Internet Layout

As you travel around the web, you’ll notice that most sites now have ads in some form or another. Some of them are subtle, but some of them just aren’t in fact, after a while, the ads at some sites can annoy you enough that you’ll either block them out entirely or leave the […]

If you want your visitors to come back again and again, you’ve got to get them to add your website to their favorites (also known as bookmarks in some browsers). That’s the menu where they can save websites that they want to use again, clicking them easily to get to them. Being added to a […]

Once you’ve built your website, you might like to offer your visitors an opportunity to interact with it, and to talk to you and each other without having to use email. Forums are absolutely ideal for this purpose.
Choosing a Forum.
Before you can install a forum, you need to decide which forum software you […]

Blogs are a very powerful force on the web today. Have you ever wondered why searching for something seems to turn up so many blog entries as results? That’s because blogs link to each other all the time, creating a strong network of links that does very well in the search engines. Not only that, […]

Many people think the Internet and the web are the same thing. In fact, the Internet is simply a global network of computers the web runs on top of the Internet, and makes it useful for us. So how does the web work?
The Invention of the Web.
The web was invented by a […]

Almost all of the most useful sites on the web use databases to organise their content, and they often use them to allow users to register and leave comments too. Any time you do something that a website seems to ‘remember’ the next time, the chances are that a database is involved.
Yet, despite how […]

So you’ve decided that it might be best to leave web design to the professionals, have you? Well, the unfortunate thing about web design professionals is that not all of them are exactly professional. Some of them are working from wildly out of date knowledge, and, well, some of them are working from their parents’ […]

One of the best ways to make your site easier to use is to provide hints to your visitors everywhere you can. You might think that sounds simple enough, but the amount of time required to do it and the number of things to consider puts a lot of web designers off.
Visitors Don’t Know […]

One way to create web pages from scratch without using HTML is to use an editor that hides the HTML from you, letting you edit a web page as easily as you would use a word processor. These programs are called WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editors.
Microsoft’s FrontPage is one of […]

With Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop and most other popular image editors being commercial, paid-for software, you might be forgiven for thinking that there aren’t any free alternatives. While they’re not very well publicised, there are plenty of free graphic editing alternatives out there, if you know where to look. Here’s a rundown of some of […]

Most of the visitors to your website are going to spend 99% of their time doing one thing: reading your content. Given that the web is a medium mainly devoted to reading, it’s surprising just how ignorant most page authors are about typography. If you use the wrong font, you make your page painful to […]

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of websites: ones where visitors come to be informed and entertained, and ones where users come to get things done. The second kind of website usually provides some kind of interactive service, which could be anything from letting people upload pictures to giving them a form to contact technical […]

Once you’ve decided to write your own HTML, and you’ve got some idea of how it all works, there’s one thing left to think about: which program are you going to use to do it? While you can use programs like Notepad or Wordpad that come with Windows, they don’t have any specialised HTML editing […]

When it comes to accepting online payments and other sensitive information over the web, normal HTTP just doesn’t cut it. It’s an insecure method of communication where everything is sent over the wire in cleartext it’s completely trivial for anyone in a network administrator position at a business or ISP to gain access to […]

Dreamweaver is sometimes seen as FrontPage’s main competitor but, really, there’s not even a comparison to be made. Dreamweaver might be expensive, sure, but there are serious web designers out there using it and getting work done I can guarantee you that no real designer has ever used a copy of FrontPage to design […]

For some reason, HTML seems to really frighten a lot of people. Some have seen complicated HMTL that’s been produced by an editor program, or they’ve clicked ‘View Source’ on a few pages and been scared by what they’ve seen.
What you have to realise, though, is that HTML was designed from the beginning […]

When you design a website, it’s easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is that you’re going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda: they’re not going to be looking at your pretty logo and they’re not going to be passing […]

One thing that lots of designers don’t seem to understand is that there’s a big difference between the kind of design you should use if you’re trying to present information (usually with ads), and the kind of design you should use if the aim of your website is to make sales. This distinction causes a […]

So your web pages have great content, a nice design, but hardly anyone seems to click through from them to any other part of your website. In many cases, the problem is the load time people are abandoning your site for the simple reason that it just takes too long for the thing to […]

In the bad old days of the web, the only way to create even slightly complex layouts was to use tables. Some sites featured silly numbers of tables, one inside the other, to create relatively simple-looking effects. With CSS, though, tables can finally be replaced.
What’s So Bad About Tables?
If you’ve ever worked with […]

Somewhere between ever more sophisticated graphic design and more complicated CSS, many designers have are starting to forget one of the ground rules of the web. This rule is the arguably the most important rule to follow at all times; one that you should always keep in mind when you’re designing your website.
So what […]

So CSS makes layouts easier than they were with tables there’s not really much debate about that. One of the reasons many people stuck with tables for so long (and, in fact, still stick with tables to this day) is that it can be difficult to create column-based designs using CSS. Since there are […]

ColdFusion is a rapid application development language for the web, developed by Macromedia. It’s not free, but many people say that it’s more important to them to have the development speed that ColdFusion offers and you can download a free ‘developer version’ to experiment with before you commit to anything.
No Need for a […]

When HTML started, people put all sorts of things on their pages: there was a tag to say which font you wanted your text to be in, a tag to say you wanted it to be in the centre of the page, and so on. Now, though, that way of writing pages is out-of-date and […]

When you’re thinking of starting a website, you have a few problems. Where will you get content from? How do you keep visitors coming back? When you make your website an online community, though, you can solve all these problems at a stroke.
The Advantages of Communities.
On a community website, people come there mainly […]

Once upon a time, building a website was very expensive. Now, though, you can have a site up and running for the price of a used book, if you’re frugal and careful. Getting the cheapest website you can is a great first step on the ladder, to get started on the web and see if […]

You can always tell the websites that want to be big, but aren’t. How? By the sheer number of stock photographs plastered all over the design. If you’ve ever been to a business’ website and seen one of those ubiquitous photos of a guy in a suit or a woman smiling and wearing a headset, […]

If all this talk of coding and designing scares you off, you might want to know that there is an alternative to all this. You can install a kind of software called a Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to put content up on the web without ever knowing a thing about HTML.
Fantastico.
[…]

There is a problem that has plagued the web ever since graphical designs for web pages started to become common and yet it’s a problem that’s never been solved. You see, different sized monitors can handle different widths of page, and yet HTML doesn’t really let you take width into consideration when you’re designing. […]

Paint Shop Pro is one of the most popular image editors out there. Even though it’s increasingly geared towards digital photography, you’d be surprised just how useful it can be to web designers.
Features.
So what features does Paint Shop Pro have? Well, for a start, it supports just about every image format there has […]