Most interactive websites nowadays require data to be presented dynamically and interactively based on input from the user. For example, a customer may need to log into a retail website to check his purchasing history. In this instance, the website would have stored two types of data in order for the customer to perform the check

When building your first site the main things that you will probably think about is what types of content you will be adding to your site, how you are going to get visitors to your site and how you are going to generate good revenue from your site.
Well, all of the things mentioned above are crucial things to consider, but then again, what

What Do Your Site Statistics Mean, Anyway
The purpose of analyzing your web site statistics is to look for trends and to research the success level of your marketing campaigns. The numbers themselves can be misleading, as statistical packages count

Have you been asked to build a website for your church Building There are thousands of people building websites everyday. It is becoming increasingly important for many small organizations and groups to build their online presence. This helps in getting their ideals, goals, and mission out to the general public. Therefore at an increasing rate many of us with computer skills are asked by organizations to put together a website. This happened to me about two years ago when the school I worked at asked me to build a website for them to help advertise their special arts programs.
The only problem with this is many of us do not have the skills nor the time to build and keep up a whole site. It takes a lot to be the webmaster of a website and it is no simple task. However often it is too expensive to pay a web designer to build a custom site for an organization and so the task often falls to an armature or even some one with no experience. This is what happened to me with the website that I build for my school. I didnt have the first clue about website design or html. So that forced me to learn the basics and use what tutorials and templates that i could find online. I made it through the experience and like many others found that it was a lot of fun. Therefore I started building a bunch of other sites. I would bet that this happens to many.
This article will help the beginning web designer or even volunteer set up a basic Church website. However since there is not a lot of money to spend on the project and often people have really unrealistic ideas about what a website can do we will give you some good guidelines and tips to get started.
The first thing that you need to have a real good idea about is your level of experience with building websites. It is really important to be honest with yourself and the church that you belong to in order to create a realistic expectation. If you are a beginner then it is fine to admit that, we all have to start somewhere. However, if you are a beginner dont plan on building an elaborate SQL php backend that can be dynamically updated or anything like that. Below I have provided some basic definitions of skill level that might help you assess where you are at.
Beginner - You are this level fall anywhere in between never setting up a site to having built a site or two with an online website builder or a pre made website like those provided on Yahoo, or AngelFire.
Intermediate - If you have either set up a website with an online builder and customized the site some or built a website using a template then you fall into the intermediate category.
Advanced - You have set up many sites before and often use templates for ideas but tweak them so much they hardly resemble the template when you are finished.
How you choose to build your website depends largely on two factors, your time commitment to the project and your skill level. These two factors have a strong correlation between them. Meaning if you have lots of time and are a beginning you will be able to build more advanced websites. However if you are an advanced designer and have very little time to build another site then you will want to go with something very basic. If you fall on either the not enough time or not enough experience end of the spectrum then you should really consider buying a template to either make your site or at least get you started. However if you are at the intermediate or advanced level and have time then you should forgo the template and create a really cool design yourself.
Some of the tools that you will need to build any website are included below:
Graphics Software - The standard for creating website is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has a great add-on product that comes with the software that allows you to slice the images you create and export them as html.
HTML editor - This can be anything from Microsoft Notepad all the way up to a high end WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get and it means that the program does the html coding for you. Some editors that you might want to look into would be ranked from least expensive to most Coffee Cup HTML Editor, Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Before you start with getting your hands dirty it is really important to lie a good foundation for your website. In order to have a high quality website it is important to have a good foundation and site plan before you start. In a Church, School, or Club it is important to have a group of people working on the website planning. The actual work might be carried out by one person but it is important to have a group plan the site plan in order to get global perspective of the organization. During this stage it is important to gather ideas, thought, and and opinions and get them down on paper. As the group refines their plans it is important to come up with a site map. A site map is a graphical representation of every page that will be on the website and how they will connect to each other. It is also important to get some basic ideas on the layout of the site.
Next you can go online and check find the templates that are available. Look around and find different ideas and templates. If you are like many people you might find that one template does not work. I often want a part of one and part of another template. If this is the case and you are experienced it is not really a problem but if you are new to website design then you might want to pay someone to customize the site for you. You can see some resources on our site dealing with template customization and templates.
It is important now if possible to assign sections of the website to different individuals. They dont even need any experience with website design. If they can type you will be able to use them. Assign sections to each member of the team to complete. That team member will then work on their own computer in Microsoft word or a simple text editor to create the text and collect any graphics, pictures, or sounds that they would like to add to the site.
Below is a list of some of the content areas that you might want to include on a church website

Events
Services
Calendar
About the Priest or Pastor
Churchs Mission Statement
gallery of recent church activity
picture tour of the church
Sunday school or singles groups etc.

