Whether you are creating a new company website or starting a new web2.0 venture, you will need a plan of action to develop a successful website. Staying organized makes the website development process go smoothly and helps your team stay on track without going off on a tangent worrying about minute details. Planning also helps prepare for unexpected road blocks that could bring things to a halt if not foreseen. These processes have helped me over the years and I hope they help you too. Here are the six steps to planning and executing a successful website:   Planning – Forming an Idea and...

We released our open source authorization system today. It helps you manage your users on your website, taking care of the following: - user registration (with optional e-mail verification) - user login - lost account retrieval - password changing - user session management - password protecting certain pages or sections of your website It is built using the CodeIgniter PHP framework so you will need that installed until we port it for general use. Check it out, there’s a fully working online demo and user guide with lots of documentation as well!

Facebook is the new Microsoft Windows. Why? Before my time, Microsoft introduced Windows as a revolutionary new platform for developers make everyone’s lives easier. Apple came out with their aesthetic, remarkably easy interface that made (almost) everyone want a new Mac. It wasn’t long before these big companies like IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, HP and of course Apple knew what was coming down the train tracks. These revolutionary new personal computers were going to change everyone’s life. And they did. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world and Steve Jobs continues to lead...

Need a website soon and don’t want to explore XHTML and CSS? Use this cool new online webpage designer I found the other day. Learning how to create website pages is a cinch with the help of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors like Dreamweaver, only this webpage designer is web-based (cross-platform) and won’t cost you a penny! Plus, they were named one of the top 50 websites in 2007 by Time magazine. If you go to www.weebly.com and sign up with your username and email you can start building your website in seconds. It uses a pretty AJAX interface, so that means you need...

First, you will need a text editor such as TextMate for Mac, Notepad or PHP Web Designer 2007 for PC. There are also two things you must learn after you read up on how to design a website. Those are: Learn XHTML. Learn CSS. These two components are essential to building a solid website. If you build a large business website without knowing XHTML and CSS, you will be banging your head on the desk from troubles with cross-browser compatibility, search engine optimization, maintainability and more later down the road. If you need help learning XHTML and CSS, you can visit W3Schools or search for...

We just got a new website and new business cards! Tell me what you think! I carry my business cards around in a case from my favorite place to go. Our website is not that web2.0 looking, but it’s simple and very easy to navigate. We do of course build web2.0 websites however if you are interested If you like the business cards, you can order them @ moo.com.

Call this a Guide to iMarketing in 2007. There are a lot of new technologies out there such as blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and networking, search engine optimization, internet marketing and web2.0. I have been researching these technologies about 40 hours a week this summer to understand how everything fits together. Now, I want to share what I compiled. It’s a basic laundry list and doesn’t go very in depth, but there are a lot of excellent resources in this guide. If anyone has anything to add, please comment! I. Website ad planning, placement, and analytics: A. Conducting...

Yesterday, I came across a really cool site. He talk about topics I am interested in, such as SEO, web 2.0, blogging, marketing, and business in general. The other articles not pertaining to web design seem a little too opinionated and might scare some people off, but some of the web design articles are right on. Finding ‘Slayerment’ on the Digg home page a few days ago, I browsed the site and found some really great articles about web design to which I can relate. His posts about web design are very easy to read and entertaining most of the time. Check out his article that was featured...

I have written a few articles on CodeIgniter now because it truly has changed the way I develop websites. It has cut the development time in at least half, preventing redundant work by providing great built-in features that I can use in every one of my projects. Plus, CodeIgniter is so easy to pick up. You can start building CI apps in about 10 minutes after watching the CI tutorials and reading my tutorial on getting set up. If you are new to Object Oriented Programming, you can read my introduction to OOP also. The way CodeIgniter keeps you organized is this: It keeps everything separate and...

I use the CodeIgniter and MooTools frameworks for my website projects nowadays. They are far easier to work with and understand if you understand Object Oriented Programming. If you are spaghetti coding your websites line by line, you will be in for a treat when you learn OOP. Here is how it works: Say you want to describe a human being with code. You will create a class called Human: class Human { } Now, you want the human to perform a few functions. This is simple also; you create functions within the class to describe the human’s actions. class Human { function Eat($food) { } ...