WEB DEVELOPMENT

Aesthetics, the ease of use, appropriate content and a variety of factors combine to create a web site. Web developers work behind the scenes to create an immaculate web site: one that’s interesting, attracts more ‘hits’, retains customer attention and ensures top-of-the mind recall. Ease of navigation, consistency of overall layout, depth of content, originality, and quality of execution, are a few prime factors to be considered when developing a web site. What is web development? Web development comprises a set of functions that include building, designing, and supporting web sites. Some functions overlap, such as programming and database administration. Others, such as web design and content management, generally don’t, though those responsible for either function will still need to work closely together. Some career options available through the Internet are: Web architects Developers decide on the hardware that the site should use, the software necessary to make it function, the appropriate design and navigation to attract users and what will add value to the business, etc. To process all this information and en sure it reaches the right people at the right time in volves a great deal of programming skill. People who generate these programmes are called web developers. Web programming involves skills ranging from a knowledge of front-end tools like Java, VB Script, etc. and back-end ones, such as MS SQL, ACCESS 2000, etc. Features, such as newsletters, community chats and dis cussion groups that impart a degree of interactivity to the web site make it more attractive to the user. These features are added by web developers. Technical skills: You may be conversant in either Microsoft technologies, Java technologies but you will also need a thorough understanding of the other tools used for building web sites, such as ASP, JSP, Java, Dot Net, CGI, Perl and others. Meanwhile, you will work on backend programming and decide on the database and hardware infrastructure on which the web site will be based, besides designing the navigation tools and some front end features. In the end, the user interface of your web site should do full justice to the functional requirements of your client. User interface forms a bridge between the user and the technological back-end, which forms the backbone of all business sites. Web maintainers A webmaster is responsible for the overall look and feel of the web site. Once the site has been built and tested, this person makes sure that the content remains current and accessible. A webmaster refines the structure and content of the portal as necessary, and evaluates both direct user feedback and other usage statistics to make sure that the portal meets all the needs of the client. A webmaster must also be conversant with the latest software tools in order to be able to routinely upgrade the web site. The graphic designers A web site can be a huge chunk of text if there are no graphics in it. In order to stand out, a web site needs some aesthetic appeal. It also needs to be informative so that the viewer gains an accurate picture of your company as well as of the products and services that you offer. Mixing elements of presentation, design and colour are a few functions that you will be re sponsible for as a Graphics Designer. Obviously, knowledge of the latest graphics packages is essential, here as well. Web site co-ordinator They are like project managers work, who work across functions. This role requires communication, organisation and interpersonal skills. You will require an understanding of technology although you will not be required to do the work yourself. In fact you will work in tandem with the client/ organisation and co-ordinate between the front and back-end to come up with a site that reflects the aspirations of the client/ organisation, supports the business objectives and has an easy flow and navigation etc. Content developer Content developers are the main resource providers for the web. The heart of the world wide web lies in the subject matter posted on the Net. A content developer, writes, edits and collates information that appears on the web page. This information must be presented in an attractive, engaging manner in order to draw web browsers to the site. A flair for writing, an ability to ferret information, edit and explain it, are some of the essential qualities needed to become a successful content developer. The ability to string together grammatically correct sentence, think critically and build an instant rapport with the reader are critical skills for this function. Further, the ability to tell a story well is also important, as is a mastery of the form in which your work appears. Most jobs require both writing and editing skills. Qualifications Age is no barrier in IT. On completing matriculation or Intermediate, students can enrol themselves for two-three year courses that will help them acquire comprehensive IT skills. Typically, in a three-year course, students have the option to specialise in a particular field in the third year. Graduates can opt for one-two year specialised courses. Study options Although, these days, there are numerous institutes that offer training in IT, it is important to choose a reputed institute, which has all the state-of-the-art facilities. Their courseware would keep students in sync ¦ with the industry demands.