Each member can then turn in their section of the website on a disk to you and you will compile all of them onto the actual website. You can often do this by a simple cut and past command in most WYSIWYG editors. It is important at this stage to name all of the files in a consistent way and stick to the site map. If you make changes to the site as you are building make sure you reflect these changes on your site map. It can become very easy to build a huge website with literally 1,000s of of files including images, html documents and much more. If you are not consistent with your file naming and site map then you will not be able to update or make changes tot he website because you will be lost.
Once your website if complete you will need to find a host and upload it to the host. If you have trouble at this stage typically the host will help you with it. After your site is up then you will breathe a big sigh of relief and feel like you dont want to see the site ever again. However the work has only really begun because website are constantly evolving an have to reflect what is happening in the world and your organization. So your work has only begun. You will now need to work to publicize your site sot hat people can find it and you will need to continually update the site and keep the content fresh and up to date.

About The Author

This article was written by: Chris Ryerson who is the owner and designer of over 10 sites that are currently on the web. If you are interested in reading this article and other articles like it you can go to http://www.crowntemplates.com/articles. You may also want to check out the wide variety of Templates and Free Webmaster tools at Crown Templates.
marketing@crowntemplates.com

1 Crystal Clear Source Code HTML/CSS
Many web-designers give far too much importance to the look and the graphics of the website while ignoring the clarity of the source code. Clean and well-written source code is the first step to website design success. If a spider cannot find your keywords, you might just as well forget about search engine optimization.
2 Keywords in Title Tags.
Keywords in the title tags are one of the most important factors for optimization. Search engines display your title tags in the search results. This tells surfers what your page is about.
3 Easy Navigation Links.
While preparing the layout of your website, remember the navigation links. They must be clearly visible. Hidden links must be removed. Navigation links embedded with key words are an asset in search engine ranking. But beware -- stuffing your navigation links with too many keywords may land you in trouble!
4 Keyword Rich
Pages BUT Understandable Content. Yes - search engines love keyword rich content. This does not mean you have to stuff your articles with meaningless sentences. A keyword rich article can contain a keyword density of five to seven percent. Your articles must also be well edited to make them both search engine and user friendly. Invisible keywords and keyword-spamming are a no-no.
5 Using Heading Tags , etc. For Ease of Reading and Search Engine Friendliness.
Using and heading tags will help the user read your articles more easily. is used for the headline; and are used for section heads and subheads. The lower the number, the larger the font size assuming you havent modified them differently. Using , fonts will help the search engines easily understand the importance of the content in your pages. Keywords in header tags are also given more weight.
6 Fast Loading Images That Trigger Emotions
Fast loading images, are very important in designing your website. Using Flash and heavy images will increase the loading time of your website. The faster your site loads, the easier it becomes for your visitor to understand your content.
7 Use Alt-Tags for Text ONLY Browsers.
Using alt tags for all your images will help your surfers who use text only browsers. Here is an example of alt tag: Many search engies use alt tags to determine the keyword relevancy.
8 Site Maps
A site map lists all the pages you feel are important for the search engines to index. SiteMaps are very important if you want search engine spiders to index each and every page of your site. A site map also provides a guide to your entire website content and helps your visitor navigate your site easily.

About The Author

Venkata Ramana has been helping webmasters to get highly targeted traffic to their websites. Join his 5 day "Targeted Traffic Secrets" course and discover 5 No-FAIL Targeted Traffic Tactics.

