People unfamiliar with web design often ask if HTML is some kind of a programming language. The answer is, no, it isn’t. It’s a markup language that consists of tags and attributes that tell the browser how to render the web page. One of the possible examples of a tag is a <p> tag that means “paragraph”. At the start of every paragraph we should put a <p> tag (and opening tag), and at the end of the same paragraph, the </p> tag (it’s a closing tag). Attributes are placed inside tags to give the browser more information about tags. For example, the following code produces a hyperlink to Google: <a href=”http://www.google.co.uk/”>Google</a>. Here, <a href=”http://www.google.co.uk/”> and </a> are opening and closing tags of the link, and href=”http://www.google.co.uk/” is an attribute telling the browser where the hyperlink should point.

The first version of HTML was suggested by Tim Berners-Lee (a famous person and a genius respected by everyone who works online and specialises in any Internet-related things). It happened in 1990 and 1991, but it wasn’t until 1995 that HTML was officially recognised as a standard to be supported by browsers and other web software. That was HTML 2.0. Currently, the most popular standard is HTML 4.01 (published in 1999), and webmasters are already waiting impatiently for HTML 5.0, which promises to give them a lot of new tools that will make web pages still more elaborate and attractive.

Like everything in the world, HTML develops continuously, and, as the browsers become more sophisticated and support published standards better, webmasters change their approach to how they use HTML. In the past it used to be the norm to use HTML for visual formatting of the web text, and tags like <font> with various attributes setting the size and colour of the font were widely used. Today the accepted approach is that HTML should be responsible mainly for semantic markup (to tell the browsers and other software where the paragraph begins, where it ends, where numbered and unnumbered lists are, etc…) and the presentation should, wnerever possible, be delegated to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets - another language that good webmasters are expected to speak). Using CSS, a webmaster can change the way the texton the whole website looks by changing just one line of code, whereas with pure HTML and font tags it would take changing a lot of tags on a lot of pages - and countless hours to do so. In HTML 4.01 the <font> tag is considered deprecated.

Another example of transition to semantic HTML is gradual rejection of HTML tables (built using <table>, <tr>, <td> and some other tags) as the means of controlling the layout of webpages. A few yers ago table tags were used by nearly everyone to control how many columns the webpage should have and what width, height and colour they should be, as well as the header’s and footer’s design and navigation menus. These days, it’s considered extremely bad coding style, and the accepted approach is this: tables should be used to hold tabular data and nothing else, and the layout of webpages should again be controlled using CSS. This way of coding webpages is not very easy and requires a professional webmaster, but it’s more semantic and accessible and has some other advantages. More and more websites are built this way.

When the search engines analyse the content of web pages, they strip HTML tags to find textual content. They are good at that, but the less HTML code they have to remove, the higher the chances that they will determine the purpose of the webpage correctly. So, good webmasters strive to make their job easier by using “light” HTML markup and keeping the number of tags to the minimum. The idea of semantic markup goes hand in hand with this - that’s why such markup is considered more search-engine friendly, apart from other advantages mentioned above.

Let’s suppose you are seeking to build/rebuild your website, and your prospective webmaster is talking to you about table-free HTML or search engine friendly code. These terms should no longer sound Greek to you - what’s more, now you can assess the importance of these factors for your future project. Our other articles will explain in detail what CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other terms mean to you.

PHP-based CMS systems are expected to have at least the following features

1. Ability to edit pages using an online MS Word-like editor (also known as WYSIWYG - What You See IS What You Get).
2. Ability to categorize pages, add them to menus.
3. Ability to manage navigation system through the site using menus, breadcrumbs, sitemaps and other standard means of navigation.
4. Ability to customize page layout using templates.

Besides most of the available PHP open-source CMS will have plugins contributed by third party PHP developers, such as eCommerce, discussion forums, user profiles (with avatars), blog (unless the blog format is the default one, like with WordPress), some tools and functions for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), tag clouds, social media shortcuts and a lot more. You can choose which plugins (or, in the case of Drupal, modules) you need and which ones you don’t need, thus minimising your system and at the same time making it meet all your needs.

Most of them have an overwhelming number of features, which creates a problem for a business user, as extra features make it difficult to configure administer and support the web-site based on it. This brings forward the necessity to hire an experienced webmaster who has worked with the CMS of your choice and can help you out of most problems. It’s also possible that you won’t find a plugin/module for your sophisticated business logic and will have to hire a programmer to write it for you from scratch.

When selecting an open source package many would go for a feature match. They will prepare a list of required features, and then see if pre-selected PHP-based content management systems match that set of features. But having a feature does not yet make this feature easily available for the end user; neither does it make it easy to use. For example, any PHP-based CMS will have a feature of adding pages, but how easy is it for you to do? If you are unsure, it’s a good idea to arrange a training session with your designer beforehand, so you are taught all the essentials once the site is ready. Besides, if you are adding a dozen of simple pages daily, clicking through a few times and then selecting a few options just to post a page can be a substantial time overhead.

