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Performancing.com is a blog for professional bloggers about how to run a commercial blog. They have a plugin for firefox that allows users to post to their blog directly from firefox. “Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.”

They are running a new contest for designers to design up some cool looking buttons to promote their plugin. Their first ad contest was a big success so they decided to run another one. The prize money is a cool grand which I’m sure any designer could put to good use. They are looking for smaller button type graphics that users can use on their blogs to promote their plugin. The specifications of what they are looking for is here. Think I might have to enter just for fun. Ok, so I did.. Here are my designs below.

125×125	80×15	80×15

The contest ends on January 20th, so only 2 more days to go. Oh by the way, Performancing uses Bank Gothic Medium for their logo text. You can find it at Myfonts.com

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Before you can get a website up and running, you need to have a place to put it. Paying for web hosting is, basically, like renting a small amount of space on someone’s server and paying what it costs them to send your web pages to your customers. Fortunately for you, though, web hosting has never been cheaper.

Domains and Hosting Together?

Many domain name companies have taken to offering you hosting when you buy your domain from them. This is generally an expensive option, and a bad idea you’ll be getting few features compared to what you’re paying. Few people who are serious about web hosting get it from the same place they get their domains.

So Where Should I Start?

Well, that all depends on what your website is going to need. How many visitors do you expect to have? Are you going to have lots of large graphics on the site? Do you have a lot of articles or products that you want to put in a database? Do you want to have an email address at your website (yourname@yourdomain.com)? On and on it goes. Each host you look at will offer you different combinations of features at different price points, and finding the one that’s right for you can be quite a task. Here’s a technical-to-English guide to what you should be looking for.

MB storage. The more MB of storage you have, the more you can put on your website. For most websites, this number can be really very small without it being much of a concern the pages would be too big for anyone to download and see before they’d be too big to store. You only really need to worry if you’re planning to put something apart from plain pages on your site. If you want to make a gallery for your digital photos or let people download ebooks from you, for example, this number needs to be higher.
GB bandwidth per month. This is a limit on how much data your website can transfer each month. For small websites, you don’t need to worry too much, but as you get more visitors the amount you need will increase sharply, especially if each one looks at lots of pages or downloads large files from the site. The amount of bandwidth your site needs is generally considered to be the deciding factor in how ‘big’ it is, and how much it will cost you.

MySQL databases. The number of databases your website will have to store things in. It will make it much easier for you if you have one. Don’t pay more to get extra, though: one database is all you need. It’s worth noting that if your host may offer some other kind of SQL instead of MySQL (for example, PostgreSQL). You should usually avoid anything apart from MySQL, unless you know what you’re doing.

PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby. These are all scripting languages, used to write your website. You should make sure your host offers the languages that any software you plan to use is written in. If you don’t have specific requirements, then you should be fine with just Perl and PHP.

Subdomains. These allow you to split your website into more sections than just ‘www’ you might decide, for example, that you would people to be able to go to ’shop.yourdomain.com’ and ‘news.yourdomain.com’ and see pages there. You don’t really need these, though, as doing the same thing with subfolders (’www.yourdomain.com/shop’) is usually just as effective.

FTP accounts. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account is what you’ll use to upload your website to your host. You’ll always get one of these. The only situation when you’ll need more is if you want to let someone alter things on your site without giving them the master password.

POP3 accounts. POP stands for ‘Post Office Protocol’, which is just fancy-speak for email. The more POP3 accounts you get, the more email addresses you can have: useful if you want to have sales@yourdomain.com for new customers and support@yourdomain.com for existing ones, for example.

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people have quite a bad reaction to Flash, in general. Sure, it can be used well, but the reaction of most visitors to something starting to load will be “oh no, Flash!”, followed by a hasty dash for the back button. Why is this? Well, there are a number of reasons that come together to cause it each one, on its own, seems relatively minor, but together they make up a pretty comprehensive case against Flash.

Flash is a Plugin.

Flash isn’t integrated with any web browser instead, it’s available as an installable plugin. This has a lot of downsides. The first time someone views something that users Flash, they’re asked to install the Flash plugin this takes time and is annoying, especially considering that Flash plugin isn’t available for all browsers. After that, every time some Flash content appears, the Flash plugin has to be loaded into the browser before the content can even begin to be loaded, losing a vital few seconds.

Flash is Slow to Load.

Once the plugin itself has loaded, the next step is for it to load the Flash movie in question. Because Flash movies are typically so heavy in images and animation (that is, after all, the point of them), visitors will often end up spending a considerable amount of time being forced to stare at a ‘loading’ graphic. This is supposed to be the web, not a PlayStation no-one wants to watch your site load.

Flash Makes Sound.