http://www.targetedTrafficForEver.com

A synopsis of Philippa Gamses Presentation to the National Speakers Association, Washington DC chapter on Saturday, January 10, 2004
Someone had asked Philippa why Websites are such a pain in a pre-seminar question. Her opening reply was simple, yet powerful, "when you stop improving your site, you stop growing." She believes that Websites are a work in progress much like a business plan or ones own self-improvement. In fact, the first question you should ask yourself about your own Website is, "What does it really do for people"
The second question is "Who is your audience" You see, websites are really a lot like a business plan! If you are trying to attract prospective clients, then each individual page on your site should offer something of value to your audience. The number one way that Philippa adds value to her audience is through her articles. The best way to keep getting top listings with the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN, is to constantly change or add content. Her articles add value to her audience and are her number one search engine strategy. Maybe this is why she doesnt cold-call. Her customers tell her that they have seen her name in multiple locations before they call her directly.
She said that we should think about the emotional connection that our website makes. How does your website represent you when you are not there Unfortunately most websites are not a true reflection of what we do and who we are. The reality is that our websites need to become an expertise center. We need to show a clear benefit such as how our programs will increase the creativity and balance of a prospective customer. Every page should have a strategy, a way to increase our database and provide a call to action.
Philippa also believes that each web site should have a dynamite testimonial across the front of the homepage, because testimonials are the least-viewed section on every website! She recommends that we pull out our testimonials and sprinkle them throughout our site. And when we think of testimonials, we should be thinking about the substantive ways that we have helped our customers. If we attempt to be clear and specific about our program benefits, why not be clear and specific about their outcomes from real customers. She recommends that we have specific testimonials for specific programs. Talk about maximizing our congruency!
In order to get started, Philippa wants to know what we have done today to improve our website. Two days after her seminar, I added a question and answer section and submitted my site to a dozen search engines. My next step is to write another article. What are you going to do today to improve your web site, your business and even yourself She encourages you to contact her about the changes you have made.
For more information on how to improve your website further, Philippa recommends that you download her tip sheet, "Twenty-Three Proven Tips and Ideas for On-Line Marketing" at http://www.cyberspeaker.com/tipsheet.html. Philippa can be contacted directly at her office in Santa Cruz, California at 831-465-0317 or pgamse@cyberspeaker.com. If she doesnt get back to you immediately, it is due to her ongoing quest to find the best deli sandwich outside of New York City.
c 2004, Mark Sincevich. All rights in all media reserved.

About The Author

Mark Sincevich is a professional speaker, photographer and author of two books and numerous articles. He works with organizations to increase their creativity, balance, leadership and personal development. He can be reached at 301-654-3010, mark@staashpress.com, or http://www.staashpress.com.

This article is written by daBoss. daBoss is the Webmaster of Designer Banners. daBoss can be contacted at sales at designerbanners dot com.
Developing a Login System with PHP and MySQL
Most interactive websites nowadays would require a user to log in into the website

Congratulations! Your Web Site is finished! Now what Your first instinct is to submit to every search engine possible and leave it up to them to bring traffic to your site. Despite what you may have been told, it doesn

Introduction
Cookies have long been used in PHP scripts, and are a very useful function. But what exactly are cookies Maybe you have used then, but you still dont know exactly what they are. Or you are completely new to cookies It doesnt matter, because in this tutorial I will show you exactly what cookies are, and what they are used for.
Cookies in a nutshell
Cookies are small pieces of information that is stored on the computer of your visitors. Each browser handles it differently, but most simply store the information in a small text file. Internet Explorer has a special folder, which can be found in your C:Windows or C:WindowsSystem32 folder. You can delete all your cookies, by going to the Options and Clearing Cookies or deleting them by hand. I dont recommend this though.
Almost every website uses cookies. If you go to Amazon.com, you will get several cookies. The same goes for CNN.com. Even Google uses cookies! They are extremely useful for temporarily storing information. For example, if you have a login system for your visitors, you could save their userid and password very heavily encrypted! so they are automatically logged in the next time they visit your website.
Or you could remember their last visit, and highlight everything that is new. And thats just the beginning.
Using Cookies
Using cookies in PHP is extremely easy. In fact, there is nothing to it, because of PHPs inbuilt setcookie function http://php.net/setcookie. Have a look at the documentation, and then try the following example:

<php

// Set a cookie
// Cookie name: name
// Cookie value: Dennis Pallett
// Cookie expire: in 24 hours

setcookie name, Dennis Pallett, time + 60*60*24;
>

If you run the code above, then a cookie will be set. Thats all. The cookie name and value are pretty obvious. The cookie expire is when the cookie expires, or goes away. Simply use the time function http://php.net/time and add the number of seconds you want to have the cookie available to it. In the example I added 60*60*24=86400 seconds, or 24 hours.
If you have looked at the documentation, you probably noticed there are additional arguments. As the documentation says, the path is to limit a cookie to a specific path on your web server. This is often used when you run multiple instances of the same script in separate directories. You can safely omit this argument when it doesnt matter if the cookie is available site-wide.
There is also the domain argument. This can be used to limit the cookie to a specific sub-domain, e.g. test.example.com. You can also safely ignore this argument, or set it to .example.com note the beginning period, this is essential!.
Finally, there is also the secure argument. This argument is only used for cookies that are sent over a secure HTTPS connection SSL. Just ignore this argument, unless youre working with a secure connection.
One thing that should be mentioned is that cookies must be set, before you display any HTML/text. Its probably best if you turn on output buffering by putting ob_start http://php.net/ob_start at the top of your page.
Now that you have set a cookie, you probably want to retrieve the value as well. After all, that is the whole point of using cookies. Thankfully, as PHP is ever so easy, you can retrieve the same way as you retrieve a GET value. See the following example to retrieve the value of the previous example:

<php
echo Your name is . $_COOKIE[name];
>

This should print "Your name is Dennis Pallett". Theres nothing more to it. Its just that easy!
Finally, one thing you probably want to do as well is remove cookies. This is as easy as setting them. Simply change the value of the cookie to FALSE, and change the expire date to -3000 seconds. See the following example:

<php
setcookie name, FALSE, time-1000;
>

Checking if cookies are enabled
Before you start using cookies, you must make sure your visitor has cookies enabled. This can be done with a simply PHP checking script. Unfortunately, the PHP page needs to reload to check for cookies. But this can be done very transparently, and your visitor should hardly notice anything.
The following example will first set a test cookie, then reload the page, and finally check whether cookies are enabled.

<php
error_reporting E_ALL ^ E_WARNING ^ E_NOTICE;

// Check if cookie has been set or not
if $_GET[set] != yes {
// Set cookie
setcookie test, test, time + 60;

// Reload page
header "Location: checkcookies.phpset=yes";
} else {
// Check if cookie exists
if !empty$_COOKIE[test] {
echo "Cookies are enabled on your browser";
} else {
echo "Cookies are <b>NOT</b> enabled on your browser";
}
}
>

Run the code above, and see what the output is. Check if cookies are enabled in your browser. If theyre not enabled, then you can enable them by going to your browsers options. Unfortunately, this is different from each browser, so I cant give you exact instructions. But Google can.
Storing Arrays
One feature of cookies that is often missed in articles is the ability to story arrays. Cookies can be used to store multi-dimensional arrays, which can be extremely useful to store data.
Consider the following code;

<php
setcookie "name[first]", "Dennis", time + 60*60*24;
setcookie "name[last]", "Pallett", time + 60*60*24;
>

You can then display these two cookies using the following code:

<php
echo "First Name: " . $_COOKIE[name][first];
echo "<br />Last Name: " . $_COOKIE[name][last];
>

The cookie name is an array, and has multiple values. You can even go deeper and have multi-dimensional arrays, e.g. $_COOKIE[name][test][something][value]. You could store whole arrays of data in cookies. But beware that you dont store too much data, there are certain size limits to cookies.
In Conclusion...
Cookies are really versatile, and can be used for a lot of different purposes. Many websites use cookies, and cookies can really make your website more personalized. Using cookies in PHP isnt hard at all, and you should be able to use them without any difficulty.
Before actively using cookies in your website, you must check whether the visitor has enabled them in their browser. If they dont have cookies enabled, you must either redirect to a non-cookies version of your website, or you can make sure your website also works without cookies.
You can download a sample script at http://www.phpit.net/demo/php%20and%20cookies/logger.zip, where cookies are used in a somewhat practical way. In this example, there is a logging module, called log.php and a display module, called history.php. Basically, you include the log.php in other PHP pages, and then you can view history.php to lookup all the pages you have viewed and how often. The example uses arrays, and stores them in cookies.
The examples in this article can be downloaded at http://www.phpit.net/demo/php%20and%20cookies/examples.zip.
If you have a really unique practical way of using cookies, please let me know at dennis [AT] nocertainty [DOT] com. Id really like to hear about interesting ways of using cookies.

About The Author

Dennis Pallett is a young tech writer, with much experience in ASP, PHP and other web technologies. He enjoys writing, and has written several articles and tutorials. To find more of his work, look at his websites at http://www.phpit.net, http://www.aspit.net and http://www.ezfaqs.com

Bill Huang sits down at his computer. As he connects to the Internet, he glances out at the sun poking its nose above the Hong Kong skyline. It will be another busy day, and he has to order those slippers for his wife before rushing off to a meeting.
He types in his search terms and Google faithfully reports: "Results 1 - 100 of about 1,760,000. Search took 0.34 seconds."
Bill clicks on a the Big Soft Slipper web site and waits for the page to load. "Site unavailable," Bill reads. He hits the "back" button. Then he clicks on another of the 1,760,000 pages Google offered him.
High above Cleveland, USA, the executives at Big Soft Slipper are clinking their glasses and patting themselves on the back. "We sure did it," the CEO crows. "Look at that beautiful home page. Look at the easy navigation. Look at how fast it loads."
Somebody please tell them about Bill Huang.
"Very few people realize how the web site that loads so zippy in their office, flows like molasses on their customers computers