Five Web Design No-Nos to Avoid

Every Web designer starts out with plans to make an effective and enjoyable browsing experience for their site visitors. Unfortunately, the gap between intention and outcome often ends up a lot wider than intended. Simple mistakes can make your Web site an annoying experience for visitors when it should be anything but. Here are the five worst Web design no-nos to avoid at all costs.

1. Slow Loading

Despite the fact that more people have faster Web connections than ever, the problem of slow Web sites hasn't gone away. Many sites are so slow that people who aren't highly motivated to see your site simply give up and go elsewhere.

Typically the culprit is a slow-loading Flash movie or introduction where the designer offers no alternative to waiting for the movie to load. Showing a progress bar isn't enough, because most people simply aren't interested in waiting around for the site to appear. If you use a Flash introduction, make sure to offer an obvious way for visitors to bypass it and go straight to the site.

Test your Web site to see how long it takes before something useful appears on the screen. If it takes more than three to five seconds you run the risk of your visitor losing interest and leaving. This might seem like a short time but people are so accustomed to things happening quickly that even a few seconds waiting for a Web site to load feels like an eternity.

2. Too Much Information

Many people are cautious when it comes to providing personal information over the Internet. If you collect information from visitors, only ask for what you actually need, and don't collect it just for the sake of it.

Also be careful in areas where people may be reluctant to provide their financial or marital status and age. For example, if you need proof that a person is over 18 consider asking to confirm the age by checking a box rather than by asking for a birth date. If you don't have a very good reason to know your customer's marital or financial status, then don't ask.

Be aware that most visitors won’t want to provide a lot of information before they know something about the site. If they are asked to register for a site before they can enter it, many people won't bother. If you think it’s a valid requirement, make sure you explain why, and be sure to provide at least basic information about the site before sign up. If registering is not essential, give them a visible and easy way to bypass the signup form.

The less information you require from people, the more likely they’ll be to sign up for things like e-mail newsletters and to buy from you. On the flip side, the more information you require and the more intrusive the information requests are, the less a visitor will be inclined to provide it.

This site doesn't have a search page, but the site map helps and it's simple to find a way to contact the owners.

Ask for information once, and if they make a mistake and have to go back and fix it, make sure the information is still there. That way, they won’t have to fill out the entire form all over again.

3. Nasty Navigation

Many sites are poorly designed and require people to click through a number of different pages before they get see any product. Worse still, when you finally get to the product pages some sites tell you that there are no products in that category!

If you have only a few products in a particular area of your site, consider aggregating similar products into one category to reduce the number of clicks that people have to make to find them. You should do everything you can to get your products in front of your potential buyers as quickly as possible even if this means showing them a wider range of products in fewer and more widely defined categories.

Check your site hierarchy. If it is deep rather than wide, then your visitors will have to click many times to navigate to the actual content. Consider flattening the structure so you get visitors to where they are going more quickly.

In addition to determining how quickly you get your visitors to your products, check how many times they have to click to finalize the sale. Your site should make it easy to add an item to the shopping cart, you should provide a Continue Shopping button so people can return to the product list easily after selecting an item, and your visitor should be able to go to the shopping cart from anywhere on the site at any time.

Check the steps to finalize the sale and do everything you can do to ensure your visitor's shopping cart converts to a sale. Don't risk losing them by making the process overly complex.

4. Disorganized Information

When you don't put information where people expect it or worse, when you omit it entirely, you annoy and frustrate your users. People expect to see a privacy notice that describes what you do with the information you have collected from them. They expect you to have a contact page where they can ask questions or make complaints. This page should include phone number, a form or an e-mail address. If you don't make the process for contacting you obvious, people will lose faith in your business.

Most people want a visible search tool on every page of a site. Search is a key way many people find information and forcing them to navigate using only menus will frustrate them.

Provide each of these features as links on every page of your site - either as an option in your main navigation system or as a text link at the foot of the page.

5. All Flash and No Substance

This annoying Flash introduction has singing that you can't turn off easily. The browser close button is easier to find than the Skip Intro option.

Some Web sites showcase leading edge Web technologies at the expense of usable content. While there is a place for Flash animations and 3D product renderings don’t provide them at the expense of information that answers basic questions about products.

In addition, these features should not require visitors to download large applications or movies to do something as simple as see the product and its specifications.

Always make sure that your site focuses primarily on providing easy access to the kind of information that visitors need most. Only when you have nailed the basics should you consider adding bells and whistles.

It's easy to think that interactive displays make a site more attractive and that this will attract customers. However, the opposite is true - people return to sites where information is easy to obtain and products easy to purchase. They will bypass difficult-to-use sites that lack basic product information, which is the key to making a buying decision.

None of these peeves are hard to fix or to avoid creating in the first place. However, both you and I know from our online browsing experiences that too many sites make these mistakes every day. The key is to make sure that your site isn’t one of them and that you focus on what your visitors most need when they visit your site. If you focus on this you give yourself the best chance of selling to your visitors and to have them return in future.

[ecommerce-guide]

New web development training course offers new opportunities

Alaska-Beginning in September, the Alaska Vocational Technical Center (AVTEC) will offer a Web Development Technology program at its Anchorage campus on Muldoon Road.

"AVTEC is responding to a need for more Web specialists for business and industry," AVTEC Director Fred Esposito said. "Individual courses are also available, so the program will also provide the opportunity for Anchorage-area information technology professionals to upgrade their skills." Classes, which will be daily Monday through Friday from 5:30-9:30 p.m., are limited to 16 students.

The program runs Sept. 14 through July 30. Successful completion of the program will earn both an AVTEC Web Developer Certificate and an AVTEC Application Developer Certificate. The cost of the program, including tuition, books and laptop computer is $5,350.

"We are excited about the potential to serve a greater number of students by moving this program to Anchorage," Esposito said. "Employers tell us they need workers with these skills. The training will allow employers to hire locally."

AVTEC offers 16 long-term training programs ranging from six weeks to 11 months and roughly 60 short-term training programs that take from a week to six weeks to complete. Call 800-478-5389 for more information.

[ktva]

BlackBerry dev tools target Eclipse, Visual Studio

Research In Motion has released new and updated tools for developers who want to build BlackBerry web applications.

The smartphone maker made its first BlackBerry Web Development Plug-In for Eclipse available on Tuesday, along with version 1.2 of its plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. The tools allow developers to build BlackBerry web applications within the widely used Eclipse and Visual Studio environments.

"The BlackBerry developer tools portfolio aims to bring together the best of Java and web development for the creation of web applications that are integrated with core BlackBerry smartphone functions for a seamless, intuitive and robust user experience," BlackBerry platform group chief Alan Brenner said in a statement.

Both plug-ins include BlackBerry smartphone simulators for application testing, together with application profiling for checking on the data traffic and load time implications of web content used in the applications.

The Eclipse plug-in, which is compatible with version 3.4 of the environment, allows the debugging and profiling of HTML and CSS-using web pages, and of rich internet applications using Ajax, Silverlights, PHP, ASP, Ruby on Rails, JSP and Python.

The new Visual Studio plug-in - the first version of which came out two years ago - targets the 2008 version of that environment, and aids the creation of simple web pages or rich applications using Ajax and ASP.NET.

[zdnet]

Flexing Your .NET 3.5 Skillset

With the arrival of .NET 3.5, WPF and the RTM of Silverlight 2, .NET developers have more choices than ever for designing, developing and deploying compelling applications with rich user interfaces. However, there are other mainstream alternatives that don't fall into the .NET camp. When it comes to the RIA world, technologies such as Adobe Flex and Flash may seem more foreign to some of us then driving on the left side of the road would be to an American. However, given the need to work on a Flex project, we are actually quite well suited for the transition, more so in many cases than developers coming from a more traditional web development world.

