Top things to look at before developing a Web Site – Part 2

  1. Web Hosting: Once the domain name is selected the hosting account has to be selected. There are different hosting types available. Most commonly used hosting is Shared web hosting. Even though the Free web hosting is used most of the users prefer the Shared hosting and VPS hosting. Beginners can start with a free web hosting account and go for the Shared and the VPS hosting types based on the budgets.
  2. Development tools: After all the above elicitationsare done the development process can be started. The below tools can be used to make the development faster.
    1. Search domain name here and check if it is already registered. If it’s already registered the site might display set of alternative domain names available.
    2. Set up a local environment and test your website. Use XAMPP, IIS, Tomcat to setup Local environments with PHP, .Net, Java languages respectively.
    3. Use Komposer, Amaya to develop the PHP type websites. Obviously only the Visual Studio is used to develop .Net type websites. I prefer using the Eclipse and its plugins to develop the PHP and Java type sites. They provide a very good interface to design, develop and test, integrating with the Local servers.
    4. Use FTP clients like Filezilla, Net2Ftp to upload the tested local files to the web servers.
    5. Many Open source tools that are alternative to the proprietary software are available Here and Here.
  3. CMS tools: Instead of developing a whole website from scratch, there are a lot of Content Management Systems available in the market to make the development time easier and faster. Some commonly used CMS tools are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. The WordPress is most widely used CMS for blogging. Similarly select a tool to that suits the site type.
  4. Testing for Browser support: Once the development of the site is completed the testing phase comes in place. Even though the testing is one of the Development Life Cycle step, the Browser support check is a most important thing to deliver your website to your clients as you wish them to be. This is one of the important advantages when using the CMS tools. Because the development community takes care of all these things so that you don’t need to put your time in. The IE Tester is used to check test the website display in the Internet Explorer versions from IE6 to IE10 While writing this article. Alternatively there are a lot of online tools to do the same. The Browsershot.com takes the screen shots of the website in all the versions of the browsers including different operating system.
  5. Get noticed: After all the above said steps, it is very important to get your site to viewers to whom it is intended to be. This set is commonly known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The SEO plays a very important role in making your website popular. I Intent to write a separate article on SEO. But I am placing a simple step to start the SEO.
    1. Submit your site to popular Search engines like Google, Bing.
    2. Once the site is placed the search engine will index the site from there on. As your site’s content becomes unique and popular they will be shown in the search results and visitors will start pouring in.

Top things to look at before developing a Web Site – Part 1

  1. Content Type (Static or Dynamic): The First and foremost thing a Web developer must look at is the “Content type”. Take a justified side between static and dynamic content when you go for the web site. If the site contains only a 5 to 10 pages with just few contents that may not have new change then the web site will be a Static that does not need much of server side support. But if you go for a site with Dynamic contents what may change in time and needs customization then you are onto a Dynamic site which needs immense Server support. Most of the sites now days are dynamic contents which need the servers support.
  2. Development Language: The Language in which you are going to develop the site is very important after selecting the content type. The widely used Language or the scripting for the web developing is PHP. Other famous technologies .Net, Java, Python, Perl etc. Every language has its own pros and cons. The developing languages have to be selected as per the need and knowledge. Usually scripting languages are easier to learnt and develop faster for beginners.
  3.  Web Servers: The web servers are the next thing we should care about. All the Web servers support the static content sites with just the HTML contents in it. When we look for the Server side scripting the Web Servers play a major role in providing the support for them. Web servers can be selected based on the Language by which you wanted to develop the websites. Even though the web servers can support any of the language with a set of customization, it’s better to go for a Web server which can natively support your development Language.  Because usually the customization never comes with less cost. Here are the widely used Web servers in market.
    1. Apache – For PHP natively and with Java support
    2. IIS – For .Net natively and PHP and Java support
    3. Tomcat – For Java natively and PHP support
  4. Domain name: The domain name is the one which is going to show up your stuffs to the World. They play a very important role and they are the entry point that visitors use to view your website on the web. The domain name can be of any length, but my personal opinion is to keep it as simple as possible and less than 8 characters. Choose a domain name that is very relevant to your site content, short, simple, crisp and easy to remember. If you could not specify your theme in just a work keep an abbreviation of the theme as domain name.
  5. Selecting a TLD: A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. In other words, the domain names ends with the extensions like .com, .edu, .org, .web, .net etc which are knows as TLDs. Select a TLD which is related to your Site theme, locations and other factors.
    1. Examples: If your site is related to education, select TLD as .edu, If yours is a big Organization select .org, if the service you provide is country specific then select a country level TLD like .us, .ca, .in, .ph, co.in, .co.ca, co.in etc.
    2. Make sure you select a reasonable TLD and also consider the cost factors. Some TLDs are very costlier.
    3. If you could not find a specific TLD for your site theme just select the .com, which is most widely used.

