How to create a professional website
September 19th, 2008 | Author: Farid
Introduction.
This book seeks to show both the newly initiated into the world of the Internet as developers websites current techniques, rules and tricks to use to make your site look like this as a quality service.
As you know, the Internet offers us the ability to launch different types of services, FTP, Email, Remote Access, News, Web, IRC, Video Conferencing, etc.. This treaty has a special focus on Web services, but are included in these notes provide links to other search able by customer service from your browser.
Specifically targeted at developers and businesses that want their corporate image implanter Internet and electronic commerce services.
Included are links (links) to more useful tools and examples to clarify the treaty, but in any case, this is not a programming manual in either HTML, XML, PHP, Perl, etc..
Rather, it discusses how to use and deploy these tools to achieve the desired effect on our websites.
The medium and the message
Internet is of course something more than a one-way sending a message. It is a participatory and interactive.
This is one of the foundations of his great success.
It is necessary to engage the visitor on the site, give opportunity not only to select the navigation path but also to intercommunicate with us. And here we can include any “robot” or program for that purpose located on the server.
That is the great innovation on the Internet is interactive, real time is participatory.
On the other hand, traditional values of the media are still present. And we would stress mainly one of these values: the medium may be the message.
Write “advertising” We are the best! “In toilet paper?
Probably not, because everybody knows that although you may be the best, the message is not only believable, but it damages the image of your company, simply because the medium has not been adequate. This is normal … but note the following.
Many pages “professionals” are hosted on personal domains, aimed at home users, most of the domains under the service provider himself.
Even in the event that this is not so, we have found that many companies are presented as you would with your domain names online, have their email addresses in the form nombre@mi_proveedor.xxx
Others do not have DNS, do not resolve reverse … and a myriad of details “how” that make the difference between the hygienic and coated 200 gr.
Of course, these details would have no major importance, because they pass unnoticed by the public, if not for the additional problem that is created in the dependency web site owner with the supplier.
If you do not have access to DNS, you can add services, such as: http://mi_buscador.mi_dominio.xxx …
if no email under the domain when the owner would want to move from site, your business and personal mail will depend on the previous provider ….
Cost reductions: the big trap?
With the current boom in Internet development as a means of communication very attractive, participatory and accepted globally, compared to more traditional means of advertising, sale and distribution of products and services, we can fall into a trap.
Initially, we think that we will have a representative or team of them, our company, working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and in all countries of the world.
We can also add a direct sales channel, which also sometimes require even distribution channel based on the type of service, and consequently this is causing a tremendous savings to cost of sales.
This is true, but not the whole truth. We’re seeing in part a reality, and sometimes there is nothing else wrong and false that a partial truth conceived.
Getting to it, or have an Internet presence that allows us the desired reduction in costs, and also give us the dream market expansion consuming the least of our resources, not a bed of roses.
In most cases there are no prefabricated solutions for your needs, let alone when it comes to electronic commerce where each company has a very concrete and specific needs that must be attended to as personalized as possible.
To begin with, is not cheap.
Typically requires intense effort of professionals, among which are to include creative, designers, trade on the one hand, and various techniques programmers, system administrators, security engineers and technical data in hardware on the other.
Only proper training team all parties will lead to the success of our website on the Internet.
Before we had only a publicist, a printing and little else. Moreover, much of the supply chain of our message was inexpensive, even if you use media such as TV.
Internet is not the case, we call it a mistake.
A single frame sent by a TV station can be seen by millions of people at once, but can not participate … they get bored and go to your computer to connect to the Internet.
When connecting to the internet, our web server requires to send the same “frame” as many times as users are connected.
This is what is called diffusion unicast versus multicast broadcast TV. In this regard, it is more like a mailing by sending a mail.
In contrast, the public to come, has come to us, so the selection of interest groups has already been done, and therefore the number of impacts needed to be much lower than in the case of TV or the mailing.
We have made our customers really are us! leaving out those who are not interested. This is a great achievement, no doubt.