First off all, why choose to use Flex anyway? If you are building an RIA to deploy through the browser, Silverlight would seem the logical choice for a truly custom and unique UI when ASP.NET and AJAX don't fit the bill. But there are certain situations where an enterprise may decide that going the Adobe route is the correct choice for the needs of a particular project. The primary motivation comes with an application that is being built for external consumers. The Flash plug-in currently has a 99% market penetration according to Adobe and that's hard to argue with. This will be changing as Silverlight continues to be adopted but it currently remains an important consideration. As an example, I was recently involved in building an RIA meant to be subscribed to by many large financial institutions. These types of clients do not typically have the freedom to install browser plug-ins at will. Something like the Silverlight plug-in would need to be deployed in a firm-wide rollout after many months of compatibility testing, while Flash has been standard for years. Aside from this reason, the Adobe AIR runtime makes for a compelling usage scenario where your application assets can be deployed both in the browser or standalone on the desktop, allowing reuse of the majority of the same code base. AIR has a sophisticated web-based deployment and versioning model as well. Some form of this is expected in Silverlight 3 but it is already a reality for AIR. Finally, if you have a set of graphical assets already designed for Flash and designers who are most experienced in this area, the Flash/Flex path may be the easiest way to get the user experience you are after.

If you (or your project manager/architect) have decided that it must be Flex, don't be discouraged. While learning any new platform is a non-trivial undertaking, Flex is not as foreign to .NET as it may seem. When I've conducted interviews for Flex positions, usually the candidate came from a history of Java web development. The Flex platform enjoys close ties with the Java community, from its Eclipse-based IDE, Java style package naming, and Adobe's support of its Livecycle Data Services and BlazeDS APIs for remote service integration. However, I believe that the learning curve is more natural coming from WPF or Silverlight than from Java, culture and IDE differences aside. Rich Internet Applications are closer architecturally to desktop applications written in C++, WinForms or WPF than the standard non-AJAX web application. The kinship between Silverlight and Flash is even closer. RIAs are persistent applications that maintain state, and call remote services to load and store data (usually through XML or JSON), rather than loading pages of HTML. As such, the patterns for architecting one should follow those of a desktop application deployed in an n-tier environment. Further, the major elements of the Flex platform will be quite familiar to any WPF or Silverlight developer. Flex contains an XAML-like markup language for UI layout, an OO language to glue everything together, a mature set of controls and layout panels, an analogous eventing system, databinding, and a DataTemplate like mechanism.

Introducing the Flex 3 Framework

Flex is the UI toolkit for building RIAs based on the ActionScript language and running in Flash player, as WPF and Silverlight are frameworks for building applications in C# that run in the .NET CLR or Silverlight runtime. As WPF has XAML, Flex has its own analogous language called MXML that serves the same purpose. It is a serialization language for describing your application views by constructing trees of layout elements and control elements, and setting properties on them. Your MXML files get compiled to ActionScript and the MXML tags that you declare create instances of AS classes. Flex does not have the same concept of codebehind as you'll find in the .NET world, but ActionScript can co-exist in the same file as your MXML markup in a special CDATA block for this purpose. This ActionScript is just another part of the class that the MXML in the file gets compiled into, so the overall effect is the same.

Many other WPF constructs have similar analogues in the Flex world. Flex provides an eventing model that anyone familiar with C# delegates and events will have no trouble understanding. Routed events have been a part of Flex for as long as they were in WPF. These events have a tunneling phase (called "capture") where they travel down through the control tree from the top level (called the Stage in Flash) to the target where the event occurred, followed by a bubbling phase where they travel up the tree, in both directions, looking for any registered event handlers.

Flex has a databinding mechanism for connecting UI controls to model data. The syntax is more awkward than you may be used to, but you can (and should) still make use of this for binding your view controls to their model (or viewmodel). Unfortunately there is no concept of a DataContext, so even if a single model object provides all of the underlying data for your view, you'll need to specify that in each binding expression path.

For giving a custom look to lists of data as well as DataGrid columns, Flex gives you a construct called an item renderer that is quite similar to our familiar DataTemplate. An item renderer is usually a small tree of MXML, but can be implemented as a class with some behavior behind it. When binding to a list of data, Flex uses the renderer as a factory to create additional instances of the same class, used to render each underlying model item in the list. Just as in XAML, your item renderers can be declared inline, separated out into separate component files or even built up in code. Item renderers in Flex only apply to list data. With the PresentationModel patterns being applied in .NET 3.5 now, views are often being abstracted into a simple ContentControl rendering dynamically based on the DataTemplate for the bound Content, but you won't be able to do anything quite that clever here.

ActionScript

Learning the ActionScript language will present no major hurdle for anyone experienced with C# or Java. ActionScript 3 (the current version) is based on ECMAScript 4.0, and is largely grounded in OO principles with the addition of some ideas from the functional world. It is a true object-oriented language supporting inheritance, polymorphism and interfaces. The language is somewhat more dynamic; however, there are no strongly typed arrays or lists and you can forget about generics. There are no explicit delegates or events (objects fire events by implementing the IEventDispatcher interface). But functions are first class objects that can be passed as method arguments, used most frequently for adding handlers for events. Functions can also be anonymously declared inline. Interestingly, the ActionScript Array class has a number of higher order functions such as forEach(), filter(), map(), and some() for applying a function over a list of elements. If you are already using LINQ extension methods and delegates, you'll have no problem figuring out what to do with these. The language does leave out a few of the common OO constructs that you've grown accustomed to, such as abstract classes, private constructors and static initializers. While you will miss them, they won't be anything that you can't work around.

Flex makes use of the Flash player threading model in which all of the code you write executes on the single UI thread, so forget about doing CPU-intensive processing while keeping your UI responsive. You can perform some I/O bound operations through a model similar to .NET's Asynchronous Programming Model though. Through this mechanism, you schedule an asynchronous action to be executed by the Flash player, such as calling a remote service or reading a file. You provide an event handling function to be invoked when the operation is finished so you can process the results, but this will be invoked on the same UI thread. While this model can be limiting, it does free you from worrying about thread synchronization or the need to marshal data between threads.

Tool Support

Perhaps the most initially disconcerting part of your switch to Flex will be getting used to a new development environment. The FlexBuilder IDE is based on Eclipse, coming either as a standalone install + the Eclipse shell or as a plug-in for existing Eclipse installations. Eclipse is a full-featured IDE when using it for Java development, and you get out of the box a similar feature set to what you have with Visual Studio + Resharper. But FlexBuilder does not support most of the more advanced refactorings, code organization, and generation tools that Eclipse users might be accustomed to. Therefore, you may feel that you are taking a step backwards when making the switch from Visual Studio. Most of your basic debugging tools are present (there are no conditional breakpoints but this is coming in Flex 4).

The story is more fragmented regarding the UI designer/developer workflow. Expression Blend has come a long way toward allowing designers and developers to simultaneously work on the same source tree and have a productive working relationship. Unfortunately there is no equivalent in the Flex world, and no tool that generates MXML, which can build and run the same projects used in Flex Builder. There is a built-in WYSIWYG editor in Flex Builder, but like the XAML designer in Visual Studio, it's not very useful beyond trivial applications. In general the flow between developers and designers is not as natural. Achieving more interesting effects, skins, and animations in Flex is often a combination of handwritten MXML combined with artifacts generated from tools such as Flash IDE, Adobe Illustrator, and open source libraries like Degrafa.

The Server Tier

As mentioned, the Adobe Flex community enjoys close ties with the Java world, and you'll find that a majority of Flex applications are served from and call remote services on a Java application server, or servlet engine. A large reason is that Adobe has released and supported a suite of APIs for integrating Flash Remoting with Java, through its AMF (Action Message Format) binary protocol. These products, BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services, provide a framework for exposing Java classes as endpoints for Flash Remoting and you get automatic mapping between your ActionScript and Java domain objects.

However, Flex is not in any way tied to Java, and you can easily serve a Flex application from IIS. Flex's HTTPService class asynchronously consumes XML, JSON or SOAP served from .NET Web Services, REST, or WCF. In this way you'll continue to use your IIS and .NET server infrastructure and skills, perhaps with a thin facade layer to serve the data in the format your Flex application expects. Furthermore, there is an open source implementation of AMF: FluorineFx. It comes complete with framework libraries and wizards for generating and configuring an ASP.NET web application that serves AMF. Writing a remote service for a Flex application becomes little more than writing your class and marking it with the appropriate attributes. I'd highly recommend checking out this option if you want to keep using C# on the server. AMF is more efficient than XML or JSON, and you'll have the power of using strongly typed ActionScript domain objects in your Flex tier without needing to write the mapping layer yourself. Pushing data to the browser is an option with Lightstreamer, RTMP, or sockets with a custom protocol.