Some system can be configured to hide/bring out some functionalities, but will it be easy to do? How much of you valuable time it will cost, or how much should you pay to a developer for doing this?

So, to summarise, this is our advice on the choice of the CMS:

If possible, go for a system you have a previous experience with. If you are entirely new to it, find a good developer, and go for the system they consider a good one (find out why). In experienced hands, Drupal is as good as Joomla; in unexperienced hands Drupal is as bad as Joomla. If you trust your developer, and they are a stable company, even a bespoke system will do - but make sure they teach you to use it, so you don’t depend on yoru developer forever.

Why so many agencies create their own PHP-based CMS systems? Because it will probably take as much to learn an open source PHP CMS as it is to build a new one. Besides an open-source system will probably have its own software architecture paradigm, which will not match the paradigm the agency use for creating other web applications.

What are other options? Maybe you do not need to stick to a community-developed open-source, but search for an open-source system developed by a commercial vendor? Even the most enhanced open-source systems like Drupal or Joomla could never compete with commercial systems, like Bitrix, for instance, in terms of either flexibility and comprehensiveness or the quality of support. Also, it doesn’t really have to be PHP. Both Java and .NET have a variety of robust enterprise-level content management systems, some of them are quite easy to use.

PHP CMS Systems used for particular purposes

Here are some e-commerce CMS based on PHP: ZenCart, Magento, osCommerce. There are others and they all have an overwhelming set of features specific to e-stores. they all are relatively easy to install and customize, but it’s still a good idea to ask an experienced webmaster to do this job for you. Also, most good CMS’s have e-commerce plugins/modules, for example Drupal has Ubercart, WordPress has WP e-Commerce and Joomla has VirtueMart.

Blogging platforms

Here, no doubt, WordPress has no rivals. It has the most blog-specific architecture as installed out of the box, the highest number of plugins written with bloggers’ needs in mind. Its history has been the history of a blogging platform, and the community that develops WP has always payed the highest attention to what a blogger might need. Of course it’s not perfect and has some subtle bugs - for example it’s not unusual to change the current theme and discover that due to a subtle bug in the platform it lost all your themes and, consequently, your blog is no longer available. It might take an experienced web developer to fix this; if you are unexperienced, the only way out of this is reinstalling the blog and losing all the content. Sounds scary, but, fortunately, happens very seldom.

Of course, it’s possible to build a blog using Drupal too, but it will be heavier, requiring a mroe powerful web server and at the same time it’ll have fewer features than a WP-powered blog. Drupal has always been developed as a general CMS with the blogging side considered secondary, and it shows.

Here are a few others. None of them, except WordPress, is very popular though. Serendipity used to be, but couldn’t compete, and at some point they had to delete the list of their proud users from their own website. Guess why? While it was still available, half of the links led nowhere (the blogs had ceased to exist), and the rest of those blogs had switched to WordPress. But it’s still possible to download this script and many others for those who’d like to test them and let us know how it was.

Our blog is powered by WordPress.

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.

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.

There are currently a lot of project management solutions available on the market; Wikipedia has a comprehensive comparison table. As you can see, most of those solutions are proprietary, and of those few available under the open source lisence still fewer have the complete set of functionality you might expect to find in a high-quality project management program. The chances are, even with the most advanced proprietaty system you’ll still find certain necessary features lacking, which will suggest ordering a bespoke system.

Some of the project management solutions that exist focum mainly on project planning and scheduling and don’t provide enough functionality for the tracking stage. Others, on the contrary, concentrate mainly on project tracking. There are standalone and web-based solutions available. Of course, the web-based option presents usual benefits as well as drawbacks of web software: there’s no need to install any special software to access the data, and it’s possible to work with the application from any computer anywhere in the world, but on the other hand, the Internet connection is essential, and security considerations become more critical.

The tasks that full-scale project management application should be available to solve are as follows:

• Scheduling
• Issue tracking
• Project portfolio management
• Resource management
• Document management

Not all existing solutions have all the features presented - so any business could make choices and definte priorities. But as mentioned above, certain kinds of businesses - e.g. medicine related - might find it necessary to order bespoke solutions for managing their projects, due to specific requirements existing in some industries.

Investing in the wrong kind of project management software (either too simplistic or too sophisticated) can become a total loss to your budget; investing in the right kind will save thousands for you in the long run. That’s why it’s important that you make a thorough research of existing solutions, as well as into the feasibility of ordering a bespoke application, before you actually buy. We are planning on a series of articles covering various types of project management software in detail.

Design - some say that to be a graphic designer you need to have a talent… But as many websites nowadays aim for simplicity and usability ability to think rational might be more useful then raw creativity. There are also plenty of templates around which you can “creatively modify” and make a site that looks better then the one designed from scratch. In fact every web site on the net can provide you with some ideas on layout and navigation.

Software packages such as Adobe Fireworks can export created content to HTML, so no HTML skills are necessary. But HTML is the next logical step towards extending your experience in web site building. There are a plenty of free tutorials on the net, the http://www.htmlgoodies.com/ is the site I used many years ago to get started with HTML and JavaScript.

