Web Design

Website Design Principles

As the field of website design expands, Developers have become responsible for many areas, including writing content, graphics, template layout, and online marketing. In addition, web developers may handle technical, back-end problems for the site. Some of the design skills for making websites do not change much over time, but other critical areas, including market research, search engine optimization, and conversion optimization, are constantly shifting as new tools become available.

Success is governed by two main factors, visitor traffic and sales conversions. How many of the right people can you attract to your site, and how many of those people can you persuade to take the action that you want them to take? Learn more about making money from websites on our eCommerce pages. Not only can you practice making your own websites to earn money, but if you focus your talents, you can find part-time employment designing websites for small businesses and individuals. A good portfolio often is the deciding factor in getting a job. Students interested in graphic design programs should take basic courses in studio art, computerized design, commercial graphics, or website design.

Offer your visitors a single purpose, whether to sell something, to educate or to entertain. The second goal is to guide the user through that experience. Therefore, skip the flash introduction, avoid blinking buttons, and cut out the clutter of words. Good website design is the same thing as good page design, like you see in a magazine. Basically, page layout can be restricted to a header, a two or three-column main body, and a footer. Menu choices should highlight your main offerings, and make it easy for your viewers to find the rest of your site.

Responsive Web Design

WordPress Website

E-commerce Website

SQL Database Course

Web Hosting

Web hosting companies provide space to publish or upload files to the internet. Web hosting services work by providing high-powered servers via a fiber network or hub. As visitors will be downloading your pages into their browser as they surf your site, it's important to use the best web hosting service that you can afford.

Shared hosting is the least expensive service, and also the easiest to start out with. One high-powered computer will act a server for your website files online. Try BlueHost, as we have been hosting our sites with them for several years, without incident. Rates are reasonable, down to $5 monthly (or lower), if buying several years in advance, or closer to $7 a month if signing up for a one year of hosting.

Virtual Private Servers, or VPS, is half-way between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. VPS customers still share the physical server hardware with other VPS customers, but special virtual partitions have their own dedicated resources. Your website will enjoy semi-dedicated CPU and memory allocations, so bad neighbors sharing the same hardware will have a diminished impact on your site speed and stability.

Dedicated Hosting offers an entire server, and users can choose the exact hardware and software specifications to meet their needs. Further, customers have full root access to their servers and can configure and tweak their setup to meet their needs. However, technical knowledge is required, as it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the server.

DreamHost and BlueHost are two web hosting companies that offer a variety of plans. The core features of these two companies are relatively similar, and they both provide web hosting with unlimited space, bandwidth, and email. Each company offers one free domain registration with service and allows for an unlimited number of domains on the same plan. However, when choosing between Dreamhost versus BlueHost, there are other factors to take into consideration.

One of the main differences between DreamHost and BlueHost is their control panels. DreamHost uses their own custom interface. It is not as easy to navigate as the one used by BlueHost, but is not a bad operation and has many useful features. However, BlueHost used cPanel with Simple Scripts, a popular hosting panel, with a very large number of favorable web scripts for blogs, forums, image galleries, CMS, wikis, project management, ecommerce, statistics, SEO, social networking, and much more.

Responsive Design

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes. Content, design and performance are necessary across all devices to ensure usability and satisfaction. A website designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries.

The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels or points. Flexible images are also sized in relative units, to prevent them from displaying outside their containing element. Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, e.g. width of the browser window width or display size. Responsive web design has become more important as the amount of mobile traffic has come to account for more than half of total internet traffic.

Server-side Development

Server-side programming topic is a series of modules that show how to create dynamic websites; websites that deliver customized information in response to HTTP requests. The modules provide a general introduction to server-side programming, along with specific beginner-level guides on how to use the Django (Python) and Express (Node.js/JavaScript) web frameworks to create basic applications.

Most major websites use some kind of server-side technology to dynamically display data as required. For example, imagine how many products are available on Amazon, and imagine how many posts have been written on Facebook. Displaying all of these using different static pages would be extremely inefficient, so instead such sites display static templates (built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), and then dynamically update the data displayed inside those templates when needed, such as when you want to view a different product on Amazon.

Backend developers use several server-side tools to build the business logic that controls app functions on the user interface. Server-side tools handle a wide array of tasks, like transferring data from the user interface to the database and retrieving it for display when the need arises. Managing scheduled tasks, processing data and managing messaging are other essential functions of the app backend.

Server-side Tools

Visual Studio is one of the best development tools for backend and full-stack developers. This tool presents a wide range of functions that help you build and manage codes quickly and efficiently. Developers love Visual studio because of its simplicity and powerful tools that help you develop apps quickly and confidently. You can integrate Visual Studio with Docker to build Docker images that contain all your app dependencies. This approach allows you to run the container-based app with any cloud service provider you like without hassles. With Visual Studio, you can use ASP.Net Core to write your program and deploy it to any webserver to make it live.