So far the primrose path … Where are the thorns?
To achieve this goal, we had to create a website that brings together a number of minimum conditions for success, including of course in many cases advertising campaigns by other means external to the network.
We had to build a professional website, done by professionals, often quite expensive by the way … bear in mind that the average monthly salary of a fluid database administrator is about 900.000 .- pesetas in Spain (about 7,000 USD), and when an advanced programmer in C / C + + can be fully traded at more than 50,000 .-ptas/hora.
To click a little more, we have that if we propose the development and creation of a Web site as an investment, the payback period will be very short, as the Web still remain dynamic, needs to be alive! The WEB will require upgrades, modifications, changes every period of time.
The assessment of profitability of a professional website is not easy, despite the great pitching that are taking new information technologies.
In many cases, even we find a negative or very limited return. In other cases the cost-benefit study should be expanded to several years.
But in all cases there is a reality: if you’re not in the network of networks do not exist.
It was always said that the visionary companies survive the changes that continually occur in every market and human activities, but now the difference is that changes are occurring at a speed difficult to assimilate, counting by thousands every day business that incorporate new technologies and especially Internet.
Electronic commerce is already becoming the best means of direct marketing in all markets given access to large numbers of users to the medium, and easy to buy.
Actually, we would like to congratulate all those who have already made the big step.
Spain is DIFFERENT
Certainly so, and also our Internet is different.
This does not mean it is better or worse, has its good side and bad side.
In the year 1.994 when payments on-line Internet in USA only worked with WEB SSL systems that captured the card number and details of the purchaser, and later introduced by the manual in a POS seller, we already had with our payment gateway Internet-connected the result of the transaction in real time, and production phases of develop life past. (See https: / / www.interec.com)
Spain has been a pioneer in electronic trading systems, however much they pretend to sell something now often called business Made in America “.
However, the speed of development here is much lower with differences, and no longer enter the profile of the buyer. It is known that in USA the retail catalog represents over 50% market share, while in Spain is very small, but what prevents us from selling “catalog” to the citizens of California?
As they developed commercial web sites in a hurry, here were with a network access that were really poor. As for them Internet access is easy in many cases free of charge at high speed for their companies, here and free, and less speed.
But not only Spain is in Europe. The base communications system essential for development, remains very different in Europe and USA.
Furthermore, the differences between the number of Internet users in Germany had only two years ago, about which we had in Spain, have paved lot.
When implementing a communications service in Europe is much more expensive than doing it in USA, reaching ratios of 10 to 1.
The logical thing would be to create a service of a certain size located locally in the U.S., but communications between the two continents are not wide enough for this solution in all cases advisable to those who want to implement your own web server.
The “home page”
This is the first page to be presented to enter our domain name, so its importance is vital. However, we must bear in mind that as we will see, not always accessible to our content through this page because we have other pages indexed in search engines with specific content, entering the visitor directly to the page of interest.
In any case, the home page or home page, should normally be able to:
*
Loaded quickly in most circumstances. This will prevent the abuse of pictures of large size, long lists, that excessive delay in its charge. Consider that a large majority of users connect to our website, depending on our profile, from very low-quality connections, where they will not exceed speeds of about 3 kBps (three thousand bytes or characters per second), which an image on the home page for example measuring 80 KB take longer than 30 seconds to reach the customer. Note that also lost some time and transfer traffic as traffic that not everything is useful, having some information during transmission indicating the status of receiving the packages, opening files, etc.. thus the delay is somewhat larger than could theoretically be calculated.
*
Submit a navigation menu in a quick understandable. Many sites suffer from a large information content and links in the same home page, so that when we look for something, we work hard enough to know where to walk.
*
Give a clear idea of the kind of place we have agreed. Besides presenting a logo or company logo, we should use distinctive type of service that we are accessing. To do this, we can play with backgrounds, pictures, drawings and explanatory text. As in any medium multimedia, image better than a text.
