We hope that you enjoy the show!

Cheers,
Paul & Dan

You may have noticed that our current episode “web analytics, a measure of success part two” unfortunately bears the burden of poor audio quality. We realized this the moment we finished recording it. We are still a little baffled as to what went wrong and why…However, due to the popularity of the subject matter, we will be re-recording the entire episode so everyone can fully appreciate it.

We truly value our listeners and we apologize for not making audio amends sooner. We hope you will enjoy the new recording which will be out shortly as well as our newest episode.

Also, Dan and I would like to say thank you to everyone that wrote in to let us know how much they enjoyed the episode despite its shortcomings. It has definitely re-enforced our belief that content truly is king and our future episodes will have the audio quality to match.

Cheers,
Paul

listener feedback & questions

Question One: Flashpaper 2 Issues

Harry called in from the UK and had a few questions about some issues with Macromedias Flash Paper 2 that he was experiencing.

Why, when dragging and dropping documents into flash paper does it reverse the pages?

I wish I had a solid answer for this one. I searched all over the net and even went so far as to give Adobe a call to see if they had an answer for this issue. However, I would check your printing preferences, you may have them set to reverse pages and now it is arranging your FlashPaper2 documents this way by default. If that isn’t the case I would uninstall the program, reboot and reinstall it, hopefully that will clear it up.

The second question was why FlashPaper2 wasn’t viewable to some users running IE7?

It seems that after updating IE6 to IE7, you may find that .swf no longer display in the browser; this seems to be a “VERY” common occurrence that everyone says is fixed with the latest version of IE7 and Flash Player 9. However, I just recently upgraded a family member’s machine to IE7 and I had the same issue. I was able to resolve the issue by logging in as an administrator and uninstalling the Flash Player, rebooting the machine logging in once again with full administrative rights then reinstalling the application. I hope that helps and feel free to drop me an email if you’re still having issues and I will put my thinking cap back on.

Question 2: Is Age a Hindrance to Marketing Your Services?

Nicky a current high school student with a few years of web development under his belt called in from Colorado with the following:

As a self taught web developer with my first website built in the 6th grade, I sometimes see my age and lack of traditional training as a hindrance to marketing my services to their full potential, how can I price my services without undercutting myself due to my age and experience. My second question is, I will be a junior this coming year and I am thinking about college, should I focus my studies on business or graphic design.

Marketing your services as a freelance developer or firm is a very slippery slope that a lot of designers and developers struggle with every day. I am a firm believer that a great portfolio speaks for itself. If the work is quality work with quality design, build on that. I think the average customer won’t be very concerned with your age if they feel confident you can not only get the job done but you will exceed their expectations. However, age can be a stigma to a lot of people as they equate it with experience. I would put extra effort into showing off your past web conquests and creating sales proposals and documents that are top notch. Show your prospective clients that you are just as pro as us old folk are. If you are meeting a client be prepared for the age issue to come up. Don’t run from it; embrace it to show your clients how talented you are. I think you might be surprised how much it impresses them.

To answer your second question, if you are truly interested in furthering your education in this field a solid background in both graphic design and business doesn’t hurt. In fact I recommend it; anything you can learn to push toward your goals is a boon. I have a solid background in web design and development, but I didn’t have any formal “business” training before I launched EOC with Dan in 2003. Suddenly I found myself awash in a world of little things like taxes, paperwork and federal forms that only a federal court judge would understand or even care to read. I really regretted passing on those business courses in college, not because I couldn’t figure it out, but because I had to spend time catching up on topics that I could have learned when I had more time to do it. Mostly I regretted it because it took time away from doing what I love, running the business and building websites. Formal training isn’t always necessary, but damn if it’s not helpful.

why you need analytics

If you want to know more about your site and your site visitors you need to know your W’s, and using an analytics package to do so is the first step. With every client we work with we encourage an analytics package, with our SEO or web marketing clients it is required to use an analytics package. The information you collect using analytics is vital to know your visitors, and gage the effectiveness of your design, landing pages, search engine visibility and much more. You can have a distinct advantage over your brick & mortar side of your business by knowing much more about your customers. You may have noticed when out shopping that some retailers ask you your phone number or zip code at checkout, this is their version of customer tracking.

the five W’s

Who they area:

Looking at your demographic information you can view your visitors by cities, regions, states, and even countries. Use this information to understand your visitor, identify which regions or areas you should buy advertising in to gain more exposure, identify weak spots in your marketing reach and help you refine online PPC programs or other online advertising.

Where they came from

Your referring source is one of the best analytic information you can get your hands on. The referring source will tell you the referring website or domain that lead the visitor to your website and/or the search engine that served your listing to that visitor. If you are performing any online advertising you will to want to track your ad sources. Use this information to find out weather your ad dollars are a waste or the best money you ever spent. You can learn who is linking to you by looking at your referring sources, see if that content rich page you created is drawing any interest, or that article you posted in a Blog or forum is generating any visits.

What search term they used:

Find out if you are loved by Google, Yahoo, and others and weather you have a high relevancy for your targeted keywords by looking at your referring search engine and keywords used to bring visitors to your site. If you or your SEO have done your keyword research, and optimized your site correctly you will see in time that you will be begin showing up in search engines, and depending on how important your site is and how relevant your content is to your chosen keyword(s) you will generally show higher or lower than your competition.

Keyword search terms can also work the other way, to point out services or products you should be selling, for example, let’s say you make pudding in 3 flavors, vanilla, chocolate, and butterscotch but every time you look at your analytics you see that 25% of your visitors are actually looking for pistachio pudding. Since they don’t find it, they leave. This may be presenting a great opportunity to give them some pistachio pudding and increase sales, after all proof is in the pudding: P. (Sorry, couldn’t help it)

Where they went on your site:

Your analytics should show your navigation or visited pages. Gage your most popular products or topics with your visitors, or identify dead pages or pages of little interest. But wait, sometimes just because a page seems dead it may not be your visitors telling you that the page is of no interest. It may be entirely your own fault; poor navigation, bad linking structures or just bad design could be at fault, maybe the page has errors or broken links. Analyze these poorly performing pages, fix any errors, and make some changes then look at the new data after time to see if your changes were effective. Do A/B testing, make 2 versions of a page and over time evaluate the results. You can do this type of testing with images, banners, links etc to see which promote greater click through, or sales.

What time did they spend on your site:

Your site Bounce Rate and visitor duration can be another tool that is useful in measuring effective website planning. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who viewed only one page, think of them as the channel flippers of the internet. It is a pretty good indication that they came they saw and didn’t like it. Looking at the average time your visitors spent on your site for the most part this is good information that can help you determine if your page is sticky, but it is recommended that you look at the big picture and cross referencing is recommended at times especially when dealing with eCommerce sites. Again, time on your site may mean that your site is not “sticky” or visitors don’t stick around. This can be a combination of a few things.

Poor keyword research and usage:

You might be capturing visitors that are looking for a term that means something else in another industry either by on site text, keywords or titles and descriptions or in online ads like Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, or other PPC or advertising programs.

a few reasons your seo campain may be sinking or has sunk

Poor design, boring or just plain dull:

Advertising mediums need to capture your attention, a website is advertising medium as well as informational. Neglecting the design and concentrating on the content is not effective and neither is the converse. With good design and effective ad copy you can entice people to read on, navigate through etc. getting people to take a look and capturing someone interest is a good first step to a purchase or sales inquiry.

Slow loading pages:

Slow pages can tank you site as well. In the land of quick and easy, fast food and express checkout people will not wait 15 seconds for your page to load unless you are their only hope for the content. Excessive page load times because of improper site design architecture or overuse of technologies, or poor hosting can cost you visitors. A lot of people have branded Flash as the demon of SEO, this is not so, use of technologies can actually keep visitors on your site, just plan to use them within reason, Flash is one of the best ad mediums for a site and can add a flair of interest, just keep page load in the back of your mind when working with any technology.