Architecture and Design Patterns

As with any platform, architecture and design plays a larger role as the complexity of your application increases. This is one of the places where your existing experience will translate very well, and you'll be better off than Flex developers coming from the web world.

One of the biggest problems we need to circumvent is that of your entire application becoming housed within a few monolithic UI classes. The problem is even worse with Flex because, as mentioned, the code that you write along with your view can be put in a script block right in your MXML markup. This can be greatly abused just as code behind in WPF and other .NET platforms often is. I've seen more than one application consisting of a few grotesquely large MXML files with a few helper classes. Instead we need a way to write our applications in a clean and decoupled manner and achieve a proper separation of concerns.

There are a number of MV-x patterns used to provide basic architectural organization, often Model-View-Presenter for WinForms and Model-View-ViewModel (also called PresentationModel) in WPF. M-V-VM is the choice for WPF (over vanilla MVP) because of the platform's sophisticated databinding framework. As Flex also has a useable binding system, I've successfully applied M-V-VM to a large Flex project. The typical three-layer approach:

Service layer composed of classes that wrap Flash RemoteObjects (when using FluorineFx) or HTTPService classes for JSON or XML transfer. There should be service interfaces for all classes.

ViewModel layer that handles events from the views and exposes bindable properties that present a flat picture of the model data used in the view. These classes get injected with the service classes (of course talking to them through their interface to allow for mocking).

View layer composed primarily of MXML components with a minimum of ActionScript required to glue everything together. The primary purpose of this code is to create the ViewModel instance and direct event handlers from the UI controls into the ViewModel. Code that needs to stay very close to the view (such as drag and drop) can stay here as well.

I like to couple the above pattern with dependency injection to construct and inject instances of the viewmodel classes with their services and any other dependencies. This is still a rare technique in the Flex community, but is becoming more commonplace with several quite useable open source containers out there. SpiceFactory's Parsley and the Spring ActionScript container (formerly known as Prana) are great candidates for this.

Another architectural alternative is the Cairngorm framework, which is the Adobe approved framework for achieving the ideals set out above. You'll find many Flex projects that use it to varying degrees of success and pain. The main features of Cairngorm are a FrontController class with a set of commands that you write to handle the events, a ModelLocator singleton that provides a global access point to your model layer, and a ServiceLocator singleton for looking up instances of Remote Service wrappers. At first glance, Cairngorm feels a lot like a Java Struts MVC style framework (with FrontControllers and Commands), and may trick some more web developers into believing so, but this is not the case.

Cairngorm, like any framework, has some useful constructs and some frustrating ones, and one of the things that makes a framework useful is being able to incorporate the parts you want without making your whole codebase depend on the pieces you don't. While this is not a problem inherent in Cairngorm, many developers new to the framework utilize everything verbatim in the way that the tutorials and how-to's demonstrate. This tends to result in a congested code base with too much boilerplate code for Commands and Delegate classes, and lots of direct dependencies on the ModelLocater and ServiceLocator singletons. As we know that singleton classes are the enemy of flexibility and testability, this should make most of us cringe.

If you decide to leverage Cairngorm or take over a project already using it, remember to apply the good lessons you've learned in the .NET world. ViewModels are still worthy constructs to use with the framework, providing a place for handling events and exposing portions of your model that are local only to your specific component (they can be managed by the ModelLocator). Cairngorm is open source, so you can modify the FrontController to use your IoC container as the factory for your Command classes, so they are injected with the ModelLocator and service instances, rather than using the singleton method of accessing them. The Spring ActionScript container is already incorporating extensions to allow you to work around the messier parts of Cairngorm and is worth a look just for this reason.

Conclusion

As Silverlight and WPF mature and gain mainstream acceptance, Flex and Flash will undoubtedly be forced to evolve in a direction where they can stay competitive. It's likely that there will be further feature swapping and parallels between the two. If you do find yourself in a position where you or your team will need to work on a Flex application, don't feel that you will be throwing away what you know and starting from scratch. Rest assured that you will be in the best possible place to pick up the new framework as well as anyone, and can continue to build on the .NET infrastructure and support that you already have.

[sys-con]

Firefox 3.5 and IE8 Abused to Spy Inside Intranets

Two security researchers have devised proof-of-concept "ping sweeping" attacks, which leverage on the new Cross-Origin Resource Sharing implementation in Firefox 3.5, as well as the one already existing in Internet Explorer 8. A design weakness can allow attackers to remotely map Web servers on an internal network by using HTTP requests as pings.

XMLHttpRequest is a common API used in AJAX libraries in order to send HTTP requests directly to web servers and return the results as XML or plain text directly into the scripting language. In previous browser implementations, XMLHttpRequest was limited by the JavaScript same origin policy, meaning that HTTP or HTTPS requests could only be sent by an application to the domain that loaded it.

All of that changed with the introduction of the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) specification, which allows such requests to be made cross-site. For security purposes, the specification requires the exchange of specific headers, which servers can use to enforce origin-domain restrictions.

However, as reputed Web security researcher Robert "RSnake" Hansen points out, even if such resource-accessing restrictions are put in place, the ability to make the request itself can be abused. "Although an attacker is not allowed to know if the page was there or not (only if it was allowed to see the content or not), the attacker is still allowed to make an initial request. In doing so that initial request can be used as a pseudo 'ping' sweep," he explains.

Obviously, this is not a real ICMP ping, but an HTTP variant, which can still be used to "tell if the site is there or not because it will either return immediately […] or it will wait around much longer […] before the browser gives up." By leveraging on this architectural weak spot, Hansen claims that a "substantial amount of internal address space" can be scanned for web servers rather quickly.

In order to support his theory, the researcher has created a PoC example, which scans a limited number of intranet IP addresses if the client visiting the page is behind a local router. It is also worth mentioning that port 80 does not necessarily have to be opened in order for this attack to work.

Fortunately, the popular NoScript Firefox extension can be used to mitigate the issue, because of its ABE (Application Boundaries Enforcer) component. Disabling JavaScript globally, something which NoScript does by default, will also block such attacks.

However, Internet Explorer 8 has its own proprietary variant of XMLHttpRequest too. It is called XDomainRequest and is implemented using the same Cross-Origin Resource Sharing specification. Inspired by RSnake's idea, another application security researcher, going by the online handle of Inferno, has devised a similar attack against Microsoft's browser.

[softpedia]

Template Monster Reaches the 25,000 Mark

Last week, visitors of Template Monster were invited to view and buy the company's latest release, template 25000. On this occasion the company published a promotional code on its official blog that gave the first 25 users a 25% discount for the 25000th template.

This is great news for the template giant, which is widely recognized as one of the biggest trendsetters in website design out there, getting more than 100,000 hits per day. The 25,000th template is a Flash-based design portfolio and features a catch-phrase, "We are the best."

"This is a big day for all of the Template Monster community - and that's about hundreds of thousands of people. Not to mention the joy we at TemplateMonster feel," says David Braun, CEO of TemplateMonster. "[...] Over the past 7 years we've been here for our audience, and the audience has been here for us."

The company was started seven years ago in New York by Artvertex, Inc with a specific target in mind: the web developing community. At first, they've hired a group of developers that started to create fresh and professional website templates, putting them up for sale on their website. The templates looked so good that the company’s reputation grew and it soon became the biggest template seller currently on the web.

Capitalizing on its success, the company launched its affiliate program and expanded the template categories to Flash, PowerPoint, Joomla, Drupal, PhpBB, WordPress, Mambo, PHP-Nuke and E-commerce. Recently TemplateMonster expanded to other new media-related services like audio files, logos and icon sets, hosting more than 21 product types and more than 100 design-related topics.

Inspired by its success, similar affiliate programs spawned all over the internet, but with poor results. In the last few years, the Envato network has caught up with it by exploiting TemplateMonster's weak spots. For several years, web-designers and developers have tried to sell their templates on TemplateMonster, but the team was very picky in allowing regular users to upload and sell products through the website. Meanwhile, Envato has done just the opposite; after a simple registration and test, users can start submitting their artwork so it can be approved and published on different Envato-owned niche websites.

