Panduan Lengkap Perbelanjaan Kahwin

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Adakah anda tahu berapakah kos perbelanjaan untuk sesebuah perkahwinan? Di sini saya memberikan panduan serta kos yang diperlukan untuk melangsungkan sesebuah perkahwinan.

PANDUAN DAN KOS UNTUK PERSIAPAN KAHWIN (SECARA RAMBANG) 1. Kadi Sebelum beberapa bulan ataupun dalam kurang 6 bulan lagi anda dan pasangan anda menentukan tarikh nikah, anda harus mendaftar di jabatan, tetapi sebelum mendaftar, anda dan pasangan anda kendaklah tahu asas kahwin yang akan diberikan, tarikh dan tempat nikah anda dan pasangan telah pun ditentukan. Setelah anda dan pasangan anda mendaftar, anda bolehlah menempah perkhidmatan Tok Kadi. Kos untuk perkhidmatan kadi : RM80.00++ 2. Kursus Rumahtangga Anda dan pasangan anda wajib untuk menghadiri kursus rumahtangga, jika tidak anda dan pasangan anda tidak boleh mengambil sijil nikah. Ini penting untuk anda dan pasangan anda untuk lebih bersedia untuk menghadapi alam runahtangga. Kos Kursus : RM80.00-+ untuk sepanjang kursus (Ikut tempat) 3. Perkhidmatan Mak Andam Mak Andam merupakan antara orang yang penting dalam perkahwinan. Mak Andam bertanggungjawab untuk menghias pengantin pada hari perkahwinan Kos Perkhidmatan Mak Andam : RM1200-+ (Bergantung pada budi bicara) 4. Photographer Selalunya Mak Andam akan mencadangkan photographer sekali. Jika tidak, anda dan pasangan anda hendak mencari sendiri. Anda boleh mendapatkan perkhidmatan kedai gambar. Kos Photographer : RM800++ 5. Kompang / Hadrah Adat orang melayu kenalah mempunyai kompang ataupun hadrah. Anda perlu mendapatkan khidmat kompang dan hadrah dalam tempoh paling kurang dalam 3 bulan sebelum hari perkahwinan. Kos Kompang / Hadrah : RM300 -+ 6. Dekorasi blok dan pelamin Inilah perkara yang menjadi tanda anda dan pasangan anda menjadi Raja Sehari. Dekorasi blok dan pelamin yang sesuai mampu menjadi ingatan setiap hadirin yang datang berkunjung ke hari perkahwinan anda. Kos Dekorasi blok dan pelamin : RM1000++ 7. Tukang Masak dan Khemah Kerusi Meja Anda perlu mempunyai tukang masak untuk menyediakan makanan pada hari perkahwinan anda. Anda juga boleh menempah perkhidmatan restoran ataupun hotel untuk menyediakan makanan untuk tetamu (bagi yang lebih berkemampuan). Kos Tukang masak dan Khemah Kerusi Meja : RM7000 (Berdasarkan Jumlah Tetamu) 8. Kenderaan Sekiranya pengantin lelaki ingin bertandang ke rumah pengantin perempuan yang jauh, anda memerlukan kenderaan untuk pengantin lelaki dan juga untuk keluarga pengantin lelaki. Kenderaan untuk tetamu juga perlu disediakan. Kos Kenderaan : RM300++ 9. DJ / Karaoke Majlis perkahwinan pastinya tidak akan meriah sekiranya tiada hiburan. Anda dan pasangan anda boleh menempah kelengkapan untuk karaoke dan juga perkhidmatan DJ. Kos DJ / Karaoke : RM850 10. Berkat & Cenderamata Pemberian untuk tetamu yang hadir. Contohnya seperti telur rebus, gula-gula ataupun biskut. Kos : RM3000-+ (Berdasarkan jumlah tetamu) 11. Miscellaneous (Perkara lain) Perkara-perkara kecil tetapi yang sangat diambil perhatian. Contohnya seperti Bunga Pahar, Sireh Dara, Kek, Sabun, Rokok Rewang, Sewa kolong blok, Tuala rewang, pisau rewang, barang barang hantaran, cadar, kelambu, langsir, carpet, bil, lauk pauk kelengkapan majlis, plastik buat bungkusan, kad jemputan dan lain-lain. Kos : RM2500 ++ JUMLAH YANG PERLU ANDA KELUARKAN UNTUK MELANGSUNGKAN PERKAHWINAN ANDA IALAH RM 17 110.00++ Jumlah di atas tidak termasuk hantaran dan mas kawin anda. Nilai di atas hanyalah dikira secara rambang berdasarkan harga dan kos pada masa sekarang.

ADAKAH ANDA MERASAKAN JUMLAH TERSEBUT MEMBEBANKAN ANDA? ADAKAH ANDA RASA INGIN MEMBATALKAN NIAT ANDA UNTUK BERKAHWIN? ADAKAH ANDA MERASAKAN DIRI ANDA TIDAK MAMPU UNTUK MENYEDIAKAN KOS TERSEBUT? ADAKAH ANDA INGIN TAHU APAKAH RAHSIA UNTUK MENGUMPUL WANG UNTUK PERKAHWINAN ANDA? JAWAPAN YA, ANDA BERTUAH KERANA ANDA TELAH MENEMUI PENYELESAIAN UNTUK MASALAH KEWANGAN ANDA. Sila klik sini untuk mengetahui RAHSIA MENGUMPUL WANG UNTUK PERKAHWINAN ANDA

Selamat Hari Raya, Maaf Zahir & Batin

Mata kadang tersalah pandang,
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Basic Approach to Strategic Planning

A critical review of past performance by the owners and management of a business and the preparation of a plan beyond normal budgetary horizons require a certain attitude of mind and predisposition. Some essential points which should to be observed during the review and planning process include the following:

* Relate to the medium term i.e. 2/4 years
* Be undertaken by owners/directors
* Focus on matters of strategic importance
* Be separated from day-to-day work
* Be realistic, detached and critical
* Distinguish between cause and effect
* Be reviewed periodically
* Be written down.

