Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Until now companies had it pretty easy. You choose a .com domain although if you were a British company you may have had to choose between a .co.uk as well. Times like that are gone now however. Now businesses have to pick between extensions including .biz for all companies and .us for US companies.

The problem is that nobody wants an unpopular extension and if dot biz does not take off many businesses could be stranded with a useless domain. Although dot biz are gradually becoming more popular and its not lucking like one that will fade out any time soon; although the best option is often to play it safe.

Dot biz problems

Domain extensions have been launched many times with the hope of climbing to the success of the dot com. But none of them have done and my guess is that none of them will do any time soon. To be popular you had to be quick off the mark.

Dot net and not org were popular as they are very widespread and .co.uk has done very well too as it was out well before it was all the crazy to bring out your own domain extensions for your country. Back when nobody hard heard of dot tv, dot ca and dot us, .co.uk were selling like hot cakes; making them very cheap helped too.

The problem is though that dot biz was not quick off the mark. And many of the big websites had already set up sites when the dot biz sales doors where opened for business. Many large corporations who could have promoted dot biz already had dot com’s by then and were not about to change.

The dot com seems like the perfect extension too. It is spelt like it sounds, its not too short and its not too long. The problem with dot biz is that unless it becomes very popular people could easily confuse the spelling with bis. And no business wants some of its website traffic heading off to an address which does not exist.

Those names though

As will any new extension however people will be tempted by the fact they can get find a name shorter than a paragraph in length which hasn’t been snapped up already. While people are cueing up on services like SnapBack to get stupidly long dot com domains, it’s easy to find a great name that ends in dot biz.

There is no localisation on dot biz as with many other domains neither. For instance owning a dot us is great and your website visitors will love it – providing they all come from the US. But chances are they won’t be, and people who don’t live in the area your name is from could feel like an outsider. This is not a problem with names like dot tk as everyone feels like an outsider together ;). I mean how did an island that small get an internet connection let alone a domain name extension in the first place?

Conclusion

If your company name is available in a dot com then go for a dot com. Dot com is still and for a while yet will be the dominant name. However if you can’t get it then a dot biz looks professional and chances are you can get your name. If so I recommend that you go for it. After all the dot biz popularity grows every time a registration is made.

Just look around expired domain lists and domain auction sites and you will probably find an advert for “rare 3 letter domains.” However, there is a reason these are rare – nobody wants them! Who wants a domain such as www.h5l.com? It’s pointless. It takes longer to say that than www.freeservebusiness.com. Yet the second domain has 6 times more letters in.

Initials are not something that you want to go for. The ideal domain is likely to be one word. Two words is also ok as long as there is no dash between them. When choosing domains you are looking out for how few syllables you can have rather than how few letters you can have.

This is where initials drag your time up. Although they only have a few letters, each letter is a syllable so it takes a while to say them. A lot of popular website domains use one word with two syllables, such as www.google.com, www.mworld.us and www.yahoo.com.

When choosing a domain name or any web address for your website it is important that you get a memorable and snappy domain so people can remember it. There are also some things which you should not do.

Make it flow

One thing I think should never be included in domains is an “-“. They should not be put in. Take a look at these two examples:

www.bigcats.com
www.big-cats.com

Try saying them. The first one is simply “bigcats .com.” Whereas the second one is “big dash cats .com.” Much more complex and so much harder to remember. Domains are far more snappy if the words follow on without being broken up with dots and dashes. Why do you thing nobody has bought a .name domain?

Words not letters

Many people are going on about how they are selling rare 3 letter domains. The problem is that these domains are usually a mix of random numbers and letters. It’s much easier to remember a name than some random initials. Don’t just get the initials of your domain when its more complex. Get the full name.

Simple words

Not everyone is a great speller. Try to keep the words in your domain simple and try not to use words which are often spelt wrong. If you really must do this then you should buy up alternative spellings to your domain and set them to redirect to the correct domain name.

