As we mentioned in an earlier post, Applied Web Vitals is developing a line of website templates for the Adobe Contribute platform. These Contribute templates will be designed for plug-in-play use and will incorporate the latest SEO standards as well as clean, light XHTML and CSS code.

We anticipate our market for Contribute website templates to be end users and developers alike. Our basic Contribute template will be an excellent starting point for further development and third party application integration by web developers.

At this point, we would like to invite input on features and functions. Please share your wish list of top features with us. We also invite fellow Adobe Dreamweaver template gurus out there to chime in . . . and/or participate in development. Contact us to discuss getting in on the ground level of development.

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Quick announcement to Applied Web Vitals’ clients and others using the latest version of WordPress, version 2.6—the plugin PodPress, used for podcasting and video casting, is not working with the latest versions of WordPress. This issue has been outstanding for several weeks now and a resolutions does not appear to be available in the near future. For those interested, I can suggest an alternative to keep going. One that actually offers great advantages in media management, including sideshows, video and audio.

While on the topic of freeware though, some other thoughts have come to mind…

The reality of open and free technology catches up with us eventually. PodPress was developed and is maintained by a gracious individual who doesn’t profit from his work and offers it free to the public. Thousands (141,380 to be exact) have benefited and profited from this great tool. And at the same time, when it stops working, the same number of users come to a screeching halt. While some users like myself are occasional to frequent users, I know that others include large news syndications. What a great deal of faith and operating efficiencies we put into freeware!

Man, it hurts when your tools stop working! But if I tallied up the potential cost of all the freeware tools that I use, my business wouldn’t be able to afford them and wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is now.

…And so we appreciate the great benefits of the latest information revolution

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

We are pleased to share the launch our most recent client site, The Teak Hut at theteakhut.com. This South Carolina company has been in operation for a number years as a brick-&-mortar business. Several months ago, Applied Web Vitals was consulted to explore the move to e-commerce. At the same time, The Teak Hut decided to go for a full site redesign to better reflect the quality of their product–indoor and outdoor teak furniture.

Through a close dialog with the client, the site was mapped and a design, modeled after select premier online retailers, was mocked up for review and an enthusiastic approval.

TheTeakHut.com was built on the Dreamweaver template structure to give the client full site management control with Adobe Contribute. With our developed template platform in place, The Teak Hut was able to take the reins right out of gates and begin adding and removing content, creating new pages and optimizing their keywords for search engine placement.

The shopping cart application of choice was Ecommerce Templates, a robust and versatile cart that could be customized to meet The Teak Hut’s needs. Integrated throughout the site, a smooth shopping experience was achieved by seamlessly weaving the dynamic shopping cart functionality into every page on the site.

With sixty unique product categories and a very large, and growing, list of products, the ability to integrate the online shopping cart with the company’s Quickbooks POS system was an absolute must. The project required several e-commerce customizations and third part integrator, and in the end a one-of-a-kind solution was tailored for The Teak Hut.

For additional information on e-commerce websites

For additional information on Adobe Contribute, 2

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Our primary audience is the small business, but anyone with a website should find this look into web management quite helpful. First, and to be redundant, if you don’t have ready and easy access to the content on your website, it’s time to upgrade! It’s that simple. Technology has progressed and the ability to edit web pages without technical skills now exists—at an affordable price.

If you’re paying someone else, an html developer perhaps, to update your content, then a CMS will quickly pay for itself. Or maybe you’re simply at the mercy of someone with technical skills to update content. No matter. Consider the opportunity cost, which for a small business translates to real money, real quick—sometimes before the close of business.

Fundamentals
Content Management Systems (CMS) are the website platforms that allow for end-user administration and automated content organization. A website built on a CMS can be edited by someone without web programming skills.

There are countless content management systems out there, each with there own merit as well as limitations. CMS functionality can be custom built into a website or provided through the integration of a CMS software application. Per software, both server-side and client-side applications exist. Server-side software reside entirely on the server and is accessed via a web browser. Client-side is accessed via workstation-based software.

Our CMS of choice for standard websites is the Adobe Contribute platform. Contribute is a workstation (PC or Mac) software application that incorporates hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) for Internet browsing and file transfer protocol (FTP) for file uploading.

