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Web Design Technology |
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Here are some of the technologies used to produce i-compute.net. Flash This powerful and flexible software application, made by Macromedia (now owned by Adobe?), allows the Web Designer to incorporate complex animation and an unprecedented level of user-interaction into their online content. Limited only by the designer's imagination (and ability), Flash is, in the opinion of i-compute.net, second to none when it comes to multimedia production. You will note the apparent lack of Flash files on i-compute.net. This is because, as the name suggests, the content it creates is very 'flashy' and is not required for such a 'functional' site. Click here to see an early example of Flash work. PHP PHP is a 'server-side scripting language' which means that program code can be written and uploaded to a server. When a remote browser selects to view the PHP page, the server executes the script itself, outputting a regular HTML Web page, which is then sent to the remote browser. The i-compute.net site is built using PHP technology. PHP code is used to 'include' the same header into every page and to implement the SeeMyStats/logVisit system. It is also used to control all database activity, including the registered members interactions, and handles user sessions, login / logout etc. MySQL MySQL is an open-source database application, used in all of the latest i-compute.net productions, and is essential when handling large volumes of data. It is readily compatible with (and some might say inseparable from) PHP, and as such you will often find job vacancies requiring 'PHP-MySQL experience'. In conjunction with the (usually) freely available application 'phpMyAdmin', this is amongst the best of choices for online data-handling available. CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology is used to standardise the format of i-compute.net, defining the styles, fonts and colours of the various links, headings and so forth. CSS can also provide more complex layout design functionality, and it is used on this site to set the spacing of elements, and also their location in some cases. CSS has become an essential aspect of modern Web Design, allowing swift style updates across an entire Website by altering a single file only. HTML Hyper-Text Markup Language is the basic language of the Internet that all Web browsers can understand. It is not a programming language as such (HTML computation is not strictly possible), more of a 'presentation language'. The structure of every single Web page is, ultimately, provided by the HTML code (whether it has been pre- processed with PHP etc. or otherwise) and it is this code which informs your browser that 'this is a link' or 'underline this text' etc. If you are looking to work as a Web Developer / Designer, the best place to start is with a book on simple HTML. Knowledge of the most basic structure of Web pages is essential for finding problems manually, when your fancy design application just won't create the page the way you want it. |
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