Multi-Part Series
This will be a multipart series on web graphics, web development and how to begin your approach. This second paper is on web functionality and how some of that is achieved.
”Do I Do, What you Do? When I Do, my love to you?”
What a web page does is really at the heart of how you design it. If you are not actively communicating with people, using action items in your web then it is pretty easy to put it all together. There are tools that make creating a web simple and fun. The hardest part of building a simple web page is understanding how to get space on a server, and how to publish to it.
As my friend and very funny writer Ed Grover commented on the expense of creating a web page, I am going to add another part to this series, which will cover various cost levels and specifics of who and how to set up the server and get your web page published. I will go into how to do it on inexpensively, moderately, and if you have found some investors. It all depends on what you want or need to do, and how much you have to spend. There are many ways to skin it back…. in a manner of speaking.
Part 1 - Aesthetics…how does my web site look?
Part 2 - Functionality…does my web site do what I have advertised, does it deliver what it promises?
Part 3 - Fun…do people want to come back again and again?
Part 4 - Performance…am I doing all I can to keep people coming back for more?
Part 5 – What are the tools called and how can I learn them?
Part 6 – Details and Costs – what are the steps, and what will it set me back?
Functionality
Web functionality is a basic breakdown of what your web site is being designed to do, what it can do and what it does. Web sites are created for a number of reasons:
To post or publish information – There are many of us who have web sites that are only built to display our writing, pictures, our families, our favorite songs or to worship some god that we adore. If you want to get a feel for the adoration of average users, just do a quick search on Van Halen or Motley Crue and see how many hits you get, hundreds and hundreds. These pages are put out as tribute pages to a favorite artist, musician or writer. For some reason, there are a lot of young, head banging web developers who like to make up little tribute pages to Korn, Limp Bizkit and Backstreet.
To Pass information on between businesses - this is at the heart of what is being called eCommerce. These web sites are called portals and are gateways between businesses (B2B) and are used for a number of reasons. Portals are sometimes set up to transfer invoice information between purchasing and selling parties. The invoice data is posted to a site, and is either passed directly to the other vendor, or they pick it up automatically, it can also be posted to a message board. These portals are also used for inventory levels, and to create a reordering situation, or to allow people to take inventory information directly. The eCommerce sites that are being set up as portals are used by many of the larger companies in private industry, the company I work for in Tulsa uses them extensively for passing information.
To Order Items from a company - There are a ton of sites set up that will allow you the consumer to order directly from a business (B2C). These are the sites that we all use many times over, Amazon, Travelocity, Barnes.com, and on and on. These involve we consumers purchasing something from a company. This is a strong way to do business but requires some extensive purchasing software.
To Order Items from Each Other - These are sites like eBay and Half dot com, where we are buying things from one another (C2C), either through an auction or through a moderator site. These are even harder to create, as they require some very extensive programming and communication software. These are really an industry and take away a little bit of the middleman, and yet – not so much.
How to do what you need to do
The first and most simple web site is a one page, purely informational site. Simple one-page webs can be built using Word for goodness sake. You just put your text in as you want it, add pictures and make the layout look how you want. This is not for a complicated site…but it is functional. Most sites require that you name your primary site index.html – and you can use your SAVE AS functionality to name it as an HTML site. Once you have saved it – you will have to secure some space on a server, upload the files to that server and then refer to it wherever you want to have that site. That is the most extremely basic of site creation methods.
There are other tools as well such as Microsoft Front Page, Visual InterDev and DreamWeaver that are all built to help accommodate your putting together your very basic web page. The key with a simple page is not to over burden you with graphics that are too large.
You can take this kind of page up a level by adding simple features such as a counter to keep track of how many friends have swung by, a guest book for comments and howdies so you can feel the love, scrolling marquees, hovering buttons, glowing text, and any number of other bells, buzzers, whistles and tweeters to make your site cool. But that is a discussion for the fun page.
The business portal and ordering features require some interactive programming and some possible database chops. To set up an ordering system you would need a database such as SQL Server, Oracle or Sybase. These are designed to keep the information that you have in a large storage area, organized into tables and indexes. These are not simple to establish nor to service. You would also have to possibly set up communication software between clients, or users, this is also not an easy row to hoe.
A lot of the more complex functionality is done in Java, which is the programming language of the web. The simple web pages are set up in a language called HTML, which is a series of tags surrounding text. It looks just like it used to look if you did a reveal codes in Word Perfect. These are set up for you automatically using a tool like Front Page, or doing it in Word. You color your text, and then it adds the tags that say, Start using Blue, now end – or Start using Bold or Italicizing, and then stop. That is what those clever bracket B and Bracket I things are all about. They are HTML tags that tell the computer how to act around that text.
But even the complexities of a shopping basket program can be purchased in a ready-made package for a small monthly fee. It does not take a long education period or any kind of relative genius to get all of this done. It does take some research, a little bit of a learning curve and some gumption. If you have the desire, you can put together a site or have one built to do exactly what you need.