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This Week's Quote
If you work just for money,
you'll never make it, but if you
love what you're doing and you
always put the customer first,
success
will be yours.
- Ray Kroc
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This Week's Glossary Pick
OPEN SOURCE
Software that is freely available to the
general public with no licensing
restrictions. It's a method of development
allowing the pubic to access the source
code, modify, add to it, or learn from it.
Redistribution is also permitted. Open
Source is available to encourage developers
to improve and produce more software
products. |
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 You
Need the Right Tools
In this week's edition, we steer off our
regular path of suggesting ideal web design
for improved targeted traffic and talk
specifically about some of the most basic
tools required for authoring and publishing
a web site.
Creating a web site first requires some kind
of authoring tool to design and layout your
web pages. Generally, an HTML editor
is used. A basic text editor can be
used but requires a good working knowledge
of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and is
also very time and labour intensive.
The most ideal HTML editor is a WYSIWYG
based tool - What You See is What you Get.
If you have used Microsoft Word or
WordPerfect than you know what WYSIWYG is
all about. The user makes use of a
windows based interface to pick fonts,
colours, insert images and so on. Web
sites may also be PHP based, meaning that a
combination of HTML and PHP scripting is
used. The PHP coding is executed on
the server, while the HTML is interpreted by
the browser. The author may choose to use a
PHP editor to formulate PHP code.
You will need even the most basic of digital
image editors to create and modify the
artwork and photographs for your web site.
Most images are saved in a JPEG or GIF
format to make for web friendly imagery.
These editors can modify the resolution,
pixel dimensions and file size of your
images allowing you to customize and
optimize each image for placement on your
pages and for most efficient download times.
Finally, you will need a means to upload
your web pages and image files to the server
where your web site is hosted. Many
web authoring tools provide a means to
upload, also referred to as publishing from
within the program. Other webmasters
prefer to use a separate or standalone
application known as an FTP program.
FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, when given
the proper server or web address, user name
and password can upload your files and write
or overwrite them on the server.
At the risk of oversimplifying web
authoring, this is all you need to launch
your web site.
The applications described in this news
letter are available in many forms.
Web authoring, image editors and FTP
programs can all be purchased, but are also
available in the way of shareware, freeware
and open source. Next week, we'll
recommend some ideal programs which are
freely available and worth having. |