Flash upsets users because they generally have no way of knowing that it’s going to make sound many users disable all their browser’s sound functions, not wanting random websites to be able to make sounds at them, but Flash sound still gets through, since it’s a plugin and doesn’t obey these settings. Flash is part of the reason why users end up browsing the web with their speakers turned off altogether people just hate having unexpected sound forced on them, and they have no way of knowing whether your Flash website might suddenly start making some.

Flash is Often Unnecessary.

Because Flash lets you make little animations, many websites use it for things that are completely unnecessary and un-interactive, but that they think look ‘cool’. The classic example of this is the web crime of the Flash intro: a useless piece of Flash that visitors have to sit through before they get to a website, usually saying and doing nothing useful whatsoever. Using Flash for unnecessary things is actively user-hostile, and many users have come to associate its use with that mentality.

Flash Breaks URLs.

If you let visitors navigate around within a Flash movie, that navigation isn’t saved at all. If they go to another site and come back, or even just press the ‘Refresh’ button, they’ll lose their place entirely, and have to start from the beginning again. This isn’t good if they found a particular piece of information or picture they’ll be annoyed at having lost it.

Flash Breaks Right-Click.

Users like to be able to right-click, to print what they’re looking at, or save it, or copy it to the clipboard not to mention all the extra functions that they might have installed on that menu. Right-clicking on a Flash-based website, though, gives a right-click menu of things related to Flash, like whether the movie should display in high or low quality. Users just aren’t interested in this menu, and are upset that they can’t get their normal one back. This is an especially large problem for users that like to have more than one window open at once by using right-click followed by the ‘Open in New Window’ function.

Search Engines Can’t Read Flash.

Finally, perhaps the most convincing argument against Flash: it’s entirely invisible to search engines. Text you put in a Flash movie doesn’t exist, as far as search engines are concerned. It’s closed off from the rest of the web and unfindable by most of your potential visitors. That surely can’t be good.

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There are a lot of web servers out there. Whenever you go to a website, you’re downloading it from a web server. When you pay money to a web host, what you’re really doing is renting a space on their web server. The Internet consists of millions of computers networked together, but it’s the servers that are providing all the information that makes up the web you can’t have a website unless it’s on a server.

What is a Web Server?

A web server is really just a powerful computer they use the same kinds of processors and memory that normal computers use, but they have more of it. Servers usually run a Unix or Unix-like operating system like Linux or BSD, but they can just as easily run Windows.

What makes these computers servers isn’t their hardware it’s the software they run. Web server software includes the HTTP server itself, as well as databases and other things that are needed to make a web server work however it needs to. This is why different hosts offer different features: they have different programs installed on their servers.

Web Servers Serve Files.

The role of the web server, at its most basic level, is to send people your files over HTTP. It has a hard disk (often more than one) and stores your files like any other computer if you don’t upload a file called ‘index.html’, many servers will list all your files for you instead of providing a web page. It’s the replacement of the index.html (named because it is supposed to be an index of files) that creates the illusion of everything on the server being one ‘web site’, instead of a set of files linked together.

Web Servers Run Scripts.

Of course, web servers don’t always just serve the same files over and over again. Sometimes they need to insert other information into pages, especially information that comes from databases. This is done with scripting languages like PHP and Perl the server is told that it should give files that end in .pl or .php to the appropriate script interpreters, and these interpreters then tell the server what to send to the browser. This means that dynamic websites can often be slow, as the server is having to produce a different page for each visitor.

Virtual Servers and Dedicated Servers.

When you buy web hosting, though, you’re not necessarily getting a whole server to yourself in fact, the chances are that you’re not, unless you’re paying lots of money. Instead, you’ll be sharing a server with the hosts’ other customers. You might not realise this, since the server doesn’t appear to have anything on it that isn’t yours, but the other customers are simply being hidden from you you’re using what is known as a ‘virtual server’.

For small websites, there isn’t really any option other than virtual servers: they’re a great idea for letting resources be shared among lots of websites that don’t use much of the server’s power or space. If one of the sites does start growing, though, you might find your website slowing down. Oddly enough, this fact means that it’s often better to find a host that offers price plans with limits instead of one that offers ‘unlimited’ disk space and bandwidth to each customer your website will be much faster at the ‘limited’ host.

More Than You’d Think.

One thing that people don’t often think about is that there’s more than one web server program out there. It’s not really visible to visitors, since they all do basically the same thing, but there are lots of servers available, and they’re all quite different in the way they work. There are three main groups:

Apache. The open source Apache software is the most popular server software out there, with around 70% of the market share.

Microsoft servers. Microsoft are responsible for the various versions of IIS (Internet Information Server) and PWS (Personal Web Server), which altogether have around 20% of the market.

Sun servers. Sun produce lots of servers, most notably the Netscape-branded ones. The market share of these servers depends on whether you count all sites (making it 3%) or just the actively maintained ones (in which case it drops to less than 1%).

