Do-It-Yourself Design with Web Page Templates



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Many people mistakenly think that they have to hire a hot web designer for thousands of dollars in order to create an eye-catching website. This is not true, especially for the do-it-yourselfer who wants more control over the look and feel of a website.

Most websites are based on only one web page template. That’s right, just one. This means that all you have to do in order to get started is to buy a web page template that will work well for your web business and use software such as Macromedia DreamWeaver or Microsoft FrontPage in order to modify the template to your needs.

Now, many new web entrepreneurs find even the thought of designing their own web pages to be an overwhelming task. Others do not have the time and would rather contract this work out. One thing that can save you money, though is finding a web page template to base your site on and hand this over to the web designer to modify, rather than having them create one from scratch. This alone could save you hundreds of dollars in web design costs.

There are many places all over the Internet to find web page templates. Some companies charge per template and others charge on a subscription basis, so that for one fee you can download as many web page templates as you want for this fee. For those who wish to have more choices or who intend to put up multiple websites, the subscription-based service is the way to go.

Now that you’ve bought your web page template and want to get started, how do you learn DreamWeaver or FrontPage? First, there are many good “Dummy” and “Idiot” books on the market for both of these web design software packages. Most will find FrontPage a little easier to learn when first beginning, but I recommend learning DreamWeaver from the get-go since this is a more powerful package and the standard package of the industry. The longer you are a web designer, the more you’ll want DreamWeaver so you may as well learn this package upfront.

Many web entrepreneurs who finally take the plunge and put up their first website, will eventually go on to put up additional sites as well. Why? In many web businesses, it helps to put up slightly different websites focused on a slightly different target market. For instance, you may have a website about auto parts, but wish to put up another one about customized auto parts or one about BMW accessories. In this case, you’ll need a handful of web page templates at your disposal for your different web businesses.

No matter which direction you go in hiring a web designer or doing it yourself, you can save money by picking and handful of web page templates that suit you and your business needs.



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This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al.

APIs and data portability

The blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail.

Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:

  1. To speed up the load time of their website
  2. To have a back up plan if the API call fails

A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail.

Caching is good contingency design practice

As I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible.

A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above.

And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Right, and it looks like I had not built the commenting functionality into this version of the site. What a surprise. I'd still like feedback so if anyone has any email me at mike at this domain and I'll pop a comment right into the database. Off to build some commenting functionality... Comments should be working now.



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