TechStyleZ Web Design:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

TechStyleZ Web Design:
Technical Terms used in this site.

Why Do I Need a Web Site?

The easiest way to answer this is to make some comparisons with traditional forms of marketing. Businesses and organisations have to advertise to market themselves. Glossy brochures and leaflets produced to do this are expensive, have a finite life and incur other costs such as postage and labour.
A TechStyleZ site compares favourably with printing costs but simple changes can be made quickly and cheaply. Your potential customers will also find you, rather than you having to find them!

• Having a web site is a very efficient means of communicating with a large number of people and is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Indeed, clients can find you rather than you finding them, subscribe via your emailing list and have regular details of all your special offers and promotions!
• As a 'shop front' it is very low cost when compared with alternative means of publicity, especially when you compare the price of reprinting brochures to the small cost of updating a site.
• It can contribute to significant cost savings. for example, a
  client phones for information, details are taken, then posted.
  All this can be done on the site by the client in minutes, thus saving you the time and the cost of materials.
• Furthermore, a TechStyleZ Web Design Site can increase the enhanced professionalism of your business and thus enhance your image.

"...but I have a friend......"

Building a web site is not like writing a word processing document! If you print out a newsletter then everyone will see it exactly as you printed it out. Just imagine that you had to produce a newsletter where some people wanted large fonts, some small, some didn't want pictures, some wanted it on A3 paper and some on A5. Sounds difficult? Well visitors to your site have that sort of control on how they view the pages and more besides! So, before you accept the free services of a friend consider these points:

• What do they know about constructing a web page? Even with the best Web Creation Software, a good knowledge of the codes and language is needed. Click on 'View' at the top of your browser, then select 'Source'. That is what web designers deal in!!
• Ask them if the site will conform to W3C standards on browser compatibility and new accessibility guidelines. Will they ensure that visitors will be able to view the site successfully regardless of browser and screen resolution;
• Are they also aware of the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) and how your site might not be even seen by some users if you haven't got a Privacy Policy correctly installed?
• If you want to have your site updated, how keen will your friend be to if they are busy. If the site is poorly constructed then it could cost the price of a new site to have it updated by a professional and brought up to standard.

TechStyleZ Web Design will make sure that you not only have the site that you want but that it will be a site that everyone will be able to view it again and again.

HTML:
-Hyper Text Markup Language. This is the formatting code that web pages are written in. Your browser reads it and then displays the page on your screen. XHTML is very strict HTML and is superceding HTML as the basic formatting language. TechStyleZ Web Design constructs its pages to this newer standard.

DHTML:
Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language. This is not strictly a language/code, but a mixture of HTML, CSS and JavaScript used to 'jazz up' the pages and create interesting and useful effects. The menu on this page here uses DHTML.

CSS:
Cascading Style Sheets. Forget the 'Cascading' bit, just think about the 'Style'! This file is a set of instructions that give the browser details about the HTML. For example, This text is in 'h2' style. The browser goes to the CSS file and finds out what size this font should be, what typeface, whether it should be in bold, etc. Using Style sheets makes the page files smaller in size so they load faster for the visitor. They also enable some site wide changes to made very quickly.

JavaScript:
A scripting language that can create many useful and 'fun' effects. For example, this page uses JavaScript rollovers to show the picture when your mouse touches the name, and on this page the form is validated with JavaScript. Try entering silly details (like not including the @ in the email address) or leaving out data ...JavaScript will tell you that something's wrong when certain parameters aren't there. It also tells you what you've entered before the form submits!

Hosting & Domain Names:
A web site has to be somewhere for people to be able to access it and read it. Hosting simply refers to a company that specialises in this area. A Domain Name is the unique name that you have for your site; this site's domain name is www.techstylez.co.uk TechStyleZ give free advice on choosing domain names and recommend www.bargainhost.co.uk for hosting.

W3C (WWWC) World Wide Web Consortium:
A group formed in 1994 that works to set standards in web design and browser software. Sites that are validated to W3C standards should be able to be viewed in most browsers.

PHP:
PHP is a programming language that is written into web pages and then executed on the server. For example, a user registers as a new member, PHP collects the details and tells the database to store them. TechStyleZ Web Design uses PHP, for example, in its emailing list managers and web site administration areas.

MySQL:
This is a database system that works very well with PHP. Over 60% of web sites using databases use the PHP/MySQL combination.

Search Engine Optimisation:
Search Engines use software that crawl the internet. When they get to each page, they look for certain details that they then record. Making sure that this software finds what it is looking for helps the site rank higher in search engines. TechStyleZ uses many methods to optimise pages and includes 'robot.txt' files to guide search engine software around the site successfully.