[softpedia]

How To Choose a Web Hosting Provider

By Stephen Holford, CMO, Fasthosts

A great start to becoming a successful Web host, particularly for resellers, is to know what hosting providers are out there. Unbeknown to your customers, the quality of service they receive from you, the reseller, can often depend on the quality of the hosting provider you choose, the true source for their Web solutions. Researching providers in the beginning, and learning what you can and cannot offer to your customers can have a substantial impact on your success in the reseller industry.

That said, Web hosting can be a lucrative business move for VARs. While an in-depth background in hosting is not a necessity to become a reseller, there are a few "tricks of the trade" that can help even the savviest IT providers become a mainstay in a very competitive industry.

1. Probably one of the most important elements to look for in a Web hosting provider is the cost associated with bandwidth and Web space. Ask the provider if it limits the amount of bandwidth and Web space you are allocated. What costs, if any, can occur if that limit is exceeded? Sometimes, providers may cap how much you are allotted in order to make a greater profit at your expense.

2. Depending on the provider you choose, as a reseller you have the flexibility to run your hosting business as you see fit. Ensuring that you have the ability to structure your business and control its progress can be a plus because it pulls the final say from the provider and gives it to the reseller. In short, if you are in charge, you have total command of your business. On the other hand, not every reseller wants to have full control. To be safe, just make sure you know what responsibilities you and the provider each have in managing the business.

3. How quickly do you want to have your reselling venture up and running? Your best bet is to have a quick and efficient start-up process. This means it should take minutes, not hours! Double check, too, if there is any software you have to use in order to get things working properly.

4. The variety of Web solutions that will be available for you to resell can be important as well. Inquire with the provider to find out what your options are, including how the solutions are purchased. Are they bundled into pre-determined packages? Can you customize them with other options? What individual services are available for you to resell, such as email inboxes, domains, etc.?

5. Regardless of how much control a reseller has, the administrative side of Web hosting matters. It’s a good idea to look for a user-friendly control panel. Ask the provider what tools it offers that can make the administrator's job easier (but not at the expense of efficiency or effectiveness).

VARs will find the world of Web hosting holds a lot of potential for those brave enough to venture into the online world. But, it's important to remember that a partnership with a dependable provider can greatly help you achieve a stable stream of revenue.

[bsminfo]

Luring local traffic to your Web site

By Emily Maltby

"Attracting local search traffic is much easier than optimizing a Web site for a national or international audience," says Pamela Swingley of Savvy Internet Marketing in Orinda, Calif. "Local search is starting to really heat up."

There are three key elements you'll need to focus on: content, search-engine rankings and design.

You're off to a good start with content. "The best thing to do is to step back and think of the top three things a client would want to see on the site," recommends Tom Grant, executive Web producer at Blue Ray Media in Denver.

Your site highlights the areas of law that your firm practices, but you should build upon that to give visitors more information. "Potential clients will want to know if you have handled situations like theirs. The site should help them answer that question," says Grant. "Some areas of the site start to answer that question, but each could go further by offering details of each area of practice."

Your "Bankruptcy" section, for example, explains what it is and how it affects people. But other topic areas, such as "Estate Planning," provide no such information. Grant thinks you should bring each practice-area page up to the level of your bankruptcy section -- then take each a step further by creating a topical "client stories" page. There, you can give prospective clients a sense of what a typical case you handle looks like.

"This will help them see where you were successful, giving them a better chance to call you if the case sounds like theirs," he says.

Expert tips

Another way to build out the practice-area pages is by providing articles for each. Many in need of legal advice will first try to find answers on their own. If you publish articles, potential clients will appreciate the free information and also have a higher regard for the lawyers who wrote them.

"They think, 'If she writes about this stuff, she must know what she's talking about,'" says Grant. "You position yourself as an expert."

Talk back: Share your advice

Linking to useful resources will also help build your credibility. Your "Bankruptcy" page links to a recommended credit-counseling class and explains the process of obtaining a completion certificate. That's a great model to follow on other pages. For example, you can link visitors to the site where they can pay local traffic tickets, or to a page with detailed information on North Carolina's divorce laws.

To keep the content fresh, try to update at least one article each month. That has a bonus advantage: It tells search engines that your information is timely and relevant. You could also repurpose your articles into content for a newsletter sent out regularly to subscribers.

"Your tagline is 'a law firm for life,' so you should make sure your services go beyond serving prospective and existing clients," Grant says. "Some clients may not realize you have these other areas of practice, so this will keep them aware that you're still there."

Helping the search engines

Expanding your content will also enhance your search engine optimization (SEO). That's because your articles and links will be full of key words that search engines look for when ranking sites.

Grant's firm, Blue Ray Media, has worked on many law firm Web sites and has tracked the "points of entry" into those sites. "We found that articles with statistics and stories are typically where people jump into the site, particularly with the law firms that update their news and articles regularly," he says.

You can also beef up your SEO by reorganizing your site's pages. For example, your "Practice Areas" pages are the most informational part of your site. In order to emphasize their importance to both search engines and visitors, Grant suggests listing all of them in a sidebar that appears on every page of your site, including the home page.

Keep in mind, however, that broken links on any of your pages will both deter clients and trip the search engine crawlers that read your site. Right now you have several broken links -- and the "News" link in the navigation bar is the same as your "Contact Us" link, which is confusing.

"It looks like you don't care and that you're not detail-oriented," says Grant. "I definitely want my attorney to be detail-oriented."

Cornering the local market

Your site's "meta" tags describe its content. A good first step to capturing local traffic is to include your town -- Concord, N.C. -- and your nearest metro area, Charlotte, in all of your keyword and title meta tags.

You are listed in the Super Pages and Yellow Pages online, and in local search tools from Google Maps and Yahoo Local, but you're not ranked very high in any of those places. To boost your visibility, you'll need customer testimonials and more "inbound" links to your page from other sites.

You can go beyond the traditional search engines by establishing yourself on locally-focused sites like Yelp, Judy's Book and Citysearch.

"When it comes to selecting something as important as legal services, references are key," says Swingley. "It's critical that you monitor what others are saying about your services and that you help your reviews along. Do all you can to encourage your clients to write a review."

Swingley suggests reciprocating links with any community programs and associations you belong to, including the Chamber of Commerce or the local Better Business Bureau. Also, try building relationships with local bloggers and your local TV station's site.

"You can never have too many quality links," she says. "If the firm is mentioned in the press, ask for a link to the site. Exchange links with professionals that refer business to you and include your Web site link whenever you answer a question on boards such as Yahoo Answers or law-related forums such as InjuryBoard.com."

Design

The job isn't over once you get traffic to your site. All the links and information in the world won't score you a client if your site looks messy and unprofessional.

"The overall design doesn't do the firm justice," says Grant of your current site. "Pick a simple theme and stick with it."

Your homepage is bland. It's the "cover" for the rest of the site, and it needs to shine. The first problem Grant notices is the color scheme. You use a lot of colors -- gold, black, blue, gray, yellow, white and red. "Stay clear of the heavy, dark layers," he advises. "Try to stick to two or three colors, such as a blue with white and gold highlights."

Jazz it up with some images, and reorganize the information you present there so that clients can jump straight from your homepage to the information they're seeking.

"The homepage has basically no hierarchy. Nothing is more or less important than anything else," says Grant. "It's a jumbled mess graphically and there's no emphasis on what people might want to do on the site."

Grant noticed only one image on your site, the courthouse pictured on the "Contact Us" page. He recommends simplifying that image and using it on every page, perhaps along with the C&W logo. This will provide a consistent theme and a context to help people relate to your firm.

Also, make sure that top navigation tabs don't disappear as visitors move through your Web site, as currently happens in a few places. Also, keep the tabs on it consistent on every page of your site.

On the secondary pages, try to include images where they're relevant, especially next to the bios on your "About the Firm" page. "It's generic without any people on it," says Grant. "Photos of attorneys and staff can make it more memorable."

Fix those bio pages so that you give visitors what they expect. It looks like each hyperlinked employee name will lead to a bio page, but right now, only the attorneys have actual bios. The rest of the names lead to a page full of empty boxes.

When the aesthetics are fixed, you can add elements to your site that will help the visitors start a relationship with you. For example, create a contact page with a standard form for visitors to fill in. Let potential clients choose an area of law from a drop-down menu and then type their questions and contact information in other fields. That type of form will provide you with client leads while cutting down on the spam you'd get by listing only a contact e-mail address.