Bad landing pages:

You have the option to designate which page visitors land on when running an ad campaign or setting up your site for search engines. Many people are making big mistakes when it comes to the landing pages used for PPC advertising. I have seen some advertisers send people to a contact page to fill out a form. In my opinion this is death, you would be better off sending them to your home page. The last thing I am going to do is fill out a form to a company that I know nothing about. Some advertisers are targeting their product in their ad; let’s say Pistachio pudding, but when people click on the ad they go to the main store page and are forced to perform yet another step. Don’t make your visitors search for the pudding, you may be loosing customers forever, I know I get annoyed.

Analytics is just one part of a great marketing strategy for your website. Many analytics packages offer many great features, this is just a sampling of all that is available to you, and ultimately choosing an analytics package depends on your specific needs. But I will equate not using a good analytics package (in combination with keyword research) to early submarine warfare or even guess work. If you would like to learn more about analytics or how your website, business or organization could benefit from its use contact us and we will be glad to go over solutions or questions that you may have. Also see our other Podcast on web analytics: Web Analytics a measure of Success” for additional information and technical explanations of web analytics.

Online Resources

• Learn About SEO on Engines of Creation.com
• Web Analytics by Wikipedia

Our podcasts will be temporarily unavailable as we upgrade some components and attempt to track down a bug that has crawled its way into our system from somewhere. We apologize for the inconvenience and will hopefully have all of our previous episodes back online shortly as well as a new episode out soon.

Edit – Updated Monday June 11, 2007 (Roughly 4 hours later)
The upgrades went smoothly and the bug was found and stomped. I hope everyone enjoys our episodes and don’t forget to keep an ear out for our new episode which will be out shortly. ]]> http://enginesofcreation.com/podcast/index.php/2007/06/looking-for-our-podcasts/feed/ 0 http://enginesofcreation.com/podcast/index.php/2007/06/looking-for-our-podcasts/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EnginesOfCreationPodcast/~3/KAxroQDNUtA/ http://enginesofcreation.com/podcast/index.php/2007/03/web-design-freelance-boot-camp/#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2007 17:49:24 +0000 podcast@enginesofcreation.com (Paul Langevin & Dan La Bate) http://enginesofcreation.com/podcast/?p=36 To freelance or not to freelance? Ok, not the most original introduction, in this episode “Web Design Freelance Boot Camp” we will discuss the pros and cons of working as a web design freelancer or what to look for if you are in the market to hire a freelancer. The following is an overview of the episode and should be used as a rough guideline of questions and concerns you should have when freelancing or looking to hire a freelance design or developer.

show notes for web design freelance boot camp

• Benefits of Freelance Work
• The Dark Side of Freelance Work
• Freelance Best Practices
• Expand Your Team (Hiring a Freelancer)
• Sources & Resources

Benefits of Freelance Work

• Your schedule the way you want it.
• Less overhead, competitive pricing.
• A great opportunity to grow your portfolio.

The Dark Side of Freelance Work

• It can be difficult to work from home.
• Building trust with clients from afar.
• Health Care//Retirement Benefits, not unless you pay dearly.
• No guarantee of income.

Freelance Best Practices

• Establish hours & methods of contact for your clients
• Your own website or online portfolio
• Provide contacts with references
• Set up a method of project benchmarks that keep your clients in the loop.
• Strive to meet goals ON TIME.
• Use a REAL invoicing tool like PayPal or Blinksale.com
• Contracts & Agreements– Be Flexible Not Bendable

Expand Your Team (Hiring a Freelancer) what should you look for?

• Do they have an online portfolio or case study?
• How relevant is their portfolio?
• Sometimes you do Get What You Pay For.
• Are you really saving?
• If your freelancer is abroad, beware of culture / social differences. Do they understand your projects vision?
• 3-2-1 contact
• Protect yourself and your wallet

Sources & Resources

The following resources are based on this episodes content and our listeners questions & feedback.

• ODP / DMOZ.org
• Getafreelancer.com
• Elance.com
• Sitepoint.com Freelance Lessons
• A List Apart
• Adobe Design Center
• Wikipedia Color Wiki
• Sitepoint.com Article on Design Principles

So without any further a-do, here they are in no particular order:

Resources…

1. Web Developer Toolbar
2. Pixie 3.1
3. A List Apart
4. Multiple IE
5. Google Toolbar
6. Firebug
7. Macromedia/Adobe Flashpaper 2
8. Adobe Design Center
9. Adobe Developer Center
10. Lynda.com
11. CSS The Missing Manual
12. W3Schools
13.Open Cube Infinite Menu
14. Istock.com
15. jQuery AJAX Library
16. Typetester
17. W3C Markup Validation Service
18. W3C CSS Validation Service
19. ColorSchemer
20. sIFR
* Sources & References

1. Web Development Toolbar by Chris Pedrick

The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

• View CSS (Disable or Enable Styles, Add or Edit Styles or View the Style sheet Information)
• View Form nformation (Display Details, View Form Information Convert Form Methods & More)
• Images (Outline, Show Paths, Broken Images, Dimensions, Alt Attributes & More)
• Outline Elements (Frames, Tables, Links, Headings, Block Level Elements, Depreciated Elements, Positioned Elements and Even Custom Elements
• Resize the Browser Window (By Standard Sizes, 800×600 or Custom Size)
• Tools for Validation.
• View Source
• And More

Cost: Free

Get It Here

2. Pixie 3.1 from Nattyware

Pixie is a great little utility, fast and tiny it a perfect fit for Webmasters and Designers. Pixie is a color picker that includes a mouse tracker. If you see a color on a website, document, or any other source that you particularly like, run Pixie and simply point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. You can then use these values to reproduce the selected color where needed. Once you start using a color picker you won’t know how you ever lived without one.

Cost: Free

Get It Here

3. A List Apart

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. It is a huge resource with contributions by many well known and respected designers, technologists, programmers and more. It is a trusted source for quality commentary and discussion and they encourage contributions of high quality from anyone.

Cost: Free

Visit A List Apart

4. Multiple IE

Ever wanted to test your website in various versions of Internet Explorer? Testing in multiple browsers is an important part of testing when developing websites, testing in multiple platform versions of Internet Explorer on the same machine used to be impossible without over-writing the previous version. Luckily in November 2003, Joe Maddalone overcame this over-writing obstacle by exploiting a known workaround to issues involving DLL called DLL redirection. “Manfred Staudinger perfected the standalone versions by adding IE version numbers to the title bar of the standalone browser window. Moreover, by removing the “IE” key in the registry Internet Explorer defaulted to respecting conditional comments based on the version number pre-built in the program.” Yousif Al Saif of Tredosoft created this handy installer which contains IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6. Give this a try, I don’t think IE 5 should even be dignified with an install, but that would depend on your audience (people still running Windows98 that have never upgraded their IE). I can’t say that this tool works flawlessly but we have not had any issues to date and any problem identified can be sent to the developer who from what I see from their Blog is quite active and helpful in any debugging issues.

Cost: Free

Get It Now

5. Google Toolbar

Besides the option of always having a reliable search engine right in the browser, the toolbar contains a built-in pop-up blocker that works great and many helpful add-ons such as spell check, RSS subscribing with one click, instant Blog posting, using Blogger of course, word translation, Gmail integration, an info button that is useful for backlinks and probably most notable feature is the Google PR feature that is handy when you need to get a general idea of Page Rank for a website. These are only a few of the many features at a glance, while you might only use a few of these on your toolbar, the ones you do use make a difference in your browsing experience and workflow.

