Difference between Web Designing Versus Application Designing?

A website design company might be in conflicting terms with an application designer. There are distinct differences between the two and they are to be appreciated by one another. Each one of them is endowed with their strengths and fair share of weaknesses, with ones weakness being the strength of the other. An application designer is aware of the fact that additional features incorporated into a design might backfire. So to keep a Web design company in check an application designer must create designs that are lean and crisp.

A Website development company has an edge because the focus of an application designer is always narrow as compared to a Web designer. This narrowness is because of restricted use of space by an application designer. For instance, an application designer would attempt to incorporate as many applications as possible on a mobile screen which ultimately becomes a limiting factor. The greater the number of applications, the more challenging is an application designer's task. For a web designer this limiting factor does not exist as he works on a Website. For a best web development company the greater the number of applications incorporated in a site the higher would be its acceptability among users.

What is more important to note here is the usefulness or value of an application. Both a web designer and application designer must integrate features or applications that add value rather than just numbers.

An application designer is always on the lookout for adding features that are markedly different from those being offered by web designers. This is one area where a Website design company  has stayed behind an application designing company. There is a tendency among web designers to make certain alterations to an already existing application rather than create a generic one. A web designing company to emerge successful in the long run must always make attempts to create innovative applications.

While creating generic or unique applications a web development company must be cautious that they use standard GUI (graphical user interface). In the event these applications fail to work on standard GUI the deviations are to be clearly specified. However for all practical purposes and for the benefit of users in general, it is advisable that a website development company create applications that are standard GUI friendly. It is customary to get links underlined, arrange navigation keys at the sides or top of a webpage, and use buttons for navigation. Deviating from these norms in order to create something novel is a useless exercise until they are vividly indicated. If a website is not user friendly it is likely to lose its visitor.

Incorporating useful error messages to a website is something a website design company must be thoughtful about. A useful error message not only indicates an error but also ways to avoid it. This is applicable for both application and web designers. A helpful error message would aid in making a webpage more user friendly.

List of important advantages of Joomla Development

Content management System (CMS) made website development a easy task. Before CMS to developed a website is tough task. In todays IT indusrty CMS are present in each of the language i.e. PHP, Java and Dot net also. Some of them are Open source CMS, which we can use w/o paying any extra cost.

Joomla is one of such open source PHP CMS. Currently Joomla is most popular CMS in PHP. In Joomla we can developed any type of website it may E commerence website or any web portal. It helps in producing a dynamically user friendly website. Joomla development is cost effective and is written in PHP scripting language, it reduces our costing for development. Because its cost effective, it is ruling Development sector these days.

Apart from all the factors that it offers, its major advantage is of being cost effective unlike other web development platform methods. A big capital investment is not required to match up with a Joomla based website.

Many Joomla developers charge a reasonable fees for providing quality Joomla web development services. Joomla offers a wide range of features to help boost the functionality of a website to a significant level. Joomla has a number of modules which extend the functionality of a website. Due to which it performs better and generates more return on investment.

Joomla development can make highly interactive, professional, user-friendly and dynamic website. It is also helpful in Search engines rank for better traffic on website. Joomla based website obtain better SEO ranking and generate large traffic compared to other one.

Joomla CMS has its own community and forum which helps every developer to developed client required module as per requirement. In such community, developer can dicuss and get knowledge about updated template and other development code. This feature helps it to yield more returns. It also hepls to the fact that visitors should not only visit the website but also have to stay long enough to make purchases, which automatically increases their chances of visiting again in future.

Joomla's remarkable features offer a visually appealing website which makes all this possible with the fresh look it provides a website. Its diverse features make a website much easier to navigate. Joomla web development services are available at affordable prices and thus fit anyone's budget. Wide range of Joomla modules can used by all to include the desired functionalities in the website. Most modules are available and priced reasonably. In terms of reliability, quality and affordability, Joomla is impeccably efficient. To put it in a nutshell, Joomla is a magic box! It is not only affordable but has all the required features that anyone would need in website development.

Thus, any business whether small or big, can afford the phenomenal and quality rich Joomla services. But, make sure that your hire experts in the field. Hire only talented, experienced Joomla developers who possess that special knack to give you exactly what you wished for! Because developers who are au fait with the technology will offer powerful services that would directly benefit your business and brand. Professional Joomla service provider will see to it to provide you with the best and latest features available.

What are the useful Features of CMS Built Using WordPress?