Swingley suggests touting a marketing deal right on your site, such as a half hour of free consulting or a discounted first meeting. Add this offer to your meta-tags description to increase traffic.

"The first thing that goes through most people's minds when they think of engaging with an attorney is that it is going to be very expensive," she says. "Make it easy to get started."

[money.cnn.com]

Building a Web Site? Did you ask the right questions?

I've been doing this Web thing for a long time; in fact, I built my first Web site in 1994, back in the days when the average American thought the Internet was an international criminal conspiracy. These days I do ecommerce consulting, which has provided me with the privilege of working with hundreds of companies over the last few years. I've worked for large companies such as Amazon and Zillow... and small companies such as the one-woman firm that arranges "fairy" tours of Ireland. I've seen it all!

One thing I've learned is that the vast majority of businesses start the Web-design process in completely the wrong place. They jump into the graphic-design part of the process, without asking a critical question.

What do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?

I know most businesses think they've already answered the question, but "we want the visitor to buy our product" is not a good answer. It's way too vague in most cases, much to general.

Specifically, what do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?

If you don't answer the question, you end up with a "throw it onto the site somewhere" process that really won't work well.

Here's an example. A firm I worked with wanted to sell a piece of software. Not having answered The Question, the site was a jumble of information and no real flow... no sales pitch or marketing message, no flow through which a visitor could be converted into a client.

It turned out that they had a great video showing the features of the product; in fact at one point the business owner said to me, "well, I guess it would really help if the visitor saw the video." Why, then, I asked, was the video hidden?

The video was reached by a small link near the bottom of the page on the right side. This was probably the most important sales element we had identified ... and yet it was hidden from the visitor. Sure, the visitor might stumble across it, but in most cases wouldn't. (As, in fact, was proven by their traffic logs; very few visitors ever reached the video.)

Now, had the company asked The Question right from the start, and fully discussed and explored it, before they built the site, they wouldn't be rebuilding the site! They would have realized that they had to push the video, that they had to make sure that every single visitor to the site know about it, and was encouraged to view it.

This, by the way, is why Web design is not about graphic design. A Web site is a piece of software--in many cases, a piece of marketing software. It is supposed to do something; interact with a visitor, and move that visitor along a path toward "conversion." That's a process, not color design, not graphic design. Graphic design is what you apply to a site once you've figured out the process.

[examiner]

Joomla CMS and Its Advantages

Joomla is an open source Content Management System (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. In August 2005, Joomla originated from the Mambo content management system, which included the source code, as well as the development team. As Joomla code is open source, so it's easy adaptable for anyone to write modules and extensions of the system. Joomla allows web designers to develop websites by combining modules, and requires no programming knowledge. Joomla framework is written in PHP, as are the modules used to customize websites.

Why Joomla?

Why is joomla so popular among web developers? There are various reasons for its popularity depending upon the joomla users. Mainly, as an open source system Joomla is free, Secondly Joomla environment is very flexible which meets the needs of different user accordingly. Thirdly, it can be downloaded from the Internet absolutely free of cost and also, because of its ease-of-use, extensible and accessible environment it so popular.

Characteristics and Benefits of Joomla

• Completely database driven site engines. Each and every element in joomla is stored in a centralized database.
• The content that is displayed on the website can be scheduled as per the requirement of the web editors.
• Fully customizable layouts - there are thousands of templates to choose from so you can change the look and feel of your site without affecting the main content.
• Joomla supports multiple languages.
• News feeds from various websites can be gathered using the News Feed Manager available in Joomla.
• Runs on any platform including Windows, Linux, several Unix versions, and the Apple OS/X platform. It also depends on PHP and MySQL database to deliver dynamic content.

Apart from these characteristics, it provides many benefits such as

• Easy Management: Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not a programmer. Once Joomla is installed, configured, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go.
• Joomla Components & Modules: The popularity and flexibility of Joomla modular architecture has made it possible to develop a wide range of components and associated modules. One can find nearly any component or module which meets our requirements and then just download and plug it into your content management system.
• Joomla Templates: There are number of web designers who develop and design Joomla Templates which can transform the look and feel of your web site. All you have to do it find a template you like, download it and apply it to your content management system (CMS). Many of the templates come with predefined module positions so you can display modules in various different positions.
• Joomla for Search Engine Optimization: Having your website found by the search engines (Google etc…) is vital in most cases for a successful website. Joomla has built-in SEO functionality. (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization). The SEO tab in Global Configuration (in Administration backend) takes care of global SEO settings for your Joomla site. Joomla provides (SEF) search engine friendly URLs to ensure you get the highest search engine ranking position

Joomla is an internationally developed application, with many developers contributing to the growing movement by submitting their own web services components and plug-ins to the Joomla Extensions Directory. It is a platform where you can plug-in smaller applications as per the needs of the user. Hence, scalability is an important factor to be considered for organizations that requires CMS.

[cms.sys-con]

Building a Web Site? Did you ask the right questions?

I've been doing this Web thing for a long time; in fact, I built my first Web site in 1994, back in the days when the average American thought the Internet was an international criminal conspiracy. These days I do ecommerce consulting, which has provided me with the privilege of working with hundreds of companies over the last few years. I've worked for large companies such as Amazon and Zillow... and small companies such as the one-woman firm that arranges "fairy" tours of Ireland. I've seen it all!

One thing I've learned is that the vast majority of businesses start the Web-design process in completely the wrong place. They jump into the graphic-design part of the process, without asking a critical question.

What do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?

I know most businesses think they've already answered the question, but "we want the visitor to buy our product" is not a good answer. It's way too vague in most cases, much to general.

Specifically, what do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?

If you don't answer the question, you end up with a "throw it onto the site somewhere" process that really won't work well.

Here's an example. A firm I worked with wanted to sell a piece of software. Not having answered The Question, the site was a jumble of information and no real flow ...no sales pitch or marketing message, no flow through which a visitor could be converted into a client.

It turned out that they had a great video showing the features of the product; in fact at one point the business owner said to me, "well, I guess it would really help if the visitor saw the video." Why, then, I asked, was the video hidden?

The video was reached by a small link near the bottom of the page on the right side. This was probably the most important sales element we had identified ... and yet it was hidden from the visitor. Sure, the visitor might stumble across it, but in most cases wouldn't. (As, in fact, was proven by their traffic logs; very few visitors ever reached the video.)

Now, had the company asked The Question right from the start, and fully discussed and explored it, before they built the site, they wouldn't be rebuilding the site! They would have realized that they had to push the video, that they had to make sure that every single visitor to the site know about it, and was encouraged to view it.

This, by the way, is why Web design is not about graphic design. A Web site is a piece of software--in many cases, a piece of marketing software. It is supposed to do something; interact with a visitor, and move that visitor along a path toward "conversion." That's a process, not color design, not graphic design. Graphic design is what you apply to a site once you've figured out the process.

[examiner]

Web May Be Ultimate Mobile Platform

While Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Nokia (NYSE: NOK), and Palm take different approaches to the mobile space, executives from each company agreed that the mobile Web will play a significant role in future application development.

At the MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco Thursday, the companies discussed what makes up a winning mobile platform. The executives agreed that the most important thing was ensuring the end user has a good experience with apps, as well as making the platform attractive to developers.

Mobile program makers are facing an increasingly fragmented world, as the smartphone space consists of Apple's iPhone, Google's Android, Nokia's S60 Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Research In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM)'s BlackBerry, and Palm's webOS. Additionally, most content creators also have to make apps for the various versions of J2ME if they want to reach a broad audience of feature phone users.

Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering, said even the search giant isn't rich enough to support this many platforms at a sustainable rate over the long term. Gundotra said the Web will become a strong mobile development platform as things like HTML 5 and offline improvements become standardized.

"We've decided to look to the future, and what we see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers," said Gundotra. "What that does for our costs is stunning."

Of course, Google also has other interests in pushing the continued adoption of the mobile Web, as more people online will mean more potential users of its Web services, as well as more revenue for its dominant Web advertising platform. But competitors Nokia and Palm echoed similar sentiments about the power of the mobile Web for apps.

