Q&A's

This often depends on the complexity, amount of data you have and what you want to achieve with it.

A possible alternative could be creating an .xml document (Extensible Markup Language) that features your collection, products or whatever.

An .xml document is relatively easy to create - Notepad or any text editor is enough.
It does however adhere to strict rules and these need to be interpreted by browsers to display your pages correctly.

Having said that, .xml in the right degree can allow you the freedom of change you might desire.

View an example of a Food list and the .xml document.

If your collection however demands rapid change, (a lot of user interaction) you will probably need a database. Of course it is possible to use a database and then either automatically or manually generate the .xml file and use this as the input.

Widgets are pieces of 'self-contained' code - they usually have pre-built javascripts and style sheets. That means a mini application that you can insert into your website adding extra bling and functionality.

Some widgets are controllable (providing you have the knowledge) and others are not. This page uses an Collapsible Panel widget (and a few others to display the Faq's page - Spry Collapsibe Accordian Widget. Colours, fonts and postioning etc. are changeable.

So widgets are a delivered form of leverage - site wide if required. But you will probably need to customise them to suit your web!

Although sometimes free or included in many applications, the implementation through 3rd parties will normally have a cost to them. Don't whinge, because they do need a reasonable amount of understanding to deploy and adjust them correctly.

For a detailed explanation on Spry Widgets and more, click here: Adobe Spry Framework

Today's digital camera's are brilliant, many of our mobile phones have 5 Mega Pixels, if not more. Producing excellent photo's at a click of the button. And now we are more or less all capable of creating pretty impressive shots. We download them to our PC / Laptop and then often just send them on; regardless of size.

So we often receive images that are either physically too large, have an incorrect dpi (dots per inch), or the rendition is incorrect for the web. This can lead to an image being far larger than is required. Any of these situations will cause an excessive page 'loading' time.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but this really does depend on your equipment and the ISP you have! Please don't imagine that everyone has the same.

The three images on the right might look the same, but they are vastly different in size. Mouse over the images to reveal the differences.

One maybe two images that are too large might get by, but imagine if you had a gallery of images all taking far more time to load than is required, the results might not be what you are looking for. It's easy to check an image and file size. Just right click and view the properties - depending on which browser and OS you are using.

In concept, yes.
However linking into 3rd party concepts can have 'technical' anomalies.

We suggest that 3rd party products should be coherent and tested on the media types that your customers use. Third parties should supply a test environment before links etc. are made from your website.

They should at least cover IE & Mozilla FireFox as they are the most two used browsers; and if your business is graphical - Mac etc. should be paramount.

In short yes we do.

Although to have an absolute 100% control would entail that there is sufficient knowledge of the building blocks that are contained within the site. This could mean that you would need knowledge of:

• Javascript
• Cascading Style Sheets
• Active Server Pages
• Databases
• Xml
• Ajax
• etc.

So in general 'user' control means changing 'textual content', updating images, etc. that work through templates by using a management tool such as Adobe Contribute. Also if there is one, keeping the database upto date.

If the level of maintenance required is diverse then through the use of 'templates' most situations can be controlled so that your 'web editor(s)' cannot interfere with design elements or delete any important code.

What we do not advise unless your designing your own site, is expecting to alter javascripts or other critical pieces of code.

A development site is just as it suggests, for development purposes!
This not only allows the customer to keep track of what's going on, but gives the opportunity to give feed back if necessary at every stage of development.

If the same tactics were deployed on a 'live' domain, the results might not be what you or your customers expect or are looking for as the development phase is notorious for making mistakes. And oh boy, disasters do occur!

Look at this way,: If you have a shop selling say 'Works of Art'. Would you stick a beautiful painting in your window that has a whacking great hole in it? Most people wouldn't, but okay there's always a few who will!

Once the development has reached the 'go-ahead' status, this is then uploaded to your domain.

We strongly recommend you do not develop on a 'live' domain.
Although this might seem like stating the obvious, believe us, it happens!

The so called 'life span' depends on so many factors that it would need a book to cover them.