As the precursor to developing a strategic plan, it is desirable to clearly identify the current status, objectives and strategies of an existing business or the latest thinking in respect of a new venture. Correctly defined, these can be used as the basis for a critical examination to probe existing or perceived Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities. This then leads to strategy development covering the following issues discussed in more detail below:

* Vision
* Mission
* Values
* Objectives
* Strategies
* Goals
* Programs

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TIPS Membina Website Yang Berkesan

1. MENYATAKAN TUJUAN WEBSITE
Website wujud untuk menyatakan tujuan bagi pemiliknya. Walupun pelbagai jenis website seperti blog, portal, minisite bisnes dan lain-lain lagi, masing-masing mempunyai tujuan tertentu yang menurut kehendak pemiliknya. Kebanyakan laman web adalah berkonsepkan perniagaan / pemasaran yang semakin berkembang pesat di Amerika dan negara barat yang lain. Tetapi laman web berkonsepkan perniagaan di Malaysia masih belum berkembang secara menyeluruh lagi.

Antara tujuan laman web berkonsepkan perniagaan yang lazim ialah:
• Melakukan promosi perniagaan
• Menarik pelanggan baru
• Meyakinkan pelanggan yang ada
• Membina hubungan yang baik dengan pelanggan
• ..untuk 24 jam / hari, 7 hari / minggu, seluruh dunia – membina rangkaian global tiada batasan masa.
• Menjimatkan masa pekerja dengan menyediakan maklumat secara automatik.
• Untuk memindahkan dokumen dengan lebih cepat.
• Membuat jualan menerusi website.

Kesemua tujuan-tujuan ini boleh diklasifikasikan kepada 2 kategori manusia yang mendapat manfaat.
♦ Bagi pemilik; di dalam terma kewangan atau publisiti:
o Menjana wang secara terus (jualan online)
o Menjana wang secara tidak terus (jualan dilakukan secara offline)
o Menyebarkan mesej yang boleh memberi faedah kepada pemilik.
♦ Bagi pelawat; di dalam terma taraf kehidupan:
o Mendapat maklumat yang berguna.
o Mendapat maklumat yang menarik.
o Mendapat layanan dan peluang yang terbaik.

2. KEBOLEHAN & KEUPAYAAN WEBSITE
Website adalah berkebolehan dan berkeupayaan jika…
• Ia boleh dijumpai apabila menggunakan enjin carian atau link daripada website lain
• Ia mudah dan cepat di paparkan (load) di computer pelawat
• Setiap pelayar internet (web browser) boleh memaparkannya tanpa ada kekangan
• Ia jelas dan mudah dibaca
• Ia tidak menyakitkan hati / menganggu pelawat sewaktu melawatnya
• Pelawat mudah membaca atau mencari maklumat yang diperlukannya

3. SELALU DIKEMASKINI (P/S : Tips yang saya kurang praktikkan)
Jangan hanya pandai buat website, tetapi malas mengemaskini. Perkara ini perlu dititik beratkan kerana ia adalah satu teknik tarikan pelawat buat kali ke-2 atau selamanya. Jika anda membina laman web yang berorientasikan maklumat, perkara ini amatlah perlu dilakukan. Pelawat sangat berharap maklumat terbaru apabila mereka sudah melihat maklumat sebelumnya di laman web anda. Dari segi antaramuka grafik pula, ia tidak lah terlalu penting untuk dikemaskini. Apa yang paling penting ialah maklumat yang disampaikan tersebut perlu sentiasa dikemaskini atau ditambah dengan maklumat yang baru. Walaupun bukan setiap hari, tetapi sekali seminggu sudah memadai.

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Dengan menggunakan internet sebagai platform, anda tidak perlu menjual dari pintu ke pintu lagi. Walaupun anda menyertai syarikat MLM, anda akan dapat prospek yang ramai dalam masa yang singkat yang tidak mampu diguna pakai dalam perniagaan biasa.

Anda tidak perlu lagi berjalan dari satu tempat ke tempat lain untuk berjumpa prospek kerana Internet memberikan anda berinteraksi hanya dengan menggunakan komputer. Tambahan lagi, anda tidak perlu untuk menggaji pekerja untuk menjual produk anda ataupun menjualnya secara sendiri.

Apa yang anda perlukan untuk menjual ialah sales letter yang berkesan dan membunuh.

Dan kami akan menunjukkan kepada anda bagaimana anda mampu mencipta penjual sendiri untuk menjual produk atau perkhidmatan anda tidak kira masa dan mampu menukarkan setiap 2 hingga 4 daripada 100 prospek yang membaca sales letter anda kepada pembeli dalam sekelip mata!

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Tak sempat nak send logo utk cabaran wc

Logo yg saya buat utk pertandingan mencipta logo utk cabaran wangcyber.. Roshatika logo..

Tapi saya xsempat untuk menghantarnya.. utk tatapan pengunjung dan rakan2 semua..

Ni logo kedua saya

Logo ketiga

Macamana? ok x? silalah komen..

Siapa2 berminat dengan perkhidmatan mencipta logo atau banner, silalah emailkan permohonan anda kepada saya di smartinfo2u[at]gmail.com..

Harga murah sahaja, boleh runding, harga permulaan ialah RM50 ++.. bergantung kepada permintaan.. 2 design logo dan banner PERCUMA dalam setiap perkhidmatan..