MICROSOFT VISTA

Ease of use When you start using Windows Vista, you will recognize familiar elements such as the Start menu, which is now faster, more streamlined, and more helpful than in previous versions of Windows. The Start menu features integrated desktop search through a new feature called Quick Search which can help you find and launch almost anything on your PC. Just type in a word, a name, or a phrase, and Quick Search can find the right file for you. But more than that, the new start menu makes it very easy for you to navigate across all of the installed applications on your PC. Eliminating the slow performing, cascading "All Programs" view, the new start menu can help you get something! started more quickly than ever. Use Quick Search to quickly find the information you need. Explorers The new Explorers are powerful yet easy-to-use tools for working with files consistently across Windows Vista. Explorers give you more information and control while simplifying how you work with your files. The experience is easy and consistent, whether you're browsing photos or documents or even using the new Control Panel. The new Document Explorer makes working with your files a snap. Find your files more quickly with the new Live Icon feature, and see what they contain without having to open them. Key elements of the Explorers in Windows Vista are designed to help you get to the informa! tion you need, when you need it. Quick Search is always available to help you find files instantly. The navigation pane contains the new Search Folders found in Windows Vista, as well as traditional folders that you have created on your computer. Command Bars display only the tasks that are most appropriate for the files being displayed. With new Live Icons (scalable thumbnails) used throughout Windows Vista, you can see the first page of documents, the actual image of a photo, or the album art for individual songs in your music collection, making it easier to find exactly what you are looking for. Type keywords into the Quick Search box in the new Control Panel to find the right system setting quickly. Windows Aero Windows Vista is the first Windows operating system that has a user experience that can gracefully scale to the hard! ware capabilities of the computer it is installed on. All computers that meet minimal hardware requirements will see the Windows Vista Basic user experience, which provides the benefits of the refined interface features already mentioned. Windows Vista Aero provides spectacular visual effects such as glass-like interface elements that you can see through. Windows Aero is an environment with an additional level of visual sophistication, one that is even more responsive and manageable, providing a further level of clarity and confidence to Windows users. Live taskbar thumbnails Resting the mouse pointer over a taskbar item displays a live thumbnail of the window, showing the content of that window. The live thumbnail is displayed whether the window is minimized or not, and whether the content of the window is a document, ! photo, or even a running video or process. See thumbnail views of the items in your taskbar by resting your mouse pointer on them. Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D Windows Vista provides two entirely new features to manage windows: Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D. Flip allows you to flip through open windows (by using Alt+Tab), providing a live thumbnail of each window, rather than just a generic icon and file name. Live thumbnails make it easier to quickly identify the window you want, particularly when multiple windows of the same kind are open. With Flip 3D, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to flip through open windows in a stack, and quickly locate and select the one you want to work with. Use Flip to view and navigate more easily through open windows. Use Flip 3D to navigate through open windows using the scroll wheel on your mouse. Windows Sidebar and Gadgets As you use your computer to access more information, perform more tasks, and interact with more software applications, you increasingly face information overload. You open a web browser just to check the weather, open an application to view your calendar, and open a calculator program to simply add numbers. You need simple, specialized, and lightweight mini-applications that put information and tasks at your fingertips—no matter what you're doing. Windows Sidebar boosts your personal productivity by providing i! nstant access to gadgets—a wide variety of engaging, easy-to-use, and customizable mini-applications that offer information at a glance and provide easy access to frequently used tools. Windows Sidebar gives you quick access to gadgets like picture slide shows, Windows Media Player controls, or news headlines. You pick the gadgets you want to see in Windows Sidebar. Windows Internet Explorer 7 New Internet Explorer 7 features, like tabbed browsing and live previews, make it easier for you to get to the websites you want to visit. Internet Explorer 7 also provides new tools to give you direct access to information you want, with built-in support for web feeds known as Re! ally Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS is a technology you can use to have information sent to you, so you don't have to look for it. Through RSS subscriptions, you can automatically receive feeds (lists) of headlines from Internet sites. Internet Explorer 7 discovers these feeds on sites and allows you to preview and subscribe to them. Once you subscribe, Internet Explorer 7 systematically consolidates headlines from each feed into one list. This lets you quickly browse new information from various sites without having to visit each site separately. Windows Vista also builds upon the User Account Protection initiative—by default, limiting Internet Explorer 7 to just enough permissions to browse the web, but not enough to modify your files or settings—keeping your PC safer from web-based attacks. This Windows Vista-only feature, known as protected mode, means that even if a malicious site attacks a potential vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7, the site's code will not have enou! gh privileges to install software, copy files to the Startup folder, or hijack the settings for your browser's home page or search provider. Windows Vista enhances the Internet Explorer experience. The upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7 not only adds important new security and privacy features, but makes everyday tasks easier through features such as tabbed browsing, inline search, and shrink-to-fit printing. Network Center Windows Vista puts you in control of your network experience with the Network Center—the central place for all your networking needs. Network Center informs you about the network your computer is connected to and verifies whether it can successfully reach the Internet. It even presents this information in a summary in the Network Map so you can immediately see your connectivity to the network and Internet. If a PC on the network loses Internet connectivity, you can graphically see that the link is down, and t! hen use Network Diagnostics to help determine the cause of the problem and get a suggestion for a solution. Check your connection status, see your network visually, or troubleshoot a connection problem in the Network Center. Network Center also allows you to quickly connect to other available networks, or create entirely new connections. You can view and configure your most important network settings in one place. And for less frequently accessed settings, Network Center provides direct links so you can easily find what you're looking for. Network Center also makes it easy to connect your workplace network from home. Easily connect to your workplace from home using the Network Center. Network Setup With Windows Vista, setting up a network between multiple PCs and devices (including printers, music players, and game systems) is simple and intuitive. The Network Setup Wizard allows you to set up wired or wireless networks by identifying unconfigured network devices and adding them to the network. The Network Setup Wizard also automates the process of adding new devices to your network. It automatically generates secure network settings to keep your network safe from intruders. Network settings can also be saved to a portable USB flash drive to make adding PCs and devices to the network a quick and easy process. Simply insert the USB flash drive into a PC or device and it will automatically read the data and ready itself to join the network. File and printer sharing is also easily enabled on each PC on the network from the Network Setup Wizard, so you can share documents, photos, music, and other files across your network. Network Explorer Once a network is set up, you need to be able to easily browse content on networked PCs, devices, and printers. The new Network Explorer in Windows Vista makes it easy to share files and take advantage of the connectivity that a network provides. It presents a view of all PCs, devices, and printers on the network, and is significantly faster and more reliable than My Network Places in Windows XP. The Network Explorer is even able to use custom, representative icons for different devices (when enabled by manufacturers). You can also directly interact with select devices—adjust settings or control music playback, for example. Create networks to share files, printers, and other devices. Network Map When people have multiple computers and devices on a network, with a combination of wireless a! nd wired connections, it can be difficult to understand how everything is connected. Windows Vista provides a new feature called Network Map which shows you an easy-to-understand, graphical view of everything on the network, and how everything is connected. This helps you optimize your network for the best performance and easily locate any problems. Network Map in a home environment showing a broken connection to a wireless router. Wireless Networking Windows Vista improves the wireless network experience in a number of ways. The new Network Awareness feature in Windows Vista keeps your applications aware of and optimized for the network's changing capabilities. Your data is also more secure with enhanced support for the latest wireless security protocols, including WPA2. Windows Vista helps you avoid connecting to fra! udulent wireless networks which seem like legitimate hotspots but, in fact, are not. Windows Vista also provides an easy way to create ad-hoc wireless networks to use peer-to-peer applications such as file sharing and application collaboration. Network Awareness Network Awareness provides the ability to report changes in network connectivity to applications in order to provide a more seamless connected experience. As you connect to different networks, the change is communicated to Network Awareness-supported applications, which can then take appropriate actions for your connection to that network. For example, when you switch from your home office to your corporate network, firewall settings can be configured to open the ports needed to allow the use of IT management tools. Group Policy will detect the reconnection to the corporate network and automatically begin processing policy changes instead of waiting for the next detection cycle.

