Web Development Process

Visual –spatial model

To develop a site, there are five stages in visual –spatial model that you should think through before crafting your final project planning:

1. Planning- to conceptual Site definition and planning
2. Content- known as Information architecture (researching, writing and adapting content for individual web pages, including markup and scripting)
3. Structure- Developing the overall structure, arrangement of pages and navigation tools. (site construction)
4. Design- Designing the visual content, page layouts and interface elements
5. Usability- Formal comprehensive testing of the site for usability and accessibility prior to publishing the site. (Tracking, evaluation, and maintenance)

Basic usability principles in Web environment

From my google, searching, I found that there are basic usability web design principles that  includes:

(1) navigation

(2) response time

(3) credibility

(4) content.

And this suggests:

·         easy-to-use navigation

·         frequent updating

·         minimal download times

·         relevance to users, and

·         high-quality content that also takes advantage of capabilities unique to the online medium (Nielsen 1993)

Shackel's Acceptability Paradigm model

Shackel’s acceptability paradigm model illustrates four things (usability, likability, utility and speed) and the balance between those aspects and the user’s financial and social costs. When users make a decision about using a web site, they weigh:

·         how useful it will be (usability)

·         its perceived ease of use (utility)

·         its suitability to the task (likability) which relatively affected

·         speed (response time) of web page, and

·         how much it will cost them (Cost)

Web Usability Model

 

To satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs:

• Availability: A site that's unreachable, for any reason, is useless.
• Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to drive customers to try an alternate site.
• Clarity: If the site is sufficiently responsive to keep the customer's attention, other design qualities come into play. It must be simple and natural to use – easy to learn, predictable, and consistent.
• Utility: Last comes utility -- does the site actually deliver the information or service the customer was looking for in the first place?

Visibility Analysis Model

Efficient visibility is a prerequisite for a website to be usable. Visibility analysis studies eye movements on the relevant pages:

·         How do users' eyes move across a web page?

·         How much attention is paid to the different regions?

·         Is attention directed to the relevant elements?

Web Development is used to bring interactivity into the website. Interactivity or dynamicity helps in making more of the visitors experience over searching the things from website.

Web Development refers to the non-design aspects of building web sites.

Website Development includes writing server side scripting codes in different languages and usage of database. There are different types of server side scripting languages and databases.

Server Side Scripting Languages

• ASP.net
• ASP (Active Server Pages)
• PHP (Hyper Pre Processor)
• VB.net
• Drupal
• ColdFusion
• CGI and/or Perl
• C Server Scripts
• Groovy (programming language) Grails (framework)
• Java
• Lotus Domino
• Python
• Ruby
• Websphere (IBM proprietary)
• Zoomla Templates

Database

• Oracle
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL
• Apache Derby
• DB2 (IBM proprietary)
• Firebird
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite
• Sybase

Website Development Planning

Web development concept is the necessary stage of website designing project. It is depends on a web development plan. A website development planning includes:

·         A blueprint (documentation- ghant chart and guideline/flow chart)

·         Your target audience

·         Website message

·         Its purpose

·         How will the information be organize

·         How will the website works (interactive, navigation)

·         Will it be usability

·         What it looks like (complement)

-planning includes asking more question (apply question that incorporate visual-spatial thinking: visual focus, problem solving, contextual, conceptual and wholeness) in the detailed of design
-  all the question provide detailed

Concept of Web Development

A thoroughly developed website concept results in an informative website tuned for its target audience in the World Wide Web. Website development concept includes several steps:

• Putting a list of tasks that you want to accomplish through your website;

• Research and analysis in the Internet

• Describing your target Website audience

Visual-Spatial concepts

Baehar (2007) suggests the Visual-Spatial concepts for Web sites.