*
Think we should cover the widest possible audience for our interest. We see that our home page is fully accessible and useful to all users, regardless of the system they use.
*
Use “detectors” of the system with the client as well as the plug-in instaslados. This prevents send Macromedia Flash content to a user who does not have the plug-in, and to an annoying e aperecerá screen requiring incardinated download the plug-in. To complicate the issue something else, even if the client down the plug-in, these are dependent on your browser and operating system. It is a good technique to make them fully readable our content from non-graphical browsers such as links, although little used, in fact it’s almost like we’re going to “see” the search engines trying to index. These detectors can be made with several tools, browsers actually inform us of these data, and only about capturing and treating them know, that is, if someone browsing with my browser and the JRE 5.0 installed, we can detect it before send content to that environment.
*
Introduce dynamic details, without abusing them, contributes to less fatigue for heavy users to the home page, at the same time gives some life to the site with little consumption of resources and virtually no waste of time. An example of this can be a time clock, a press release with the latest news, etc..
*
In some cases, customize the session with the client, including identifying the connection of it. It is good in some designs to send the visitor a “Welcome Mr. Bean, thanks for visiting again.” But … how we know who we visit? For this type of information is used called “cookies” which are small pieces of information with a predetermined life span, which are sent to the client browser, and then, days later, or even years, we may collect such information from client machine to know who he was.
General rules on our Web site
Basically a site, must be composed of the following elements:
1.
Welcome Home
2.
Page where we will be able to convince the visitor of how good we are. These pages include such customer references, awards won, quality of service, rules to which we submit (eg ISO 9002), and so on.
3.
Page to facilitate quick contact with our company, including both postal and electronic data, e-mail addresses, URLs, ICQ, IRC channels where they can contact us, and so on.
4.
Page of the products or services offered.
5.
Pages added value. These are the ones that contribute greatly to capture our target audience. The clearest example: this manual you are reading right now, falls into this category. Its function is to provide information, while we have achieved that you visit our site … maybe you can interest more than we offer you during your visit.
Of course, if we observe these points together, there are some general guidelines and goals to achieve, among the most important is to provide visitors the information they seek at any time and earn their trust in our company.
To meet these objectives, trust and quality of service must:
1.
Having your own Internet domain name, or if feasible, more than one name. Who will think seriously about a company that does not spend even 70 dollars per year on your website?
2.
Manage additional services under our own domain name, for example news.midominio.xxx, ftp.midominio.xxx This clearly indicates to visitors that we have “power” over our DNS servers and do not walk from any home user provided.
3.
Never include in the email names of third companies. Would you believe in an email sent by ibm@arrakis.es?
4.
Using our own domain names in all services. For example, if someone receives an email from us and who we want to pry, but it is normal to refer to see the message headers (it is a good way to detect both inept promising gold and not even know what are talking). Therefore, our mail must be sent by mail.midominio.xxx and not a server of a third company.
5.
In cases where it is deemed necessary, have a unique IP range assigned to us, at least 16 addresses. Although we do not use them all, your goal is to make a record in RIPE (www.ripe.net) which is the European IP address allocation, so you see our company name in the records.
6.
On what we called “reverse resolution. If you install a service such as IRC on your pages when users enter using your service, everyone will see as usuario@su_dominio.xxx or the name you enter in the reverse resolution. It also demonstrates once again that we have control over the name servers (DNS).
7.
Do not include links to other sites. It is an invitation to zapping door besides that probably if we select a quality site according to our company, if the client accessing the link on other site can provide a lower quality of service, in many cases be much slower . The ideal measure is to request authorization from another site to copy to our part of the content, so avoiding possible that our visitors receive advertisements or information outside of our control and we guarantee the quality of service. It is good in any case provide the original links, trying not to prevent the client can go to other sites, but naturally without inviting him to leave us when this is not really necessary.
8.