Palm has probably taken the most aggressive stance in this Web-centric model for apps, as its recently released webOS was built from the ground up with Internet connectivity in mind. The company also made its Mojo software development kit available to the masses, and Palm said it uses standard Web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Palm is hoping to attract millions of Web developers, even those with little or no experience with mobile devices.

Michael Abbott, Palm's senior VP of application software and services, said Palm is pushing this Web-centric approach beyond its company. The company's SDK enables developers to access the phone's accelerometer using only JavaScript, and Abbott said Palm is pushing to make this a standard in HTML 5, or in future standards. With this in place, content creators could potentially write a platform-agnostic app with motion controls that's delivered through any capable mobile browser.

While it doesn't get the buzz or attention that iPhone or Android gets, Nokia is still the dominant player in smartphones with roughly 41% of the global market. Tero Ojanpera, Nokia's executive VP of services, said this Web-centric view could be hindered by the lack of unlimited data plans for many customers around the globe, but he agreed that the underlying operating system is becoming less important than the layers on top, including those delivered through the browser.

The company is a big backer of the Qt framework, which is an application and user interface framework based on C++ that enables developers to write programs for multiple platforms with little adjustments. Qt is used by many big Web developers like Google, Opera, Last.fm, and others. Ojanpera hinted that Nokia will soon be bringing this to "the next level," but did not elaborate.

This vision of Web applications dominating the market is nothing new, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs originally said all of the iPhone's programs were going to be Web-based ones using mobile Safari. The developer community was severely disappointed by this though, and the iPhone did not really hit critical mass until a full SDK was released and the App Store was implemented. These native apps have done extremely well for the touch-screen smartphone, as iPhone users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion apps in about a year.

Gundotra said the timing and technologies just weren't right for what Jobs envisioned, and he points to the innovations like geolocation and strong JavaScript support that are just making their way into desktop browsers as a sign of where mobile browsers are headed.

"Jobs had it right from the beginning," said Gundotra. "Maybe instead of 'There's an app for that,' it should be 'There's a bookmark for that.'"

[informationweek]

Recovery.gov Development Contract Details Coming

By J. Nicholas Hoover

Contractor Smartronix will be responsible for Web develpment, storage, security, disaster recovery, hosting, maintenance, and operation of the Web site.

By Monday, the General Services Administration and Smartronix are expected to release a version of the contract to design and operate recovery.gov, a spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board said Tuesday.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has been urging GSA and Smartronix to release the Recovery.gov contract, which is worth up to $18 million. Watchdog groups such as OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation have begun doing so as well.

"We are not spending this kind of money just to paint a pretty picture," RATB spokesman Ed Pound said in response to some criticism online and from the media that $18 million was too much to spend on designing a Website. "There's a whole heck of a lot of other stuff going on here."

According to a press release and documents the RATB released late Friday, that "other stuff" includes significant infrastructure and operational responsibility. In cooperation with the RATB, Smartronix will be responsible for storage, security, disaster recovery, hosting, maintenance and operation of the Web site and related data.

The initial $9.5 billion outlay to Smartronix will cover redesign and development of Recovery.gov, procurement and installation of hardware and software to host the site, operations, storage and a content management system for the site, among other things.

In a nod to transparency, the RATB also posted a 50-page statement of objectives online Friday, which goes into great detail about the technical requirements for the Recovery.gov contract, describing the required networking and security architecture, high-level user interface requirements, business intelligence and content management capabilities, reporting requirements, and data architecture.

Smartronix won the Recovery.gov contract over two other bidders, SRI International and Accenture, in an accelerated bidding process that only included companies who are part of the multi-vendor Alliant contracting vehicle.

By law, Recovery.gov must be up and reporting stimulus spending in detail by October 10, but Pound said that the normal, full, and open competition process takes an average of 267 days to award a contract. "That's unacceptable and people would be screaming for our heads," he said. Now, the RATB expects the site will be up as early as late August.

Though not well known for developing Websites, Smartronix said in a press release Tuesday that it will be working with digital agency TMP Government and consulting firm Synteractive to design and implement Web 2.0 features in Recovery.gov, including community interaction through features such as blogs and photo uploads. Auditing firm KPMG will be providing support for financial information, policy, reporting and data management.

"We have assembled the best team to meet the contract's complex requirements and have immediately begun work to meet the Recovery.gov 2.0's aggressive schedule," Smartronix CEO John Parris said in a statement.

Contractors and other recipients of stimulus money will be required to report their spending via Excel spreadsheets that recipients will upload to the forthcoming FederalReporting.gov.

That site, contracted with CGI Federal as part of another existing contract ith the Environmental Protection Agency, will feed data to Recovery.gov. The Office of Management and Budget is holding a series of Webinars next week for recipients to find out more information about how to report data.

[informationweek]

Aptana scores $7.8M for open source web building tools

Aptana, maker of open-source software used to build, implement and manage web sites and applications, has raised $7.8 million in a second round of funding to scale its virtual environment offering, Aptana Cloud - a free service that allows users to deploy and manage their web applications from a central location.

Based in San Mateo, Calif., Aptana is known for making web deployment fairly easy for users of varying skill levels, providing tools to run apps on Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL and Apache. Users can toggle the amount of computational power and storage space they need for the tasks at hand. It also lends itself to collaborative projects by giving administrators the ability to add or subtract project team members and edit their privileges.

Before its cloud product was released last year, the company was known for its Aptana Studio offering, an open-source web development platform that just hit 4 million downloads. An Eclipse-based development environment for Web 2.0 sites, Aptana Studio is downloaded 200,000 times each month, the company says.

Mobile Web or Mobile Application Which way to go?

Enterprise mobility is now moving from the early adopter stage to become a mainstream focus for enterprises and their IT departments. Enterprises are beginning to understand how they can use mobile technologies to improve business process and optimize their mobile worker performance.

Factually, lots of enterprises are in dilemma in terms of choosing a right option a mobile website or a downloadable application that run on the handsets. The best answer is, it depends on what the enterprise wants to accomplish.

Web applications traditionally have been valued for its ease of distribution; faster release cycle, decreased barrier to entry etc. Coming to mobile, web development has long suffered from a rigid platform and the inability for mobile browser to keep up with current web technologies. With many handset manufacturer attempting to clone the iPhones usability and appeal, the mobile web applications are getting better, the browser more robust and the devices more capable in terms of supporting Javascript and other web technologies such AJAX, flash etc.

The mobile web allows you to develop on a single platform and target the broadest set of handsets. On the flip side, the mobile web application cannot access the advanced features of the phones such as contact list, location information, camera, bluetooth etc. The interfaces on mobile websites are quite poor and clunky resulting in less than desirable user experience due to browser fragmentation and varied form factors. For better usability, vendors such asVolantis ( News - Alert) (Multi-channel Server), Mobileaware (Mobile Interaction server) etc. have come up with middleware that manages rendering of web pages to different devices based on device capabilities.

If enterprise has an existing high traffic web destination, developing a mobile version makes sense as site already has a brand attached to it and loyal followers.

Today's mobile handsets are more than just a phone and improved native capabilities of phone can be better utilized with smart client mobile applications. The mobile application provides ability to better control user interactions and user interface via possible inputs such as touch, voice, keyboard etc. The smaller footprint of database allows user to store reasonable amount of data directly on handset giving offline functionality to user. The offline functionality, the important differentiator, could become a major decision factor for enterprises in deciding which way to go.

Mobile device fragmentation at platform, device, firmware and operator level may lead to further confusion for enterprises to choose best suit for their business needs. Additionally, the porting efforts to other platforms and testing applications on physical handset add to overall cost of developing rich mobile application when compared to web site development.

If enterprise has need of extensive data management and interactive user experience on device and also requires access to device functionalities such as location, contact list etc., developing mobile application makes sense.

In conclusion, if enterprise is targeting the mobility to reach out to their customers- a wider audience, mobile web may be better choice compared to native application development, as they do not have a direct control over the mobile devices, personal devices being used by them. If enterprises are thinking of improving the business process or optimizing the mobile workers performance, mobile application would be better choice as enterprise are in better position to manage and control the devices. And, if enterprise believe in mobility as a strong medium for marketing, business process improvement and operational efficiencies, consider investing in both mobile application and mobile friendly web site to utilize the best of these two technologies.

[callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com]

W3C Discontinues XHTML 2 Development

In an effort to speed up HTML 5 development, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) announced at the start of July that it would discontinue all XHTML 2 research. This means that the XHTML 2 Working Group will stop all activity at the end of 2009, and all resulting resources will be redirected to the HTML 5 Working Group.

The XHTML 2 Working Group has been assigned to expand HTML as an XML mark-up language, working on correcting problems with internationalization, device independence, form processing and making it easier to integrate and combine with other mark-up languages. The group has been active since it was initially charted in March 2007, working alongside the HTML 5 group on developing new HTML web technologies.

Ian Jacobs, representative of W3C said, "We're investing in HTML 5 for the future," announcing W3C's future development plans. From this statement it's clear that XHTML 2 will not become a W3C standard, and all efforts to build an XML formulation for HTML will be continued for HTML 5.

This strategic move from W3C was hailed by the web-developing community. According to InfoWorld, Dion Almaer, co-director of developer tools at Mozilla, had the following to say: "XHTML was a rat hole, and now we can use W3C folks to help make HTML 5 better." The opinion is widely supported because HTML 5 seems to be one of the most powerful and anticipated web development tools to ever be released. Many actually feel that it could spell out an end to Flash-driven applications. "HTML 5 is really the second coming of this Web," concluded Dion Almaer about the future release of HTML 5 to the World (Wide Web).

Big names in the industry, especially browser developers, have also been involved in the development of HTML 5. Well, almost everyone, except for Microsoft, which has been pumping millions into the Silverlight project, which does practically the same thing as HTML 5. Another industry player that might have something against HTML 5 is Google. Mountain View developers may be concerned about the capabilities of HTML 5, which will make YouTube's Flash deployment for video presentations old and obsolete.

For the moment it's quite clear that things are still in the works at W3C, since more resources are needed for the HTML 5 group.

[softpedia]

Web Design with a CSS make excellent mobile shopping for your site

With a second style sheet and minor changes to a page's HTML, many online stores can offer an excellent mobile shopping experience without creating a second web page or registering a mobile specific domain.

Mobile Internet use is on the rise. And online merchants presumably want to provide customers with the best possible shopping experience. It is for these reasons that many leading ecommerce sites have begun to offer either mobile specific pages (typically a subdomain) or mobile specific styles.

In this "Web Design Tips," I am going to make some suggestions about whether you should build a separate, mobile specific website, and provide a quick example of how you might transform your CSS to create a more mobile-friendly version of your current page.
Should You Build a Separate Mobile Site?

The answer can be either yes or no. Personally, I believe that mobile Internet devices and mobile handsets will soon be as capable of rendering web pages as well as laptops and desktops do now, so that registering a .mobi domain or even building a separate site could be a waste of time.

A better solution might be to redesign your current site so that it is easy to render on multiple platforms. In fact, developing websites that easily migrate among platforms (mobile, desktop, RSS, or more) was the one of the main reasons that CSS was created. Good website design will largely separate content from layout and appearance.

If you do decide that the best way to serve mobile customers is with a mobile-specific site, I will encourage you to use a subdomain rather than a .mobi domain. For example the URL might be http://m.yoursite.com rather than http://yoursite.mobi.

An Example Conversion

Just as each ecommerce website is unique, creating a mobile friendly version of that site will also be somewhat unique. So I thought that, perhaps, the best way to describe a site conversions was to do one.

For this "Web Design Tips," I created a home page for an ecommerce comic book store. This page was created for this demonstration.

First, here is the complete page code from before the conversion.

Here is the style sheet for on-screen display

body {background: url(images/main-background.png) repeat-x; margin-top:0px; font-size:62.5%;}
#wrapper {margin:0 auto; width:800px;}
#access {position: absolute; top:-500px; margin:0; padding:0;}
#header {background: url(images/head-background.png) no-repeat; width:100%; height:256px; overflow:hidden;}
#header img {border: none; position: relative; top:162px; left: 235px;}
#top-nav {position: relative; top: 73px; left: 210px;}
#top-nav li {display: inline; list-style: none; font-size: 1.4em; font-family:Denmark; letter-spacing:1px; font-variant: small-caps; padding-left: 3px;}
#top-nav a {color: #676666; text-decoration:none;}
#top-nav a:hover {color:#e2232b; text-decoration:overline;}
#searchbox {position:relative; top:170px; left: 530px;}
#content p {font-size:1.6em;}
#content li {float: left; display:inline; list-style:none; width: 45%; text-align:center; margin:5px; padding: 10px; border: #ffffff solid 3px;}
#content li:hover {background:#676666; border: #000000 solid 3px;}
#content li:hover h3 {color:#f8a043;}
#content h3 {font-family:Denmark; font-size: 2.6em;}
#price {font-family:Denmark; font-size:2.0em;}
button {margin: 5px; padding: 10px 100px; font-family:Denmark; font-size:1.8em;}
#footer {clear:both; background: url(images/footer-background.png) no-repeat #000000; margin-top:50px; padding: 120px 10px 200px 220px; text-align:center; font-size:1.4em; font-weight:500;}
#footer a {color:#000000; text-decoration: none;}
#footer a:hover {text-decoration:overline; font-weight:900;}
#footer ul {margin:0px; padding:0px;}
#footer li {display:inline; margin: 0px 2px;}

Adding a Mobile-specific CSS

The first step in our conversion process is to add a mobile CSS, linking to it in our HTML and adding a file, which is still blank, to our site hierarchy. In this demonstration, I named the file "handheld.css."

Using the Page Layout As a Guide to Begin Creating Your Mobile Styles

Our goal is to meet the World Wide Web Consortium's standards for mobile browsers, so we'll use that organization's CSS Mobile Profile 2.0 as our guide when determining which selectors or attributes to use. We will also try to keep our page width to 205 pixels, and take steps to limit the total file size of our mobile site.

While our goal is to make most of the changes in the CSS, we will also have to create a couple of mobile-friendly background images. You can watch me do this step-by-step in the video above. Below is the completed "handheld" CSS file.

body {background:#ffffff; margin-top:0px; font-size:62.5%;}

#wrapper {margin:0 auto; width:205px;}

#access {display:none;}

#header {background: url(images/m-head-background.png) no-repeat #60605F; width:100%;  border-bottom: #f8a043 solid 3px;}

#header img {display:none;}

#top-nav {text-align:center;}

#top-nav ul {margin:0px; padding: 2px 0px;}

#top-nav li {display:inline; list-style: none; font-size: 1.2em; font-family:Denmark; font-variant: small-caps; padding-left: 1px;}

#top-nav a {color: #000000; text-decoration:none;}

#top-nav a:hover {color: #f8a043; text-decoration:overline;}

#search {width:120px;}

#searchbox {padding:72px 0px 2px 4px;}

#content {margin:0px; padding:0px;}

#content img {width:100%; padding: 0px;}

#content p {font-size:1.2em;}

#content ul {margin:0px; padding:0px;}

#content li {float:left; display:inline; list-style:none; width:181px; text-align:center; margin:0px; padding: 10px; border: #FFFFFF solid 2px;}

#content li:hover {background:#676666; border: #000000 solid 2px;}

#content li:hover h3 {color:#f8a053;}

#content h3 {font-size:1.6em; font-family:Denmark; margin: 1px 0px;}

#price {font-family:Denmark; font-size:1.4em;}

button {margin:5px; font-family:Denmark; font-size:1.4em;}

#footer {clear:both; color:#FFFFFF; background: #000000; margin-top: 50px; padding: 5px 0px 100px 0px; text-align:center; font-size: 1.2em; font-weight: 500;}

#footer a {color:#FFFFFF; text-decoration:none;}

#footer a:hover {text-decoration:overline; font-weight:900;}

#footer ul {margin:0px; padding:0px;}

#footer li {display:inline; margin:0px 2px;}

#product2 img {display:none;}

#product3 img {display:none;}

#product4 img {display:none;}



An Example of What Can Be Done

This demonstration gave an example of how you might convert your existing ecommerce website to a mobile-friendly store using basic CSS. Every store will have different challenges and tradeoffs to make, but optimizing your site for mobile customers can be done.

