Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Importance of CSS in web development
CSS style sheets have made it easier to handle web pages during web development. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets as the name suggests is a style sheet that allows you to easily link to other documents in your website. It allows you to retain control over the various elements in different web pages of your website.
CSS only defines the structure and content presentation of a website it has nothing to do with the design of a website. A single CSS sheet can control the font, positioning, colour and style information of an entire website.
9 advantages of using CSS
* Web pages are easier to load and uses less bandwidth
CSS style sheets are preferred by web developers for website development because they are lighter than table layouts, which consumes lots of bandwidth. The style sheet is downloaded only once and stored in the cache memory, so subsequent pages load faster.
* A CSS style sheet compliments well with HTML
HTML is insufficient when used independently in website development, but when combined with CSS they can result in technically stronger web pages.
* CSS allows you to position your element anywhere in the webpage
Web developers love to use CSS because it allows them to position their element where ever they want in the web page. If during any phase of web development the developer feels that particular links or columns are not going well with the situation then it becomes easier for them to position them easily using CSS. CSS reduces the risks associated with maintenance of the website.
* CSS is compatible with all web browsers
CSS is combined with HTML or XHTML by web developers for web application development because it is compatible with all web browsers. The sites that use CSS appear similar in all the web browsers.
* CSS can be used to create print friendly web pages
Most of the web developers love to use CSS for building their HTML based web applications because they allow them to create print friendly web pages. These web pages can be easily printed. The colours, images and other things which are difficult to be printed can be eliminated and printed easily.
* CSS style sheets allows the user to customize the webpage
Now days many websites allow the user to change the layout of the website without affecting the content. The CSS style sheets which are stored externally allow the user to make requisite changes by themselves. Most of the modern browsers give user the liberty to define their own style sheets like changing some font properties etc.
* CSS style sheets makes it easier for your website to feature in search engines
The CSS style sheets are favoured by web developers because they allow them to position their elements as per their wish anywhere in web application. Positioning helps to project the main contents first, so that it is easily captured by web spiders. CSS also gives cleaner HTML codes thus cutting down the job of web spider to search the real content from junk code.
* CSS allows the web pages to have absolute consistency
One of the reasons for using CSS during web development is that they allow consistency to all web pages. All the expressions and texts will get their characteristics from external style sheet. Web developers need not to worry about the change in characteristics of the elements because they can be easily altered at any stage of web development by using CSS.
* CSS lends portability to content
By using CSS you can make separate style sheets for different media. This provides you the great flexibility in presenting your content. CSS allows you to redefine the characteristics of elements in a website to suit the need of the situation. For e.g.: A separate style sheet will allow you to redefine the characteristics of certain elements so that they are easier to be printed. Also the user will never come to know that you had restructured the characteristics for their benefit.
CSS is created to make the things easier for your website and also to give you control over different elements in your website. Utilizing benefits of CSS will give you popular user friendly web pages.
To appreciate the beauty and flexibility of CSS, check out the site, CSSZenGarden.com
The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file.
CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure. To date, most examples of neat tricks and hacks have been demonstrated by structurists and coders. Designers have yet to make their mark. This needs to change.
Original Source:
http://support.fuchsiasoft.org/importance-of-css-in-web-development-t67.html
Friday, August 31, 2007
Optimize your Web site performance to survive heavy traffic
1. Avoid accessing databases to often
On a database driven content sites, the slowest task is accessing the database to retrieve the content to display. If a site is not fast enough to serve its pages, many simultaneous user accesses force the Web server to create more processes to handle all the requests.
This is bad because it demands more server memory. Once the server RAM is exhausted, the machine starts using the virtual memory, making the server even slower, until it halts completely.
2. Cache Web pages
If the site needs to access the database to retrieve the content to display, what can we do to minimize the database accesses?
First, we need to focus on what kind of information the site retrieves from databases. The most common type of data is information used to build the HTML pages.
The fact is that the information in database does not change so frequently. As a matter of fact, usually different users see the exact same HTML content when they access the same page.
It is not unusual to execute many SQL queries to retrieve all the data that is necessary to build a single HTML page. So, it is evident that it would be much more efficient if the sites could cache the HTML of each page after it is accessed for the first time.
So, what if the database content changes? Just call a code that invalidates all the page caches that depend on content of the changed database table rows. This way, it forces the caches to be rebuilt on the next access to the site pages, and so the pages are always upto date.