WordPress is widely used platform around the globe as a Content Management System because it has many powerful features in it that makes it a preferred choice to switch from a traditional HTML-based website to WordPress. There are many reasons why people use WordPress as CMS. WordPress supports lots of international languages and it is very important if your business is able to cover various regions across the world because only English readers cannot be your customers. WordPress language extension is useful feature and it is gives possibility for your website visitors to select language in which they want to view your website. It will give you an advantage to customize the language with just a single click of the mouse.

WordPress comes with user authentication feature and give facility to multiple users to access the website at the same time each user can access the website with his or her own user rights. In most cases in the development of a traditional websites the developers have to add authentication and user access features in separate way but in WordPress, this is comes as a native feature. Using with various extensions it is possible to build a powerful social networking website with almost no investment and at a much faster rates compare to hiring a developer to do it. Templates are important aspects to achieve a consistent look and feel throughout the website so one needs not to worry about those pages which are destroying the look of your entire website. 

WordPress represents all web pages within a template and the best part is a template can be manipulated at any point in time so there is no need to revisit each and every web page in order to change how it looks because a single click is all it requires to change the look and feel of the entire website. WordPress makes it easy for people around the various sections to work on a website at a same time. Now, there is no longer a dependency where one has to remain dependent on the designer or programmer in order to get their content uploaded on the website. Once user has given the proper permissions and with proper rights anyone with a supported web browser can create content to use on the website and have it published. All newly published pages from the single template have the same site-wide template which makes sure that a consistent look and feel is maintain throughout the website and it allows the use of extensions feature which is perhaps the most powerful feature of Word Press.

Advantages of Open Source Development(OSD) for Web Site Development

Website developers are always hunting for cost-effective ways which can help in creating effective websites. They are in need of software which can help them in constructing highly appealing and qualitative sites at easy affordability. One such software that can help site owners to secure exceedingly effective websites is opensource development. This is powerful software which despite of having low cost is able to serve website owners with numerous benefits. All such benefits which can be acquired through this site development software are as follows:

• The  most vital benefit of this software is that it is obtainable free of cost.Website owners can acquire this tool for absolutely free. In addition to this, it can also be upgraded regularly without spending money. So, this is highly cost-effective tool for website development.

• A license required for legally operating open source development program is also available free. This license can be purchased and installed any numbers of times. It is very useful for protecting the website data from being tracking and monitoring. So, in this way website owners can provide complete protection to their sites in most affordable way.

• This software can be stored easily and in a much less disk space in comparison to other programs. Due to this small size it uses very less hardware power. It can be extracted to full size as and when required.

• Open source development software is highly useful for developing every task of a website. So, a complete website development project can be carried with it in much effective manner.

• Customization of this program is also very easy. It can be customized in many varieties of ways. Its effects can be utilized in order to secure quality web developing project.

• Another benefit of this tool is that is offers portability potential. With this potential, website owners can import any external data into their websites within minutes.

• Different aspects of a website project can be easily combined with each other through effective utilization of this program. Aspects such as application, workstation, server and service can be combined easily for effective management.

• There are free of cost maintenance and support services offered by companies who offer open source development program.

All these advantages can be secured through open source development tool. For this reason, it is one of the finest ways to secure well developed website structure.

Joomla Template Builder

PHP with MySql server on Linux Web Hosting

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. It is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language. It is designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It is the most popular scripting for web development and obove all it is free, open source and server-side. Along with another same open-source relational database management system "MySql Server", for database management, php and mysql gives users great options to create any kind of website you want, from large corporate portals to small contact form site.

The normal process flow is something like: The visitor create the page with PHP and some static language like HTML, and when the visitor opens the page the server processes the php commands to create html based output and sends the data to the user. Unlike ASP or ColdFusion, however, PHP is cross-platform. PHP runs on Windows NT and many Unix versions also.

The endless possibilities of the PHP scripting language, and MySql Server to serve as back-end and a great community of users has made PHP and MySql one of the most popular web development environment in use today.