[practicalecommerce]

Norman plan to begin Web design classes

Residents can get tips on how to design a Web site during the next session of "Ask the Geek" at 6:30 p.m. July 27 at Norman Public Library, 225 N Webster Ave.

Traci Stallings, who teaches college computer classes and works in online marketing, will teach the two-hour session.

The beginning Web design class will cover accessibility standards, navigation techniques, audience needs, browser/platform concerns, and connection speeds.

Registration is required, and participants must have basic keyboarding and computer mouse skills to attend. To register, call 701-2620.

[newsok.com]

Content Organization

After ensuring that content is useful, well-written, and in a format that is suitable for the Web, it is important to ensure that the information is clearly organized. In some cases, the content on a site can be organized in multiple ways to accommodate multiple audiences.

Organizing content includes putting critical information near the top of the site, grouping related elements, and ensuring that all necessary information is available without slowing the user with unneeded information. Content should be formatted to facilitate scanning, and to enable quick understanding.


Organize Information Clearly:

• Organize information at each level of the Web site so that it shows a clear and logical structure to typical users.
• Designers should present information in a structure that reflects user needs and the site’s goals. Information should be well-organized at the Web site level, page level, and paragraph or list level.
• Good Web site and page design enables users to understand the nature of the site's organizational relationships and will support users in locating information efficiently. A clear, logical structure will reduce the chances of users becoming bored, disinterested, or frustrated

Facilitate Scanning:

• Structure each content page to facilitate scanning: use clear, well-located headings; short phrases and sentences; and small readable paragraphs.
• Web sites that are optimized for scanning can help users find desired information. Users that scan generally read headings, but do not read full text prose-this results in users missing information when a page contains dense text.
• Studies report that about eighty percent of users scan any new page. Only sixteen percent read each word. Users spend about twelve percent of their time trying to locate desired information on a page.
• To facilitate the finding of information, place important headings high in the center section of a page. Users tend to scan until they find something interesting and then they read. Designers should help users ignore large chunks of the page in a single glance. Keep in mind that older users (70 and over) will tend to scan much more slowly through a web page than will younger users (ages 39 and younger).

Ensure that Necessary Information is Displayed:

• Ensure that all needed information is available and displayed on the page where and when it is needed.
• Users should not have to remember data from one page to the next or when scrolling from one screenful to the next.
• Heading information should be retained when users scroll data tables, or repeated often enough so that header information can be seen on each screenful.

Group Related Elements:

• Group all related information and functions in order to decrease time spent searching or scanning.
• All information related to one topic should be grouped together. This minimizes the need for users to search or scan the site for related information. Users will consider items that are placed in close spatial proximity to belong together conceptually. Text items that share the same background color typically will be seen as being related to each other.

Minimize the Number of Clicks or Pages:

• To allow users to efficiently find what they want, design so that the most common tasks can be successfully completed in the fewest number of clicks.
• Critical information should be provided as close to the homepage as possible. This reduces the need for users to click deep into the site and make additional decisions on intervening pages. The more steps (or clicks) users must take to find the desired information, the greater the likelihood they will make an incorrect choice. Important information should be available within two or three clicks of the homepage.
• One study found that the time to complete a task was closely related to the number of clicks made by users. It appears that users will keep clicking as long as they feel like they are getting closer to their goal. Another study showed that when users were trying to find a target, they were no more likely to quit after three clicks than after 12 clicks.

Design Quantitative Content for Quick Understanding:

• Design quantitative information to reduce the time required to understand it.
• Make appropriate use of tables, graphics, and visualization techniques to hasten the understanding of information. Presenting quantitative information in a table (rather than a graph) generally elicits the best performance; however, there are situations where visualizations will elicit even better performance. Usability testing can help to determine when users will benefit from using tabular data, graphics, tables, or visualizations.

Display Only Necessary Information:

• Limit page information only to that which is needed by users while on that page.
• Do not overload pages or interactions with extraneous information. Displaying too much information may confuse users and hinder assimilation of needed information. Allow users to remain focused on the desired task by excluding information that task analysis and usability testing indicates is not relevant to their current task. When user information requirements cannot be precisely anticipated by the designer, allow users to tailor displays online.

Format Information for Multiple Audiences:

• Provide information in multiple formats if the Web site has distinct audiences who will be interested in the same information.
• Information can be provided in varying formats and at different levels of detail on the same site. For example, information about cancer can be presented in differing ways for physicians and patients.
• When segmenting content for two or more distinct groups of users, allow users from each audience to easily access information intended for other audiences. One study showed that users want to see information that is intended for a health professional audience, as well as for a patient or consumer audience. Users want access to all versions of the information without first having to declare themselves as a health professional, a patient, a caregiver, etc. To accommodate these users, audiences were not segmented until they reached a page where links to multiple versions of a document (i.e., technical, non-technical) were provided.

Use Color for Grouping:

• Use color to help users understand what does and does not go together.
• Color coding permits users to rapidly scan and quickly perceive patterns and relationships among items. Items that share the same color will be considered as being related to each other, while items with prominent color differences will seem to be different.
• People can distinguish up to ten different colors that are assigned to different categories, but it may be safer to use no more than five different colors for category coding. If more than ten different colors are used, the effects of any particular relationship will be lost.
• Do not use color alone to convey information.

Source:[usability.gov]

CRM on the Web with WinForms-based Visual WebGui Solution

"Thanks to Visual WebGui the product is a simple, easy to use and efficient application that performs exceptionally well over the web while accessible on multiple platforms and browsers" Overview CRMCompany is a high quality supplier and consultant in the field of CRM and Information. The company's objective is to apply its knowledge and experience in order to provide added value to business which would assist them in improving profitability. This is done by providing businesses with the ability to use information technology in commercial and administrative processes efficiently and effectively as possible with a measurable return.

The customer is a big supplier of materials in the construction industry with many nationwide locations. To support logistics, there was a need for a centralized application to simplify the information flow from the various locations to the central administration. This application extends CRMCompany's 'open' CRM system to the web and makes the process of maintaining customer information much easier and efficient.

Business needs The customer is a so called umbrella organization with many independent companies. This organization has a CRM solution in which customer data is maintained from a centralized database. Since the CRM solution is a Windows application and the users which are employees of the independent companies have to maintain their customer data, there was a need for multi-site customers to keep data that would be on this central database. To provide a 'public' portal to the customer data, a web portal is needed so each independent company can maintain their own data.

Since every company has its own customer data, the product must consist the capability to upload the data in a specific format and users also need to be able to download their own customer data from the central database to their desktop. It was decided to useMicrosoft ( News - Alert) Excel. Another user requirement was the ability to identify customers for a particular mailing.

The portability and usability was very important for this project. The requirements were based on a target of audience of about 50 different independent companies and totally about 200-300 users and it was important that the solution would allow all those requirements while still flexible and not too complicated to implement.

The Solution Visual WebGui was chosen because it fulfills all the major requirements. Many web development tools where looked at, but none of the tools had the flexibility, development simplicity and the ease of maintenance that Visual WebGui offers. The Visual WebGui platform also offers a smooth transition with no learning curve for Windows application developers since it uses the same methodologies.

"We were searching for a tool that makes a good compromise between the time it takes to develop a complete application and to make changes afterwards (maintainability). Visual WebGui is the best choice we made because it takes little time to learn how to write a web application, as a developer you don't have to worry about writing Html, JavaScript or AJAX," said Roy van Duist.

The entire development lifecycle of this web application project (the process of developing, deploying and maintenance) was extremely effective and easy due to Visual WebGui. Other tools are often time-consuming while Visual WebGui takes much shorter development cycles. This is even more significant especially when working on a project with over 200 users, the risk of changes is very large, so maintenance is a very important issue.

Visual WebGui is an easy to use development environment. As a developer you can aim on functionality instead of solving the multi browser problems, etc. One of the best benefits is the built-in AJAX which means that "with VWG it is really easy to write good performing code. There is no time wasted with complex client side code - Just straight to the point code," stated Roy van Duist.

To read about the benefits of the Visual WebGui-based solution and view screen shots of the final project click here: http://www.visualwebgui.com/Gizmox/Showcases/tabid/358/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/620/CRM-on-the-Web-with-WinForms-based-Visual-WebGui.aspx


[tmcnet.com]