Now that we’ve got our background images squared away and set to break themselves down nicely across various devices and screen resolutions we can look in to populating our home page with some content. Let’s begin with our header. I always like using a separate file for all the things that will stay uniform throughout my site, header, logo, navigation, etc. That way if I need to make a minor edit down the road I just have to edit the header file, which is then pulled in to every page with a simple PHP include...
Some experts say search only drives 30 percent of a website’s traffic. While that may seem insignificant, that 30 percent often makes up visitors who are looking for the products, services or information specific to your company so losing them could have a significant impact on how well an organization performs. In part one of this series we looked at some things that web developers need to consider when it comes to search engine optimization, but now it’s time to step up to the plate. Let’s roll...
In XML, you can use XSDs to define markup structures in varying levels of detail. Compositors are among the many XSD structures you can choose from when specifying your XML content models. The XML Schema standard supports three different compositor types, each of which indicates restrictions on the range and ordering of elements. In general terms, a compositor dictates (or describes) the composition of child elements within a parent element in an XML data source. Compositors often appear within...
A while back we took A Look at Responsive Web Design and how different designers utilize it in different ways. Now that we’ve seen a few examples in action, let’s create a responsive website of our own. In this installment we’re going to set up the structure of our homepage and add in a few media queries that will help the site load quicker, navigate better, and keep our desired appearance across multiple devices, platforms, and resolutions. Before we dive in to the HTML, let’s cover the “viewport”...
Most IT professionals do not work in state of the art design shops with all the latest developer suites available to them. Many of us have to make older applications and components work with newer technologies. I found myself in this predicament last year when I was required to make a new ASP.NET (3.5) web application work with a ten year old VB6.0 COM Plus Component. When I suggested to management that I re-write the component, they said: There’s no time. I know you can make it work. By the way, we need...
For the vast majority of modern websites, advertising is a major source of revenue. Banner ads for services related to the web site owner’s industry allow customers to view products that tie into the site owner’s core business. In exchange, the web site owner can charge the banner ad owner for every impression (banner ad appearance) or click-through (when a user clicks the banner ad). In order to build a banner ad management system, we must first create the database tables that will hold the ad information,...
This week we’re going to finish up our series on how to develop a clean website by laying out a secondary page. We’re going to include a secondary navigation bar along the top of our design, as well as include all of our text for the section on one page. This will eliminate the unnecessary loading of other pages when all that’s changing is the text. It will allow the visitor to browse your site quicker and be less work for you to develop. When all is said and done, this is what you’ll have developed:...
MySQL stored procedure's come in really handy at times. I like to let the database do the work for me sometimes. For example, in an e-commerce system you may need to calculate a tax. For our example today though, we will use the tables we made in my previous article on the XREF table. We are going to focus this tutorial on getting the appropriate tables in place to preform our history logging. To start, we are going to create a module's table so that our history table can be one table instead of many and we are...