Creating a static web site is much easier than creating a blog, a forum or a social media site, because sites that require a lot of interactivity need programming work to be done. Even if you buy and install an out-of-the-box script, it means someone somewhere has done all the programming work for you. You’ll probably find out that it’s not enough and that you programmers will still need to enhance it. Static web sites can be done without any programming work at all, but they will still be based on certain web technoligies.

The most important technology, without which a web site can’t exist, is HTML (or XHTML). HyperText Markup Language is always necessary: even websites built entirely in Flash require at least a few tags for the Flash object to become visible online.

Invented in 1989 by the famous Tim Berners-Lee, HTML has since become as much part of our modern life as electricity or TV. Consider the number of web sites and the fact mentioned above that all of them use HTML to a certain extent, and you’ll see that it’s not an exaggeration at all.

HTML is a system of marking up the source code of the webpage to instruct the browser which parts of the text should be treated as paragraphs, which of them are numbered/unnumbered lists and where to insert a picture or another object. It can also be used to create hyperlinks, thus linking various web pages among themselves. Initially HTML was expected to be responsible for the presentation of the webpage, but modern standards require that HTML controls only the semantics of the web document and the presentation part if left to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), another important technology often mentioned in connection with web sites. Thus certain tags (e.g. <font>) and attributes (e.g. bgcolor) have become deprecated in the latest published standards of the language.Learning the basics of HTML is a relatively easy task. It’s quickly mastered by anyone, including schoolchildren. But as HTML developed through the years, different quality standards emerged. Writing perfect, “beautiful” HTML code is no longer easy, requiring a high level of professionalism, especially when developing a web page whose presentation - including positioning of elements - is controlled entirely by CSS. An expert can judge the level of the webmaster’s expertise in the profession by simply looking once at the source code of the page.

CSS is a set of standard instructions given to browsers to intstruct them on the presentation of certain portions of a web document. Using CSS, a web master can set the colour and the size to all headings used throughout the website, text inside paragraphs, backgrounds, appearance of tables and numbered/unnumbered lists and many other things. Should the webmaster want to change the colour of all headings from, say, blue to green or purple, it can be done using just one line in the CSS file. With the old-fashioned <font> tag it would have taken a lot more time.Besides, CSS can be used to control the positioning of the page’s elements, which is a more semantically correct approach than using HTML tables for this purpose, but requires experience and skills from the webmaster and make cross-browser compatibility a challenge. Internet Explorer 6 is most often mentioned as the main troublemaker when it comes to CSS positioning, and since it’s expected to die very soon after Google refuses to support it, webmasters will definitely become more willing to shift to advanced, table-free web site design.

While talking about client-side technologies, it’s important to mention JavaScript, Java applets, Flash, AJAX and jQuery. They make web pages more animated, improve interation between the page and the user and make a lot of things possible which could have never been done using plain HTML. The most amazing example of it are Flash-powered games, which are swiftly gaining popularity. Thanks to Flash you can now play chess on Facebook with a friend living half the globe from you, take care of a virtual pet or play arcade games online without having to install them on your PC.

AJAX is a combination of technologies (JavaScript, XML, HTML and CSS) using the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server without reloading the whole page. Development of AJAX, has made web pages more interactive, as well as the development of Flash, and has opened new horizons for web developers.

Finally, jQuery is an advanced JavaScript library. Just one among many others, that’s true, but the most popular and, according to Wikipedia, used by 27% of the most visited web sites. It was developed to improve interaction between JavaScript and HTML. Experts do wonders with it.

Web 2.0 is unthinkable without Flash, AJAX scenarios or JavaScript effects which can help you improve the presentation of a web page where CSS’s capabilities are insufficient, at the same time making it more dynamic and interactive without sending any requests to the web server. But it’s important to remember that too much JavaScript, as well as too much Flash is worse than none. For example, building the whole web site in Flash kills its accessibility (screen readers can’t read text embedded in Flash), usability (impossible to copy and paste, or bookmark a particular page), search engine friendliness (the engines’ spiders don’t go into the Flash and Google, apparently, has stopped experimenting with reading Flash files). Such sites also take ages to load up. Screen readers and search engine spiders are also unable to interpret JavaScript. So this advanced technologies should be used wisely.

As the web develops and the new browsers offer their users more and more advanced means of exploring the World Wide Web, client-side technologies evolve too. Ten years from now, modern advanced technologies will look obsolete and weak, and new ones will replace them to impress and inspire web users. This makes it important for webmasters to continuously learn, enhance their knowledge and skills and keep up to date with new technologies.

Project management is a complicated, complex task. It involves setting proper objectives, thorough tracking and continuously making sure that it doesn’t cost more than its benefits are worth. Setting objectives is the first and most crucial phase. Objective are about benefits rather than products, which is an often misunderstood concept, and in order to properly describe an objective we need to define a performance parameter to modify, a measurement procedure to assess the achieved modification, current and target values of the parameter and the date when we expect to achieve the target value.

As we mentioned in one of the previous articles, a well chosen software tool for tracking the project and its objectives is an exceedingly important part of the process. A good program will help the project manager see in time that the total costs are likely to go over the top or that a important deadline is about to be missed, and take appropriate measures to improve the situation. It will automate - at least partly - the measurement procedures related to various project objective. It’ll track the activities of staff involved with achieving objectives and help the project manager see how effective their work is. It will simplify communication within your team and simplify decision making.

Good project management software should be customisable too meet specific needs ot specific businesses. It also needs to be intuitive so your team can learn the interface quickly, since this affects cost-effectiveness.

So, before choosing your project management and tracking tool, make sure you do thorough research and estimate all the costs involved. You might have found the most comprehensive and configurable software available, but if your team consists of three people and the project is expected to end in three weeks, choosing this tool can ruin you financially rather than help. In this case, email, Skype and a few Excel sheets are probably the only project management software you need. But if your project is expected to take several months (or years) to be completed, and your team consists of 50 or a hundred people, then it becomes a different matter, and a really sophisticated tool becomes a must.

The why

Any project goes - roughly - through the following five phases:

• defining
• planning
• execution
• controlling
• closure

On every stage your project management software will help you, though on the stage of defining the project it will come down mainly to writing up the scope and setting the objectives. It’s the third phase - the execution - when a good project management software solution becomes essential.

if the project is relatively large, it will be broken up into separate tasks, each of them receiving a deadline - otherwise it becomes virtually impossible to control anything and to deliver on time. It will be handy to assign a discussion to every tasks, so all people involved with its execution - including the client - could discuss arising problems and possible solutions. This brings forward the question of access rights and restrictions, since you won’t want a client to be able to view discussions related to another client’s project. The members of the team who are responsible for the task typically report their activities and time spent through the same system.

Once a task is completed, its status will be accordingly changed, and the aggregated data on the time spent and costs involved will be analysed and stored - and, if necessary, added to printable reports. That’s how project tracking works, making lives of project managers much easier (just imagine how hard it would be to do all this work on paper, especially if you have a large team!)

Issues and deliverables are tracked in a similar way.

Once we estimate that we have achieved the target value for a certain objective, the aggregated data collected during the execution phase can be used to assess the achieved modification and see whether the real benefit (in money terms) meets our initial expectations, considering the costs involved with achieving result. Once the project is completed, our software will preserve this data for us to use during the planning phase of our future projects, thus improving our experience and the quality of our project management.