Studio 12a

Starting an online e-business? Faced with deciphering the countless possibilities of custom features for your website, it can be really confusing! There are just so many options and so much slang.

Where the Heck Do I Start?

So, what’s out there? Let’s start by going over some of the more common options for your e-business.

Web site features are limited only by imagination, time and money. As with any other business decision, features should be implemented based on return on investment (ROI). In internet terms, ROI often means “traffic”. Some of the major fields of web site features include blogs, wikis, stores, auctions, forums, articles, directories, news, and entertainment.

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SSH is a tool used via command line by programmers and admins to connect securely to another server. The server could be across the room, or across the globe. In my work as a web developer, it’s one of the most useful tools I have at my fingertips daily. Once you learn it, you’ll want to install it on every *nix machine you come in contact with…and want it on every server account!

SSH is actually a suite of tools. Once you start to use the different tools includes in SSH, the power of the suite really starts to change the way you work.

Secure Shell is a program to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. Unlike telnet, rlogin, ftp, and other such programs that perform similar tasks, SSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other network-level attacks. SSH lets you do all the important, useful *nix stuff like telnet, rlogin, rsh, and rcp in an encrypted format. In most SSH implementations, there is also a replacement for FTP: sftp.

If you’re familiar with SSL certificates for websites, SSH is pretty similar. Both setup encrypted communications over the web using keys or public credentials (digital certificates).

Using SSH is pretty easy once you learn a few commands, and becomes even more handy if you know or learn VIM (a unix/linux text editor). If you’re familiar with DOS or basic linux commands like mv (move), cp (copy) or rm (remove), you’ll have no problems doing the basics.

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In no particular order, the following is a list of successful women helping to shape the face of the internet, internet entrepreneurship and internet corporations.

Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman is the President and CEO of Ebay since 1998.

Emily Richards

President of MP3.com. Does the name sound familiar? She’s also the most downloaded artist of MP3.com.

Laura Tidwell

Owner and founder of Internet advertising company, Enginehouse Media. Enginehouse Media supports over 30 employees and is valued at about $30 million dollars.

Lopa Patel

Named ‘Asian Woman of the Year 2005’ by the he Asian Women of Achievement Awards, Lopa Patel is the founder of Asian Lifestyle Portal redhotcurry.com. Redhotcurry.com is a self-financed web portal that focuses on Asian life in the UK. The site includes news, views, money, business, entertainment, food and drink, health, style, sports and travel with interactive discussion groups, on-line chat, web based email and a comprehensive searchable UK South Asian restaurant directory.

Eva Manolis

Co-founder, Vice President of Web products and services of Shutterfly.

I’m thumbless today on my right hand due to overuse of my several year old trackball. My thumb is in a splint and I’m having to learn to rely more on my left hand. I understand splints are controversial but it discourages me from using my thumb, so I’m happy.

I have been procrastinating purchasing a Wacom pen for several months now and am debating on if I can use one now. It may turn out to be the solution I’m looking for, or exactly the wrong thing. Not sure…

This situation has directed my thoughts towards ways to prevent and care for ‘programmer hand’, as I like to call it. Repetitive use is a serious challenge for those of us who use keyboards and mice/trackballs/etc. for 8 or more hours daily.

Some of us get shoulder issues, while others get hand and wrist issues. Or we could get knee issues from sitting all day (your leg tendons actually shorten) or back issues. How do we take care of ourselves when we need to sit and type for extended periods without interruption?

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A wonderful link I received recently is for an article about 50 beautful css-based web designs. The featured designs are really refreshing and vary in both layout and color. I’m an avid reader of CSS Zen Garden so, of course, I loved this link! Bookmarked for inspiration.