The two standout features of Contribute are 1) breadth of design freedom and 2) ease of page editing.

1. With the CMS functionality built into the software application and not into server page structure itself, the developer is offered design freedoms that are either unavailable or costly to achieve in other content management systems. Consequently, page code can be kept clean and light for fast loading and cross-browser compatibility. [Note: Adobe Dreamweaver is used by the site developer and Adobe Contribute is used by the “contributor” or client.
2. Contribute initialy operates like a browser to navigate, then functions much like Microsoft Word to edit a web page. This WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) functionality incorporates easy to identify icons and menu options that virtually everyone understands and have become accustom to. The process from start to finish: browse the website, make the changes, and click Publish.

ADVANTAGES of Contribute are numerous:

• Developed by Adobe Systems, Inc., the software is well-built and continually upgraded, more than justifying the $169 one-time software license fee
• Creating and saving drafts prior to publishing is a feature that many people find indispensable
• Permissions enable administrators to define who can edit and publish content on a website or within a specific web page.

Whether you opt to go with Contribute or another CMS, we recommend making the move. Not until you’ve actually taken control of the content on your website, will you realize that you’ve been sitting in the passenger seat this whole time. Take the wheel with a CMS and see what your website can really do for your business.

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Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

What a great honor! A Webby Award nomination!!!

Applied Web Vitals has received a Webby Award Nominee letter for its participation in the development of the Eyes on Darfur website. Citizen Group, a premier branding and design company in San Francisco, CA, brought us on board to write the site code—HTML, CSS, Java Script—and bring their elegant design to life.

Working with this world-class team of professionals, and on such a profound project, was in itself an incredibly rewarding experience. We’re thankful to have been a part of this effort and hope to see the site make a tremendous impact.

As all projects go though, challenges and deadlines were par for the course. Already on a tight time line, the site launch date was moved forward to coincide with Amnesty International’s accelerated PR efforts. And with lives on the line, what could we do? Well, we took this opportunity to pour ourselves into the work and not only worked faster (around the clock), but improved the quality of work right up until the switch was flipped.

If you haven’t yet visited Eyes on Darfur - please do. Be prepared for an eye-opening experience though, one that hopefully puts you into motion.

“Eyes on Darfur” site uses satellite imagery to expose genocide

Amnesty International’s unprecedented Eyes On Darfur project leverages the power of high-resolution satellite imagery to provide unimpeachable evidence of the atrocities being committed in Darfur – enabling action by private citizens, policy makers and international courts. Eyes On Darfur also breaks new ground in protecting human rights by allowing people around the world to literally “watch over” and protect twelve intact, but highly vulnerable, villages using commercially available satellite imagery.

The project was led by the Crisis Prevention and Response Center (CPRC) – Amnesty International USA’s rapid response center for engaging members, policy-makers, and the public in preventing and responding to human rights crises around the world. The website was designed and developed by Citizen, and can be viewed at www.eyesondarfur.org.

The project was funded by the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) which seeks to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur while mobilizing a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of people throughout the Darfur region. It is an alliance of more than 180 faith-based, advocacy and humanitarian organizations. The coalition’s member organizations represent 130 million people of all ages, races, religions and political affiliations united together to help the people of Darfur. For more information on the coalition, visit www.SaveDarfur.org.
-description from Citizen Group

If you’re thinking about bringing your e-commerce operations in-house or setting up your online store for the first time, you may not know where to start or what questions to ask. Each time I walk a client through the maze of e-commerce setup steps, I’m amazed at how disjointed the process can be and how difficult it is to find good information and guidance.

I’m painfully reminded each time just how difficult my own I experience was when setting up our e-commerce years ago. In this article, I hope to share the lessons from our initial trial and error process, as well as subsequent (and may I offer - much smoother!) client e-commerce setups and site integrations. The ultimate purpose of this article is to walk through the considerations of setting up your own in-house e-commerce solution, so the tangential topics along the way will just be touched on for reference.

In a hurry? Scan the article for our recommendations. Look for blockquotes formated like this.

E-commerce: In-house vs. Hosted

Backing up just a bit, the first decision to make is whether your store or shopping cart software will be on your server or hosted elsewhere.

Hosted e-commerce examples include PayPal, Yahoo Stores, Ebay and other e-commerce providers that run the software application on their server.