Source for statistics: netcraft.com.

Other servers available are mostly ’simple’ servers that don’t have all the somewhat unnecessary features of these servers, such as thttpd (the ‘t’ is for tiny or turbo). There are literally hundreds of them, but they have mostly negligible market share.

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Whenever you want people to enter data and send it to you, you need a web form. Whether the data is as simple as a username and password or as complicated as a full address form, the basic principles remain the same.

The Tags.

Form tags have always been a troublesome part of HTML, simply because they’re not often used and require you to memorise a lot of words, depending on what kind of input boxes you want on your form.

To set up a form, you need to have a form tag with a method and an action, like this:

These properties aren’t very well-named, but they basically tell the browser where and how you want things that are entered on the form to be sent. The file named in action should be a script that is prepared to do something with the data from your form, such as entering it into a database. It’s worth knowing that you can make use odd things like “mailto:youremail@address.com” as the action (that one submits by email), although it’s not recommended.

Once you’ve got that, the next step is to put input tags between the form tags. There are lots of different kinds of input tags, and you say which kinds you want using the ‘type’ property. For example:

one

This is a checkbox (the boxes you can tick). The name property lets you give the checkbox a name so you can refer to it your scripts later on. The text between the tags (’one’) is what appears next to the tick box.

Other input types include:

text - a text box.
radio - a set of options where only one can be chosen.
button - a clickable button.
file - a box that allows someone to upload a file to your site.
submit - a special kind of button that sends the result of the form to the server.
reset - a button that clears everything a user has entered in the form, so they can start over.

Web Forms and CSS.

Those forms you just made, however, aren’t going to be pretty: they’ll be displayed in only the most basic style, one after the other and surrounded by ugly boxes. Luckily, it’s simple to add some styling using CSS in exactly the same way as you would add it to normal text. You can change the boxes’ background-color, font (font-family), remove the borders, and so on.

You might also like to make use of the various CSS ‘events’, such as the hover event. Take a look at this example CSS:

input:hover {
background-color: yellow;
}

It makes the input box go yellow when the user hovers over it combine that with a bit of Javascript that automatically moves the typing cursor into input boxes that the user hovers over, and you’ve got an easier to use form right away. Try as much as you can to make your input boxes look and behave like ones you like in software you find easy to use, and you won’t go far wrong.

Validating Input.

Once the user has typed something in, you need to validate it that is, check it makes sense. If they’re supposed to be filling in an email address, there needs to be an @ in there somewhere. If they’ve chosen a username, you need to make sure it’s not already been taken by someone else. That kind of thing.

There are two ways of validating input: client-side and server-side. To put it simply, client-side validation is done by Javascript, and is purely there for the user’s convenience, so they don’t have to submit a form only to find out it was wrong. Server-side validation will be done with a language like PHP, and is the final check before the data gets written to a database if it’s wrong at that point, you have to throw the user an error page and ask them to re-enter the relevant piece of information.

It’s very important that you don’t leave vital checking purely up to the Javascript, as some of your visitors may have Javascript turned off, or may even turn it off deliberately to get around your checks. The last thing you want is people being able to fill your database with bad information.

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Logos are difficult to design. Every website needs a logo, and you should spend some time designing them or yours if you haven’t already

Your Logo is Your Face.

When visitors come across a website that they haven’t seen before, one of the first places they look is at your logo and that’s when they start to form impressions of you. A good logo can make or break trust in your site, and be a big factor in whether anyone takes you seriously. Branding experts know this: logos can produce positive reactions (like recognition), and negative ones (like revulsion), but both are equally strong. Having a bad logo is, effectively, like having an untrustworthy-looking face.

Keep Pictures Simple.

If you do include an image in your logo, keep it to one, and keep it to simple shapes. You don’t want your logo to become ‘busy’: just suggest what you’re getting at, instead of pasting in a full-colour photograph of it. In fact, you should keep your logo to as few colours as possible, if you want it to make an impact.

Typography is Important.

Don’t let anyone deceive you into thinking that the most important thing about a logo is how many little shapes and pictures it has in it. What draws visitors’ eyes about logos is the typography: the font, spacing and whitespace.

Unfortunately for logo design, there are a hundred or so fonts that come with Windows and Office, and they’ve become overwhelmingly common in amateur logos. You’re never going to be taken seriously if your logo appears in Times New Roman, or Verdana, because everyone else’s is too.

So where can you find a less-common font. Well, take a look around sites like fonts.com and typography.com for a start. Personally, I often like to use fonts that I’ve seen in advertisements and found appealing: you can identify any fonts you can scan using a service like WhatTheFont (www.myfonts.com/whatthefont) it will take a look at the letters and tell you which font you’ve found.

