The Big Web FAQ

DIY Build a Stud Wall

admin — Thu, 12 May 2011 10:51:37 +0000

A common and easy way to divide a living space is by building a stud wall aka partition wall. This is a great way of creating a playroom, washroom, extra bedroom etc. The stud wall is not loadbearing and simply made up of a timer frame with plasterboard on each side. Insulation can be added between the plasterboard for added warmth or sound insulation.

What you will need is the timber, plasterboard, plumb bob and line, nails, screws, spirit level, hammer and screwdriver.

It is an easy job for someone with a modicum of DIY experience.

The following links are guides and information that go into detail on building stud walls.

Wickes – Build Partition Walls (PDF) – Very Good
Build Partition Walls
Stud Walls
Wall Guide
Stud Wall Regulations
Stud Wall Calculator

No related posts.

What is an Active Directory?

admin — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:35:22 +0000

An active directory is a directory structure used on Microsoft Windows based computers and servers to store information and data about networks and domains. It is primarily used for online information and was originally created in 1996. It was first used with Windows 2000…

http://www.tech-faq.com/active-directory.html

What is a TLD?

Build a Popular Optimised Website

admin — Sun, 30 May 2010 23:08:33 +0000

A popular website with a lot of traffic (visitors) is the goal of any serious website. There is no silver bullet or one simple solution unless you wish to fork out a lot of money for advertising. The way to a popular website is quality content, time and most importantly writing for the visitors and not for the search engines. It has to be an optimised website.

There are two ways to gain a lot of visitors. The first is by search engine referrals where Google, Bing, Yahoo and the others send traffic your way. The second is the return visitor who is a person who probably found your site via a search engine, liked what he saw, bookmarked it and is now returning to see what is new.

Search Engines like Google are interested in providing quality content to those using them. For this reason they are on the look out for websites that provide just this. They are not interested in sites that cater to computers. They love sites that cater to humans with good content, clean navigation and clear design. An optimised website is optimised for humans, not computers.

Do yourself a favour and forget search engines and think all about the visitor!

Domain Name

If you do not already have a domain name, you should get one. The domain name should be short, descriptive and to the point. If possible it should be a .com but it is better to get a descriptive domain name with another TLD than a random or very long name with a .com TLD.

Visitors use the domain name as a clue as to the site’s content. For this reason, search engines also like descriptive domain names. The best domain name for a big web FAQ site would be www.bigwebfaq.com. It tells the visitor (and search engine) that it is big, it is about the web and it is an FAQ. An optimised website starts with the domain name.

Content

Content is King. That is the saying on the web and it is true, but not just any old content. It has to be quality content. It has to be relevant to your site. It also has to be original and by that is meant that you must not copy other’s content. Not only is content copyright protected, but search engines such as Google frown upon duplicate content. You want to keep Google happy! An optimised website has good content.

Keep it Simple

The design of a website needs to be clean and simple. You need to keep your visitors in mind more than search engines. Your visitors need to see a layout that tells them where they are and where to go next.

Try to structure the site with a homepage and then category pages with each page assigned to a category. Using Bread Crumbs is a good idea and Google even recommend them. Make it easy to navigate through the categories.

Simple also means a website where the backend code does not dwarf the content. Some say that this can harm a page’s ranking with search engines, but I have not found this. However it does not hurt to make the code as simple as possible for the search engine to read. An optimised website has simple navigation.

HTML Tag Reference

admin — Sun, 30 May 2010 22:42:25 +0000

Basic Tags

<html>
Creates an HTML document. All Web pages are enclosed in this tag.

Contains the title and other meta information that isn’t displayed on the Web page itself.

Contains the visible content of the Web document.

Creates a comment. Comments are not show in the browser.

Text Tags

Creates a headline. The first headline would be h1 followed by the sub headline, h2 etc all the way down to h6.

Creates bold text.

Creates italic text.

Creates a citation, usually italic.

Creates teletype text. This text often looks like Typewriter Text.

Emphasizes a word, normally in italic. Better than using for emphasis.

Emphasizes a word, normally in bold. Better than using for emphasis.

Long quotation. Indents text.

Short quotation.

Abbreviation.

Creates preformatted text. Text in a pre tag is displayed in a fixed-width font, preserving both spaces and line breaks.

Acronym.

Definition.

Code. Often used to show programming code examples.

Citation.

Deleted text.

Inserted text.

Subscript.

Superscript.

Links

URL”>
Creates a hyperlink.

Creates a hyperlink that opens in a new windown.

Creates a mailto link.

Creates a target location within a document.

Links to that target location from elsewhere in the document

Formatting

Creates a paragraph.

Aligns a paragraph to the left, right, or center.

Inserts a line break. Only use this when a
will not suffice.

Unordered list. Creates a bulleted list. Use
to list items.

Ordered list. Creates a numbered list. Use
to list items.

Encloses each list item.

A generic tag used to format blocks of HTML, also used with stylesheets.

A generic tag used for snippets of HTML. Used together with stylesheets.

Creates an image.

Aligns an image: left, right, center; bottom, top, middle.

Sets size of border around an image. Often set to “0” if used as a hyperlink.

Sets the alternative text of the image if it can’t be shown or viewed.

Inserts a horizontal rule.

Sets height of rule.

Sets width of rule, in percentage or absolute value.

Creates a rule without a shadow.