Cost: Free

Get It Now

6. Firebug

One of our favorite development and debugging tools that we use on a daily basis is Firebug. Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. I use this constantly and I honestly can’t give it enough praise. You have to give this tool a try if you’re a designer or a developer because it will definitely make your work life run smoother.

Cost: Free

Get It Now

7. Macromedia/Adobe Flashpaer 2

FlashPaper 2 allows anyone to convert printable files into Macromedia Flash documents or PDF files with one click. This is a great tool to create documents quickly and easily for clients or your websites visitors. We covered FlashPaper2 in one of our previous Podcasts if you want to hear more about the great features visit http://enginesofcreation.com/podcast/

FlashPaper2 is a great alternative to PDF, the text is crisp and the user interface is pleasing to the eye, easy to use and load time is a fraction of the time compared to .pdf. Some of the things you can accomplish with FlashPaper2 Instantly generate Flash documents that can be accessed by over half a billion web users, or transform files into secure, compact PDFs for e-mailing, archiving, and printing.

Cost: Free Trial – $79.00

Get It Now

8. Adobe Design Center

Complete with a “Think Tank” to see how today designers engages with technology. There is a focus on broader issues involving the relationships designers have with developing technologies, tools and the impact they have on society. This may sound more academic but is more or less how Adobe wants this to function. By reading through the articles you will get a sense of how designers & creative people are working with technology and design tools to bring attention to social issues, opening more creative avenues for the rest of us, and enhancement of daily life and media experience. As a designer it can be inspiring to think that you have the chance to function on a greater level than just make my website pretty. The Adobe Design Center also has a “Design Box” Section that focuses on motion graphics and tons of tutorials on how to use Adobe products.

Cost: Free

Visit the Adobe Design Center

9. Adobe Developer Center

This is a great place to go for information in developing in anything from CSS, Flex, ColdFusion, Flash, XML and More. This side of Adobe is definitely geared to the developer with a focus on code, programming etc. If you are looking for a resource to learn, re-enforce, or build your knowledge there is plenty of information for all skill levels with links galore to articles and tutorials.

Cost: Free

Visit the Adobe Developer Center

10. Lynda.com

Lynda.com is an award-winning provider of educational materials for creative designers, instructors, students, and hobbyists. Lynda.com features an online training library full of training videos with exercise files with a large assortment of topics lead by ell know professionals in their respective fields. Courses are available online or available on CD or by Book. They are constantly adding new titles and do listen to user feedback when considering which topics to expand their training library with. Each “lesson” is very well recorded and broken into short sections usually 2-5 min in length, perfect attention span oriented time limits. Exercise files are available with different subscription levels and include everything you need to re-create the project (excluding software) and useful resource links mentioned in the video.

Cost: Free Trial – $200.00 a Year or $20.00 a Month

Visit Lynda.com

11. CSS – The Missing Manual

I really enjoyed this book and I find it to be an excellent CSS reference and recommend it for anyone looking to learn CSS or just up their CSS game in general. The book didn’t read like a manual, which is a good thing because god knows I read enough of those already. The author David McFarland combines realistic and crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, a dash of humor, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you ways to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers.

You’ll learn how to:

• Create HTML that’s simpler, uses less code, is search-engine friendly, and works well with CSS
• Style text by changing fonts, colors, font sizes, and adding borders
• Turn simple HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars-complete with CSS-only rollover effects that add interactivity to your Web pages
• Style images to create effective photo galleries and special effects like CSS-based drop shadows
• Make HTML forms look great without a lot of messy HTML
• Overcome the most hair-pulling browser bugs so your web pages work consistently from browser to browser
• Create complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs that don’t require using old techniques like HTML tables
• Style Web pages for printing

Cost: $34.99

Buy This Book

Visit The Authors Website

12. W3Schools

At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP. W3Schools is a free site dedicated to the learning of web practices. There are many tutorials offered in a wide array of subject matter related to web design. W3Schools also offers tests to measure your knowledge on a subject which may be followed up with a certificate exam at a low cost. This is a great way to develop a basic learning plan. The certification exam offered must be supervised, but you get to pick who that is, so your best friend is not a good pick, neither is your dog. I would try for an academic sort like a professor of computer science this will help to give your certificate more weight if you intend to use it as a job placement tool. W3Schools is not accredited so any certificate is worth more to you as a personal accomplishment, or to your employer as a measurement tool. W3Schools’ tutorials are recommended at over 100 universities and high schools over the world.

Cost: Free

Visit W3CSchools

13. Open Cube Infinite Menu

Sometimes it pays to have an excellent drop menu system that you don’t have to create from scratch for a client, especially if it is fully compliant and browser friendly to boot. Drop menus are notorious for being tricky to implement and buggy, not to mention search engines don’t always crawl them properly, until now. If a drop menu is needed we recommend Infinite Menus by Opencube.com. Infinite Menus is the only Zero JavaScript Pure CSS menu commercially available, our unique visual interface and optional scripted add-ons make site navigation a snap. Dual mode hybrid / pure CSS navigation is light-years ahead of the out-dated DHTML based drop downs still being offered by other software companies.

Here are just a few advantages…

• Naturally Search Engine Friendly without added markup.
• Fully accessible and 508 Compliant.
• Fully functional with or without JavaScript in all CSS2 browsers.
• Main menu functionality in non-CSS2 browsers without JavaScript.
• Zero load time, menu renders and functions immediately.
• Super tiny footprint is high traffic compatible.

Cost: Free Trial, $139.00 – $389.00

Get It Now

14. Istock.com

This massive collection of royalty-free images is an excellent resource for photographs, vector Illustrations, Flash files, and Video clips, it is free to join istockphoto.com, and the benefits of joining include a wonderful light-box feature that allows you to save items in folders to reference later. When working on projects you will find it particularly useful to create a light-box with the client’s name and save images there so that your design team can look at, add or delete items, this can be done from any location within a browser. You can also email you light-box to your clients so that they may view your selections, or create an account with a light-box for them to choose their own images. This can shift the workload over to the client and allow them to be more involved in their own project.

Image prices are reasonable, although there has been a recent change in the pricing format; they are 99% cheaper than rights managed stock photography websites. X-small images start at a dollar and go up to XX-Large for around 15 bucks. Anyone can apply to contribute images to iStock’s collection. You can apply to become a photographer, illustrator, or videographer. Once you are accepted, start uploading files, and earn royalties when your images are downloaded.

If you are a good photographer and want to earn some extra cash this is a great option.

Cost: $1.00 USD & Up

Visit Istock.com

15. jQuery AJAX Library

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript and we highly recomend it.

Cost: Free

Get It Now

16. Typetester

Typetester is an online application for comparison of fonts. The idea is to make your life as a designer easier when working with or choosing fonts. Typetester plans to update their common fonts as new fonts are bundled into operating systems. Knowing which fonts are system fonts is useful because using non-system fonts in a webpage leaves the font choice and control up to the fonts on the users system or user-style sheet. So although you are in love with Papyrus, your visitor may not have that font installed and may be seeing courier new. Typetester will also allow you to view the fonts you have on your local machine and compare up to three different fonts side by side in 12 different formats such as bold, italic, small caps italic, UPPERCASE, and more. You can adjust the type settings such as color, size, leading, tracking, decoration etc. Believe me this can save you a serious amount of fussing with fonts in your graphics program, especially in Photoshop.

Cost: Free

Visit Typetester

17. W3C Markup Validation Service

W3C Markup Validation Service is a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. This is very useful and important to perform during development not just after the project is finished. You may also find it useful when debugging. The service is not perfect and does have some limitations when working with XML. There are always new technologies developing, and this is a lot to keep up with. If you realized the thought, discussion, and bickering that goes on when W3C panels discuss standards you would shake your head. Just read one of their papers on web standards, they are so dry that the paper they are printed on has to be flame retardant. This is not my style of reading, but the W3C has been bringing some conformity to the web, this make a developer’s life easier by creating a common set of rules. All we need now is for the major browsers to listen and play nice as well.