Back in the old days you could pick between all 3 domain extensions, .com, .net and .org. And each one would cost you £100 a year or over. Now you can pick between 100’s of domain extensions from .cc to .sk. And you can register domains from as little as £3 per year.

This causes problems though. Back in the 90s if you were looking for a website you hardy had to guess at the web site address because they were all .com’s. Now-a-days there are so many you may never find the correct site.

For instance, Worfolk Online uses 5 different domain extensions including .biz, .tk and .us. Guessing the address of M World if you didn’t know the address could take a while. How many extensions would you go through before guessing .us?

The trick is getting the compromise right. New extensions allow you to get a better domain name but you have a not so good extension. Whereas if you go for the classic .com, most of the good domains are taken but when you are looking for a website .com is and I’m guessing always will be the first extension people go to.

Buying expired domains can get you valuable visitors and an already strong standing in search engines and website directories. However if you pick the wrong domain you can lose traffic, popularity and reputation.

Search Engine Bans

Everyone hates those sites that occupy domains and have sites with one a homepage covered in Spam and paid for search listings links. And so search engines have various methods to counter the Spam pages with spoil results and annoy searchers.

One system that many search engines use, including Google, is to permanently ban Spam addresses. The ban can be appealed but this takes time and effort, which you really don’t want to be wasting. The key is to find out before you buy.

Research the owner

Does the previous owner, own one domain or one hundred domains? If they own loads of domains, the chances are that they will all be part of an interconnected Spam network set up to fool search engine spiders and generally annoy people.

Research the site

Check out the Way Back Internet Achieves (http://webdev.achieves.com) who spiders many sites and keeps records of how the website used to look since 1996.

Conclusion

Before registering an expired domain, make sure that you have researched it first. If you do you are likely to end up with a great domain bringing your visitors and search engine listings.

So you’ve designed your perfect homepage. The only problem is that it doesn’t fit on anyone’s screen but yours. Suddenly you are finding you have to redesign your site so it is more accessable to everyone and your amazing designs and idea’s are laid to waste.

When first building your website you need to decide how wide your going to make it. If its just formatted text going across the screen then you are ok, but for most of us, we need to set a width for our tables and layers which is bound to cause problems somewhere along the line.

100% width

The easier way to make a site fit is to set the width to 100%. It will stretch across any screen so no problems you say. However its not as simple. Designing a site with 100% width is not always that easy as you have to make sure everything will squash down – no point using 100% width if your images won’t let it go down futher than 900 pixels.

You still really need to pick a width as any images and menu’s that make your site wide will set the width for you. People on 640 X 480 screens with browsers in shrunk mode would probably like your site to squash down to about 400 pixels. Test if your site will do that (though don’t worry if it won’t).

100% width works good for sites such as Microsoft.com and Worfolk.biz who have a lot of product information and so use text with can go across the screen and still squash down easily.

700 pixels width

This is the site I use for most of my sites. I use it because I can fit a banner into it and still have room for a 200 pixels wide logo next to it. The only problem with doing this is that its slightly too big for people with 640 X 480 screens and slightly too small for 800 X 600 screens. I consider it a nice balance though.

A lot of sites go for a 800 pixels wide screen so that it wil fit on a 800 X 600 screen now as people using 640 X 480 are become rarer quickly – I’ve been using 1024 X 780 for years now. Ever Yahoo is now to big to fix on a 640 X 480 and has been for a while too.

A fixed width site works well for sites which have content in the right place, all neat and correctly laid out in sections such as Msn.com or Mworld.us.

Other options

MSN use javascript to show hide layers. If you read Java Junky (MXL Magazine column) then you will know what this is about. Bascially if the browsers screen is big enough, they add extra information dowen the left column – Full screen your browser on one of the channels and then shrink it to a fairly small size. Some content should disappear (probably the channels menu) from the right hand side.

They also have a script on their homepage so that it rearrages the content for people with 640 X 480 screens so it fits on them while using up the space nicely on a 800 X 640 screen.

Conclusion

If you site isn’t almost all text then go for a set width such as 700 or 800. If you don’t have any menu bars or extra content down the side then you might even want to go for 600 pixels like Worfolk Online uses (or used to use depending on whether it has changed since I wrote this). Test it out on different screen sizes and see what looks good. Check out what the competition does. When you’ve found something you like – stick with it.

JavaScript allows you to adding programming functions to your web pages. Browsers will read the HTML and interpret the JavaScript. JavaScript can also produce dynamic effects using variables. JavaScript can also react to events, write HTML code and validate data.

The key parts of JavaScript are functions and events. Functions are mini scripts that can be executed by an event such as a timer or a user clicking on a link. Take a look at this basic script that brings up a gray dialog box saying ‘Yay! javaScript Rules!’

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--

function yay() {
alert('Yay! JavaScript rules!');
}

// -->
</script>

The java is in a standard script tag (which you will read about next) and also has comment tags around it. This hides the script from old browsers who don’t understand JavaScript.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a pop up window using java script. There are many tools to do this but most of them create pop up windows that open when a page loads. These are fine for pop up ads but what do you do when you want to open up a pop up window when a user clicks a link? This tutorial will show you how to write a function to do this.

This will be a function and it will be embedded in a standard java script tag.

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
</script>

Now before we start lets look at the whole source code, then I will explain it all

function launch(){
jim=window.open("http://www.hardwaretutorials.com/","Hardware Tutorials","width=400,height=300,top=0,left=0,resizable=no,
scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,toolbar=no,status=no,location=no")}

Thats the function in full. Lets start at the beginning. The variable name is ‘Jim.’ Inside the window.open part there are all the configurable components of the pop up window. Lets start with the address. In our example I used http://www.microsoft.com but you could relace this with ‘www.yoursite.com’ or ‘information/popuppage.htm’.

The name for the window (the name that will appear before the title appears) for my example is Microsoft. Now is the window settings. You can set the width and the height as well as the top and left margin. You can also choose whether the window is resizable, scrollbars, a menu bar, a tool bar, a status bar and a location bar.

Once you have configured these just put them in a standard tag, in either the body or head tag.

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
function launch(){
jim=window.open("http://www.microsoft.com","microsoft","width=400,height=300,top=0,left=0,resizable=no,
scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,toolbar=no,status=no,location=no")} 
</script>

Thats the full code. Now all you need to do is create a link ‘javascript:launch().’ If you want to change the java script to ‘function whatever()’ instead of function launch(). You must do this if you have more than one pop up scripts on one page as you will need each hyperlink to activate a different pop up script.

This will show you how to make a password page. This should never be used for anything! Ever! It’s purely just to show you how it could be done. But it is literally less lecture than leaving your front door wide open.

In you you put in your password and if it is correct you go the another page. If you are incorrect you go to a wrong password page. Take a look at the script.

<script language="JavaScript">
function passwordOK(anystring) {
anystring = anystring.toUpperCase()

if (anystring == "GREEN" || anystring == "BLUE" || anystring
== "RED" || anystring == "YELLOW") {
/*Add more passwords if you'd like, but ALL PASSWORDS MUST BE IN CAPS!*/
alert('You got it right!')
alert('Now taking you to the hidden page.')
location="page2.htm"
//Change page2.htm to your hidden page
}


else {
alert ("Please enter the CORRECT password next time.")
location="wrongpage.htm"
/*substitute your own wrong page for wrongpage.htm*/
}
}
</script>
<form>
Password:
<input type="password" name="pass" Size="20" onChange="passwordOK(this.value)" />
</form>

As you can see the input box triggers the javascript function ‘passwordOK.’ Below the function name, in the next paragraph and what to do if the password is correct. Below that is the alert if the password is incorrect. Have a play around with the script and see what you can do. The whole thing can be copied in the body tag of your page.