Banner WanitaDotCom 2

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Header Designer Competition

Logos And Slogans

In 1987, Microsoft adopted its current logo, the so-called "Pacman Logo" designed by Scott Baker. According to the March 1987 Computer Reseller News Magazine, "The new logo, in Helvetica italic typeface, has a slash between the o and s to emphasize the "soft" part of the name and convey motion and speed." Dave Norris, a Microsoft employee, ran an internal joke campaign to save the old logo, which was green, in all uppercase, and featured a fanciful letter O, nicknamed the blibbet, but it was discarded.

Microsoft's logo depicted here, with the "Your potential. Our passion." tagline below the main corporate name, is based on the slogan Microsoft had as of 2006. In 2002, the company started using the logo in the United States and eventually started a TV campaign with the slogan, changed from the previous tagline of "Where do you want to go today?." Like some of Microsoft's other actions, the slogan met its fair share of criticism. For example, in his ThirdWay Advertising Blog, David Vinjamuri states that while "This is gorgeous, touching advertising of the type that wins awards," he ends by noting that the slogan "Only reminds us what we don't like about the brand. Can it."

Diversity

In 2005, Microsoft received a 100% rating in the Corporate Equality Index from the Human Rights Campaign relating to its policies concerning LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) employees. Partly through the work of the Gay and Lesbian Employees at Microsoft (GLEAM) group, Microsoft added gender expression to its antidiscrimination policies in April 2005, and the Human Rights Campaign upgraded Microsoft's Corporate Equality Index from its 86% rating in 2004 to its current 100% rating, putting it among the most progressive companies in the world, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

In April 2005, Microsoft received wide criticism for withdrawing support from Washington state's H.B. 1515 bill that would have extended the state's current antidiscrimination laws to people with alternate sexual orientations, although some claim they never withdrew support and instead simply were neutral on the bill. However, under harsh criticism from both outside and inside the company's walls, Microsoft decided to support the bill again in May 2005.

During his visit to Waterloo in October 2005, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stated, "Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world, typically 50 or even more."

Microsoft hires many foreign workers as well as domestic ones, and is an outspoken opponent of the cap on H1B visas, which allow companies in the United States to employ certain foreign workers. Bill Gates claims the cap on H1B visas make it difficult to hire employees for the company, stating "I'd certainly get rid of the H1B cap."

Working Mother magazine named Microsoft one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers in 2004 and 2005.

Stock

When the company debuted its IPO in March 13, 1986, the stock price was US$21. By the close of the first trading day, the stock had closed at twenty-eight dollars, equivalent to 9.7 cents when adjusted for the company's first nine splits. The initial close and ensuing rise in subsequent years made several Microsoft employees millions. The stock price peaked in 1999 at around US$119 (US$60.928 adjusting for splits). While the company has had nine stock splits, the first of which was in September 18, 1987, the company did not start offering a dividend until January 16, 2003. The dividend for the 2003 fiscal year was eight cents per share, followed by a dividend of sixteen cents per share the subsequent year. The company switched from yearly to quarterly dividends in 2005, for eight cents a share per quarter with a special one-time payout of three dollars per share for the second quarter of the fiscal year.

Around 2003 the stock price began a slow descent. Despite the company's ninth split on February 2, 2003 and subsequent increases in dividend payouts, the price of Microsoft's stock continues to stagnate as of June 2006.

Corporate Structure

The company is run by a Board of Directors consisting of ten people, made up of mostly company outsiders (as is customary for publicly traded companies). Current members of the board of directors of Microsoft are: Steve Ballmer, James Cash, Jr., Dina Dublon, Bill Gates, Raymond Gilmartin, Ann Korologos, David Marquardt, Charles Noski, Helmut Panke, and Jon Shirley. The ten board members are elected every year at the annual shareholders' meeting, and those who do not get a majority of votes must submit a resignation to the board, which will subsequently choose whether or not to accept the resignation. There are five committees within the board which oversee more specific matters. These committees include the Audit Committee, which handles accounting issues with the company including auditing and reporting; the Compensation Committee, which approves compensation for the CEO and other employees of the company; the Finance Committee, which handles financial matters such as proposing mergers and acquisitions; the Governance and Nominating Committee, which handles various corporate matters including nomination of the board; and the Antitrust Compliance Committee, which attempts to prevent company practices from violating antitrust laws.

There are several other aspects to the corporate structure of Microsoft. For worldwide matters there is the Executive Team, made up of sixteen company officers across the globe, which is charged with various duties including making sure employees understand Microsoft's culture of business. The sixteen officers of the Executive Team include the Chairman and Chief Software Architect, the CEO, the General Counsel and Secretary, the CFO, senior and group vice presidents from the business units, the CEO of the Europe, the Middle East and Africa regions; and the heads of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Services; Human Resources; and Corporate Marketing. In addition to the Executive Team there is also the Corporate Staff Council, which handles all major staff functions of the company, including approving corporate policies. The Corporate Staff Council is made up of employees from the Law and Corporate Affairs, Finance, Human Resources, Corporate Marketing, and Advanced Strategy and Policy groups at Microsoft. Other Executive Officers include the Presidents and Vice Presidents of the various product divisions, leaders of the marketing section, and the CTO, among others.

User Culture

Technical reference for developers and articles for various Microsoft magazines such as Microsoft Systems Journal (or MSJ) are available through the Microsoft Developer Network, often called MSDN. MSDN also offers subscriptions for companies and individuals, and the more expensive subscriptions usually offer access to pre-release beta versions of Microsoft software. In recent years, Microsoft launched a community site for developers and users, entitled Channel 9, which provides many modern features such as a wiki and an Internet forum. Another community site that provides daily videocasts and other services, On10.net, launched on March 3, 2006.