Cost: Free

Visit the W3C Markup Validation Service

18. W3C CSS Validation Service

Just as it is important to validate your XHTML pages it is just as important to validate your CSS. A great free validation service is the W3C CSS Validation Service, which will check your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and (X) HTML documents with style sheets. It will even give you a list of warnings so you can address potential issues before they arise. Remember, although validators find errors in your page’s source, they do no ensure that it will appear as you want in various browsers. It merely ensures that your code is without HTML or CSS syntax errors. Ensuring that your code appears correctly in different browsers require cross a lot of browser testing. To ensure that your website appears as you want in various browsers, you should test as you build in multiple browsers.

Cost: Free

Visit the W3C CSS Validation Service

19. ColorSchemer

There are a ton of Color Wheels on the web; Colorschemer does a good job of providing a useful tool that is not complicated or technical for the exploration of color for your projects. The full version is reasonably priced and there is a 15 free trial for you to evaluate. Colorschemer allows you to save selected colors as favorites, has a built in drag and drop tool to simulate a basic web site design, and you can share your color creations with other users by uploading them to the web. There are many features that you may use to your advantage. There is a color blindness simulator, color mixer, switch from color wheel to swatches, ColorSchemer will even give you suggestions for color schemes, and a lot of other bells and whistles put together in a nice user interface familiar to windows users. Have fun, share your colors and hopefully this makes your life a little easier.

Cost: Free Trial – $49.00

Get It Now

20. sIFR

Have you ever wanted to retain your non system composition fonts and avoid making them an image so the browser will render them properly?

Than sIFR is for you! sIFR lets you use your favorite font on your websites by cleverly working with Flash, JavaScript and CSS. sIFR is a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. That to me is worth its weight in gold. I have always hated being confined to system fonts or having to create images for headlines, which makes them time consuming to change and hard for search engines to index, not to mention throws semantic layout out the window. sIFR solves all these problems and is quite easy to implement . sIFR or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement allows website headings, pull-quotes and other elements to be styled in whatever font the designer chooses sIFR requires JavaScript to be enabled and the Flash plug-in installed in the reading browser. The really cool part is if either condition is not met, the reader’s browser will automatically display traditional CSS based styling – the user won’t know the difference.

That’s the part that makes sIFR a safe alternative to image headers or plane Jane fonts. Does this mean that you should use a font face that no one can read? Absolutely not, although sIFR can do it, you should always ensure that whatever font that you choose is legible and reasonable in its use. You wouldn’t want to use sIFR on a whole page for instance, it wouldn’t be efficient and system fonts are fine for your actual page content anyway.

If you want to add some style to your headers however, it can’t be beat.

Cost: Free

Get It Now

Online Resources

Resources for this entry and information pertaining to each resource was retrieved from the products or authors web site.

With that in mind let’s jump right in:

What is ColdFusion?

ColdFusion is one of the most popular web development technologies on the Internet, originally developed by the Allaire brothers in 1995. With the success of the language they formed the Allaire Company, which was later bought by Macromedia who was in turn recently purchased by Adobe.

Don’t you just love corporations?

Like most Web languages, ColdFusion was meant to provide Web developers with a way to talk to a database and display data on Web pages. As with many such languages, in the early days, it was not the most advanced technology, but it was one of the more simplistic to implement, understand and use with a gentle learning curve.

An interesting fact; ColdFusion was the reason Microsoft released ASP, which was being developed by Aspect Software, a competitor of Allaire, Aspect Software was later bought by Microsoft because of the ColdFusion growing popularity with developers. So, in a round about way, all you ASP programmers have the ColdFusion developers to thank for your programming language!

I bet that statement will get us some email, but it’s true none the less.

ColdFusion has grown leaps in bounds since its inception in 1995 and is being used in more than 75 of the Fortune 100; ColdFusion provides the power behind over 18 million pages on the public Internet.

With the help of ColdFusion, companies like Allied Office Products, Bank of America, Boeing, FAO Schwarz, Hertz, Jaguar, and Simon & Schuster have built customer service applications, online publishing systems, e-learning solutions, business reporting applications, business-to-business extranets and more just to name a few, later on we will talk about some other companies that leverage the power of ColdFusion.

ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) Announcement

With ColdFusion 8 underway at Adobe, codenamed “Scorpio”, it is scheduled to be released by the second half of 2007.

The focus for Scorpio is innovation. Confirmed new features for Scorpio are the cfpdfform tag, which enables integration with Adobe PDF forms, image manipulation functions, Microsoft .Net integration, and the cfpresentation tag, which appears to allow creating and integrating with live Macromedia Breeze presentations. The CF Administrator is also reported to have a new Flex 2 interface, and there will be built-in server monitoring.

How the Heck does ColdFusion Work?

ColdFusion is an application server, which in simple terms is nothing more than a piece of software that (usually) resides on the same computer as your web server that enables the web server to do some things that it normally wouldn’t be able to perform, mainly ColdFusion functions, if you want to learn more about this visit our show notes for resources about ColdFusion at enginesofcreation.com/podcast. The ColdFusion Application server simply looks for pages or templates that have instructions written in ColdFusion’s language CFML.

The ColdFusion Application server then runs the code on the page processing any special processing instructions before handing it off to the web server and then to the browser for the user to see. This all happens in the blink of an eye and if you haven’t made any programming errors the end user has a seamless experience and never knows the difference. ColdFusion isn’t just an application server however, and as mentioned previously it has a very powerful and flexible language, CFML or ColdFusion Markup Language. CFML along with some HTML tags, CSS and whatever else you like to add to your pages allows the creation of some very powerful apps.

ColdFusion is a tag based programming language based on standard HTML that is used to write dynamic web pages. Like any server side programming language it lets you create pages on the fly that differ depending on user input, database lookups, time of day or whatever other criteria you can come up with!

ColdFusion pages really aren’t that much different than your typical HTML page in that they still consist of standard HTML tags but these are mixed together with CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) tags. Just like with HTML there are some simple syntax guidelines to use when coding in CFML, but they are not overly complicated and you would be amazed at what you can accomplish with just a few lines of CFML compared to other server side programming languages. A few of the nifty things CFML can do:

• Read, Update and Delete information from a database
• Send and retrieve email
• Send and retrieve SMS or text messages
• Process form submissions
• Use conditional processing
• Work and interact with local files
• Create sessions, use cookies and more…

This list is by NO means all of what you can do with CFML in fact it’s not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. You can interact with XML, Java & almost every relational database system and web service. You can even integrate ColdFusion with:

• C and C++
• COM
• COBRA
• And more…

ColdFusion – Simple and Straight Forward

With little or no effort you can begin coding applications that range from auto email functions, ColdFusion Flash forms to dynamic .pdf or FlashPaper 2 documents.
EX: – Take the CFMAIL tag, this tag functions exactly the way it sounds, it sends an e-mail message that can optionally contain query output, using an SMTP server. All you have to do is pass it some values; perhaps from a form a user fills out or at the end of a checkout process to inform the user of the status of a transaction. I actually use it on our website to send an email to my mobile when we get a contact as well as an auto generated email to our office PC’s. This way I am always on top of things and I don’t miss a beat.

As we already know ColdFusion is an application server used for the development of dynamic web sites, ColdFusion also supports other programming languages like server side ActionScript.
More advanced users can use ColdFusion as a productivity layer above a J2EE platform or use ColdFusion as middleware in a service oriented architecture (SOA), generating SOAP or RESTful web services or Flash remoting.
ColdFusion can also handle asynchronous events such as SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, available in ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition.

If your eager and want to start right away, Adobe allows you to download a fully functional developer edition to use as a robust developing tool. The free developer edition even comes with the ability to test SMS messaging applications.

