HTML editing software. You could say that hiring a designer is like getting someone to make furniture for you and deliver it, while using an editor is more like buying […]

If you can choose your database, you’re lucky: few hosts offer anything more than MySQL. If you’re doing things yourself, though, or you have one of those rare hosts, then you might find that you need to weigh up the positives and negatives of different database software.
MySQL.
MySQL is the most common database software […]

When you use a visual HTML editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, they tell you that WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. This means that, in theory, what you see while you’re editing the page should look just like what you get when you’re done. While word processors have pretty much got the concept […]

There are a lot of different kinds of websites and there are a lot of people who know they want a website, but aren’t even sure why. If you don’t already know, you need to figure out exactly what it is that you want your website to do. What kind of thing do you […]

More and more, people don’t have traditional websites: static things where pages can be added, updated or taken away. Instead, they write new material for their website when they feel like it, and then put it up on one page, with the most recent writing first. These people are running weblogs.
How Did Weblogs Start?
[…]

VBScript is a web language for inserting into HTML documents. It’s a lot like Java, but is easier to write thanks to its Visual Basic-like code.
Is It Really Easier?
Well, it’s largely a matter of personal preference, and what you’re used to. If you’re an experienced programmer, you’ll probably think that VBScript is a […]

When it comes to getting young people to visit your website, textual content just doesn’t cut it there are few things that they want to read articles about, and they certainly don’t want to read articles every day. They like to talk to each other, but they’ll often cause trouble if you let them, […]

So you know Flash can be used for bad things, but you think your website would really benefit from it. Well, while you need to know what you’re doing, there’s absolutely no reason why Flash can’t be used entirely sensibly, to make your website better and provide useful information or entertainment for your visitors. So, […]

Once you’ve created your website, you’re going to need to upload it to your web server. The easiest and fastest way of doing this is using FTP.
What’s FTP?
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It’s a standard for transferring files quickly and easily between computers, intended to allow computers with different operating systems to […]

Don’t know your HTML from your HTTP? Your cache from your cookies? The web has serious amounts of jargon, and it seems like people come up with new words almost every day. Most of it isn’t especially useful, but there are some words that it’s good to know to help you along on the web. […]

Once you’ve got some visitors, the chances are that you want to know more about them. How many are there? Where are they from? What web browser do they use? Luckily for you, there are plenty of ways to find out.
Server Log Analysis.
Most web servers keep a log of every file they send, […]

What’s this? A whole article about titles and headlines? Well, yes. Titles are some of the most vital parts of your site, especially if it consists of a series of articles. Yet they’re also some of the most ignored elements of all web pages, and more difficult than you’d think to do correctly. You have […]

In software development, testing is a key word. Everything that gets developed gets put in front of the testers and used in every possible way. They send back bugs to the developers, who start fixing them, and on it goes until the deadline hits and the product has to ship.
For websites, though, things just […]

If you’re like 90% of web users, then you use Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s web browser. Why? Well, because it comes with Windows, usually, and it’s there on your desktop when you first want to use the web. When you’re creating a website, however, you have to consider the other 10% of the web’s users […]

The web is a relatively new medium in fact, it’s often referred to as just that, ‘new media’ and practical graphic design on the web is still less than ten years old, by all accounts. This fact means that plenty of so-called web designers are really just print graphic designers trying to transfer […]

When you’re a web designer, there are lots of little programs that you’ll gradually accumulate to make your life that little bit easier. When you’ve spent hours doing something by hand and you’re dreading ever having to do it again, it can be a big relief to learn that there’s a free program out there […]

In the world of web design, there are plenty of mistakes you can make, and in this article, I’m going to look at what I believe to be the top 10 biggest. You need to check your site for these mistakes right now, and fix them if they’re there otherwise you’re going to be […]

When you’re designing your website, it’s easy to start loading it up with graphics, creating images that you think look good and piecing them together to make a design. While it’s a tempting way to do things, you have to try to avoid it as much as possible otherwise, you’ll end up with graphical […]

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language of the web every website out there is written in some kind of HTML. Because of the rapid evolution of the web, though, HTML grew quickly in a very unplanned way, which can lead to problems if you’re not sure what kind or version of HTML you’re […]

Once you’ve written a web page, you can upload it to an HTML validator. This site, run by the web’s standards body, will check that your site is valid (’correct’) HTML, and give you some idea of how to fix it if it isn’t. This is an essential step in the development of any website […]

More and more websites, especially business ones, seem to adding PDFs to their website yet users are united in their hatred of them. How on earth did this happen.
Why PDF?
PDFs are marketed as an easy way to re-use print designs and content online: all you do is export the data from your […]

Before you can get a website up and running, you need to have a place to put it. Paying for web hosting is, basically, like renting a small amount of space on someone’s server and paying what it costs them to send your web pages to your customers. Fortunately for you, though, web hosting has […]

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people have quite a bad reaction to Flash, in general. Sure, it can be used well, but the reaction of most visitors to something starting to load will be “oh no, Flash!”, followed by a hasty dash for the back button. Why is this? Well, there are a […]

There are a lot of web servers out there. Whenever you go to a website, you’re downloading it from a web server. When you pay money to a web host, what you’re really doing is renting a space on their web server. The Internet consists of millions of computers networked together, but it’s the servers […]