Most free technical support available through Microsoft is provided through online Usenet newsgroups (in the early days it was also provided on CompuServe). There are several of these newsgroups for nearly every product Microsoft provides, and often they are monitored by Microsoft employees. People who are helpful on the newsgroups can be elected by other peers or Microsoft employees for Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status, which entitles people to a sort of special social status, in addition to possibilities for awards and other benefits.

Business Culture

Microsoft has often been described as having a developer-centric business culture. A great deal of time and money is spent each year on recruiting young university-trained software developers and on keeping them in the company. For example, while many software companies often place an entry-level software developer in a cubicle desk within a large office space filled with other cubicles, Microsoft assigns a private or semiprivate closed office to every developer or pair of developers. In addition, key decision makers at every level are either developers or former developers. In a sense, the software developers at Microsoft are considered the "stars" of the company in the same way that the sales staff at IBM are considered the "stars" of their company.

Within Microsoft the expression "eating our own dog food" is used to describe the policy of using the latest Microsoft products inside the company in an effort to test them in "real-world" situations. Only prerelease and beta versions of products are considered dog food. This is usually shortened to just "dog food" and is used as noun, verb, and adjective. The company is also known for their hiring process, dubbed the "Microsoft interview", which is notorious for off-the-wall questions such as "Why is a manhole cover round?" and is a process often mimicked in other organizations, although these types of questions are rarer now than they were in the past. For fun, Microsoft also hosts the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt, an annual puzzle hunt (a live puzzle game where teams compete to solve a series of puzzles) held at the Redmond campus. It is a spin-off of the MIT Mystery Hunt.

As of 2006, Microsoft employees, not including Bill Gates, have given over $2.5billion dollars to non-profit organizations worldwide, making Microsoft the worldwide top company in per-employee donations.

Product Divisions

To be more precise in tracking performance of each unit and delegating responsibility, Microsoft reorganized into seven core business groups — each an independent financial entity — in April 2002. Later, on September 20, 2005, Microsoft announced a rationalization of its original seven business groups into the three core divisions that exist today: the Windows Client, MSN and Server and Tool groups were merged into the Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division; the Information Worker and Microsoft Business Solutions groups were merged into the Microsoft Business Division; and the Mobile and Embedded Devices and Home and Entertainment groups were merged into the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division.

Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Corporation, is a multinational computer technology corporation with an extremly high global annual revenue of US$44.28 billion and 71,553 employees in 102 countries as of July 2006. Microsoft Corporation is one of the world's largest software company. It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, its best selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software, each of which has achieved near-ubiquity in the desktop computer market. Microsoft possesses footholds in other markets, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets both computer hardware products such as the Microsoft mouse as well as home entertainment products such as the Xbox, Xbox 360 and MSN TV.

Microsoft's name, originally bi-capitalized as MicroSoft or with hyphenation as Micro-Soft, is a portmanteau of "microcomputer software" and is often abbreviated as MS. The company was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. After the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones in the mid-1980s, Microsoft used its new position, which it gained in part due to a contract from IBM, to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS, which stood for Microsoft Disk Operating System. The company later released an initial public offering (IPO) in the stock market, which netted several of its employees millions of dollars due to the ensuing rise of the stock price. The price of the stock continued its rise steadily into the early 2000s. In Microsoft Windows, originally an add-on for MS-DOS, the company was selling what would become the most widely used operating system in the world; Microsoft continued to push into multiple markets, such as computer hardware and television. In addition, Microsoft has historically given customer support over Usenet newsgroups and the World Wide Web, and awards Microsoft MVP status to volunteers who are deemed helpful in assisting the company's customers.

With what is generally described as a developer-centric business culture, Microsoft has become widely known for some of its internal codes of conduct for its employees. One example is the principle "eat your own dog food", which describes the practice of using pre-release products inside the company to test them in an environment geared towards the real world. Microsoft has been convicted of monopolistic business practices — the U.S. Justice Department, among others, has sued Microsoft for antitrust violations and software bundling. The slogan "embrace, extend, and extinguish" is often used to describe Microsoft's strategy for entering product categories involving widely-used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors. In addition, Microsoft has been criticized for the insecurity of its software. However, Microsoft has won several awards, such as the "1993 Most Innovative Company Operating in the U.S." by Fortune magazine, as well as maintaining a place on the Fortune 500 list of companies as of 2006.

How The Internet Is Connected

Small Internet service providers (ISPs) hook into regional ISPs, which link into major backbones that traverse the U.S. This diagram is conceptual because ISPs often span county and state lines.

Modest Beginnings

These four nodes were drawn in 1969 showing the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, SRI International and the University of Utah. This modest network diagram was the beginning of the ARPAnet and eventually the Internet. (Image courtesy of The Computer History Museum, www.historycenter.org)

The Next Internet

Ironically, some of the original academic and scientific users of the Internet have developed their own Internet once again. Internet2 is a high-speed academic research network that was started in much the same fashion as the original Internet (see Internet2). See Web vs. Internet, World Wide Web, how to search the Web, intranet, NAP, hot topics and trends, IAB, information superhighway and online service.

Life Before The Web

Before the Web and the graphics-based Web browser, the Internet was accessed from Unix terminals by academicians and scientists using command-driven Unix utilities. These utilities are still used; however, today, they reside in Windows, Mac and Linux machines as well. For example, an FTP program allows files to be uploaded and downloaded, and the Archie utility provides listings of these files. Telnet is a terminal emulation program that lets you log onto a computer on the Internet and run a program. Gopher provides hierarchical menus describing Internet files (not just file names), and Veronica lets you search Gopher sites. See FTP, Archie, Telnet, Gopher and Veronica.