Behind the Scenes of a ColdFusion Page Request

To better understand how ColdFusion works, let’s preface with how a website functions in general. A website is a collection of files that reside on a server. The web server handles requests for those files. When a user types in a web address, clicks a link etc. to visit a web page they are asking their browser to make a request for that page. When a web browser requests a static web page such as an HTML page, the web server locates the file in the file system and then sends it back to the browser for display.

When a page in a ColdFusion application is requested by a browser, it is automatically pre-processed by the ColdFusion Application Server. Based on the CFML in the page, (indicated by a .cfm extension of .cfc), the ColdFusion Application Server dynamically constructs the page before delivering it to the web server. the Application Server executes the application logic, interacts with other server technologies, and then dynamically generates an HTML page which is returned to the browser.

Based on the CFML, the server may interact with database servers, the file system, mail servers, and potentially other applications and systems.
The output from ColdFusion can be HTML, WML, XML, and even application-specific content, such as data for Flash or desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel.

ColdFUsion Architecture Brief Overview

ColdFusion is built on a completely standards-based infrastructure; ColdFusion Server includes an embedded Java server based on the Adobe (formerly Macromedia) JRun technology. This proven infrastructure provides the runtime services for ColdFusion applications, including high-performance connectivity to databases, Internet protocols, and components; a standards-based web services engine; and resource management features like database connection pooling, thread management, and security, complete with the ability to sandbox developers for ease of project management.

In addition to providing tighter integration with Java technologies, ColdFusion also offers support for the Microsoft .NET architecture. ColdFusion includes continued support for Windows and integration with the .NET Enterprise Servers, including IIS, SQL Server, and Exchange. ColdFusion also makes it easy to integrate with applications built using Microsoft technologies through native support for the COM component model and integration with .NET web services.

On top of this powerful infrastructure, ColdFusion provides an enhanced version of the rapid server scripting environment and built-in application services that have made ColdFusion wildly popular.

Why Use Coldfusion?

Ok, now that we know exactly what ColdFusion is and what it’s made of not to mention a smattering of what it’s capable of let’s investigate why you should use ColdFusion.

ColdFusion Provides Powerful Internet Capability.

Developers, businesses and clients love options, control and power over their application and I say the more control the better. ColdFusion delivers powerful Internet capabilities within an easy-to-learn and highly productive server scripting environment that can truly empower users and site owners alike, which is why ColdFusion has a very committed and happy community that is constantly growing.

It’s EASY – Deliver applications in record time.

• Intuitive tag-based language that requires fewer lines of code by handling low-level programming tasks automatically and simplifying code reuse.
• Server-side ActionScript that enables Macromedia Flash developers to use the same scripting language for both client and server logic.
• Complete support for new ColdFusion features within the Dreamweaver development environment, including powerful visual layout and prototyping, enhanced code editing and development capabilities, and integrated debugging

POWERFUL – Deliver a more compelling user experience.

ColdFusion provides a robust architecture and rich set of built-in capabilities that deliver high performance and scalability and enhance your applications with advanced functionality.

• Fully integrated application services for adding full-text search, dynamic charting, and high-performance connectivity to Macromedia Flash clients to your applications.
• Innovative architecture that delivers the scalability, reliability, and power of the Java. Platform without the complexity.
• Complete extensibility via custom tag libraries, reusable components, Java/C++, and thousands of available third-party add-ons.

OPEN – Leverage the latest industry standards and infrastructure.

ColdFusion supports open industry standards and easily integrates with your existing technology infrastructure.

• Highly approachable integration with all of the major Internet standards and component models, including XML, web services, Java, .NET/COM, and CORBA.
• Support for developing and deploying applications on a standalone ColdFusion Server or on leading Java application servers such as IBM WebSphere.
• Support for the leading server operating systems, web server software, mail servers, directory servers, file systems, and relational database management systems.

ColdFusion Is Popular and Cost-Effective

Investing time and effort into learning and integrating a Web programming language can be difficult work because creating large-scale applications can be very expensive, not to mention time consuming. Presumably, you’re going to have to live with the environment that you select for a long time. For these reasons, you want to make sure that your language will continue to grow in the years to come and that it is capable of performing the heavy-hitting transactions that you’ll require of it.

ColdFusion is trusted on some of the most transaction-intensive, sensitive sites on the Web. For example, Bank of America, the United States Senate, use ColdFusion to get their work done.

Perhaps the reason it’s so popular is that, using ColdFusion, you can do a lot more than write dynamic Web pages and shopping carts. You can do really fantastic things with standard language elements that would require dozens of lines of code or custom tags in other languages. (This saves development time which saves you money)

Efficient Data Interaction

You can use a subset of XML called Web Distributed Data eXchange (WDDX) to serialize and expose packets of data as generic XML. You can also perform file and directory manipulation, perform full FTP interactions, and create intelligent agents. It is easy to interact with LDAP servers with just one ColdFusion tag. You can create database-driven graphs and charts in Flash all through ColdFusion.

Customized Tags – Pimp my <cfride>

As in JSP (JavaServer Pages), you can create your own extensions to the language, custom tags. You can write custom tags in ColdFusion, C++, or Java.

The ColdFusion Developer’s Exchange and other Web sites have thousands of free custom tags available for download. These tags range from very simple utility tags to full-blown applications. As a developer this means that odds are you won’t have to recreate the wheel when it comes down to a development time crunch.

Cost Effective & Free for Developers

You probably know that, unlike JSP or PHP, ColdFusion is not free.

Depending on your projects needs ColdFusion can be very cost effective. As mentioned earlier Adobe offers the developer edition as free download that you can install on your local machine or development server and comes with all the features as their enterprise edition. There are tons of ColdFusion Shared hosts to meet your applications needs. Check our show notes for links to the developer edition as well as links to hosts that offer ColdFusion plans.

A few features that ColdFusion makes readily available and simple

ColdFusion is intended as a rapid application-development platform. This means that the tags that make up the language encapsulate much of the complexity of the code required to perform sophisticated operations. One tag in ColdFusion can do the work of 10 or 20 lines of Java servlet code.

Some other simple functions for ColdFusion are

• Conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaper client-side form validation including rich forms using Flash
• GUI widgets such as data grids and date pickers platform-independent database querying via ODBC or JDBC data retrieval from common enterprise systems such as Active Directory, LDAP, POP, HTTP, FTP client and server cache management session, client, and application management file indexing and searching service based on Verity K2

Who is Using ColdFusion?

More than 300,000 developers at over 10,000 companies worldwide rely on ColdFusion to build and deploy powerful web applications faster than any other technology available on the market today. ColdFusion is in use at 75 of the Fortune 100 companies and at more than 10,000 other companies worldwide. A few of the more notable companies that power their online applications with ColdFusion are:

• windowsitpro.com
• quark.com
• American Psychological Association (apa.org)
• 192.com
• ACD Direct
• Allied Office Products
• America First Credit Union
• American Power Conversion
• Amkor Technology
• Aspen Skiing Company
• AT&T Wireless
• Bank of America
• Bertelsmann
• BMW USA
• Boeing
• Casio USA
• Caterpillar
• Chicago Bears
• City of Davis, CA
• County of San Diego, Dept. of Child Support Services
• Crayola
• Dallas Stars
• DHL
• Dial Corporation
• East Carolina University
• eBags
• Eli Lilly
• eMCSaatchi
• FAO Schwarz
• First Union
• Foot Locker
• George Washington University
• Georgetown University
• GlobalSpec.com
• Goodyear
• Half.com
• Hasbro
• iHotelier
• Inmarkets Training, Ltd.
• International Speedway Corporation
• InvestEdge
• Jaguar Australia
• Legato
• The Limited
• Mayo Clinic
• Mayo Health Systems
• Michelin
• Moen
• MySwitzerland.com
• NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• New York Giants
• New Era Cap Company
• New York State Office for Technology
• One World Alliance
• Peace Corps
• Pepsi
• PGA of America
• Pottery Barn
• Prometheus
• Quaker Oats
• Roche Pharmaceuticals
• Rugby Football Union
• Schlumberger
• Scott’s Corporation
• Seattle Times
• United States Senate
• Siemens
• Simon & Schuster
• SmartMoney.com
• Sprint
• State of New York
• Symantec
• Travelers
• United States Olympic Committee
• US Bank
• The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