Include additional services such as credit card payments, online orders, check stock, etc.. Consider the customer wants information and services online and in real time. The request of the client that sends an email or a fax even worse, for something that could be automatically obtained on-line is like when we were at a vending machine soda box tell us that we introduce the coin with one eye closed, little cripple foot, looking up and singing the hymn to joy.
9.
With a bit of shooting, we find that many customers ask the same, and our responses are in the same direction. Not a bad idea to give all this information in detail to the customer, not always an easy, trying not to overload the site, but pretending it pleasant and conversational as if the information we provide in a phone call in question.
10.
Internet has no boundaries, except in a few restrictions imposed dictatorial countries. Although our company is a local activity, we will not be able to avoid being seen from outside. Both of foreign visitors we have, for their own neighbors, not a bad idea to include information in other languages.
11.
Optimize each page of the retail site. This is a tremendous job! For each browser used by the client, for each plug-in installed in the browser, for each connection type and even each region of the visitor.
12.
Use automated tools to facilitate both visit the site as it updates. An example may be the image preprocessor, if they include any extra load level our web server processor, get optimize the size and features ideal for an image file before sending to the client.
Minimum requirements for providing a good service.
1.
Of course a web server where we hosted all content that has no overloads on other functions, preferably on Unix, because differences in performance over Windows (and not talk about security!) Are higher. This goes for servers with high load capacity, able to bear the entire demand of visitors, but the “jobs” internal processor to create images dynamically, access databases, etc..
2.
It also has FTP account to send the files, access to at least level shell or telnet. Ideally in servers and network shares using the SSH protocol (a protocol with encryption everything we do, including login). There are hundreds of things that can not be done by FTP and require your configuration using a shell account to the server.
3.
Use a HTTP server that meets our requirements. Normally INTEREC use Apache with PHP internal compilation included in the server it self, and graphics libraries included as well as interface to many databases.
4.
Overall chance of locating executable programs using different techniques on the server. This makes since to include a simple counter of hits to be able to access large databases. These are what are called CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and form the basis of all construction sites interactive En dynamic and ultimately, be able to “run” on the server programs.
5.
Having Perl. Perl is one of the most interpreted languages used on Web servers, and a great help to many uses in many function’s CGI is required.
6.
The availability of PHP. PHP, like Perl is another interpreted language tool for the construction of CGI. It enables easy access to engine systems databases.
7.
Provide additional tools pre-process files, such as manipulators of images, with which we can include images degrees on “on air” or on demand. Other features such as an image pre-processor is to convert sizes, colors, formats, file type, compression quality, etc.. all of which can be programmed on the fly, depending on the characteristics of visitors to our site.
8.
Disputer de C/C++ y otros languages compilations. For highly repetitive tasks, high load, it is best to use compiled applications that require no external interpreter code, but its update is more tedious because you have to compile and link the code.
9.
Additional services in the server side, as might be Real Media streams for video and audio files, CGI of the most commonly used and many libraries for CGI useful for any developer.
10.
Security system well implemented and to ensure our service to potential attacks, including systems from user and group quotas on the disk partitions used (this avoids for example, that we “saturate” our site simply email bombarding us with many great size) to firewalls controlled by automatic processes to identify and address any attack accordingly.
11.
Automatic processes of task performance. For example, check status of quotas of the group, operating processes, using tools included in almost all operating systems. An application can be elaborate classical statistical results on our site every night at a certain time. These processes can for example run a command with other permits from data capture made by a CGI.
12.
Services statistics, measures both visits and at the level of traffic flows to our site, identify potential bottlenecks and congestion on our transfers to visitors. With them we can see with clear graphic peaks, and if they were cut by our ability to process or by our capacity communication lines.
13.
Advisory service, training courses and web designers on the use of tools such as Perl, PHP, C / C + +, using database engines, security and all that will condition that our designers are not to be mere creative when facing a world often new to them and which unfortunately in many cases are no more easy to handle HTML editor.
JavaScript Functions
JavaScript is a user-friendly language that we insert in our pages, or referenced as an external code file, which can be included in a directory with restricted access if they do not want that our JavaScript code is visible.