The TCP/IP Protocol

Internet computers use the TCP/IP communications protocol. There are more than 100 million hosts on the Internet, a host being a mainframe or medium to high-end server that is always online via TCP/IP. The Internet is also connected to non-TCP/IP networks worldwide through gateways that convert TCP/IP into other protocols.

It Went Commercial In 1995

In 1995, the Internet was turned over to large commercial Internet providers (ISPs), such as MCI, Sprint and UUNET, which took responsibility for the backbones and have increasingly enhanced their capacities ever since. Regional ISPs link into these backbones to provide lines for their subscribers, and smaller ISPs hook either directly into the national backbones or into the regional ISPs.

The Original Internet

The Internet started in 1969 as the ARPAnet. Funded by the U.S. government, the ARPAnet became a series of high-speed links between major supercomputer sites and educational and research institutions worldwide, although mostly in the U.S. A major part of its backbone was the National Science Foundation's NFSNet. Along the way, it became known as the "Internet" or simply "the Net." By the 1990s, so many networks had become part of it and so much traffic was not educational or pure research that it became obvious that the Internet was on its way to becoming a commercial venture.

Chat Rooms

Chat rooms provide another popular Internet service. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) offers multiuser text conferencing on diverse topics. Dozens of IRC servers provide hundreds of channels that anyone can log onto and participate in via the keyboard. See IRC.

Newsgroups

Although daily news and information is now available on countless Web sites, long before the Web, information on a myriad of subjects was exchanged via Usenet (User Network) newsgroups. Still thriving, newsgroup articles can be selected and read directly from your Web browser. See Usenet.

The Web Was the Explosion

Secondly, with the advent of graphics-based Web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, and soon after, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the World Wide Web took off. The Web became easily available to users with PCs and Macs rather than only scientists and hackers at Unix workstations. Delphi was the first proprietary online service to offer Web access, and all the rest followed. At the same time, new Internet service providers (ISPs) rose out of the woodwork to offer access to individuals and companies. As a result, the Web grew exponentially, providing an information exchange of unprecedented proportion. The Web has also become "the" storehouse for drivers, updates and demos that are downloaded via the browser as well as a global transport for delivering information by subscription, both free and paid.

E-Mail Was The Beginning

The Internet's surge in growth in the mid-1990s was dramatic, increasing a hundredfold in 1995 and 1996 alone. There were two reasons. Up until then, the major online services (AOL, CompuServe, etc.) provided e-mail, but only to customers of the same service. As they began to connect to the Internet for e-mail exchange, the Internet took on the role of a global switching center. An AOL member could finally send mail to a CompuServe member, and so on. The Internet glued the world together for electronic mail, and today, SMTP, the Internet mail protocol, is the global e-mail standard.

Technology

1.(Lower case "i"nternet) A large network made up of a number of smaller networks.

2.(Upper case "I"nternet) The largest network in the world. It is made up of more than 350 million computers in more than 100 countries covering commercial, academic and government endeavors. Originally developed for the U.S. military, the Internet became widely used for academic and commercial research. Users had access to unpublished data and journals on a variety of subjects. Today, the "Net" has become commercialized into a worldwide information highway, providing data and commentary on every subject and product on earth.

Commerce On The Internet

Commerce on the Internet is known by a few other names, such as e-business, Etailing (electronic retailing), and e-commerce. The strengths of e-business depend on the strengths of the Internet. Internet commerce is divided into two major segments, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). In each are some companies that have started their businesses on the Internet, and others that have existed previously and are now transitioning into the Internet world. Some products and services, such as books, compact disks (CDs), computer software, and airline tickets, seem to be particularly suited for online business.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) is based on technology called hypertext. The Web may be thought of as a very large subset of the Internet, consisting of hypertext and hypermedia documents. A hypertext document is a document that has a reference (or link) to another hypertext document, which may be on the same computer or in a different computer that may be located anywhere in the world. Hypermedia is a similar concept except that it provides links to graphic, sound, and video files in addition to text files.

In order for the Web to work, every client must be able to display every document from any server. This is accomplished by imposing a set of standards known as a protocol to govern the way that data are transmitted across the Web. Thus data travel from client to server and back through a protocol known as the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http). In order to access the documents that are transmitted through this protocol, a special program known as a browser is required, which browses the Web. See also World Wide Web.

Domain Name System

The addressing system on the Internet generates IP addresses, which are usually indicated by numbers such as 128.1.1.111. Since such numbers are difficult to remember, a user-friendly system has been created known as the Domain Name System (DNS). This system provides the mnemonic equivalent of a numeric IP address and further ensures that every site on the Internet has a unique address. For example, an Internet address might appear as google.com. If this address is accessed through a Web browser, it is referred to as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), and the full URL will appear as http://www.google.com.

The Domain Name System divides the Internet into a series of component networks called domains that enable e-mail (and other files) to be sent across the entire Internet. Each site attached to the Internet belongs to one of the domains. Universities, for example, belong to the “edu” domain. Other domains are gov (government), com (commercial organizations), mil (military), net (network service providers), and org (nonprofit organizations).

TCP/IP

TCP/IP is a set of protocols developed to allow cooperating computers to share resources across the networks. The TCP/IP establishes the standards and rules by which messages are sent through the networks. The most important traditional TCP/IP services are file transfer, remote login, and mail transfer.

The file transfer protocol (FTP) allows a user on any computer to get files from another computer, or to send files to another computer. Security is handled by requiring the user to specify a user name and password for the other computer.