Other collections of CSS Designs you might find interesting…

• CSS Princess
• CSS Import
• CSS Beauty
• CSS Vault

“Most people think web design is a technical field. And, of course, it is — to some degree. But it’s also a creative field, and I don’t think most people understand this. When I tell people I’m a web designer, their response is often, “oh great, you can help me fix my printer.” Or, “oh, I have Dreamweaver, myself.” In other words, they believe we’re geeks. And maybe some of us are. They don’t seem to understand that a huge portion of what we do is design — layout, typography, color, communication, problem solving — these are the areas where we really earn our stripes. But clients hire us in much the same way as they hire a moving company. They say, “Put this over here, and that over there. Make this bigger. Now change this color.” They don’t realize these are the decisions that they’re paying us to make.“

- Jeff Croft, www.jeffcroft.com

I often ponder this topic when I get a client that “knows exactly what they want”, questions my rate or mentions they “could get so-and-so to do it for less”. Sometimes they really do know exactly what they want and things go incredibly smooth. Other times, nothing could be further from the truth. And when someone could do it for less, my response is to wonder why we’re talking.

Design for the web is an art, as are many other professional trades. It requires dicipline, knowledge and experience. Simple decisions can have a greater impact than initially thought. For instance, a low-contrast color scheme could dramatically decrease the ability of a color-blind visitor’s website experience. It could make buttons hard to find or links hard (or even impossible) to read. Using drop navigations or fly-out menus can reduce the usability of a website. The list goes on…

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Congress passed a Bill today that prohibits credit card companys and banks from making payments to online gambling companies. While this doesn’t criminalize online gambling, it is certainly a huge shift in this industry. The U.S. is the largest majority market spender, and Britain is the largest money-maker in this industry.

The U.S. already has legislation prohibiting online gambling on U.S. soil and recently arrested David Carruthers, CEO of Betonsports.com, while he was on a layover to Costa Rica. David Carruthers was arrested on charges of racketeering, conspiracy and an illegal online gambling enterprise.

Why the pressure on online gambling? One could assume that it’s the exportation of U.S. spenditure to foreign soil, but that seems a simplistic point of view. One thing that is certain is that this new move will create new methods of transferring money for online gambling. It’s simply too far entrenched to be stopped.

And why try to stop it? We have two wars going on (Afghanistan and Iraq), a huge deficit (not counting the accounting irregularities of Social Security). For the record, I’m not a gambler myself. I just don’t understand where the pressure on this issue is coming from.

It will be interesting to see what effect this legislation will have on an industry that has been forcasted to become a US$20 billion worldwide industry by 2009.

I recently did a layout that required equal height columns with boxes inside the columns. I didn’t want to use tables, not because it’s not cool anymore, but because it’s difficult to maintain. Reading through embeded tables and trying to figure out where that missing td is…well, I certainly don’t miss it.

In addition, each page in this project was broken out into Mason components, with another developer building the logic and components. So calculating where to cut a table into a component looked like a huge headache for both of us. Try finding the missing td in a group of files….fun stuff, huh?

I used the ‘One True Layout‘ for this project because it fit the bill. Although, I have to admit that it was difficult for the other developer on the project to quickly absorb because it’s complex. At least this implementation was…it required equal height columns with boxes inside the left/right columns for blocks of content.

If the content in the center column exceeded the height of the left/right columns, the weight had to be distributed to the last box in the left/right column. This required what I like to call, ‘faux borders’. I used the ‘One True Layout’ to do the columns with borders in a way that pushed the last box border over the area of the content area. Basically the bottom border of the last box was hidden.

I then added a div for each column to create the bottom border. Sometimes it was 3-column, 2 column, etc. Project specs kept changing, but luckily, the layout I created was flexible enough to accomodate. Heck, they could have added 5 or more columns…it didn’t matter.

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Blogging software has been often confused with being a Content Management System. While the application of blogging software is used to manage articles (a.k.a “posts”), it’s important to remember that articles are not all that the term ‘content’ implies when comparing blog software to full-blown CMS software.

Content also includes photos, web forms, calendars, products and anything else that appears on a website. Content for a CMS can actually include blogs.

While I realize that the last statement could end the topic, I think it’s worthwhile to more fully explore the differences…because there is a lot to know.

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I recently ran across SEOmoz.com and found the Page Strength Tool really useful for accessing inbound links, visibility and other SEO factors. Since my original visit, a new tool has been added to determine the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword. Visit SEOmoz’s tool section.