ColdFusion Hard Facts

• More than 125,000 ColdFusion servers deployed
• Estimated base of over 300,000 developers
• Purchased by more than 10,000 organizations
• Relied on by 40% of the Media Metrix Top 50 Web Properties
• Used by nearly all major branches and agencies of the U.S. federal government
• Used to develop more than 19.7 million ColdFusion pages (Source: Google)
• Global network of more than 360 user groups
• Official Macromedia Developer Certification Program availableThousands of third-party components and add-ons
• In use at leading systems integrators, including CSC, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Deloitte Touche

Online Resources

• ColdFusion developer edition download
• Adobe ColdFusion Developers Center
• Adobe ColdFusion Exchange
• Ashwin Mathew’s MAX presentation on the CF8 server monitor
• Adobe Labs page
• Ben Forta’s Blog
• Wikipedia
• House of Fusion

Sources & References

• Macromedia Coldfusion MX7 Web Application Construction Kit
• Adobe.com
• About.com
• Wikipedia

What Exactly Is Web Analytics?

What exactly is web analytics?  Web analytics is the measuring of data collected from the visitors to your website. This includes: search engines, spiders, bots, and of course people. The information collected can be a valuable resource to website owners, webmasters/designers, and an indispensable tool for search engine optimizers.

Website Information is collected using two main methods: Log file analysis, which uses your web servers log files, is the data that is recorded by your web server ever time your website is “transacted”.  The second method is “page tagging” which uses JavaScript code snippets’ that are placed into the code of your website which is usually tracked by a third-party server each time a page is rendered by a web browser.

Log files have been always used by web servers, but interpreting the data was not a time effective measurement tool or considered an important phenomenon until that people discovered that a web analytics programs could be developed to show how popular a website was.

As the web evolved so did log files, servers added an additional measure of page views and visits to give a more accurate account of human activity. Because of the addition of images to the web in the early 1990’s, accuracy became a challenge because log files did not make a distinction, the usefulness of the common log file was defunct, hence came the combined log file (same acronym better accuracy) which introduced page visits and page views.

The method of Page Tagging evolved to address issues surrounding the inaccuracies of log files and as a business opportunity for web analytics companies.

A Few Analytics Terms for You to Digest

A Hit:

A hit is a record of any request for a file on the web server (this is for log analysis only) and includes images and every nuance of code that need to be pulled to render a page in your web browser, a single page request may generate double digit hit counts. Recording hits is an extremely inaccurate measurement of site popularity or traffic.

A Page View (Log Analysis):

Is a measure of file requests made to a web server whose file type is defined as a page.

A Page View (Tagging Method):

The page tagging method would define a page view as an occurrence of the script being run on a page.

A Page Visit or Session:

Is recorded as a single occurrence and most importantly is generated from only one user/client that has a set timeout for their session.

So what does that all mean in the real world, well lets use an example. Johnny is surfing the web and goes to www.ilovebenaffleck.com, (and feel free to buy that domain because I checked and as of today it is available) when Johnny arrives at the home page he has made his first visit to www.ilovebenaffleck.com, even if Johnny visited each sub page it will only be considered as part of the same visit, however those individual pages will be considered a view, so when you see that your 5 page website has 600 views the amount of visitors is more likely less than 120.

There is a current debate/conflict over which method of web site analysis is better; log file analysis or page tagging. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Log Files Main Advantages

Spiders: The majorities of search engine spiders, crawlers, bots etc. do not read JavaScript, and therefore cannot be tracked via page tagging.

Files: – you can track PDF’s, SWF’s and measure downloads of files including your Bandwidth usage (I dispute this you can be creative and track the actual request via links)

Log files main disadvantages

Server formatting
Unavailability to alter server for more complex tracking yourself without purchasing your own server

Under reporting/caching
- If a user accesses a web page via an external proxy server, their visit may not be recorded by your web server, Problems also arise for sites that use an external content caching server.

eCommerce transactions
- Many sites use an external payment gateway for processing credit card payments. Often, depending on the setup, it is difficult to measure a purchase or action that has been completed, which is the key component to conversion tracking and ROI.

Main Advantages of Page Tagging

Advanced tracking features are easily changed and added to 3rd party server

No problems with caching

No need to purchase your own web server

Main Disadvantages of Page Tagging

JavaScript: 98% have it turned on 2% do not, so you will loose out on that minority. (But using a tiny image as a backup can be used with page tagging if JavaScript is not enabled, I am not sure of the effectiveness of this method though)

Spider tracking: Most spiders are JavaScript illiterate.

Cookies: if your page tagging analytics uses 3rd party cookies instead of 1st party cookies (client domain assigned) to track users/clients people with 3rd party cookies disabled will be untraceable or if they delete cookies and revisit the site they can be tracked as a false visit.

Who Needs Analytics and Why?

OK, well that is a lot of information on some dry topics, so let’s switch gears and talk about why this stuff is so advantageous to you if you own a website. First and foremost on most peoples minds is to make more money or be number one sort of an ego thing. If you can effectively track your users/visitors you have the advantage of “seeing” which pages users entered on, where they left, and how long they stayed.  If you notice people come to your home page and run away, it is a good indicator that there is something that is wrong that needs to be addressed, essentially it is a message from the visitor that “your page sucks”.

Good analytics packages will allow you to see what city your visits came from, not just a county or state.  If you are running a PPC campaign for your widgets you might want to know that it would be more effective to run your ads in the Wichita area if that is where the majority of your website traffic originates.

Web designers: Your analytics or server logs are an important resource as to page errors that are occurring.  Additionally analytics is a good barometer for effective design and copy.

Advertisers/marketers: Without analytics your landing pages will be without measure.  The knowledge that your visitors came first through your landing page rather than the home page help’s you gauge the sales & promotions that you might run via landing pages on the web or even in print to web type promotions.

Search engine optimizers: Most SEO’s know the importance of good analytics, but there are many SEO’s who are starting out in the field, we all were/are there and everyday there is something new to learn.  An analytics package that accurately tracks websites traffic is a good tool to present to your clients as a measure of success.  Many clients’ eyes glass over when talking technical terms and do not understand ranking etc. (explaining these parts is a skill).  Here is where the true advantage, if you tell them before you started they had 7 people/mo. visiting their website and now there are 700/mo. that will make an impression, unless of course they did not convert any sales, remember design is as important to a website as is usability and SEO.

Google Analytics, A Great Place to Start

GA has robust and powerful tracking capabilities with few short fallings. Ideally it is an effective tool that integrates with Google’s PPC, SEO’s can utilize GA to track multiple client Google PPC campaigns while allowing for individual client access to each account by setting permissions and passwords. The Google analytics is a page tagging code using the urchin JavaScript tracking code, but is different from the separate urchin software that is available.  The code is placed in each page of your website to track your page visits, views, unique visitors, Geographic’s, funnel navigation and PPC manager and more.

Google Analytics is Free.
Google Analytics is one way we invest in our advertisers and everyone else who wants to create quality content on the web. With Google Analytics, you can get started today creating targeted, ROI-driven marketing campaigns and improving your site design and content.