Easier way to Earn through Yahoo Contributors Network (YCN)

Yahoo has become one of the biggest content producers on net. It all happened when Yahoo purchased Associated contents for $100 millon. Not long after, it was rebranded as Yahoo Contributor Network (YCN). Using YCN, anyone can publish just anything with the push of a button – articles, videos and photos – to associated content and yahoo partenr sites, and get paid for it. YCN opens new opportunity ti freelancers and business alike to find new audineces, earn revenue and promote their brands.

Steps Involved:

1. Registration
This all starts with a simple registration page which asks for personal information. Be sure to include all your websites, Facebook and twitter profiles(and any other relevant networks). YCN will use this information to determine what contributors get which assignments, including localized assignments such as community reports and business  reviews, linking to websites, blogs and online profiles helps extend your network both in and outside the YCN community – and this is vital for making some money out there.

2. Submitting contents
The next step comes the content submission. During this process you will create a title, description, tags, photos and supporting informations like keywords that given maximum possibility to get the search engines to you contents. Be specific to add your own images to your contents than adding the external images, its better avoiding images if not since YCN has its own image guidelines for image use else use Yahoo public gallery. Editors at YCN will manually review your first three submissions for publication.

3. Getting Paid
Earnings with YCN comes in two basic forms, up-front payments and performance payments. All payments are made via PayPal.
Up-front payments can be selected as an option when submitting contents and the review process can take about 10 days. Once accepted, the content is published and eligible for performance payments. Offer is made ranging from $2 to $15.
The Performance payments are based on every 1000 pages viewq your content receives. Payments starts from $1.50 per 1000 views.

4. Content Distribution
When it comes to content distribution there types of distribution are provided.
Exclusive means the yahoo owns the right to the content once it is published. The content cannot have been previously published nor can it be republished by you. This leads to better performance according to YCN, since the contents are not reproduced.
Non Exculsive means content producer is free to publish the content anywhere.
Display-Only means content may have been previoulsy published, can be republished by you and is completely under users control.

5. Getting Business
The content you publish is the commodity. It is shared across a network and you can benefit by including your business or product within this content, references to your industry etc. This takes your product to the people who have not even heard about thus getting in your products and comapny to higher heights.

Tired of Social Network Sites and useless fake virtual friends

   Are you tired of the time wasting Social networking sites like Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and MySpace.com etc. Is it frustrating to go online because of the unknown contacts. Stop all those non sense by committing suicide online and learn to be lively in the real World with the help of Web2.0 Suicide Machine!!.

   This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alter ego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moderator is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. The service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn! Click here to Commit Suicide NOW!

What happened to Sun.com

Last night when i checked for the Sun Microsystems site (http://www.sun.com), i was shocked to see that the site has been redirected to Oracle.com. This is the reflection of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.

On January 27, 2010, Oracle announced it finalized its acquisition of Sun. This combination will transforms the IT industry. With the addition of servers, storage, SPARC processors, the Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL database to Oracle’s portfolio of database, middleware, and business applications, it plans to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems—from applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together out of the box.

It is belived that each layer of the stack will be architected to improve performance, leverage innovation and centralize management so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable, and more secure. If all these are achived customers will be benefited with their system performance, reliability and security going up and their system integration and management costs going down. The changes are effected from the web site of the Sun Microsystems.

At last the giant Oracle has got power over the Sun Microsystems and they started the changes over the Sun website. Those who wants to get accessed to Sun’s site may look at the right top corner for the “Sun Quick Links“.

Get fonts from images

Have you seen some pictures with great wordings in great fonts?. Do u want to get the Font and try your own.

Jus go to http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont and download the fonts. Here are the steps to do it.

1. Note that the image should have enough spacing around the corners and legible.

2. Use characters that have distint shape in the image.

3. Let the height of the fonts be atleast 100 px.

4. The text in then image should be horizontal.

5. Make sure that the characters are not touching each other. Dont try for the text that have cursive letters or Hand written characters.

6. Now upload the image or give the url of the image and click upload.

7. You will get set of images with characters similar to the characters in the image. Look at each image and make sure the text box agrees with the character highlighted in the image. Leave character boxes blank if no valid character is highlighted, and press continue.

8. Thats it, you will get a set of fonts that are very similar to the characters in the image.