The network terminal protocol (TELNET) allows a user to log in on any other computer on the network. The user starts a remote session by specifying a computer to connect to. From that time until the end of the session, anything the user types is sent to the other computer.

Mail transfer allows a user to send messages to users on other computers. Originally, people tended to use only one or two specific computers. They would maintain “mail files” on those machines. The computer mail system is simply a way for a user to add a message to another user's mail file.

Other services have also become important: resource sharing, diskless workstations, computer conferencing, transaction processing, security, multimedia access, and directory services.

TCP is responsible for breaking up the message into datagrams, reassembling the datagrams at the other end, resending anything that gets lost, and putting things back in the right order. IP is responsible for routing individual datagrams. The datagrams are individually identified by a unique sequence number to facilitate reassembly in the correct order. The whole process of transmission is done through the use of routers. Routing is the process by which two communication stations find and use the optimum path across any network of any complexity. Routers must support fragmentation, the ability to subdivide received information into smaller units where this is required to match the underlying network technology. Routers operate by recognizing that a particular network number relates to a specific area within the interconnected networks. They keep track of the numbers throughout the entire process.

Technological Features

The Internet 'Ls technological success depends on its principal communication tools, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). They are referred to frequently as TCP/IP. A protocol is an agreed-upon set of conventions that defines the rules of communication. TCP breaks down and reassembles packets, whereas IP is responsible for ensuring that the packets are sent to the right destination.

Data travels across the Internet through several levels of networks until it reaches its destination. E-mail messages arrive at the mail server (similar to the local post office) from a remote personal computer connected by a modem, or a node on a local-area network. From the server, the messages pass through a router, a special-purpose computer ensuring that each message is sent to its correct destination. A message may pass through several networks to reach its destination. Each network has its own router that determines how best to move the message closer to its destination, taking into account the traffic on the network. A message passes from one network to the next, until it arrives at the destination network, from where it can be sent to the recipient, who has a mailbox on that network. See also Electronic mail; Local-area networks; Wide-area networks.

Internet

A worldwide system of interconnected computer networks. The origins of the Internet can be traced to the creation of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) as a network of computers under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969. Today, the Internet connects millions of computers around the world in a nonhierarchical manner unprecedented in the history of communications. The Internet is a product of the convergence of media, computers, and telecommunications. It is not merely a technological development but the product of social and political processes, involving both the academic world and the government (the Department of Defense). From its origins in a nonindustrial, noncorporate environment and in a purely scientific culture, it has quickly diffused into the world of commerce.

The Internet is a combination of several media technologies and an electronic version of newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs, bulletin boards, and much more. This versatility gives the Internet its power.

Designing For Sales

One thing that lots of designers don't seem to understand is that there's a big difference between the kind of design you should use if you're trying to present information (usually with ads), and the kind of design you should use if the aim of your website is to make sales. This distinction causes a lot of confusion, bad design, and, ultimately, lost sales. If you're trying to sell, then there's a whole other set of design principles that you need to follow.

The Headline is Everything.

If you want your website to make sales for you, then the first thing you need to pay attention to is the headline on your sales page. It needs to be large, to stand out, and to grab the visitors' attention. It should give a clear benefit (not a feature) of your product that you think would appeal to most people. If you have a bad headline then people won't even look at the rest of what you've written – they'll just press the back button.

Always Be Ready to Make the Sale.

As soon as a visitor gets to your product's page, it should be absolutely crystal clear what they've got to do to buy the product. If it's a long page, then 'buy' buttons should be scattered throughout. If a visitor could look at any part of your page and wonder where they have to click to buy the product, then there's something fundamentally wrong with your website's design.

Make Happy Customers Prominent.

On a sales page you should have a space for feedback that has been left by previous customers, whether it's in the form of reviews or testimonials. This gives people an opportunity to read a supposedly objective view of your product, and makes them feel better about spending their money on it. Of course, this means that you need to solicit feedback from previous customers to put in that space – a good way of doing this is to offer rewards for customers who contribute in this way.

Pay Attention to Payment.

You need to make sure that your payment page – that is, the page where you collect credit card details – is well laid out and easy to use. Doing things like making it difficult to type in a credit card number or making it confusing to choose what kind of card you have is likely to damage the customer's confidence in you and your website. This page should be professional and standard – don't be tempted to do anything unusual with it.

Highlight Special Bonuses.

To help persuade potential customers who are on the fence about whether to buy or not to buy, you should take care to highlight any special bonuses that purchasing your product will give them. For example, a physical product might come with free delivery, and a non-physical product might come with a free ebook. Don't go overboard and have a ridiculous number of bonuses, but do add enough to make the customer feel like they're getting very good value for their money.

Keep It Simple.

When you're designing a website that is going to be used to sell products, you've got to keep things as simple as possible on the technical side. That's because the more complicated functions you use, the more things there are that could go wrong and stop them from buying anything from you. It's better that people see a slightly less fancy website than that they don't see one at all because if they don't see your website then they won't be doing any shopping there.

To understand the basics of how e-commerce websites work you should look at as many other websites as you can. Write down the elements that they all seem to have in common – for example, shopping carts – and you will gradually figure out which things are essentials and which things are just bells and whistles. Your website should leaev out everything but the essentials, but make the essential things very easy to do. That is the key so successful e-commerce design, and if you can manage it then it will be very rewarding for you and your website.

Cut To The Chase: How To Make Your Website Load Faster

So your web pages have great content, a nice design, but hardly anyone seems to click through from them to any other part of your website. In many cases, the problem is the load time – people are abandoning your site for the simple reason that it just takes too long for the thing to load.

How Fast Does It Need to Be?

