Tag Archives: building websites

Building a Website: Text Editors

Posted on 8/26/2010 by Cindy

When you save something on a computer, it saves it to a file. The information inside that file may be in one of many different formats. The file name extension, which is the part of the name after the last … Continue reading →

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Updating Your Web Page Without Refreshing the Page

Posted on 8/22/2010 by Cindy

AjaxHopefully, after reading some of my latest posts, it’s very clear that visitors to your site are actually seeing your web page on their local computer.

The page may have been built on the fly at your hosting server using PHP and MySQL and then downloaded to the user’s computer, but by the time the visitor sees the page, it’s on their local computer.

Javascript code in the page may be making the web page more dynamic as well, but the user’s browser is handling the Javascript dynamics.

Since the user is viewing your web page on their local computer, any updates that need to be made to the page requiring PHP and/or MySQL must happen at the server level. This means that something on the page, such as a button or a link, must send another request to the server for the updated information. This used to require a page refresh.

The click of a link or a button would send the message to the server that another page was needed from the server. It might have been the same page with new, updated information, but as far as the server was concerned, it was a new page.

In other words, once the page has been built and sent to the user’s local computer, the only way to interact with the server is to send another request. This used to mean that the user’s browser would send the request and receive a new response to show a new page.

With advances in technology, advances in the languages that we now use for web development, and advances in our web browsers, it’s now possible to update specific sections of a page without refreshing the entire page. This has allowed web developers to create web ‘applications’ instead of just web ‘pages’. Web applications look and behave more like applications that you would run on your local computer. This new technology is called Ajax – Asynchronous Javascript and XML Continue reading →

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How to Make Your Web Pages Dynamic!

Posted on 8/14/2010 by Cindy

Many times we need to make our web pages dynamic on the client side of things. In other words, we need to do something dynamically on the browser side of things – your local computer – instead of at the server side. For instance, if I enter something in a form, I have to submit the form, wait for the php code to check to see if what I entered is correct and then send me the results. If my browser were somehow able to check what I entered before it sends it to the website, it could speed things up considerably.

This is where Javascript comes in. Javascript is a scripting language that works inside your browser instead of inside the web server software like PHP. Javascript allows me to send instructions to your browser through the website code. Javascript is responsible for some of the basic animation that you see on web pages such as drop down menus, pop-up boxes, and buttons that change when you move your mouse over them. Continue reading →

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How to Make Your Websites Interactive

Posted on 8/12/2010 by Cindy

As web development evolved, websites not only became better looking, but they also became more functional and interactive. More and more forms were being added so that not only could you find information, but you could send information as well. You didn’t just ‘read’ a website anymore, you could communicate with it. These new technologies opened the doors for shopping carts and ecommerce.

This interactivity required more than just HTML (structure) and CSS (style). Now, we needed languages that could make our pages more dynamic by adding in real time information or more interactive by processing and responding to the information that we could now enter into the forms. Continue reading →

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How to Add Style to Your Web Site

Posted on 8/9/2010 by Cindy

CSS CodeWhen websites first began, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was generally enough. It allowed us to make our online documents more readable. We could even format the documents to some degree. (If you want to know more about HTML and how it began, see my earlier post – How Websites Started.)

Enter cascading style sheets, or CSS for short. Cascading style sheets allow us to separate the structure of the document (HTML) from the look or ‘skin’ of the document (CSS). This allows designers to build better looking websites. Since CSS arrived on the scene, more, better graphics began to show up online. Websites were not only readable, but they were also becoming pretty. Continue reading →

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