However a number of very relevant points are as follows:

Does your website reflect the quality of your business - visually and information wise?

• Are your products regularly updated - text and photo's?
• If you sell products online, are you offering your customers a good online shopping service that connects to secure services for payment (for instance in The Netherlands, at least Ideal - supported by all major Dutch banks)?
• If you have a news / events page - is it news or is it history?
• Are your pages scoring with Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines?
• How well do you liase with your web builder? It's more important than you might think!
• How are the 'core' pages controlled, by you or by the web master? Unless your website is driven by IT experts - try to have the core pages under your own control.
• Has your web been designed and run by the 'next door neighbour'?
• Also check your pages for spelling and grammar, we all make these mistakes, but often they are not checked.

If your business is 'scrimping' on any of the above, the chance is your web will have a short term life span.

In retrospect, the life span is according to the effort and seriousness that you put into to your business.

CMS - Content Management System.

There are many types of templates, and as the names suggets it is a file type that does a lot for you as the coding is pre-defined.

Basically you can type into the defined areas without worries about the wrong fonts, colours or sizes - they exist in the template and linked to your pages. They stop you making 'user' mistakes.

A CMS template will allow you to add, modify or delete data. In other words, 'the donkey work' bit has been done allowing you to update your core information, without too many worries.

Do not confuse CMS templates with background templates, the latter are only design elements and do not contain the functional elements of Content Management.

CMS Templates are usually built by 'web masters / IT department / software developers'.

They usually cost more in the 'short term', but should benefit your business in the 'long term', because you are now capable of doing a lot for yourself.... and that saves money!

This answer is abbreviated - it's not a forum.
But basically the answer is get a photographer, decide how you want to show the images.

Add your descriptions and link to a user form if it's saleable item. There are many ways to incorporate the most import payments of e-Commerce.

Data through a database - XML, or let a third Party do this for you.

Use templates, probably custom built if you are looking for 'own identity'. Or if your e-Commerce application supplies them... well use them.

Well I guess the web is full of answers on this, but strangely enough there are so many sites out there that tend to ingore this. So just a short example.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Flexible Solutions Automation - Frequently asked questions</title>

The rest of your code.....

</head>

I've highlighted 6 <meta tags> and simply put, it's as follows:

1. The first one determines the character set interpretation - in other words how a browser will determine which characters to display.
2. Next is a line which many think determines if your browser should refresh the page (i.e not use a cached page on your PC / Laptop etc.).
   Please note this is not reliable and probably won't acheive what you expect.
3. description - is the description that shows up on your browser and if the page is indexed on a search engine. Important!
4. keywords - these are the words, phrases etc. that you hope will make a reasonable score, once the page has been indexed. Important!
5. author - does as it says. Not required.
6. robots - the way to invite a robot in, index the page and follow and links that are on the page to index. Important. If you do not want a robot/spider to index or follow a page, then use - content="noindex, nofollow". Note - there are more combinations. However using a 'robot' text file might acheive more.

There are of course other <meta tags> that you can apply.

For a comprehensive description of these and many other aspects, visit the W3C Consortium site.

Well XML is great, although it can be a little lengthy if you've lots of data and doing it manually. As mentioned in the Data Collections question - you could use the standard Notepad or any other text editor to create an XML file. See below for a much better Notepad Editor.

XML lets you create your own tags so to speak - but there are rules that you need to adhere to.

For instance, all the tags start with <something> and end with </something> - note the content is enclosed between the same "something's"! In other words, they are nested correctly.

As more people are becoming aware of XML and the lovely bits which surround it you can find a free and pretty good XML Notepad 2007 from Microsoft.

Okay, fair comment, but not really a question. However, eye appeal often depends on what a client can provide. Mainly we deal with a 'technical' way of displaying information as efficiently as possible with the elegance your budget can afford. Don't forget, we make sites for businesses and not the 'glitzy' individual taste.

In other words, we do our best to make you visble, the graphics and photo's howewever are often your own vision. And in many cases it's your product text and deliverance that does this.