Of course, commercial fonts can be expensive. Don’t pay ridiculous amounts, but don’t be afraid to pay a little: the chances are that you’ll be getting a much better font than you would be otherwise.

You can find great fonts at places like t26, Chank or check Typophile’s site for some free fonts.

Avoid Cliche’s.

Finally, whatever you do, please avoid the painful cliche logos that are so common on the web. To help you out, here’s a quick list of logo types to stay away from:

Decade-linked logos. Please don’t make your logo look like something from the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, unless one of those decades is directly relevant to your site. If you just do it for no reason, it’s a cliche.

Spirals. Putting spirals in logos has been done to death no matter what variations you might be able to think of on it, they’ve been done. Spirals are nice, appealing shapes, but simply too common in logo design to consider.

Animals. Putting an animal (or a silhouette on an animal) into your logo might look nice, but the chances are that there are already plenty of people out there using your animal. Especially if you’ve had the ‘original’ idea of combining a rabbit and a hat to imply that your product is ‘magic’.

Letters making faces. Painful in every case, and yet getting more common all the time. Please resist the urge to draw a little curve under two O’s to make a smiley face. Please.

Letters making punctuation. Like the faces, but worse. How many more I’s turning into exclamation marks do we have to endure? Just don’t do it.

Swooshes. The king of the clich’s, the swoosh is at the point where using it in your logo will get you mocked. A swoosh is a curved line running across your logo some say it’s now the most common logo device in the world. I’m sure you can think of something better.

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Advertising on the web is big business again, but idea behind the revival is quite strange. Back in the dot-com boom days, all ads were graphical, as it was assumed that this was the best way to get people to click through. However, modern ad companies, led by Google’s AdSense division, have found that text advertising works just as well as (if not better than) graphical banners. It’s this discovery that got advertising on the web moving again. But why does it work so well?

What Does a Text Ad Look Like?

The answer to this question is that they look pretty much like any other link. A typical text ad might look like this:

Buy My Stuff
I have stuff to sell to you. Come buy it.
http://www.example.com/stuff

It’s as simple as that: headline, text, URL. The ads usually appear in a ‘block’ of three or four, followed by an ‘Ads by’ message, but it’s just as possible for them to appear on their own. Clicking anywhere in the ad follows the link some text ads even exclude the text and URL parts, making them nothing but a link. One of the good things about the text ad approach is that it solves the ‘banner blindness’ problem, where users gradually learn to ignore banner-shaped areas of websites and so don’t actually see the ads at all.

Text Ads Annoy No-one.

Text ads are very subtle: they don’t jump out at you, animate, open in a new window or make noises. The great thing about them is that their lack of annoyingness is also part of their power: people actually pay more attention to an ad that looks like a useful link than they do to one that looks and sounds like an ad. You get to annoy your users less while making more money from click-throughs, and you get to reduce the amount of space ads take up on your site while increasing their effectiveness. It’s win-win.

Lower Ad Costs.

Text advertising also works out well for the advertisers themselves. Previously, to advertise on the web, you had to get a bunch of banners made in different sizes. Each time you wanted to change the message, you needed a new banner. Uploading these banners to the various ad sites was a pain, and the cost of the bandwidth used to serve the ads made the ad rates more expensive to advertisers. There was also a need for ads to be reviewed to ensure that they were suitable for the intended audience.

Text advertising changes this situation, removing a huge number of the costs associated with the whole process of putting ads on a site. Text takes effectively no bandwidth. You can’t really produce anything unsuitable in text or, at least, things that are unsuitable can be easily flagged by automatic filters. The whole process of creating an ad and taking it live becomes much easier for the advertisers: lower cost, and with more flexibility to create campaigns at short notice.

What this means for the marketplace is that there has been a shift in who buys advertising: instead of sites having three or four big advertisers, they can now have hundreds of small ones. This lets small businesses advertise when they wouldn’t have been able to before, not to mention removing websites’ dependency on their advertisers and giving them greater freedom to say what they want to. Again (and this is a pattern with text ads), it’s win-win.

Text Ads and Context.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the power of text ads doesn’t just come from the fact that they’re not graphical. It’s also important to note that the systems serving the ads pay more attention to context than the old graphical systems did: they can compare the text of the ads to the text of the websites that are being advertised on, to find the best match for the ads in question. This raises click-through rates by making ads highly targeted.

In short, we’re moving away from the web full of flashing graphical ads that are mostly irrelevant to what we’re reading, towards one with sober text ads that offer us just what we wanted.

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Thanks everyone for a wonderful year and hope that 2006 is totally super. I have big faith that 2006 will be a great year and hope everyone can keep their new year’s resolutions. Mine is to stop smoking which is of course a big deal to a smoker, or I should say ex smoker. Here’s to a happier and healthier 2006!

Hope you all have a happy and safe New Year’s Eve and New Year!

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