Advantages: In some cases, selling within a larger e-commerce community like Ebay can provide instant exposure to a large audience. From a technical standpoint, hosted stores are all inclusive packages where maintenance and upgrades are covered in the cost.

Disadvantages: Hosted store platforms tend to be fairly ridge in design and functionality. That’s to say, the pre-designed templates and store features generally can’t be changed or customized. The store domain or URL is most often a subset of the host (i.e. yourstore.yahoo.com) which doesn’t provide much in the way of branding or company image.

In-house e-commerce solutions are software applications that are installed on your own hosting server.

Advantages:

• Design freedom is at its greatest with the right in-house shopping cart software, where the entire shopping cart or select functions can be integrated directly into your site design. Shopping cart layout and design can most often be customized to meet your specific needs.
• You control the advertising and can opt to have none at all or take advantage of the ability to sell advertising space on your own store.
• Use your own domain name, which offers enormous SEO advantages. While some hosted stores offer custom domain options, you’ll generally find design freedom, advertising and additional server space to be lacking.
• Additional server space on your own server or web hosting account along with the right back-end components provides the ability to integrate additional application like discussion forums, support ticketing systems, blogs and so on. These features paired with your shopping cart allow you to run a business through your site, never needing to send you customers off-site to complete a transaction, get help, voice their opinion or what ever is you feel will help increase conversions.

Disadvantages: Maintaining e-commerce software on your own server requires regular maintenance. Periodic software updates, security enhancements and the like need to be applied to the application by a developer. On the positive side, this is still less expensive than going with a comparable hosted solutions but does cost more than an Ebay type option. On the same note, technical glitches will need to be handled professionally and if you don’t have a reliable professional, you can find your store off-line or malfunctioning until it’s fixed. To be fair, this can and still does happen with a hosted solution including mega providers like Yahoo—it’s inherent in technology.

We often recommend going with an in-house shopping cart given the overwhelming advantages for small businesses (see above). In-house e-commerce solutions can be the most economical route. After the initial investment for setup and integration, ongoing maintenance is relatively low and monthly fees are a fraction of the hosted counterpart.

Hosting Requirements

Now that you’ve decided to explore setting up an in-house e-commerce solutions, what do you need in the way of a hosting server? First, don’t make any moves until you’ve selected a developer (or conversely have identified the software). Your developer’s technical expertise and perhaps preferred shopping cart application may dictate what type of server and database will be needed. Of course the search process could be reversed if you know what shopping cart software you need, whereas you then search for a developer to suite.

For the most part, hosting an e-commerce shopping cart will require database access. For secure transactions, a must for both your and your customers’ security, an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate will be required. Not all hosts or hosting accounts allow for SSL and/or a dedicated SSL (as opposed to a shared SSL).

Per hosting companies, we don’t recommend the large mega hosts, like Godaddy, for two reasons: 1. Their servers are jam packed with sites, slowing yours dow and 2. Customer service is similar to calling a public utility - good luck. On the other end of the spectrum, we tend to avoid very small outfits because 1. the technology often isn’t up to speed and 2. again with the lack of customer support.

Hands down, we can’t say enough about the hosting company Emerging Markets Web Design (EMWD), which consequently does design as the name suggests. We have been with them for 8 years or more and have never been left out to dry. Keeping in mind that technology is bound to have trouble, the difference is the human on the other end. And when you need help, EMWD goes above and beyond . . . and with a smile.

If your head is spinning from all this new information, don’t be discouraged. You’re probably reading this article because you’re not a developer . . . and are probably questioning why anyone would want to be. That’s another discussion though. Feel free to bookmark this article and return to it for reference as you move along in the setup process.

Merchant Accounts, Gateways & Vendors

This is where your head can really start to spin. To sum it up in advance, everyone wants a piece of the pie. It’s helpful to understand the progression of steps when processing orders from a shopping cart.

1. An order is placed, credit card number entered and “checkout” is clicked
2. An Internet Gateway (i.e. Authorize.net) confirms the authenticity and capability of the buyer
3. Authorization for the purchase is returned to the shopping cart by the Gateway and presented to the customer in the form of a “successful purchase” confirmation screen
4. The Gateway simultaneously passes the authorization to the Merchant Account provider, who in turn transfers the funds from the credit card company (i.e. Visa) to your business bank account, less transaction fees (i.e. 2.5% + $0.25 per transaction)
5. The Merchant Account, charges its own monthly fees, as well as billing for corresponding Gateway fees if applicable.

That’s a rough description, with some flaws, but should give you an idea of how it happens. As far as selecting one of these third-party vendors, I can offer some tips and recommendations, but you’ll be well served to spend time researching what works for your business and volume level.

Merchant Accounts are a dime a dozen. There appear to be few barriers to entry in this industry so you will find thousands of options out there, with quite a few rotten apples. I found this out myself after going through the paces with A-p-p-l-i-e-d M-e-r-c-h-a-n-t S-y-s-t-e-m-s (hyphens added to negate any SEO benefits they would receive from this article). After several hundred dollars worth of fraudulent withdraws from our company bank account and legal intervention, the relationship was cut short. It was tough for them to lean on a service contract that failed to mention the “hidden fees” that they wanted to collect. All of that was to say, be cautious!
Merchant Account provider fees can vary greatly when it comes to setup fees. Large vendors that service high volume merchants can have upfront fees of $200-$500. For my small business clients, I don’t think you should pay an up-front fee, nor do you need the level of service that those vendors provide.

Transaction fees tend to come in about the same across the board and generally adjust downward as your volume exceeds pre-set benchmarks. On the high end, you could expect 3% plus $0.30 per transaction. Oh the low end, perhaps 2.25% plus $0.20 per transaction is achievable. These fees mentioned are for internet or virtual sales, where the credit card is not physically presented and swiped. Traditional physical transactions have a lower risk of fraud and appropriately carry lower rates.

It’s worth noting in our experience that the banks’ preferred or recommended Merchant Accounts have the higher fees. Perhaps this is to cover the referral fees worked into the partnership or they simply cater to larger businesses. But know that any Merchant Account can deposit funds into your bank account, you will not need the bank’s preferred provider.

We can recommend the Merchant Account provider Money Tree Merchant Services by CardPay.net. They offer no setup fees, competitive transaction fees and a corresponding traditional merchant account service if you have or are considering a physical point of sale. Additionally, they use the Internet Gateway Authorize.net, which is one of the most widely supported Gateways by shopping cart software applications.

Internet Gateways are the critical component between your shopping cart and authorizing a credit card transaction. Stay with me on this, it’s going to seem out of order here. The shopping cart software will be pre-configured to work with certain Internet Gateways. Merchant Account providers will use certain Gateways. Accounts with Gateways, like Authorize.net, can not be set up independently but are resold exclusively through the Merchant Account provider.

So with the above in mind, one scenario could be:

1. you know the cart software that fits your needs, find out which Gateways the cart supports
2. research the supported Gateways and find out from their respect websites which Merchant Accounts they list as resellers
3. finally research that list of Merchant Accounts, comparing prices, services and terms

Per above, we use the Internet Gateway Authorize.net and have been extremely satisfied. Authorize.net has a fairly intuitive web control panel, where transactions can be managed and voided. Additionally, they offer a virtual terminal than can double for on-site sales if you want to process transactions physically and outside of your website.

Shopping Cart Software

Even more plentiful then Merchant Account providers are shopping cart software applications, which come in all shapes, sizes and capabilities. A logical place to start your search is internally. Ask yourself if there are any unique requirements of your business as well as what the primary characteristics of the online transactions will be. For example, are you selling physical products that need to be shipped or virtual, possibly downloadable, products or services? Will customer need to create an account and go through an approval process before buying? What is the best way for customers to review your product - will you need extensive graphics or maybe dynamic image galleries?

After you’ve thought through the above internal questions, you should have a list of “must have” shopping cart attributes. A photographer would quickly learn that there are e-commerce solutions on the market specifically designed to present and sell photos. An international merchant would zero in on those carts that handle multiple languages, currencies and country shipping destinations. For those merchants with the least number of special needs, you’ll still be left with a large pool of options.