Features with PHP hosting:

Below are some of the featuers provided with HosterPK's Sql Server Hosting:

• PHP 4 and PHP 5
• MySql Server 4.x and 5.x with phpMyAdmin to manage your server on the go on web
• Database backup and restore options
• cPanel, Softaculous, Website Builder, Fantastico Deluxe (with more than 50 one-click script installations)
• Linux and Windows Platforms
• Generous diskspace and bandwidth
• Instant Account Activation
• 24/7 database support

You can get access to all of above features by using phpMyAdmin (see below). And rest assured to get the best support and services on both of our web hosting services.

phpMyAdmin for MySql Server

myLittleAdmin is an open source php based Sql Server administration tool used to manage the Sql Server on the internet for shared Ms Sql Server Installations. myLittleAdmin give you access to all the features of full featured MS Sql server including creating, modifying or deleting databases, tables, fields, rows; user management, permissions and sql statements. 

www.hosterpk.com

Best and Free Developer Tools

Following are some simple but useful FREE tools for software developers.  Each tool is freely distributable and includes the original C# source code so you can modify the tool to your needs.  These tools are not supported.  Enjoy!
 

  Color Gadget

Select a .NET KnownColor or other color, copy RGB and hex values to the clipboard.

Free Download

  Guid Generator

Generate a new globally-unique ID and copy it to the clipboard.

Free Download

  

  Hex Converter

Quickly convert between hex and decimal numbers.

Free Download

  Shortcut Replace

Search/replace the path and working directory in a collection of shortcut (.lnk) files.

Free Download

  

  Visual Studio Toolbox Installer

Console program that installs/removes tabs and custom controls and components in the Visual Studio .NET Toolbox.

Free Download

  

  Window Watcher

Shows the form and client bounds of the active window.

Free Download

How To Build A Website??

Learn The Different Ways to Design, Develop and Build a Website

As there are so many useful tools on the web today, we would share some of the different ways you can build a website.

For Beginners

If you've always wanted to create a website, but you thought it would be difficult, this is for you!

If you’ve always wanted to create a website, but you thought it would be difficult, if you have no experience in website building and know nothing about web design, I highly recommend using site builders where you can create a website easily without having any technical knowledge.

Wix - You can create a free Flash website with Wix with its easy to use drag & drop editor, choose from dozens of free templates & publish online with a click.

For Budding Web Designers

For Students Who Want To Learn Professional Website Design and Development

1. First, you need to get a Domain Name and Web Host. We recommend Hostgator for cost effective Hosting solutions. HostGator is one of the world's top 10 largest web hosting companies with more than 1,000,000 hosted domains. They include a Site Builder, 24x7 Support, 99.9% Uptime Guarantee, 45 Day Money Back Guarantee, Free / Instant Setup, Instant Blogs, Formus, Portals Guestbooks and much more!
2. Next you need to need to purchase the best web design software. Currently it is Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.
3. Finally, you need to learn how to design and develop a site in Dreamweaver. Discover everything you need to know to build your website step by step from start to finish with this Dreamweaver tutorial.
4. The above tutorial also teaches you how to FTP your site to your host and make the site Live!

For Seasoned Web Design Professionals

For Busy Web Design Professionals, Web Design Firms, Freelancers and Programmers

I recommend using ready-made website templates, where you can show a variety of designs to your client and they can choose the best design which you can customize so it is tailor made to your clients requirements. It cuts down design and production time. You can choose from a variety of more than 19,000 ready made website designs. You need to have the web design software and software expertise to customize and use these templates. The templates also include Joomla templates, blog templates, Flash website templates, ecommerce templates, logos and corporate identity. The best part is you will earn a 20% commission for each template you sell from your website! These templates are great and would take days to develop if you needed to develop it yourselves. 

Joomla: Localization

You may have seen so many web sites which can me viewed in several languages. You may also think that it is so difficult to create such a site. But doing such a thing is not much difficult.

Presenting your Joomla web site in 3 languages is not a much difficult thing. Joomla can be used with several languages. I used as Trilingual in the title because in Sri Lanka we mainly use 3 languages.

So, we are going to use the popular JoomFish component for this. This is a great component which can be used very easily for localization.

(For writing this article I’m using a Joomla site installed in a folder called jom in localhost)

Let’s first install this component to our Joomla site.

http://www.joomfish.net/downloads

Download the latest stable version here.

Now  in the Joomla Backend (http://localhost/jomdemo/administrator/) go to Extensions>> Install/Uninstal.

Now press Browse button and select the downloaded file. After that press upload file and install. Now JoomFish will be installed.

