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.

Ok, so you know about Facebook, Twitter, Google Trends, Web2.0, AJAX, YouTube and blogging (if you don’t you should read my first article, Step 1 to Building your Own Online Business). Next, you need to take your fresh list of ideas and start researching! Sound fun? The guys over at Thirty Day Challenge have come up with some great ways to research niche markets using FREE online tools. These tools are: Google Search Google Trends Free Keywords @ WordTracker.com They are simple yet they can determine almost EXACTLY how much traffic you can expect with a particular product and keyword phrase...

I am going to provide a few steps on starting a business, this being the first article. Since these processes are fresh in my memory, I am documenting what I have accomplished to try and make it easier for you to start your own web company. Of course, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to let me know. I will only provide a bit of information at a time so you can research the material in small chunks. Finding your Niche Market. Write down a list of business ideas related to popular items you see when you walk around the mall or retail stores, what ads you see in magazines and what...

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...

They make your iLife simple. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. ” - Steve Jobs They understand the engineer’s dilemma. Take a normal television remote control. All you really need to use is the power button, channel and volume buttons, and maybe a few others. So why are there 50 more buttons on the remote besides these essential ones? There was too much unused real estate on the remote control of course! When Apple makes a product they strip the functions down to their necessities. Take the iPhone. They took what was already there...

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) { } ...

CodeIgniter is great because you can separate your content from your styling with controllers, models, and views. Another great thing is when you create a website with CI, you automatically use friendly URLs (if you use an .htaccess file). If you have a bunch of unrelated pages however, you might wonder how you can keep those URLs as tiny as possible without having thirty different controllers for each page. For example, I have a CI application with a home controller that has about 20 different functions inside of it. To access each one of these functions, I would normally visit http://localhost/home/contact...