Fast load times are extremely important: usability studies say users rate them as one of the most important things about a website. Users would much rather use a quick-loading site of average quality than a great one that loads sluggishly – no doubt you've done this yourself at some point.

What's the limit? Well, studies say that over a third of users will leave a website that doesn't load within ten seconds. You might think that, in the age of broadband, download speeds don't matter, but remember that in the US, over half of all Internet users are still using slow dial-up connections (if you are, you have my sympathy). Other countries don't tend to have quite as many dial-up connections left, but broadband penetration is certainly nowhere near universal.

This means that you need to pay attention to the size and download speed of your site: those 10 seconds on a 56k dial-up connection correspond to about 70KB in page size – that means that your HTML and graphics should add up to 70KB as an absolute limit. That's quite a stringent requirement, and makes every byte count.

Reduce Graphics.

The first thing you should do, then, is to keep the number of graphics your website uses to a minimum. Don't have graphics for things where text or CSS would do, or where they don't enhance your information or design significantly. You should consider the web to be a text medium, and justify every graphic you use to yourself.

Compress Your Graphics.

Once you've removed the un-needed graphics, you might consider compressing the ones that remain. Try turning up their JPEG compression higher, or reducing the number of colours used – you might try using a GIF, if your graphics don't have very many different colours.

When you can't compress your graphics any smaller, don't miss more traditional steps: you could always resize your graphics to make them smaller!

Clean Up Your HTML.

You'd be surprised just how bloated HTML code can get with unnecessary tags, especially if you use a WYSIWYG editor, or design your site using tables. Design your site using CSS as much as you can, and use HTML Tidy (or another HTML cleaning program) to clean up your HTML. Don't ignore the extra bandwidth taken by CSS, though, and try to keep that as small as possible too.

In many cases, a simple cleaning-up process can reduce the download size by your pages by as much as half – it's especially effective for pages that contain long articles, because of the number of unnecessary tags many editors insert at the start of new paragraphs.

Switch Web Hosts.

Finally, you might find that, despite your website's small download size, it still loads slowly. In these cases, your web host may be to blame. Test from a few different connections and computers to make sure, and try putting up a completely different page to test the speeds – but if it's consistently bad, then it may be time to move hosts. You should, however, email your host about the problem first and give them a week or so to fix it, as they may just be having short-term problems.

When you're switching to a host to try to get a good speed, you might want to consider looking around at sites that are already hosted by them. The best way to do this is to do a search for "hosted by [host's name]" (with the quote marks), as many sites will write who they're hosted by on one of their pages – you can then check a few sites out to see whether they're generally fast or slow.

CSS And The End Of Tables

In the bad old days of the web, the only way to create even slightly complex layouts was to use tables. Some sites featured silly numbers of tables, one inside the other, to create relatively simple-looking effects. With CSS, though, tables can finally be replaced.

What's So Bad About Tables?

If you've ever worked with a site that uses tables, you'll know just how difficult it can be. Your HTML becomes a mess of confusing rows and columns, with no clear markers of which parts of the page do what. If you want to redesign the site, you're forced to try to extract your content from the HTML and start building the tables all over again. With tables, building web pages felt a lot like building a house of cards.

What's CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS lets you apply styling information to specific parts of your HTML, identified by tag name, or by IDs and classes you specify. This is done using CSS selectors.

CSS Selectors.

The first thing you need to know about CSS is the basics of how selectors work. There are lots of esoteric and mostly useless selectors, but the basics aren't too hard to grasp.

CSS relies on your tags having classes and IDs – the only real difference between an ID and a class is that an ID refers to one tag and one only, while a class can refer to more than one.

If you just have the name of a tag on its own, then your CSS rules will affect all of those tags. If you use a tag's name followed by a dot and the name of a class, then you'll affect all of those tags with that class. Using a tag, a hash and an ID name will affect only the tag with that ID. Using the hash and ID alone will work on any tag with that ID, while using a dot and class name along works on any tag with that class. So:

p - all paragraphs
p.thing - all paragraphs in the 'thing' class
p#thing - the paragraph with the ID 'thing'
.thing - all tags in the 'thing' class
#thing - the tag with the ID 'thing'

To add rules to each one of these selectors, you just put curly brackets ({}) after it, and then put the rules in that space – that's all you need to do to create CSS.

Useful CSS Rules.

CSS rules look like this:

rule-name: setting;

Here are some of the most useful rule names and the different settings that can be applied to them.

background-color.

Lets you set a page's background colour using HTML colours (they look like this: #123456).

color.

Sets colours for text.

font-family.

Lets you set fonts for your text – you can add more than one font name, separated by commas, in case your first choice is not available.

font-size.

You can set the font size in px or em – it's better to use em, as these measurements are relative rather than absolute.

width and height.

Lets you specify the width and height of things. You can use px or percentages.

margin.

The amount of space around the edges of some content. You can add -left, -right, -top and -bottom to margin to specify these margins individually.

padding.

Works the same way as margin, but is for the space between the edges of the tag's box and its content, instead of the space between the tag's box and other boxes.

border.

Puts borders around boxes. Takes three settings (width, type and colour), so you have to put spaces between them, like this: border: 1px solid black;

text-align.

Lets you align text on the left or right, or in the centre ('center').

text-decoration.

Controls some text effects – mainly used to stop links from being underlined, like this: a { text-decoration: none; }

float.

Tells content to float over other content, instead of starting underneath it on a new line. This is the tag most often used to simulate the kind of effects that you get with tables – floating a div and setting the main content area's margin to its width is one of the easiest ways to create a sidebar, for example.

Content Is King

Somewhere between ever more sophisticated graphic design and more complicated CSS, many designers have are starting to forget one of the ground rules of the web. This rule is the arguably the most important rule to follow at all times; one that you should always keep in mind when you're designing your website.