Now in the Backend menu you’ll see the name JoomFish under components’

Also in the Frontend you’ll see the flag of UK near the search box( If you are using the default template)’

Flag

Now we need to download the language packs. Find them here : http://community.joomla.org/translations.html

Sinhala:

http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jtranslation/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=3494

Install 3 packages
 si-LK.installation.zip,
 si-LK_joomla_lang_admin.1.5.15v1.zip,
 si-LK_joomla_lang_site.1.5.15v1.zip similar to the above described way.

Tamil:

http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jtranslation/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=3455

Install the 2 packages ta-LK_joomla_lang_site.1.5.15.zip, ta-LK_joomla_lang_admin.1.5.15.zip found in the above url.

Now language installation has been completed.

Components >> JoomFish >> Language Configuration (http://localhost/jom/administrator/index.php?option=com_joomfish&task=languages.show ) and check the checkboxe for Sinhala under Active, and press Save.

Go to Components >> JoomFish >> Language Configuration (http://localhost/jom/administrator/index.php?option=com_joomfish&task=languages.show ) and check the checkboxes for Sinhala and Tamil under Active, and press Save.

Now in the Frontend you’ll see “Sinhala (Sri Lanka)Tamil” with that above stated flag of UK. We can change the site’s language by clicking on these.

If you want to show 2 images instead of “Sinhala (Sri Lanka)Tamil”, create two images called si.gif and ta.gif , and place them in the components/com_joomfish/images/flags/ folder inside the folder where we installed Joomla.

Examine the changes in the frontend when we are changing the languages’

You won’t see any changes in Articles and Menu Items. We need to translate them manually.

Translation

For this goto Components >>JomFish >> Translation.

In the right side give the language we are going to translate for the listbox “Language”. Let’s select Sinhala’

In the other ListBox (Content elements:) select Menus. You’ll then see a list of available menu items.

Click on the link for the menu item “Home”. So you’ll get a page for translation. There under Name you’ll see a box called Translation.Then check the Published checkbox in the right side and press save.

Now go to the frontend and check the main menu.

Now similar to the picture above, you’ll see what has happened.

Now I’m going to Translate the article “Joomla! Community Portal” into Sinhala.

In the similar way described above select Contents in the Content elements: ListBox. Then in the next view click on Joomla! Community Portal article and Translate in the same way described above.

See below:

See it is translated.

Translated the other things in the same way. Good Luck!

(You can find extensions to get the site automatically translated into several languages using Google Translate here : http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/languages/automatic-translations)

Difference between Cookies and Sessions

Cookies

There is a function setcookie() for cookie manipulation. This function allows reading and writing cookie files, as demonstrated in the following example:

<?php 

if (!isset ($_COOKIE['visited'])) { 
// if a cookie does not exist set it 

setcookie("visited", "1", mktime()+86400, "/") or die("Could not set cookie"); 

echo "This is your first visit here today."; 
} 

else { 

// if a cookie already exists 

echo "Nice to see you again, old friend!"; 

} 

?>

To see how this works, request the page above through browser a couple of times. The first time around, because no cookie has yet been set, the first message will be displayed. On all subsequent attempts, because the cookie has already been set, the client will be recognized and the second message will be displayed. Note that this works even if you terminate the browser instance, restart it and visit the page again. The setcookie() function accepts six arguments: the name of the cookie, its value, its expiry date, the domain, the path for which it is valid, and a Boolean value indicating its security state. Cookie values are automatically sent to PHP from the client, and converted to key-value pairs in the $_COOKIE variable, a super global array similar to $_SESSION.

Sessions

This is a simple counter that initializes a variable the first time you visit a Web page, and increments it each time you reload the page. The counter variable is stored in a session, which means that if you browse to another site and then return, the last saved value of the counter will be restored.

<?php 

session_start();                                                // initialize a session 

$_SESSION['counter']++;                              // increment a session counter

echo "You have viewed this page " . $_SESSION['counter'] . " times";      // print value  

?> 

To see how this works, request the script above through your browser a few times. You will notice that the counter increases by 1 on each subsequent page load. If you open up two browser windows and request the same page in each one, PHP will maintain and increment individual session counters for each browser instance. The session ID is used to identify which client made which request, and recreate the prior saved environment for each individual session. This also means that if you visit one (or more) other Web sites during the same session and then return to the script above without shutting down your browser in the interim, your previous session will be retrieved and recreated for you. Every session in PHP begins with a call to the session_start() function. This function checks to see whether a session already exists, and either restores it (if it does) or creates a new one (if it doesn't).