Our main recommendation is that anyone using page tracking like Google analytics is that you must remember that the JS code is only tracking successful page renderings, so your error pages will not show in your analytics unless….you create custom error pages and add the tracking code to them, you will be surprised at the 20+ different error pages that there are, I know I was, I think there is even one for a possible Elvis sighting. If you are using a server side coding language you may need to ask you host to enable to enable “Check if file exists” on your server for your appropriate file extension for your error pages to work.

Another common mistake is not adding your tracking code to hidden pages such as contact page submission processing pages, although the user never sees that page in order to have the page tracked the JS code needs to be present and especially if it is part of your goal/conversion tracking.

If you are in a quandary about the log file vs. page tracking issue you can quell your unrest with the knowledge that there are analytics companies that are offering both, and if you don’t like them there are many hosting companies that provide good log file analytics packages for free to supplement your need for spider knowledge.

Online Resources

• Google Analytics
• nextSTAT
• Analytics by Wikipedia
• ShinySTAT

What is NOD32

Nod32 by ESET provides integrated, real-time protection against viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, phishing, and hackers. We think it has the best detection, fastest performance & smallest footprint compared to other antivirus products & suites. NOD32 is a single, highly optimized engine that works as a unified anti-threat system to protect against a broad spectrum of malware, viruses, worms, spyware, and other malicious attacks, which are constantly evolving.

ESET NOD32 utilizes their patent-pending ThreatSense® Technology to detect tomorrow’s threats in real-time, by analyzing code execution for malicious intent – which ESET claims will keep you ahead of the viruses, hackers and other evil doers and their evil plans of pc chaos. According to the ESET NOD32 website found at http://www.eset.com/products/index.php. ESET believes that viruses, worms, adware, and spyware can and should be detected by a single engine. A well-designed, integrated application like ESET NOD32 can detect adware, spyware, viruses, root kits, and other malicious attacks without sacrificing your systems resources.

NOD32 Benefits

ESET’s NOD32 is powerful and quick and with NOD32’s ThreatSense Technology it literally keeps track of every system nuance without sacrificing your precious system resources. They offer one single optimized engine offers the best protection from viruses, spyware, adware, phishing attacks, and more.
A few of NOD32’s Features:

• ThreatSense® technology — a single optimized anti-threat engine for analyzing code to identify malicious behavior, such as viruses, spyware, adware, phishing and more
• Unprecedented heuristic analysis capable of discovering new malware threats as they emerge
• Powerful virtual PC emulation technology enables unpacking and decryption of all types of archives and run-time packing
• Able to clean active malware running in memory
• Protects at multiple infiltration points, including HTTP, POP3, SMTP and all local and removable media
• Removes infections from files that are locked for writing (e.g., loaded DLL file)
• Prevents infected files from being opened and executed, and warns on creation of infected files
• Automatic execution on system startup
• Supports multiple Terminal Server environments
• Supports scanning of mapped network disks
• Automatic Updates
• And more!

What NOD32 Means for Developers

Most developers receive tons of emails, attachments and data everyday from clients and peers in order to work on projects. Thankfully most developers are savvy enough to have antivirus protection. Unfortunately this usually comes at the high price of lost system performance.  If you’re anything like me you have multiple applications open and running all at the same time it is usually a necessary evil to get things done in a timely fashion. A top heavy antivirus package can really slow things up for you if it is too bloated, next time your system is really dragging hit control > alt > delete and look at your antivirus processes and be prepared for a shock. Most programs developers use are usually processor intensive and very demanding of your system  to begin with, it’s the nature of the beast, you cant have all the fancy bells and whistles without it.

Your antivirus program shouldn’t take away from what you need to get the job done. NOD32 has a full background presence that does everything the other antivirus platforms do without sacrificing your systems resources and stability. Not only that but it scans A LOT faster than the its competitors, check out the reviews and statistics on ESETS website for the statistics run by independent companies, they are impressive and after all time is money, you don’t want to wait all afternoon for your system to run a scan.

What NOD32 Means for Home and Business Users

NOD32 is cheaper and easier to implement and update than a lot of its competition with options for any size business or personal editions. It’s fast, efficient and has a simple to use control panel interface that is very intuitive. Most home users aren’t running the fastest machines in the world, they have just what the need to get the job done and NOD32 will assimilate smoothly into their computing environment without taking it over.
Businesses will also notice how smoothly it integrates and appreciate the cost and ease of management across servers and the fact that it scans network drives is a big plus. We have been using NOD32 now for about a year and can’t stress how happy we are with it and encourage you to look over ESET.com to see what we are talking about.

What Was Considered Web 1.0

If you are one of the proponents that believes the web evolved in stages Web 1.0 could be defined as the birth of static HTML pages. In the mid-1990s, Web 1.0 began as a repository of information and static content. What is now termed “Web 1.0″ often consisted of static HTML pages that were updated rarely, if at all. They depended solely on HTML, which a new Internet user could learn fairly easily to cobble together some type of web presence.

In Web 1.0 genre, a small number of developers created Web pages for a large number of readers. As a result, people could get information by going directly to the source: Adobe.com for graphic design issues, Microsoft.com for Windows issues, and CNN.com for news just to name a few.

Over time, as the web grew, more and more people started writing content in addition to reading it. This had a major impact on the web as we knew it — all of a sudden there was too much information to keep up with!
No one had enough time for everyone who wanted our attention and visiting all sites with relevant content simply wasn’t possible.

Main Web Technologies Used:

• HTML
• JavaScript
• Simple Forms with little or no user interaction

Site Examples:

• drudgereport.com – Founded by Matt Drudge, 1994. What began as a gossipy email newsletter has, since its first post in 1994, developed into one of the most powerful media outlets in American politics.
• amazon.com – Founded by Jeff Bezos, 1994. Amazon.com quickly became the headline act of the dotcom boom and Bezos was Time magazine’s man of the year in 1999.
• yahoo.com – Founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, 1994. Yahoo.com is an internet portal and media corporation that is now the single most visited website on the internet.

With the desire for businesses and individuals to keep their users interests a new system was needed. This new system evolved the web into its next pseudo phase Web 1.5.

What Was Considered Web 1.5

Web 1.5 could be described as the dynamic web with the advent or creation of Content Management Systems or CMS for short and the addition of new and exciting interactive content to websites that users could control and manage. The tail end of this era saw the creation and arrival of “Blogging” which was a huge step forward toward the original purpose of the web which placed the power of content and its creation in the hands of the everyday people.

These dynamic and interactive content styles revolutionized the web and changed the face of many websites as well as the backend systems that supported or powered them. These websites powered by new CMS systems enabled website owners or publishers to not only update and add fresh content more frequently but easily without hassle or fuss. This reduced the need for a team of developers to be on hand to code the latest updates or additions. These CMS systems although a little intimidating at first for some were generally as easy to use as a rich text editor and had powerful management features that gave the user the ability to upload images, text and even multimedia content such as video and audio files with the a few simple clicks.

The quickly rising amount of audio and video files being utilized online to inform, sell or tantalize swiftly revolutionized the way we interacted with information, entertainment and the mainstream of media as a whole. These types of content gave websites a certain amount of intrigue or “stickiness” as the term is used in the web development community, but this was only the tip of the ice berg.

Blog’s or Blogging, which stemmed from this time frame and is still currently all the rage is in all reality a CMS with an simplified front end design with a straightforward yet very powerful ability to allow users to interact with the website, comments.
A simple form at the bottom of the page (generally after the article or post) allowed the user to add his or her comments which would appear after the article for others to read.
This was true user interaction and it was embraced very quickly by the online community from personal publishers to large corporations as a way to interact with their users, fans and customers.

So what powered all of these interactive and powerful online applications? Most of the before mentioned advancements were programmed by powerful server side programming languages and a smattering of client side programming languages.

