How to Build a Web Design Business: Part 2
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This week we discuss the skills and knowledge needed to succeed as a Web designer, such as knowledge of HTML, CSS, browser issues, programming knowledge, e-commerce shopping carts and more. By Peggie Brown. 0109
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Question: We're in the early stages of startup and beginning to shop for technology. We'll need basic hardware and software, plus many other technology and Web-based services to sell online, service customers and keep it all secure.
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Looking for affordable E-Commerce? Then check out Site Build It (SBI). Template driven, SBI shows users how to build a web site with high quality content, coupled with affiliate advertising, rather than just a straight product site. By Nathan Segal. 0804
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On his blog today, Stoyan points out a topic he's started over on the OpenSourceCommunity.org site - What do you think makes a good CMS?.   This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.   He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.
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Rakesh Pai has posted an interesting piece on The Economics of XHTML, which explains why websites would benefit from following the new standards-based school of web design.
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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Stefan Mischook has release three new parts of his "Building Objects in PHP" video series:   Part 1 - This is a hands-on video where I hope the viewer will actually write code along with me. I want to stress that this video (like everything else on this site,) targets beginners .. not old PHP hacks. Part 2 - In this video, we actually use the object we created in Part 1, in our PHP page. Part 3 - In this video, I clarify a point I was trying to make in part 2. In a nutshell, I talk about why it makes sense to keep any page rendering code (HTML and CSS) out of your business logic classes.   Lots of other videos (on different topics too) are also posted on Stefan's website.
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In the final article in a series on building a website, Michael Herman explains how Google ranks webpages and what you can do to improve your ranking.
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With all the HTML editors available, you too can build Web sites for profit. Time to start a small business? No! While it's easy to publish Web pages, a lot of planning is necessary to create a viable business. In this article you'll learn how. By Peggie Brown. 1212
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The World Wide Web is no longer a novelty. To many companies and organizations, the Web is a necessity, the foundation of their businesses. This week you'll discover the thinking behind customer-centered design and learn how to apply it to your projects. By Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay, and Jason I. Hong. 0111
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DevShed caps off another series with this new tutorial today, ending their look at creating a blogging engine in PHP.   Welcome to the concluding installment of the series "Building a blogger with PHP." Made up of three friendly articles, this series provides you with all the information you need to start building a blog system with PHP in a few easy steps.   They look at their blogProcessor class first, including adding the needed database functionality to it. Then it's back out to the client side for the input forms and some validation before adding some style and formatting to the layout of the pages to make it a bit easier to use.
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The promise of e-commerce is of great success online. If your business model is solid, there's a good chance that you'll prosper. This week you'll learn how to retain your business integrity on the Web. By Josh Greenfield. 0416
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John Scott gives a rundown on the history of link buying and then 10 rules on buying links intelligently. (Yes, I do realize this is a post made in May, but I&#8217;m playing a little bit of blog catch-up this week and feel that the post is of good value.) Google is still running link based [...]
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How the right tools can create a solid search strategy.
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Ushering in a new term of sorts today is this new article from Nick Lo on the Zend Developer Zone talking about the Zend Framework and the "New Hybrid Designer":   While a good sense of aesthetics is important, it does not in itself directly equate to a well designed product. This is particularly true with web design, as a recent Web 2.0 Expo session entitled "The New Hybrid Designer" put it; "modern web design requires the coding savviness of a developer coupled with the aesthetics and user awareness of a designer".   The idea behind the article is to propose a simple setup of the Zend Framework that developers can use as the powerful system that it is and the designers can get into and understand how to use (things like building forms and templating the site). He touches on a few topics including the MVC pattern the Framework follows, security in the application and the "pretty URLs" that it allows.
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The publisher describes this book as "the definitive reference for the principles, patterns, methodologies, and best practices underlying exceptional Web design." If you've been looking for an all-in-one guide about Web design, check it out. By Lee Underwood. 0207
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In his latest post, Stoyan Stefanov introduces a new project he's working on, the implementation of CSS sprites:   This is a simple technique used for page load performance purposes. Since HTTP requests are the most expensive thing you can do in regards to front-end performance, you strive for making as little requests as possible. So instead of having the browser download 4 rounded corner images for example, you create one image that has all four. Then you use CSS' background-position to only show the part of the image you want.   He explains briefly how the system works and includes a simple example in PHP (showing how to use the imagemagik utility to create the custom image).