BANDWIDTH

Most hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So exactly what is bandwidth as it relates to web hosting? Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public internet. Network Connectivity The internet, in the most simplest of terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. These connections within the internet can be large or small depending upon the cabling and equipment that is used at a particular internet location. It is the size of each network connection that determines how much bandwidth is available. For example, if you use a DSL connection to connect to the internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth therefore is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer and the internet. If you have a DSL connection to the internet, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet provider. But your internet provider may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connection aggregate at your internet provider who then has their own dedicated connection to the internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single connection. They must have enough bandwidth to serve your computing needs as well as all of their other customers. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet so it can accommodate your needs and up to 166 other users (255/1.54). Traffic A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up. Traffic is simply the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. It is easiest to understand traffic using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. To put this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 file cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters - A GB is all the characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB). If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a web site to your computer, you would create 4MB of traffic between the web site you are downloading from and your computer. Depending upon the network connection between the web site and the internet, the transfer may occur very quickly, or it could take time if other people are also downloading files at the same time. If, for example, the web site you download from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing that web site to download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that web site. However, if three people are all downloading that same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic has been created. Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth, someone will have to wait. The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time so each person's file transfer can take place, but the transfer for everyone downloading the file will be slower. If 100 people all came to the site and downloaded the MP3 at the same time, the transfers would be extremely slow. If the host wanted to decrease the time it took to download files simultaneously, it could increase the bandwidth of their internet connection (at a cost due to upgrading equipment). Hosting Bandwidth In the example above, we discussed traffic in terms of downloading an MP3 file. However, each time you visit a web site, you are creating traffic, because in order to view that web page on your computer, the web page is first downloaded to your computer (between the web site and you) which is then displayed using your browser software (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) . The page itself is simply a file that creates traffic just like the MP3 file in the example above (however, a web page is usually much smaller than a music file). A web page may be very small or large depending upon the amount of text and the number and quality of images integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for CNN.com is about 200KB (200 Kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is typically large for a web page. In comparison, Yahoo's home page is about 70KB. How Much Bandwidth Is Enough? It depends (don't you hate that answer). But in truth, it does. Since bandwidth is a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, you should take time to determine just how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis If you do not intend to provide file download capability from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward: Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor If you intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be: [(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) + (Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor Let us examine each item in the formula: Average Daily Visitors - The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could be from 1 to 1,000,000. Average Page Views - On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view. If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of those pages each time they visit. Average Page Size - The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate this directly. Average Daily File Downloads - The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average, each day. Average File Size - Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site. Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can calculate this directly. Fudge Factor - A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that your estimate is off by 50%. However, if you were very unsure, you could use 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements are more than met. Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31. Summary Most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic to your site will be significant, you may want to go through the calculations above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.