Do not confuse JavaScript with Java, because they are different things.
JavaScript allows us to skip pages, make links automatically detects the browser used by the visitor, check the fields in a form filled out by visitors and much more.
However some of the functions that could be done with JavaScript can be carried out best with other tools, such as the detection of fields filled in a form, can have better treatment and sometimes even easier with Perl, PHP or C with JavaScript.
On the other hand, is useful to reference and update content on our site, such as changing a photograph without reloading the page, referencing the content for that object.
This may be the greatest value that JavaScript features in the design of a Web site when you have other tools. In other cases, when the designer does not have the possibility of including Perl or PHP (let alone compiled C code!) Is left with no choice but to use JavaScript to do a field check or send an email.
JAVA
JAVA is precompiled code that might call, because it requires a special processor to do it executable. Its main advantage is that the same code, which will be a file called. Class or. Jre, which is composed of what is a “bit code” or the interpreter executable code for Java, is platform independent executable, either MAC, Windows, Unix … etc.
This works on what are called “virtual machines”, where the virtual machine is in the client’s browser, so the program runs on a visitor’s computer, under your browser or interpreter, usually called JRE.
This seems a great advantage, but like everything else, has its drawbacks. We will try to explain very briefly their two largest, and possibly will lead to the conclusion (somewhat erroneously) to obviate completely the use of JAVA.
The first is that the required load a middleware that interprets the code “bit code” of Java, its performance is very low, and if you run the client in a domestic type computer or low processing capacity, both in CPU and memory, its performance is very slow.
Another drawback is that many browsers will “hang” when running certain codes “bit code”, thus the performance problem, we add a stability problem.
What’s more, we find that in addition to its poor performance and his intestate, we also have a security problem.
The security problem occurs when the client uses some of the existing MS Internet Explorer versions 4.0 and 5.0 and required to successfully run our bit code, deploy the Microsoft JRE on your machine. This allows that if you access other Internet websites, where there was someone with “bad intentions” may have put it on a website a bit code can have full access to the client’s hard disk.
Macromedia, Flash and other wonders
Each day seems to have greater acceptance and Web Design applications with these tools, which come standard even on some browsers, but for most mortals down still requires a plug-in.
With them, we can create a very dynamic page advertising, really beautiful and impressive. Unclear to those without the plug-in will not see it.
In any case it is good to install a detector plug-in installed on client machine and depending on the result, send or not content with Flash.
Consider that in many cases, for example the current plug-in for Linux from Flash, not work properly with all sites and Flash content.
But above all and most importantly, keep in mind that while pretending to reach users with analog modems or even ISDN lines with connections “home” in many cases free, through a REDIPEN (info via Plus) that fragments and broken packages and lost, and where average speeds do not exceed 3kBps (in many cases not even wear ADSL), Internet is not TV, or a multimedia product.
To do this, better to select two types of customers who visit us, those who have a connection “decent” and those which have connection of “low cost”, and this function select the content to send.
Report to the applications with Flash and Macromedia, occupy a very small file size to send, are therefore quick to send, and its effects are very good, it would cost by other means sending a huge amount of information over the network.
THE IMAGES
An important part of our Web pages are graphic images, composed mostly of pixelated image files.
The most commonly used formats are GIF, JPEG and PNG. We will treat the difference in the use of each of them when composing our website.
GIF. (Graphic Interchange Format) into a format that the file has included a chart or map of colors to 255 colors. In reality, the browser can not use them all, eg Netscape will present only 216 colors. The main advantage of this format is the possibility of including transparencies and animations. Another advantage is that we can use color palettes with less than 255 colors, or assign less than 8 bit color to each pixel, thereby reducing the file size. For example, we create a GIF with only 4 colors, thus using only 2 bits for each pixel and reducing job size ratio is almost 8:2, is four times smaller in size.