Before getting to our recommended shopping cart software, I would like to touch on free open source solutions, like oscommerce. These can be a viable option, but don’t choose this route just to save $150 or so—a fraction of your long-term costs. Fee open source carts can be incredibly versatile in functionality due to the large communities that develop add-ons and modules to meet the many needs of the users. Likewise, the code for these applications can get quite tangled with so many cooks in the kitchen. Another disadvantage that I have found is the lack of design flexibility that they have. I should preface the design inflexibility comment by saying that a specialist in a particular software would be able to accomplish much more than I could. Even still, significantly more time would be required to customize a free open source solution than our cart of choice.

Our preferred shopping cart software is EcommerceTemplates by Internet Business Solutions. Specifically we use their Ecommerce Plus PHP shopping cart version designed to run on a Linux server with a MySQL database back-end. This shopping cart is rich with features, but does an excellent job of performing those business critical functions well. There are plenty of solutions that try to do everything . . . and end up performing them rather poorly. I have spent a great deal of time working with this particular software and have increased my efficiencies, allowing for a smoother, more cost effective installation and maintenance.

Well, that pretty much sums it up. This article may have seemed a bit long-winded, but actually it just skimmed the surface of the e-commerce pond (or ocean). Additionally, it was written with a bias for our expertise and preferences so we were able to cut to chase pretty quick. We hope that you found the article helpful and invite you to poke around our site a bit more.

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Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Search engine optimization has pretty much everything to do with web design and development . . . or at least it should! In an era long gone, at least on the Internet time line, web designers operated on an aesthetic design level, not knowing and perhaps not interested in the traffic or marketing side.

From a artistic standpoint, one would argue that sacrificing visual design would impact the conversion of site visitors (conversion is essentially the desired action being taken - i.e. purchasing, subscribing, contributing). The rationale goes that if a visitor likes the site, enjoys looking at it and using it, then they’re more likely to purchase or do what it is that you want.

From a marketing standpoint, the law of numbers supersedes aesthetics and getting 10 times the visitors at a 20% conversion rate is better than getting a 100% conversion rate. In reality, a search engine optimized site could see many 100’s of times more traffic than one that receives no search engine traffic at all. And on the flip side, the 100% conversion goal isn’t probable.

So here we are in 2008 where SEO is a driving factor in site structure and design. Who are the participants and how does SEO get incorporated and at what stage. Well, the separation of designer and developer can exists, a dynamic more commonly seen on mid to high end projects where the budget affords both an “artist” and a “technician”. In this scenario, the two professionals work together to design and build an optimized site. For the small business however, the designer and developer are often one in the same and that individual needs to have a firm grasp of everything. If your survival depended on one or the other though, I would strongly argue that a mastery of SEO structure and techniques trump aesthetics.

Fortunately, the two disciplines can come together quite well. The overall quality of “design/developer” or “artist/technician” (the all-in-one professional) has improved significantly over the years—I happen to be one myself. At the same time, it’s important to know where one’s strengths lie. Not every project can be best served by the all-in-one professional. At that critical juncture, where need and budget dictate, specialists are brought together to deliver the goods.

Back to the small business though, where constraints rule the day. What should one demand of a full service web professional? Dave Davies summed it up pretty well in his article “Picking An SEO-friendly Web Designer.” Following are several excerpts:

Picking A Web Designer
There are two main considerations that you’ll need to make when you’re picking your web designer. The first is, can they build an attractive site and the second is can they build a search engine friendly site?

Building an attractive site:

When you’re choosing a designer take a look at their portfolio – put some of their designs past people in your target demographic and see what they think. It’s also wise to view the sites of the leaders in your industry to see what they’re doing (and maybe even who designed their sites). Just because you like something doesn’t mean it’s effective to your target market.

Building a search engine friendly site:

This is crucially important but probably one of the areas we have to address most frequently. I can’t possibly get into all the various areas of search engine friendly design so I’ll simply list off a couple of the most common issue we encounter and then provide references to other reading.

Enormous amounts of code on the page. For some reason, even some new designs are coming to us as though they were out of 1998 as far as the page code is concerned. All skilled web designers should have a solid grasp of CSS and should be putting all the main formatting into this file(s). Way too often we’re getting sites with dozens of font tags, color tags, size tags, etc. etc. etc. This just gives the search engines a lot more to dig through to find what they want – the content.