Heroku offers a cloud solution that allows developers to use multiple programming languages for development projects. The eight languages supported are Node.js, Go, PHP, Ruby, Scala, Python, Clojure, and Java. The service of Heroku is powered by smart containers called dynos. These are managed runtime environments where developers host apps. The technology stack of Hero is maintained and upgraded regularly to provide more features. Developers on this platform can access real-time server events like CPU load, memory, app response time, errors, and many more. Heroku also shares information about ongoing user projects to its entire network through a secure URL.

Firebase provides a suite of server-side tools for developing, enhancing, hosting, and scaling your app. These tools simplify most of the app development assignments and minimize the need to write codes manually. That is why Firebase helps app developers save time on their projects. Experienced developers can add custom features to their Firebase app by creating server-side codes. With unfettered access to several fully managed mobile-centric services, developers can focus on creating frontend features that elevate the user experience. Cloud services on Firebase are mainly NoSQL databases and REST APIs. Other useful features include database, authentication, analytics, notifications, configuration, and authentication. All these services are on the cloud and they scale automatically when required.

Docker is a powerful tool that developers use to quickly roll out features and update apps. It is an open-source container optimized for cloud deployments and improves application framework development in modern apps. Docker deployment is faster because it allows developers to launch apps with automated configurations and infrastructure. Developers leverage the resiliency of this server-side tool launch, test, upgrade, and rollout production versions without suffering downtime. The high stability of Docker improves productivity because it supports more features without encountering bottlenecks. Therefore, there is less need for debugging.

Initially, Jira was developed to track bugs in mobile and web apps but evolved to a full-fledged project management tool. It is commonly used by developers for building customized app development roadmaps so they can release app versions on schedule. Jira uses Scrum and Kanban models for managing projects. The four packages of Jira are Jira Core, Jira Software, Jira Ops, and Jira service desk. These packages are suitable for various users ranging from non-technicians, to project managers, engineers, and developers. Jira also supports plugins that empower various professionals to get unique results.

Search Engine Results

Google Analytics provides free tracking of your visitor traffic, enabling you to monitor growth, and find out what works. After you copy the code to the header on each of your pages, this free stats package displays great graphs, going far beyond the number of visitors to your page, into user flow, what links they clicked on, how long they stayed, bounce rate, the percent of repeat visitors, search traffic, and referral traffic.

In order to rank well on Google's organic search results, the foremost consideration must be to create unique content, and lots of it. A well-written page will do more for your search-engine ranking position (SERP) than focusing on black-hat search engine optimization tricks. With that said, however, there are several on-page factors that must be included in every web page you write. To begin, use the title tag sparingly, and summarize what your page is really about. Google is smarter than you might think, and uses complex search algorithms to deduce page content. Both the title and description tags will be displayed right on Google's search results. Visitors will be reading your headline copy, deciding which link to click on, so don't just write for Google, and keep your readers in mind.

Keywords dominate search interaction. When a search is performed, search engines match pages based on the keywords entered into the search box. The order of the words, spelling, and punctuation of the keyword phrase provide additional information that the engines use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them. Therefore, ensure that you use keywords in title tags, body text, and meta data on your website. The best practice is to use your keywords naturally and strategically. If your page targets the keyword phrase Eiffel Tower, for example, then you might naturally include content about the Eiffel Tower itself, the history of the tower, or even recommended Paris hotels.

Understanding which websites already rank for your keyword gives you valuable insight into the competition, and also how hard it will be to rank for a given term. Keyword research is one of the most important, and high-return activities in the search marketing field. Generally, the more specific your keywords, the better your chances of ranking higher, based on less competition. In reality, popular search terms actually make up less than 30% of all searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lies in the long-tail of search. The long-tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world's searches.

The key to the system is long-tail search results. Realize getting one visitor each from 100 pages is more achievable than attracting 100 visitors to a single page.

Page Optimization

Google Pagespeed insight offers a suite of tools for analyzing your website speed and suggests ways of improving the loading time of your site. This tool provides vital insight into user experience, lab data, and performance issues on a website. In essence, the tool checks potential issues based on best design practices and also simulates the site’s real-life user experience.

The field data gives insight into the real-world experience, while the lab data is useful for troubleshooting performance issues. The information derived from this tool gives the developer an overview of the site’s performance on desktop and mobile devices. It also makes recommendations for enhancing page load speed. In all, Google Pagespeed insight is a useful backend tool that analyzes website performance, allowing developers to improve the overall user experience.