Web design and web development

These are the notes from my Kaya FM interview on the business of being online:

1) What are some of the main things small businesses need to consider when looking at setting up a website?

I really think the most important aspect of setting up a web site, is planning. Think how a house is built – you don’t jump straight in and start building – No. You first think about the ideal house that you want, and then develop the plans for that house, based on your specific needs and your financial situation. It’s exactly the same with building a website.

Web Worker Daily has posted a useful list of 15 iGoogle productivity gadgets. I particularly like the sound of the google analytics gadget that allows you to track your stats without constantly having to log into your analytics page.

Although firefox is my preferred browser, I do have to check everything in IE too, and when certain css displays one way in firefox, and one way in IE, I was looking for a way to debug directly in IE. It turns out there's a developer toolbar for IE, which can be downloaded here.

Listened to a great podcast on web page hierarchy, that gives insight into how to use hierarchy on a web page to increase usability, prioritise content, and to ultimately help attain whatever goals you've set for your website. He also presents a number of case studies, slides of which you will find in his presentation pdf. So much good stuff here, like how users actually read a webpage (we don't - we just scan), and what tools to use to create hierarchy (contrast).

If you are looking for design ideas for colour schemes, check out Kuler (http://kuler.adobe.com). This is a site set up by Adobe which allows users to post colour schemes, and there's some great stuff there. Also, if you're an Adobe Illustrator user, check out this video on illustrator cs3 - there's some pretty amazing stuff you can do with colours...

While I normally stick to all lowercase table names for my MySQL database tables, I often have to come in on a project where the database has already been set up using a mixture of lower and uppercase table names. Because windows is case-insensitive, when you create a MySQL table or export tables for use on a linux system, all table names will be lowercase by default. This will cause problems when the dump imported into MySQL on linux, as any calls to the original mixed case tables will result in errors, as these tables don't actually exist.

I'm putting together an OpenLDAP authorisation system for a client's business web application, and wanted to test things out on my local windows machine. Well, I managed to get OpenLDAP working fine, but the authorisation using Apache has not been easy (in fact I'm still struggling with it ...). In the process, I've uninstalled and reinstalled php and apache a number of times to try and see where the problem is. This has in itself caused it's own issues, one of which was a php module not being loaded by apache.

Robin Good goes web 2.0 with his remix of Michael Arrington's "What is Web 2.0?" video. Michael remixes the original video so that we end up with the bits that stood out for him.

Good article that takes us through the fundamentals of good navigation, and how to make your website links usable.

Infoworld reviews 6 of the 'top' open source AJAX libraries. What I picked up from this article is that although we are still in the early stages of AJAX, there is enormous potential, and some great toolkits that will help you get started using AJAX on your webpages. For my first foray into AJAX, I didn't use any of the abovementioned libraries. I used scriptaculous to create a drag and drop sortable list that is automatically updated in the database.