Its use is advised when required animation of several frames, and when we can reduce the number of colors, or when we require a color image (or more than one) that this transparent to show the bottom of the page.
JPEG: This is a format that works with 24 bit color, but thanks to an advanced image compression (based on the Huffman compression code) achieves a smaller file size and high quality connection. We set the level of compression / quality we want.
Its use is advised when it is intended to display an image with high quality. Who Consider the quality of an image is determined more by the number of distinct colors that the decision of the same.
PNG: the new format is added, similar to JPEG. Their applications as the same as the JPEG, but promises to add new features.
An interesting detail about the GIF image is when we use “interlaced”, ie the content of the image first contains the even lines and then odd for example, thereby downloading the image is faster and its display quality is changing on the screen of the visitor to our pages as the download completes the file. For JPEG and PNG image vision during discharge is vertically, not fully completing the picture until it has completed its reception.
With preprocessors image at the web server, we can send the image before the customer needs to transform it as a given, for example by detecting the time it took to download a text, or other image, and calculating a ratio of speed, this way, the images will be sent in a lower resolution and / or quality to those with slower connections.
Another interesting function of the image preprocessor is the ability to superimpose titles, crop images, paste, etc.. Actually we could make almost real-time demand everything that makes our graphics editor with an image, the difference is that we do it dynamically.
The web server may treat an output of a process (a CGI for example) as an image, we can write where src=imagen.cgi> <img image.cgi is actually a program that turns the flow containing GIF or JPEG .
PHP: The HTML preprocsador
PHP is an interpreted language, ie requires an additional program for execution, which rolls on the server side. When compiled into Apache as a module inserted, the main advantage is that the pages that include PHP code run as child processes Apache itself, and therefore with the same permissions and classes derived from it. In other words, users and permissions are under the security restrictions of Apache itself over its own file.
Your code is quite simple to learn, especially if you have knowledge of Perl and C.
Among its most common use are the features provided with access to many databases and interact with these engines and can include graphics libraries that allow us a certain manipulation of images on demand.
This added to its strength, as can practically do almost everything, open files, sockets, etc.. PHP makes one of the more commonly used on the Internet today, while editing PHP code is extremely fast for maintenance.
. Your call can escape realia by a MIME type registered in the web server, for example calling the files. Php, php3 or phtml
This form allows you to insert the normal HTML code and PHP both within the same file. An example:
<html> <head> <title=”mi Page to </ title> </ head>
<table <center> border=1 cellpading=0>
<?
/ / Comments in PHP can be similar to those of C
# But also this is a comment for a line similar to Perl
/ * We can also use C + + styles within our PHP * /
/ / We started the PHP code
echo “<td> This is a test </ td>”;
?>
</ tr> </ table>
We can see what the code is understandable, and for those who run C, many functions even have similar names, for example strsub.
At first PHP can be somewhat tedious to use, but he is accustomed to fast, which makes all the developers who have already used it as the usual system to HTML content on the WEB.
Like other CGI, PHP can do of course calls to system functions, and of course this means the power to include within the code running applications that require higher performance and they were compiled in C / C + +.
However as the performance ratio given by the tool used, PHP uses the actual database engine (usually an application made in C) so that takes full advantage of it.
On the other hand, sometimes to the developer of a Web site can result in development time and costs more interesting multiply by two or four processor speed of the machine, your RAM or even work with RAID disk systems, before to start working with CGI working on compiled code. In any case, always varies from one client to another, so there is no standard solutions to the assessment ratio performance / cost in a project.
Se manual has a fairly complete on-line, which includes search functions http://www.php3.de
REFERENCES
Web Servers:
http://www.apache.org
http://www.netscape.com
http://www.microsoft.com
Database Engines:
http://www.oracle.com
http://www.tcx.se
http://www.postgresql.com
Preprocessors:
http://www.perl.org
http://www.php3.de
JAVA:
http://javaboutique.internet.com
[w] Intercom 2000
Forbidden reproduction in all this text without the written consent of the owner.