Bad internal links. You want your internal pages to rank. Most sites will generally target the highest priority phrases on the homepage of the site but the internal pages are the ones that will rank for specific products, services and long tail phrases. To maximize the rankability of the internal pages you need them to be easily found by the spiders and you need to associate these pages with the keywords you’re targeting. In short, you need to link to them with text and you need that text to include the keywords. This isn’t some deep, dark mystery of SEO and has been well documented and commented on but we’ve seen tons of instances where internal links are image only or worse, an unspiderable script-based navigation system.

If your designer is using image or script-based navigation for aesthetic reasons that’s fine. In fact, it’ll likely leave you with a more appealing site visually however you need to make sure your key pages are linked to in the content of you homepage or from text in the footer to insure they get found and spidered quickly and easily.

Over-optimized pages. I love seeing websites that were developed by a web designer who “knows SEO” and has stuffed so many keywords and header tags into the pages that it reads more like an eye chart than sales copy.

So in part 1 of this series, we discussed the design phase of a website. An exploratory interview with the client has already been had and a graphical mock-up of the site has been refined and approved for development. This brings us to actually building the site.

As mentioned earlier, the push-button web creation function, provided by graphics applications like Photoshop, will not produce an optimal page structure or take into consideration forward-looking steps that will allow for a versatile and scalable website. During the design process, the designer/developer will have already mapped out the solutions for various site features and layout configurations. Given the different requirements surrounding these features, the site structure will be created to accommodate them.

Take a simple two column site layout for example. As the height of these two columns changes with varying amounts of content over time, how do the the columns behave? Does the overall site design depend on these two column expanding and contracting together or is it better suited to have them expand independently? Furthermore, do the pros of a table structure in this scenario outweigh the cons and what impact will this decision have on cross browser compatibility?

At this point, the considerations of structure have been made, the developer knows which language will be employed (according to their own expertise or perhaps simply based on the hosting server being used), and the site’s ongoing maintenance and accessibility has been factored in.

By this I mean, who is going to update the site and how? Even if the site is being built by an in-house developer who will maintain their own code, it’s simply not time and cost effective to maintain and grow a site from code view. Which bring us to building the site on a CMS (content management system). A CMS allows the site to grow gracefully, protecting sensitive code and maintaining the site design, while giving non-developers edit access to the site. There is a vast field of CMS’ out there to choose from and the one that’s right one for you will depend on your need. The demands of an online news agency, for example, will differ greatly from that of a local book club. Either way—big or small, high volume or low—a content management system is an absolute must.

Consider that we, professional web developers, use a CMS on everything internal that we build. Believe it not, I still see ads being placed by cost-conscious small business owners seeking low cost developers available to make frequent and ongoing edits to their site. That’s crazy! Done right, on the right platform and by the right developer, the upfront cost of building a site on a CMS is negligible compared to keeping a professional developer on payroll. In fact, when done right, the cost of building on a CMS can often reduce the cost of a project by allowing for quick replication of pages and page features as well as allowing the developer to set aside a majority of the content entry task for the client.

To be continued… We’ll continue our discussion of the development process in part 3 of this series. To be covered are site features, functions and integrated applications.

The web creation process begins verbally, then takes shape graphically, and won’t move into the code or programming phase until the final stage. This process isn’t well understood by those outside of web design. And why should it be? A great deal of “designers” don’t actually get it either.

Web sites aren’t conceptualized in a web development tool like Dreamweaver. The business needs of the client are discovered through an interview to identify wants, needs, the audience, the message, functionality, look and feel, and so on.

This discovery (scoping) information collected from the client is interpreted into a graphical mock-up in a graphics application like Photoshop. The mock-up is a non-functioning image of what the future site will look like—a flat image.

Once the graphical mock-up has been refined and polished, the image is then taken to code. Based on a number of considerations, including the programming languages to be used, web applications employed, search engine optimization techniques and more, the image is dissected and interpreted during the site building process.

It’s worth noting that modern graphics tools like Adobe Photoshop have a push-button website creation function, whereby anyone can use the tool to dump out the code and files required to post a web page. No doubt these features are quite amazing, but this method should not be confused with proper website development. Proper development takes into consideration usability, the target audience, ongoing site maintenance and scalability . . . not to mention the integration of different technologies that give life through functionality.