3. Avoid needless personalization
What about pages that appear differently to each user that accesses them? Use separate cache files depending on the user accessing the pages.
However, it would useless if the site would use a separate cache file to store the HTML that each user sees. The benefit of reusing cached information would be lost.
To maximize the efficiency of this approach you should minimize the number of user profiles that may be used for each page context. Therefore, it is very important to avoid personalization as much as you can.
4. Queue tasks that may take too long
Caching is great to avoid repeated accesses to the same content stored in a database.
However, caching only applies to accesses that retrieve data from databases. Operations that update the database content may not benefit from caching. However, when done to frequently, database write accesses may cause server overload.
One of the solution is not to update that table in real time. Instead, create a similar table that act as a queue. The queue table has no indexes. Periodically, start a background task from cron, and move the queue table data to the main table.
5. YSlow 13 optimization rules
There are many aspects to be concerned regarding what to do to make browsers interact with the Web servers in an optimized way that it takes less time and less server resources.
The issues are often not trivial to understand for people looking for quick and easy solutions to optimize their Web sites. Fortunately, there are tools that help you to audit your sites and suggest what needs to be done to boost the performance of the sites to the limit.
YSlow is one of those Web site performance auditing tools. This is a tool that the fine folks of the team of Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo! released a few weeks ago.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
This is a wonderful tool that in a few seconds gives you an overview of how a page of your site is being served. It also suggests what can be done to optimize aspects that affect page loading speed and the consumption of Web server resources.
This tool is an extension for the Firefox browser. It works together with another very good extension named Firebug. So, to use YSlow, first you need to install Firebug.
http://www.getfirebug.com/
Once you have installed Firebug and YSlow, it is very easy to audit the performance of any Web page. Just load a Web page that you want to test and wait until it finishes loading. Then open the Firebug pane, click on the YSlow tab, and use the Performance button.
Immediately YSlow starts collecting details about the current page. When it is done it shows a list of 13 rules about aspects of the page loading performance.
On the left side of the listing you see grades from A to F. Those grades express how your page performs on each of the 13 rules, A being the best and F being the worst. On the top of the listing you see your overall "Performance Grade" also from A to F, and a score between 0 and 100.
If you got the score 100, congratulations, your page is perfect. Otherwise there is performance tuning work to be done.
Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site are
6. Too much AJAX and external Javascript may kill your page performance
Using AJAX and cool Javascript libraries is definitely the latest fashion in Web application development. These are common aspects that you may notice in the so-called Web 2.0 sites.
The problem is that when you use a Javascript library that has may interdependent components, sometimes to use a simple component you end up loading a pile of separate Javascript files.
This makes the browser send a lot of requests to the Web server once it enters a page that needs many of those Javascript files. Not only it may cause excessive load to the server, but it also slows down the rendering of a page, even when the page HTML has already been fully loaded. It is a similar effect of pages that use Flash movies that take a while to load.
Browsers cache Javascript files, but when the user is making the first access to a page that needs many Javascript files, it may take too long. It may give the impression that your site is much slower than it actually is.
More detailed information regarding rules to optimize your Web site performance and for defensive programming practices to survive Web site traffic peaks can be found in www.phpclasses.org
On a database driven content sites, the slowest task is accessing the database to retrieve the content to display. If a site is not fast enough to serve its pages, many simultaneous user accesses force the Web server to create more processes to handle all the requests.
This is bad because it demands more server memory. Once the server RAM is exhausted, the machine starts using the virtual memory, making the server even slower, until it halts completely.
2. Cache Web pages
If the site needs to access the database to retrieve the content to display, what can we do to minimize the database accesses?
First, we need to focus on what kind of information the site retrieves from databases. The most common type of data is information used to build the HTML pages.
The fact is that the information in database does not change so frequently. As a matter of fact, usually different users see the exact same HTML content when they access the same page.
It is not unusual to execute many SQL queries to retrieve all the data that is necessary to build a single HTML page. So, it is evident that it would be much more efficient if the sites could cache the HTML of each page after it is accessed for the first time.
So, what if the database content changes? Just call a code that invalidates all the page caches that depend on content of the changed database table rows. This way, it forces the caches to be rebuilt on the next access to the site pages, and so the pages are always upto date.
3. Avoid needless personalization
What about pages that appear differently to each user that accesses them? Use separate cache files depending on the user accessing the pages.
However, it would useless if the site would use a separate cache file to store the HTML that each user sees. The benefit of reusing cached information would be lost.