The industry-standard graphic design tool is Adobe Photoshop - but I would advise to stick to Fireworks as it is more web-oriented. Download Photoshop Elements instead to try how the Photoshop “feels” and see if it is for you. There are also free online tools that can replace Photoshop http://www.pixlr.com/ for example.

If you want to proceed to web programming JavaScript is an easy way to start. It has became almost a “proper” programming language. At the same time you do not need to set up a complex environment or learn any IDE (integrated development environment) tools, just a notepad and a web browser can get you started. After you pick up some JavaScript, you can try to move to server-side programming - PHP is an easy way to start.

What is your passion?

It is important to like doing what you do. Try different things and see what activities find most exiting and most rewarding. It is more likely that you will progress faster in the areas you enjoy most.

Training courses.

This will largely depend on the type of personality. If you are self-motivated enough you can learn more or less everything yourself. Just pick up a book on Amazon and go through it from start to finish, then another book on the same topic… At the same time work on something practical (our own web project) so you can utilise the knowledge gained.

The benefits of formal training are:

Structure - your knowledge will be build systematically from easy to complex problem solving. The same can be achieved by using a book or an online video tutorial. Plenty of free tutorials can be found on YouTube.

Support from tutors - I think this is the most useful part of any training course. To some degree you can replace this with asking questions at expertexchnange, or yahoo answers, or related discussion forums. You also can hire a personal tutor, and this could work out cheaper then taking corses as personal training is much more efficient.

Mixing with like-minded people - this is fun, you can not only share problems, but find friends and professional contacts. Social networking sites and networking events can serve the same purpose. Join related groups on Facebook, Linkedin or Ecademy. Find related meetings at meetup.com

Official papers. - you will get a certificate, diploma or a degree, depending on how much time and effort you can sacrifice. But you can pass tests on-line and show test results as a prove of your knowledge: see for example brainbench.com. Also I think in digital industry experience and personal portfolio of work is much more important then papers.

Think about future employment.
Research your salary at http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/.

I would suggest to start looking for a job more or less immediately. There are some “low-end” roles, like support, and assistant positions. The money won’t be good, but there might be opportunities: you will experience the environment of organisations you will work for in the future, and meet people that work in positions you are aiming for.

Freelancing, contracting or full-time employment.

To freelance you have to be more then a specialist in web development: you have to market, sell, organise your work, and finances. This is not for everyone, but if you can do it it can be very rewarding. I would say SALES is the most important thing to look at. Especially if you start from grown zero. The competition at the bottom end of skills is tough, there are companies that do the web sites at £20 per page, and there are offshore freelancers working at $2 an hour.

A contractor is simply a person who takes temporary positions, but works on-site, normally via employment agencies. Those assignments can be from several days to 6 months +. I know some people who work as contractors for one company for years… It just happened that their contract is extended every 6 months.

Contracting is a good way to start and to try doing different things. Hourly rates are also typically 30%-100% higher compared to permanent positions, from £12 to £40 per hour +.

Full-time employment - I wish I could comment, but never been in one.

Yes, these are the main points: elegance and clarity. Good usability means the user should be able to learn to use the new piece of software at a glance and figure out how to accomplish the majority of tasks - including sophisticated ones - intuitively and without any training. Bad usability means that the user will have to receive special training to complete even basic tasks.

Designing software and websites with usability in mind can be more expensive than designing without usability. Best practices recommend usability tests involving teams of testers - users unacquainted with the product, who are given tasks and do their best to achieve their goals using the software. For effective usability studies their actions must be thoroughly recorded and later analysed, because it’s the only way to find out how intuitive the interface is. People are different, and what seems usable to one (especially the developer or the project manager) may be overwhelming to the other, that’s why it’s so important to invite several testers - ideally, representing different age and gender groups.

Generally, and especially for our purpose, the testers should be “target users” and in case of bespoke software end (business) users.
In practice we, and many other companies do not record user actions for later analysis (too time-consuming). Just watching real people performing tasks can help us figure out most of usability glitches.

All this can come at a cost, but it pays long term. Usable, intuitive software will save hundreds of working hours, which your personnel will be spending working on their tasks rather than thinking how to do it. It will save a lot of money also - the money you would otherwise have to spend on training your staff. So, if you calculate your ROI, you will see that investments in usability work well for your business.

Apart from being easy to learn, good, usable interfaces should be easy to remember, provide the fastest ways to accomplish the task, ensure that the user makes as few errors as possible - and even that the user enjoys working with it. If these requirements are not met, further usability improvements are necessary.

We have already shown that if you are ordering an application from a software development company, whether standalone or web-based application, it makes sense to invest in user-friendly design from the start because it will pay afterwards. But what about software development companies themselves? If they are developing a product they hope to sell, should they invest in usability?

The answer is yes, absolutely. The problem is. people tend to avoid using software which they find difficult to use, or just don’t like. So if your software is designed without any usability in mind, you’ll find it hard to sell it - people will buy from your competitor, even if your software provides more functionality. So, if you are aiming at selling your application, usability becomes an absolute must!