Webmaster Crap
Time to Launch
There are two very distinct phases to a website: (1) Design and (2) Marketing. In my opinion, far too many people spend way too much time on #1 and not enough time on #2. That is easy to do. All of us want to have a website which looks great and functions the way we need it. Those of us who do it ourselves can go around in circles trying to make it absolutely perfect before launch. Those of you who do not know how to design and program a website will hire developers to do it for you. However, many web designers and developers know not the first thing about marketing the website. They simply design the site, hand it over to the client, and leave with check in hand. Simply put, no website, no matter how well programmed and designed, is going to matter if people are not visiting it. And simply launching a website by uploading it is not going to attract anybody. So, the question is: how do you launch a website and actually get people to come to it? Click Here To Continue Reading »
Why PHP?
As many of you know, I do all of my web programming using the PHP programming language. There are quite a few other web programming languages out there, though, including Java, .Net, Cold Fusion, Perl, Ruby and others. I am partial to PHP, though, and there are reasons why I think this language has a leg up on the other main contenders.
PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in order to track users of his own site. Rasmus downplays the importance of his role in the language, though, and with good reason. Some other developers took an interest in what Rasmus created. they got together and wrote an API for it and turned it into PHP 3. The community took the original programming and expanded it heavily, ultimately using the language in settings for which it was never intended. Eventually, a new script parser was written (the Zend Engine) and PHP4 was released. PHP changed to PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP5 marks an even greater advancement in the language. The main benefits to PHP5 lie in the realm of object oriented programming. Click Here To Continue Reading »
The Prevention of SPAM on Your Website
One of the big issues with setting up any website is how to prevent SPAM. Simply put, if you directly publish your email address on your website, it is likely to be picked up by software robots and added to spam lists. These little robots act just like search engine robots. They scour the web, scanning the text of web pages. When they find an email address, they add it to a database. I can tell you from first-hand experience (from my earlier days in this business) that publishing your email address on your site WILL lead to problems with spam email. So, how can you prevent it? Obviously, you want website visitors to be able to contact you. If your site is a promotional mechanism for your business, you obviously want to have potential clients be able to easily contact you. The more barriers you put onto the process of contacting you, the least likely they are to go through with it.
Here are a few quick ways to spam-proof your site. Click Here To Continue Reading »
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