To maximize the efficiency of this approach you should minimize the number of user profiles that may be used for each page context. Therefore, it is very important to avoid personalization as much as you can.
4. Queue tasks that may take too long
Caching is great to avoid repeated accesses to the same content stored in a database.
However, caching only applies to accesses that retrieve data from databases. Operations that update the database content may not benefit from caching. However, when done to frequently, database write accesses may cause server overload.
One of the solution is not to update that table in real time. Instead, create a similar table that act as a queue. The queue table has no indexes. Periodically, start a background task from cron, and move the queue table data to the main table.
5. YSlow 13 optimization rules
There are many aspects to be concerned regarding what to do to make browsers interact with the Web servers in an optimized way that it takes less time and less server resources.
The issues are often not trivial to understand for people looking for quick and easy solutions to optimize their Web sites. Fortunately, there are tools that help you to audit your sites and suggest what needs to be done to boost the performance of the sites to the limit.
YSlow is one of those Web site performance auditing tools. This is a tool that the fine folks of the team of Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo! released a few weeks ago.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
This is a wonderful tool that in a few seconds gives you an overview of how a page of your site is being served. It also suggests what can be done to optimize aspects that affect page loading speed and the consumption of Web server resources.
This tool is an extension for the Firefox browser. It works together with another very good extension named Firebug. So, to use YSlow, first you need to install Firebug.
http://www.getfirebug.com/
Once you have installed Firebug and YSlow, it is very easy to audit the performance of any Web page. Just load a Web page that you want to test and wait until it finishes loading. Then open the Firebug pane, click on the YSlow tab, and use the Performance button.
Immediately YSlow starts collecting details about the current page. When it is done it shows a list of 13 rules about aspects of the page loading performance.
On the left side of the listing you see grades from A to F. Those grades express how your page performs on each of the 13 rules, A being the best and F being the worst. On the top of the listing you see your overall "Performance Grade" also from A to F, and a score between 0 and 100.
If you got the score 100, congratulations, your page is perfect. Otherwise there is performance tuning work to be done.
Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site are
- Make Fewer HTTP Requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Add an Expires Header
- Gzip Components
- Put Stylesheets at the Top
- Put Scripts at the Bottom
- Avoid CSS Expressions
- Make JavaScript and CSS External
- Reduce DNS Lookups
- Minify JavaScript
- Avoid Redirects
- Remove Duplicate Scripts
- Configure ETags
6. Too much AJAX and external Javascript may kill your page performance
Using AJAX and cool Javascript libraries is definitely the latest fashion in Web application development. These are common aspects that you may notice in the so-called Web 2.0 sites.
The problem is that when you use a Javascript library that has may interdependent components, sometimes to use a simple component you end up loading a pile of separate Javascript files.
This makes the browser send a lot of requests to the Web server once it enters a page that needs many of those Javascript files. Not only it may cause excessive load to the server, but it also slows down the rendering of a page, even when the page HTML has already been fully loaded. It is a similar effect of pages that use Flash movies that take a while to load.
Browsers cache Javascript files, but when the user is making the first access to a page that needs many Javascript files, it may take too long. It may give the impression that your site is much slower than it actually is.
More detailed information regarding rules to optimize your Web site performance and for defensive programming practices to survive Web site traffic peaks can be found in www.phpclasses.org
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Free Web Hosting
Can you really get FREE web hosting?
Yes, there are hundreds of free hosting web sites, as far as not having to pay any money to have your website hosted. Generally they either cost you in time, web hosting restrictions, or modifying your free web pages by adding pop ups, banners, or other adverts. When looking for free web hosting (especially on search engines), you should beware that there are also a large number of commercial web hosts that claim to offer free hosting services, but those often have a catch, such as paying an excessive amount for a domain name or other service, and therefore aren't really free. The free free hosting guide below will give you some tips for finding the right free web hosting company for you.
How do the free web hosts make money?
The free website hosts often make money in other ways, such as putting banners, pop ups, or pop unders ads on your free web pages. Some free web hosting companies do not put ads on your site, but require you as the webmaster to click on banners in their control panel or sign up process, or just display banners in the file manager in hopes you will click them. Some lure visitors with free hosting in hopes you will upgrade and pay for advanced features. A few send you occasional emails with ads, or may even sell your email address. A new method that is becoming popular is requiring a certain number of "quality" forum posting, usually as a means of getting free content for them and thereby being able to display more ads to their website visitors.
