Planning your Site: The How

In my last blog, I talked about two of the most important questions you ought to ask yourself when planning your website: "Who will this site be for?" and "What do I want them to do?"

In this blog, I will look at some of the most obvious tasks a website can perform for you, and the technologies that are needed to make those tasks possible.

Most professional or business websites fulfill one or more of the following functions:

• present information about your work or your products in an easily accessible manner that can conveniently be kept up to date - the "brochure" website
• sell things, either directly through a shopping cart system, or by enabling people to place orders from a product catalogue - the "online shop" website
• offer user interaction: guest books or message boards to leave feedback, search functions to find targeted information, forms to request quotes, online booking systems, online help desks - the "interactive" website
• inform and entertain: blogs about topics relevant to your industry, collections of helpful or fun links, image galleries, online video or flash presentations, interactive games - the "brand building" website

Different technologies are needed to fulfill these different functions: a brochure type site may only require straightforward html/css - though it may be advisable to include features like a search function, login system, or catalogue type features, which would require Php/MySql, or another programming language that works with a database. And unless you are comfortable to update your own html, by using an html editor or even writing your own code, you may wish to have a content management system included, which also requires some programming.

Shopping carts can be installed either as ready made packages - Zendcart or Cubecart are popular systems, though it requires some programming expertise to set them up - or they can be custom programmed. Security is an important issue when it comes to e-commerce applications: you would want to make sure that your client's credit card information will be well protected! The simplest (and free) solution is using the Paypal system. This is only really advisable for shops with relatively few products, but it is a feasible solution if for one reason or another, you cannot run Php/MySql on your web server.

If you would like to interact with your clients via message boards, have "members only" features on your site, enable visitors to do site searches, or even upload content themselves, you will not get around using Php/MySql or one of the other web programming languages, such as ASP. All these features work with an online database, where information can by uploaded, by yourself or even by visitor to the site, depending on how it is set up. The Php scripts then pull this information from the database and automatically write the html code that is at the base of what your site visitors see. Not only does this make site maintenance and updates much faster and more painless, it also allows for all sorts of customizations - to the point where no two people will see exactly the same content when they visit your site! It does require a bit of setting up and programming, and the price tag for an interactive site is therefore quite a bit higher than that for a simple brochure type site or even an online shopping cart.

Flash is another technology which is very prominent on the web. Flash has got a bit of a bad name in some web design circles: not just because of the infamous (and once so popular) "Flash intro" that takes fifteen minutes to load and is a surefire way to make most prospective visitors click on to the next site - but mainly because sites which are built entirely in Flash, cannot be indexed by search engines. Obviously, this is not good for your search engine ranking! A Flash site essentially is a self contained file that is embedded in an html page. Search engines only read html, they do not read Flash - so any keywords you display within your Flash site will be invisible from the search engine's point of view.

The beauty of Flash, however, lies in using Flash components within an html context. Flash also comes with its own very powerful programming language, Actionscript 3.0. It is an essential technology if you wish to include rich multimedia content in your site: music clips, video, slide shows, animations, little interactive games or even just a few cool buttons that do interesting things.

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: http://webdesign.asni.net :: http://www.asni.net

An Introduction to Web Technologies: part 4

One of the most basic interactive technologies on websites are forms. As in, forms that a user can fill in and submit. These can be as simple as submitting an email enquiry - forms are preferable to an email link, because they will protect your email address from robots who farm them for nefarious use. Or they can be as complex as a full fledged market research survey. Popular uses, in a business context, are enquiry forms that prompt your prospective customer to enter some of the information you need to know about their project, or forms that return an instant quote, based on the information the customer enters.

There are various ways to set up forms, but again, PHP is now widely used for them. The code allows various functionality, such as sending an email to your address, entering customer information directly into your database, spam filters, controls that make sure all required fields are filled in, and sticky fields that remember what the customer has previously entered, even if there was an error submitting the form.

Form fields can be simple text fields that your visitors can type into, they can be radio buttons that allow them to choose one of several options, drop down menus, or multiple choise buttons that allow more than one choice.

When designing a form, it pays to take care not to overwhelm your visitors with forms that are too long, or questions that are too complex. A well designed form can save you a lot of work extracting information from your client in order to come up with an accurate quote, or gathering feedback, or even automating things like subscriptions to your mailing lists and newsletters.

They can also save your prospective customers time, by being able to check availabilities and prices online - and even streamline them directly into your online shop, as you can see on most airline or hotel booking sites.

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design :: webdesign.asni.net :: www.asni.net

An Introduction to Web Technologies - part 3

In my blog post on 11 November, I introduced the web coding language PHP, and some of the things it is used for. Today I will look a little more closely at one of the most important applications of PHP coding: Login systems, sessions, and cookies (yum).

PHP does not only pull information *from* a database - for instance, to automate the building of product catalogues or image galleries - it also allows you to store user input *into* your database. One of the most common applications of this are page registration systems, or login systems.

Surely you have come across sites that ask you to register with a username and password. Most commonly, you will also be asked for a valid email address, and perhaps some other information such as age, gender, place of residence, occupation, etc. etc. Often, the site, or certain sections on the site, can only be accessed after user registration. Even more commonly, users can only leave feedback - on message boards, forums or blogs - after they have registered and logged in to the site.

As well as providing a measure of security and protection from spam robots, from the site owner's point of view, collecting this information is an easy and efficient way to do market research. It helps to build a database of people who are potentially interested in what the site owner has to offer. If people are interested enough in accessing the information on your site, to take the time to register themselves, then perhaps they will also be interested in receiving, say, a newsletter - and in eventually buying from you. Of course, anti spam legislation has to be respected: often the site registration form will give users the ability to opt in or out of receiving emails or additional information in the future.

A more advanced use of this technology is to provide users with personalized information. This can be very simple - for instance, greeting people by their name when they log in. An application of this I am working on at the moment, is to offer one of my clients the ability to provide their clients with personalized updates about their building projects. Instead of being sent an update by email each week, the idea is that clients will be able to log into the site and check on their project's progress at any time.

Some of these applications can be quite complex. Amazon's customer recommendations are an example of that - the site will recommend books based on what you have previously bought there, as well as on what other customers who have ordered the same items have also bought.

The time between an user logging into a site, and logging out again, is called a session. For the duration of the session, the site remembers who the user is and what previous information they have entered. This is usually achieved with a little piece of code, called a "cookie", which is stored on the user's computer. A cookie permanently stored on the user's computer enables a website to recognize a previously registered user, the next time they log in. Cookies can also be used to track user's browsing habits - Amazon's recommendations would not be possible without this tracking.

Most cookies are quite harmless, and are really only there to streamline your online experience and make everything go smooth. Tracking cookies, in particular, can be used for malicious ends though - be wary of accepting cookies from sites that look a bit dodgy!

Besides, the idea that someone might be able to track every website that an individual person clicks on does not sit comfortably with many people, including myself. And that's not because I visit a lot of porn sites, but simply because I am wary of the uses this can potentially be put to by, say, governments, or other institutions of power.

Even Amazon's elaborate recommendation system tends to leave a stale taste in my mouth. I prefer to make my buying choices myself. Not to mention, that they are usually completely off. Being presented with a selection of cooking and knitting magazines, on account of the information I have volunteered about my age and gender, does not sit well with this web and multimedia designer!

Asni: Multimedia Art & Design:: webdesign.asni.net :: www.asni.net