Tables

Creates a table.

Sets width of border around table cells

Sets amount of space between table cells

Sets amount of space between a cell’s border and its contents

Sets width of table, in pixels or as a percentage of document width

Creates a row in a table.
or or
Creates a cell in a row in a table.

Same as

Sets alignment for cell(s) (left, center, or right)

Sets vertical alignment for cell(s) (top, middle, or bottom).

Sets number of columns a cell spans. Default=1.

Sets number of rows a cell spans. Default=1.

Prevents the lines within a cell from being broken to fit.

but used for headers. Often shown in bold and centred.

Forms

Creates the form.

Sets the target address for the form’s data.

Sets the method for data transfer (get or post).

Creates a pulldown menu. Encloses

Creates a menu item embedded in a
Creates a text box. Cols set the width. Rows set the height.

Creates a checkbox. Text follows tag.

Creates a radio button.

Creates a one line text area. Size sets length in characters.

Creates a Submit button.

gif”>
Creates a Submit button using an image.

Creates a Reset button.

Related posts:
What is Dynamic HTML?

What is HTML?

What is a hyperlink?

First Homepage Tutorial

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:16:34 +0000

Introduction

In this tutorial we will build a simple homepage which is the very first page on your site.

Materials

A text editor such as Notepad.

A browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari.

An FTP client such as Filezilla:
http://filezilla-project.org/download.php
FTP Client: File Transfer Protocol Client
This is a programme used to transfer files to and from a web server.

Basic Concept

The web is made up of simple text files called HTML documents.

What is HTML?

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It is the language of the World Wide Web. It is not so much a programming language, but a tag based markup language. That means that it holds the text you see on a page and uses tags to describe the usage of the text.

A basic page would look something like the following:

Hello World

Note how it uses pairs of tags to start the HTML page and end it. It also has a pair of body tags in which the content of the page goes. The actual content is wrapped in special tags too. In this case,
is used which tells the browser that the text is a paragraph.

HTML documents mostly end in .htm or .html.

Practical

Open up your text editor. The first thing we need to do is establish that this is an HTML document by starting with the tag at the very top. This tells the browser that it needs to render (draw) this page as a web page.

After that we tell the browser that we are starting the body of content that is to be shown on the page. We use the tag for this.

Now we can add content. In this case we just want to write your name on the page so write your name. Content needs to be embedded with a tag that defines its role. In this case, your name would be a very short paragraph so it needs to be preceded by the
for paragraph tag.

Most tags have a start tag and an end tag. The
tag tells us when the paragraph starts. A
would define the end of the tag. Note how the forward slash has been added to the tag to tell us that we have reached the end of the tag. In conclusion, we end up with a paragraph that looks like this: Your Name
.

As with the paragraph tag we now need to close the tag and then the tag. Note how tags are nested within one another and do not overlap. Closing the

Save the file as index.htm and open it in your browser. Index.htm is a standard name for a homepage. You will see your name in the browser window.

For fun try adding new paragraphs. Also try what is called a header tag above your paragraphs which looks like this:
Headline
. This is used for headlines.

Related posts:
What is HTML?

What is CSS?

What is Dynamic HTML?

What is Cloud Computing?

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:39:44 +0000

Cloud Computing is computing on the Internet. Data and applications are stored and run on a server that a user’s computer accesses often via a web browser.

The “old” way of computing was to install a program on a workstation such as a home computer, then access and save any files on that same computer or a server within a closed network.

Cloud computing takes away the need for installation and storage on a workstation as all the data is processed and stored remotely in the “cloud” somewhere on the Internet. It means that workstations can be simpler devices which are still able to perform complex computing as the hard work is done by another computer and all the workstation has to do is send requests and show the results.

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What is an IP address?

What are Deep Links?

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:02:57 +0000

Deep links are hyperlinks to specific page or files on a website other than the home page or main landing page.

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What is HTTP and HTTPS?

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:13:31 +0000

HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is a common set of rules for how computers communicate with each other over a network. It is used for retrieving resources such as HTML files and images on The Web.

Using HTTP your browser sends a request to the web server. The web server then responds also using HTTP.

HTTPS is an acronym for Secure HTTP which is a secure way of transferring data. The data is encrypted before being sent over the network.

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What is a server?

What is XML?

What is The Internet?

What is an SWF file?

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:49:40 +0000

.swf files are complied Flash files ready for deployment on the web.

When creating Flash files they are saved as .fla files. In order to view the file on the web in the Flash Player, they need to be compiled into a .swf file.

Related posts:
What is a PNG File?

What is an SVG file?

What is data?

What is Flash?

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:45:37 +0000

Flash or Adobe Flash is a platform for adding multimedia to websites such as images, animation, sound and video. It is owned by Adobe and can be found on just about any web browser as an add-on. The format was born out of a need for rich media on the web at a time when web browsers where limited to static images or simple animated GIF files.

Flash started as a simple way to create vector graphic animations for the web and is still used for this purpose but today Flash is a highly sophisticated package with its own programming language (Actions Script), video formats and various versions for all popular operating systems and browsers.

Although it is strongly associated with vector graphics, the format can be used for displaying bitmaps too as well as video and playing music for that matter. Many websites use the format for rich media such as YouTube and BBC iPlayer for delivering video.

Related posts:
What is an SVG file?

What types of images are used on the web?

What is a GIF file?