Are free web hosts reliable?
Generally no, although there are a few exceptions. If the free host is making money from banner ads or other revenue sources directly from the free hosting service, then they likely will stay in business, provided someone doesn't abuse their web hosting server with spam, hacking, etc., as often happens to new free web hosting companies with liberal signup policies. If the freehost accepts just anyone, especially with an automated instant activation and it offers features such as PHP or CGI, then some users invariably try to find ways to abuse it, which can cause the free server to have a lot of downtime or the free web server to be slow. It is best if you choose a very selective free hoster which only accepts quality sites (assuming you have one).
Uses for free webspace
Free web hosting is not recommended for businesses unless you can get domain hosting from an ad-free host that is very selective. Other reasons for using free hosting websites would be to learn the basics of website hosting, have a personal website with pictures of your family or whatever, a doorway page to another web site of yours, or to try scripts you have developed on different web hosting environments.
How to find the right free web hosting site
The best place to search for free web hosting is on a free webspace directory website (i.e. a web site which specializes in listing only free web hosting providers). There are some which add new free hosts pretty much every week (and if it is updated often, has usually had to delete about as many). There are also many which almost never update their web site, and a huge percent of their links and info are outdated. Unfortunately that includes most of the directories that were the best several years ago. The problem is free hosts change so often, and most fold up in less than a year (often even after only a day or two), that it is hard to keep such a free hosting directory up-to-date.
For a more selective list of the best free hosts, there are also these free webspace hosting directories:
Free WebHosts (http://www.free-webhosts.com)
Best Free Webspace (http://www.100-Best-Free-Webspace.com/)
Free Hosting (http://www.Absolutely-Free-Hosting.com/)
Free Webspace (http://www.free-webspace.org/)
Other (usually less useful) resources include subcategories of freebies sites, search engines and directories, and forums. Your ISP might also supply you with free webhosting.
Hints for finding the best free web hosting service
Generally it is best not to choose a free hosting package with more features than you need, and also check to see if the company somehow receives revenue from the free hosting itself to keep it in business. As already mentioned, it is best to try to get accepted to a more selective free host if possible. Look at other sites hosted there to see what kind of ads are on your site, and the server speed (keep in mind newer hosts will be faster at first). Read the Terms of Service (TOS) and host features to make sure it has enough bandwidth for your site, large webspace and file size limit, and any scripting options you might need. Read free webspace reviews and ratings by other users on free hosting directories. If you don't have your own domain name, you might want to use a free URL forwarding service so you can change your site's host if needed.
Recommended free web hosts
It would be awfully hard to recommend any free web space host and someone not like it, as different people need different web hosting features and have different priorities, and the webhosting quality may change over time. Also some people want free domain hosting (you own the domain), and others might not be able to buy a domain name. Here are some of the most recommended free web hosts, and their main features.
- Tripod - http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/
- 100webspace - http://www.100webspace.com/web_hosting/free_plan.html
- AwardSpace - http://www.awardspace.com/signup.html
- php0h - http://www.php0h.com/
- XlPhp - http://www.xlphp.net/signup_form.php
- Hp-h - http://hp-h.us/signup.htm
- Gig4free - http://www.gig4free.com/registration_form.php
- 50webs - http://www.50webs.com/signup.html?domain_type=new&plan=0
- JayWebDesigns - http://www.jaywebdesigns.com/modules.php?name=Your_Account&op=new_user
- Somee - https://somee.com/Signup.aspx
- Domaindlx - http://members.domaindlx.com/otmain.aspx
- 1ASPHost - http://members.1asphost.com/otmain.aspx
- websamba - http://www1.websamba.com/registration/
- Free Cpanels - http://www.freecpanels.com/hsignup.php?pt=&plan=free
- 100-Best-Free-Webspace - http://www.100-best-free-webspace.com/
- Absolutely-Free-Hosting - http://www.absolutely-free-hosting.com/
- free-webspace - http://www.free-webspace.org/
You could read the original article in this link: http://www.free-webhosts.com/free-webhosting-article.php
More Lists of Free Web Hosts
- http://www.free-webhosts.com/webhosting-01.php
- http://www.free-webhosts.com/php-hosting-comparison.php
- http://www.free-webhosts.com/search-webhosts.php?ORDER=14&CO=1
Please visit my other blogs too: http://edwardanil.blogspot.com for information and http://netsell.blogspot.com for internet marketing. Thanks !!
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