So what is it? It's simple. Your visitors are at your website to get information. Content is King.

The Search-Driven Web.

Studies show that well over 90% of users now have a search engine as their homepage, and use it for around half of everything they do on the web. Unless you're advertising your site heavily, most of your users are likely to arrive through a search engine.
However, they're relatively unlikely to just be searching for a description of your products. What are they looking for? Information. There's a reason why the web was once referred to as the 'information superhighway' – while some people might be actively looking to buy things, most of them are just looking for information.

Relevant Articles.

So, if you're selling products, you need to provide articles that your potential customers are likely to want to read. The bigger the audience you can build for your articles, the more conversions you're going to have to sales. It can't be emphasised enough just how important your content is: if it's badly-written, or not useful, your visitors are likely to just go back to their search results page and try another link. If you give them good information, though, you instantly create the kind of loyalty that no number of advertising dollars can buy.

What many practitioners of techniques like 'search engine optimisation' don't realise is this: you can't fake good content. However many keywords you might stick into it, you'll fool search engines, but not the visitors they bring in – all you're doing is costing yourself money in bandwidth and wasting people's time.

No Time to Write?

The most common objection I hear when I tell people they should write great content is that they have no time to write the amounts that would be needed – and, yes, writing can be very time-consuming. What you have to realise, though, is that there are plenty of ways around this, such as hiring a freelance writer to do some of the work for you, or using speech recognition software.

You might also consider buying in content from people who resell it, or even getting your users to write the content – there's nothing better than getting visitors to write their own content and then getting more visitors from search engines where people have found it. There are even sites offering content for free in exchange for a link back to them at the bottom of the article, although you should be cautious about reviewing the quality of content offered this way.

Keep it Updated.

Here's something that many people don't realise: it's better to write a little occasionally than to write a lot all at once. This means that, even if you have written hundreds of articles, you should release them one by one on a regular timescale. Both visitors and search engines prefer sites that are updated often to ones that have a big pile of content dumped on them once and then aren't touched for years.

Content Makes Money.

Nowadays, it's once again possible to make money from good content without even having anything to sell. Plenty of businesses were based on advertising back in the dot-com boom, but ad prices eventually dipped too low for this to be sustainable. Ad prices have now recovered, however, thanks to text advertising.

You can sign up with most of the big search engines now for context-sensitive ads for your site that are chosen automatically – Google AdSense runs the most popular service. This kind of advertising eliminates human 'ad editors' altogether, while producing ads that are targeted enough to give far better returns than they ever used to. Purely content-driven websites with ads are once again a viable revenue stream, and content is as much King as it's ever been.

Column Designs With CSS

So CSS makes layouts easier than they were with tables – there's not really much debate about that. One of the reasons many people stuck with tables for so long (and, in fact, still stick with tables to this day) is that it can be difficult to create column-based designs using CSS. Since there are so many websites that essentially consist of a middle column of content surrounded by left and right columns containing navigation and ads, this was considered to be unacceptable.

The Power of Float.

Really, though, CSS columns aren't that difficult to produce once you understand how CSS float rules work. Float allows you to say that some parts of your content should 'float' next to other parts, instead of being displayed one after the next (that is, underneath each other).

Despite all the fear of column layouts in CSS, it's quite simple. Basically, the first thing to do is to divide your content from your navigation using the div tag.

Note that the divs must be in this order – left, right, centre – because otherwise one column might end up underneath another in a way you don't expect. Ordering things logically as left, centre, then right, for example, will cause your right column to end up under the centre one.

Anyway, the next step is to write the CSS for those IDs you just set up. Are you ready for the CSS that's made old-style HTML developers run in fear for about five years now? It looks like this:

#left-nav { float: left; width: 20%; }
#right-nav { float: right; width: 20%; }

Obviously you can adjust the widths depending on how wide you want your left and right columns to be (you can choose whether to set the widths as percentages or in pixels). And that's it! You've set up a successful three-column layout.

Then, though, the problems come – they might seem small, but they're big enough to drive anyone who works on CSS column layouts nuts. Luckily, however, they can be solved with a little lateral thinking.

The Background Problem.

If you want your left and right columns to be have a different background colour to the centre one, you're in for a problem. In most browsers, your columns are only considered to extend downwards as far as the text in them does, which means that the bottoms of your columns won't line up.

What's the way around this? The best answer is to make your columns fixed-width (meaning that you specify their width in pixels, eg. 'width: 100px;'). Once you've done that, you can create one-pixel-high image that includes the colours you want for the columns, and make it the background image, tiling it using 'background: repeat;'.

The only problem left to solve at this point is that fixed-width columns can look strange if you leave them spaced as they are. The solution is to specify a fixed width for your document's body, and then set the left and right margins to 'auto' – this will centre the page on the screen.

The Header and Footer Problem.

Another problem? Well, yes. If you want to display a header or footer separately from the page's columns, CSS can give you a little trouble – sure, you can add them to the middle column, but that would require you to add extra space to the navigation columns at the top, and make sure they didn't reach down further than the main content text at the bottom. It quickly becomes painful to work with.

The solution to this lies in a little-known CSS rule called 'clear'. The clear rule means that you don't want anything to be floating around the tag you apply it to. It has three possible settings: left, right and both.

In this case, you want to add your header and footer before and after the other div.

Then you want to add this CSS to what you've got already:

header, footer { clear: both; }

That tells the browser that you don't want anything floating on either the left or the right of your header or footer: you want them clear of everything. You might also like to add text-align: center, so they appear in the middle of the page. And that's it! What was all the fuss about, eh?