Main Web Technologies Used:

A few of the more widely used languages and technologies used to develop truly interactive website experiences and Content Management Systems are:

• PHP
• ColdFusion
• ASP
• Perl
• Flash’s ActionScript
• XML
• SQL
• MySQL
• Oracle
• DHTML
• JavaScript
• Java

The before mentioned list is by NO means all of the programming languages or technologies used in this era or for the creation of dynamic and interactive websites, merely an example of the most commonly used, some of the best websites and some of the worst utilized several or more of these languages to leverage the power of each and to attempt to provide their visitors and users with the features and information they desire.

Site Examples:

• amazon.com – Yes, Amazon.com. I know what you’re thinking, didn’t they just mention them in Web 1.0 and yes we did. Amazon has always been forward thinking and far seeing with both their users and their site development. With their powerful CMS and customer reviews on every product, sample chapters and multimedia products not to mention the powerful and tightly integrated programming languages makes Amazon.com a leader in this era of the web.
• Ebay.com – Ebay.com although started in 1995, really matured in this era and is completely user and user sales driven, complete with reviews, ratings and a vast individual store template and customization scheme made Ebay.com a force of nature to compete against and to keep users away from.
• CNN.com – CNN.com has always been at the forefront of news and its presentation with sticky features on their website. Their website never fails to attract visitors and keep them there with its rich dynamically driven content and multimedia news blurbs that are constantly updated 24 hours a day seven days a week. Complete with user polls and questionnaires, users feel as if their involved with the news not just reading it.

What is Web 2.0?

So now that we have seen the basics of what led up to the so called Web 2.0 it’s time now to attempt to figure out exactly what that term means. As I mentioned earlier this is no mean chore since it seems to mean something different to everyone. The term seems to be used loosely and perhaps this is a good thing since a term or technology can only encompass so much.

According to Wikipedia “O´Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0 in 2004 to refer to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in perceived new ways — such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies. O´Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since then it has become a popular, if ill-defined and often criticized, buzzword amongst the technical and marketing communities”.

Phew…so what does that mean? If a website shares information and collaborates with users its does that mean it is web 2.0? Wait a minute; didn’t Ebay.com, Yahoo.com, Amazon.com and a whole slew of others already do that previously in the so called Web 1.5 era?

Maybe we should look at another definition to help clarify things.

Answers.com has Web 2.0 defined as “An umbrella term for the second wave of the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 implies information and computing platform as well as a content storehouse. Sometimes called the “New Internet,” Web 2.0 promotes thin client computing, where everything is stored on servers (on the Web), and a user has access from any laptop or desktop computer via a Web browser”. The Answer.com definition is slightly more robust than the previous one but let’s see if we can mash the two together and add some more specifics to create a list we can really sink our teeth into.

Web 2.0 seems comprised of the following characteristics:

• It needs to let people collaborate and share information online
• It makes a great title for a conference
• Promotes “Thin Client Computing” (Where a user’s computer that performs all the application processing, but stores nothing locally and everything is stored on the web and everything is handled through the browser).
• The site should not act as a “walled garden” – it should be easy to get data in and out of the system.
• Users usually own their data on the site and can modify at their convenience.
• Mainly web-based – most successful Web 2.0 applications can be used almost entirely through a web browser: this is commonly referred to by the phrase “network as platform”.
• Data returns should be dynamic, not static, changing depending on variables associated with the user’s query (e.g. keywords, location).
• An “architecture of participation” that allows users to add value to the application as they use it.
• Some social networking aspects.

Now that’s a little easier to grasp, but keep in mind that NONE of these aspects or technologies are a new concept to the web, they are just being leveraged in some cases in a different manner. Does that mean it’s a new era of the web? Or is it perhaps just a new spin on the old. You will have to make that determination yourself. With that being said lets talk a little bit about the technology used.

Main Web Technologies Used:

The technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 is complex and evolving; it includes server software, content syndication, messaging protocols, standards-based browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client applications. These differing but complementary approaches provide Web 2.0 with information storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that go beyond what was formerly expected of websites.

A Web 2.0 website typically features:

• Unobtrusive Rich Internet Application techniques (such as Ajax)
• CSS
• Semantically valid XHTML markup and/or the use of Microformats
• Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS/Atom
• Clean and meaningful URLs
• Weblog publishing
• Mashups
• REST or XML Webservice APIs
• RSS Syndication

• XHTML
• JavaScript
• XML
• Large Font Sizes
• Colorful Headings and Text
• Glossy Icons
• A lot of Drop Shadow Effects

Site Examples:

• Wikipedia.com – Wikipedia (a combination of the word wiki and encyclopedia) is an on-line “copyleft” encyclopedia that is constantly evolving and can be edited by anyone. Hosted and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, this open source resource is collaboratively created and maintained by thousands of users worldwide. Any article contributed to Wikipedia becomes free content that may be used, edited, copied and redistributed by users. All materials contributed to Wikipedia must be verifiable by other users.
• Flickr.com – Flickr.com allows photo submitters to categorize their images by use of keyword “tags” (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to easily find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags, Flickr repeatedly has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy. Also, Flickr was one of the first websites to implement tag clouds.
• Digg.com – A website with an emphasis on technology and science news. It combines social book marking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system.
• del.icio.us – The website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is a social book marking, social software web service for storing and sharing web bookmarks. A non-hierarchical keyword categorization system is used on del.icio.us where users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone’s bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL “http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki” displays all of the most recent links tagged “wiki”. Its collective nature also makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.

Web 2.0 – New Technology or Just a New Selling Point?

Given the lack of set standards as to what “Web 2.0″ actually means, implies, or requires, the term can mean radically different things to different people. For instance, many people pushing Web 2.0 talk about well-formed, validated HTML; however, not many production sites actually adhere to this standard. Many people will also talk about web sites “degrading gracefully” (designing a website so that its fundamental features remain usable by people who access it with software that does not support every technology employed by the site); however, the addition of Ajax scripting to websites can render the website completely unusable to anyone browsing with JavaScript turned off, or using a slightly older browser.

Many have complained that the proliferation of Ajax scripts, in combination with unknowledgeable webmasters, has increased the instances of “tag soup”: websites where coders have apparently thrown <script> tags and other semantically useless tags about the HTML file with little organization in mind, in a way that was more commonly done during the dot-com boom, and is something many standards-proponents have tried to eschew. Some critics also object to cluttered, arcane navigation structures in Web 2.0 websites.
Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 featured on networked systems well before the term “Web 2.0″ emerged; Amazon.com, for instance, has allowed users to write reviews and consumer guides since its inception, in a form of self-publishing; and opened up its API to outside developers in 2002.

Conversely, when a website proclaims itself “Web 2.0″ for the use of some trivial feature such as blogs or gradient boxes, observers may generally consider it more an attempt at self-promotion than an actual endorsement of the ideas behind Web 2.0. It has sometimes been reduced to simply a marketing buzzword, like ’synergy’, that can mean whatever a salesperson wants it to do, with little connection to most of the good, but unrelated ideas that it is based on. The argument also exists that “Web 2.0″ does not represent a new version of World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use “Web 1.0″ technologies and concepts.
Other criticism has included the term “a second bubble” stating that there are too many Web 2.0 companies attempting to create the same product with a lack of business models.
Some venture capitalists have noted that there are too few users of the second generation of web applications to make them an economically-viable target for consumer applications.

Online Resources

NOD32 by ESET

• Eset.com
• NOD32 Free 30 Day Trial
• NOD32 Key Features

Web 2.0

• Web 2.0 by Wikipedia
• Web 2.0 by Answers.com
• Web 2.0 for Designers
• What is Web 2.0 by O´Reilly
• Web 2.0 Websites & Services

Sources & References

• Wikipedia.com
• Answers.com
• Digital Web Magazine
• O´Reilly.com
• ESET.com
• A Ton of Google.com