1. Visual focus on- Outlining main website contents; important objects, change appearance, and good

                                Contrast

2..Problem-solving- Determining website functionality and usability, override your isual instincts with

                                 fixation

3. Contextual – Developing website navigation system; linking and sharing characteristics, helps users

                           interpret relation and meaning of content

4. Conceptual – Determining suitable Web design choices, share characteristics and suggest concepts,

                           icons and shapes

5. Wholeness – Developing an optimal informational structure of your website; grouping and

                            arrangement of elements, contextual clues, perception and trial and error

Ways to upload my files to servers

There are two ways:

1.       Using a File Manager provided by the web hosting company or File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This method is easier but time-consuming.

2.       Using FTP to upload website files on your web hosting server. This method is faster but needs a little technical knowledge.

Using the File Manager to upload files to a web hosting server

·         This method is applicable only if a File Manager has been provided by your hosting company.

·         It is located under Control Panel. You need to login first. Read more…

Using FTP to upload website files on your web hosting server

File Manager can upload multiples file but it is not a good option. The File Manager don’t have the track record files which were uploaded and which were in queue in case you lose the net connection.
You need to maintain files on your web site. The FTP is like HTTP. Using FTP you can quickly and easily manage the files on your web hosting server and the best way is through FTP clients. Learn more… 

Before You Get Started:

2.      Find out about your hosting account:

• Your FTP server/address: for example,  ftp.yourdomain.com. But sometimes, you will need to use your domain's IP address.
• Your user name and password: This should have been sent to you when you first signed up with a web host. Check your welcome email.
• The folder you need to publish your site to: This differs depending on the system your web host use. A popular folder to publish to is public_html     Link

Concept of servers

From my search, there are many different types of servers used in the market place today (for example: web servers, FTP servers, mail servers, audio/video servers, application servers, chat servers, News servers, server platform, fax servers, List servers... ). Check it here

To Compare Server Features, you can check the following url:

http://www.serverwatch.com/stypes/compare/index.php/compare_V2Vi

Web servers vs Application server

Web server serves pages for viewing in web browser via defined protocols. They host websites, connect to the browser to handle HTTP requests, like website www.google.com is hosted on google web server which can be accessed globally via web browser.

Application server runs the applications (programs), serves bussiness application programs through various protocols. Normally application server has a third server, the database server, that provides data for the applications.

Web server and Application servers are both serving a client but web server can (nearly) only serve html pages. Application server is more dynamic than web server. We can also configure an application server to work as a web server. It also could be argued that an application server is a superset of web server.

There are three reasons to separate the web server and the application server:
1. Security. Web servers are easier to secure from attacks because they only have show pages.

2. Scalability. Both server can be upgraded or more servers can be added as needed.

3. Performance. Web servers need to transport lots of data, application servers generally do

    computing. They can be specialized for their tasks in terms of CPU, RAM, storage, etc. Link

The State of Web Development 2010

About this survey…

It trigged my eye as it related to the latest web application issue. It reflect as nearly the same of all browsers.

As noted, this survey is used by professional web designers and developers around the world, it is a subjective survey.

Web development practices get changes over the time... we should try to update and focus on these issues by read¬ing pop¬u¬lar sites, blogs and attending¬ con¬fer¬ences so that we can track the changes for the web.

What is Web 2.0?

We all use web2.0 websites in our daily Internet activities.

Examples of Web 2.0 include social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, hosted services, web applications…allow users to do more than just retrieve information. We can build on the interactive Network, run software-applications through a browser.

Web 2.0 changed the trends of WWW technology and web design to user-centered, enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.

There are a few of successful and popular web2.0 websites:

Youtube.com, Wikipedia, the big article directories like the popular EzineArticles.com article directory, social bookmarking websites like digg.com or furl.com, wiki-based websites like wikihow.com where users can edit the contents of the website and the list of successful web2.0 websites go on and on.

A lot of people around the web claiming that web2.0 will soon go away. It's not that simple to create the next generation web2.0 website. A site has to be unique, innovative, creative, democratic…Read more…

                                A Comparision:  web 1.0 and web 2.0

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication