Databases are not very glamourous. They are the domain of techno geeks and nerds who spend more time writing queries and testing them than doing anything else. I like them!

In it’s raw form, a database is just a collection of tables, almost like a spreadsheet really, but for a database to be really useful there needs to be a relationship between these tables. All elmnet customers who have a content management system have a relational database in the background running the show. In brief, whenever they update their content they are in effect updating a database, and the changes that they make are instantly reflected in their website.

A database table may contain fields such as ‘title’, ‘section’, ‘content’ and ‘date’. These fields may contain entries such as ‘Welcome to my site’, ’1′, ‘My site content goes in here’ and ’29th July 2009′. The clever bit is that the entry under ‘section’ relates to another table in the database, so although the value of ’1′ means very little by itself, when the database looks into the table called ‘sections’ and finds that the section with the ID number of ’1′ is called ‘About Me’ it all starts to come together. And because this section is referenced by a number we can change the name of the section if we like. We could rename it to ‘Who We Are’ for example, but as it still has the ID number of ’1′ the database integrity remains intact.

The purpose of this post though is to consider the more traditional database, and it’s potential to be held online rather than in a database application such as Microsoft Access. We’ve recently converted an MS Access database with over 18,500 entries into an online version for a customer of ours. The database contains information on previous and current visitors to events, and all the things that could be carried out in Access such as searches, filtering, exporting, updating, inserting and deleting can all be actioned using the online version. It’s been converted from an .mdb file to a mySQL database and it’s all queried using a custom coded, very user friendly web based management system, rather than the far more complex MS Access procedures.

Any set of results can be exported in a format that Word can use for mailing list labels, and as the system is stored online and backed up automatically it’s safer. There is also no problem with multiple users accessing the system at once from any location in the world, and it’s easily extendible – an email marketing system has been added on which talks directly to the email address field of the table that contains the customers personal details. It’s all password protected, and all access is logged.

So, when you think of the internet it’s worth remembering that it’s basically one big network used for sharing information. It doesn’t have to be a trendy website, it can be a complex database application made very simple.

It can streamline your operation and present you with information in a far more effective manner than you may have thought.

At elmnet we’ve been putting together a website for a primary school. It’s an interesting situation – the old school is being knocked down and a new one being built, and a website is being produced to tell the story.

Over the last few months a mixture of people have been to the school and have spent time with the kids telling them about their profession, and in some cases helping them produce something to go on the website. There’s been an illustrator, a sound artist, a photographer, a creative writer and a web developer (that’ll be us!).

Our job has been to bring this all together in a web site which showcases the work the children have produced along with their thoughts about moving schools. There are animations, songs, interviews, photo galleries, a book, all sorts – and as soon as it has all been approved in September I’ll update this post with the link.

It’s almost been like being back at school! We’ve had a week to complete the task, and there have been loads of different subjects involved. We’ve built a database driven ‘Facebook’ style wall for the children to post their comments on. We’ve got some sections driven by Flash, others static HTML and others database driven PHP. We’ve got embedded MP3 players, a print ready PDF of the book that was written and also a Flash version for the web with animated turning pages.

“So what did you learn at school this week?”

Content Management Systems – the perfect option for a business?

On paper at least, probably! A Content Management System (or CMS) is in it’s most simplistic terms a web based system that allows an authorised user to log in and make changes to their own website without needing to pay a web designer to do so.

We like them for two reasons. The first being that we think it’s important that a business is empowered with control over their main marketing tool so they can react appropriately as business activity demands. The second is that from a business point of view we find that we are more productive if our energies are spent on business activities other than entering content to websites, something which can be easily achieved by our customers with a little training, saving them money in the long run.

At elmnet we don’t use a third party content management system. Each one is written specifically for the customer we are working with. We find that each customer has their own individual requirements in a CMS, and these vary considerably. We’ve had customers who have needed a full sales database system with automatic emailing of delivery notes and order tracking, right through to those who need one click multiple image uploads with automatic resize and thumbnail generation. No two are the same and we think that commercially available CMS systems, good as they are, are never really a substitute for a custom coded job.

Simplicity is always the key. We’ve actually tested our CMS systems on a variety of age ranges, from an eight year old to right up to the ‘Silver Surfer’. Our guinea pigs managed to create sections, add pages and upload images, and to be honest they did a pretty good job of the whole thing! It’s all very ‘point and click’ – if you want to add a new page you click the link titled ‘Add a New Page’. If you want to upload a gallery image you click the link titled ‘Upload a Gallery Image’. Get the idea? It’s all pretty intuitive stuff – I mean if an eight year old can do it surely you can?

So, often the question isn’t ‘how difficult is it?’, it’s more ‘how much time do I have?’. As web designers we have to always bear in mind that most of our customers don’t have the luxury of sitting at a desk in front of a computer all day working on websites. It’s tough to get the right balance, but the first thing to consider isn’t necessarily what you want your content management system to do, more how much time you have to update it. We’ve had customers come to us before asking for the full works, but in reality they simply can’t find the time in their business lives to give the attention they need to their website on a week to week basis.

It’s always a balance between what you want to say, and how much time you have to tell people about it. If you’re pushed for time we can build you a low maintenance site that you’ll be able to keep up to date with the minimum of effort. If you run an office with the staff available to update a site as often as you like then of course we can build a system that will give you this facility.

And if you’re the busiest person on the planet then of course we can maintain your site for you – but wouldn’t you rather be in control?

Social networking – the internet buzz words of the moment! So what exactly is it, and how can it work for you?

I must admit that as a web developer I knew little about social networking until recently. I saw it as ‘something that the kids did’, and so that meant that as a self confessed grumpy old man there was little there for me to be bothered about. But then I heard so much about Facebook from friends that I thought I should at least see what all the fuss is about.

Facebook is addictive, there’s no doubt about that! Once you manage to find a few friends it’s good fun, and you can quickly and easily see what your friends are doing. It’s also dead easy to quickly write a message on your ‘wall’ so that they know what you are up to. You can be as distant or as involved as you like really. There are some people on Facebook who have literally hundreds of friends. I’ve got around 50, and I don’t think I would want any more as they simply wouldn’t really be my friends, more people that I’ve just met along the way. Facebook used in this way is aimed to be used by people who are already friends, and not those you who haven’t met yet.

There is another way of using Facebook though, and that is to set up a ‘Facebook Group’. Any user can subscribe to a Facebook Group, and when you write a post on your Facebook wall it will appear on the wall of everyone who is subscribed to your group. That’s a pretty powerful tool! The best example I can think of is also my favourite marketing campaign of the last ten years. It’s genuis, and it involves a small furry animal called a meerkat. Of course it’s comparethemeerkat.com which is a superb spin off from ‘Compare the Market’.

Quite brilliant really, set up an alternative marketing campaign which is far more interesting that the business activities of the real organisation (car insurance) and use social networking sites like Facebook to spread the message. Aleksandr Orlov – founder of “Compare the Meerkat” currently has nearly half a million fans on Facebook. Absolutely amazing, that’s half a million! So twice a week half a million people receive a funny message from Aleksandr on their Facebook wall and it doesn’t cost the company a penny – and all the time they are being drip fed the branding. When they want car insurance where are they going to go first? So there you go, Facebook – not just kids stuff.

The next social networking application I began to experiment with was this one. The blog. Today it’s dead easy to set a blog up. If you are a web developer you can write your own blog program. If you are a web developer with little time then you can install a WordPress blog (host your site with Elmnet and we’ll do it for you for free!). This blog is run by WordPress, and I’m very impressed with it’s simplicity and flexibility.

A blog gives a website owner the opportunity to discuss a subject online. There are two important factors though, the first is that they can invite the world to leave a comment and become engaged in the debate. The second is that they can do this in the framework of the blog, leaving their site to do the job of the site. Rather than have all of my rants and ravings in my site (cluttering up the main message) I can put it all safely to one side in the blog which is specifically designed to hold lots of text. There is also a search engine benefit to a blog. Google likes lots of text and keyword rich environments, and where better to put it all than a blog. I’m enjoying writing the blog too, so even if nobody reads it (though I hope they do) I find it quite therapeutic.

The final application I’ve tried is Twitter. I’ll be honest, at first I just didn’t get Twitter. It just didn’t make sense. One question, “What are you doing”, and 140 characters to tell the world. After using it though the penny has dropped. It’s been said that the developers of Twitter quite happily admit that it’s a rip off of the Facebook “What’s on your mind’ question which appears at the top of everyone’s Facebook page. I’ve found that this is what I read the most of on Facebook. I’m not too interested in the squillions of photographs that friends upload, or all of the comments that they make on each others baby photographs. Twitter condenses the whole lot beautifully.

With Twitter you are not limited to following friends, but can follow anyone you like provided they don’t block you. I’m currently following Lance Armstrong and Stephen Fry, and it’s actually quite cool to take a quick look and just see what they are up to. So the same opportunities exist for Twitter as for Facebook. Stephen Fry has 572,000 followers, and Lance Armstrong over a million. Everytime they ‘tweet’ a combined one and a half million people get the message.

So, clearly social networking is something that has to be explored. I’m not saying it’s the answer to everything and that it will work for all businesses, but it will probably do more good than harm.

If you want to follow elmnet you can follow our tweets by clicking here.

‘The fold’ is an imaginary line on a website, beyond which the user has to scroll to see more content.

This term more than likely originated from the broadsheet newspaper which must be read folded due to it’s size. Editors traditionally put the most important items above the fold, cascading down to the less important ones. This trend has carried on from the press to the computer screen, and to a degree still exists today.

It’s amazing how many web designers still believe that the internet user of today hasn’t figured out what a scrollbar is for. In the early days, when the web was still new, some viewers actually believed that the page was broken if the text and images disappeared into nothing below the foot of the browser window. It was positively discouraged to have any kind of scrolling at all, and some of these old fashioned attitudes remain today, quite unnecessarily.

For a start, where actually is this fold? It depends to a great extent on the display that the user is viewing the page on. A monitor with an output of 800×600 pixels will have a fold much higher up the page than a widescreen of 1980×1200. Likewise, a viewer on a netbook with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels will see the fold in a different place to someone on a mobile phone. Research suggests that at best if we decide to design based on a fold we will get it right for at most 10% of our target audience, so how do we deal with all these instances if ‘the fold’ is real?

The simple answer is that we don’t let it worry us too much at all! We design so that there is compelling content at the top of the screen and then just get on with building clean, simple web pages. There are techniques which can help, such as cutting off text and images so users know there is more to follow, but users on large monitors often view their browsers tiled at a size of their choosing, so you just can’t get it right.

I guess what I am saying is that it’s good to have a page that scrolls. People are used to scrolling. They scroll when looking for contacts on their mobile phone, or when viewing the channel guide on their Sky box. It’s second nature now that the web is such an integral part of peoples lives. We shouldn’t try to cram pixels into the top portion of the screen, we should allow our designs room to breathe and make them a pleasure to view.

If your content is interesting enough, people will scroll and read it.

We’re big believers in this very simple statement: “content dictates design”.

We’ve been approached many times by clients who want to see the shiny new design for their website before developing the content for it. It rarely works as well as when content has been thought through, developed and used as a keystone in the development of a design.

How can you know how long a page is going to be until you have the content? Is it possible to design a really effective navigation system if you don’t know where you are going to be navigating to?

With smaller sites you can probably get away with it. With larger ones the old saying ‘content is king’ has never rung truer.

“The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out.”

So say respected industry magazine ‘.net’. Microsoft released IE6 nearly eight years ago, which in I.T. terms is an eternity! It’s non standards compliant, not as secure as modern browsers and not as well featured. Putting it simply, the web looks different through IE6, much like it did eight years ago in fact.

The problem here is that Microsoft won’t port out IE7 to Windows 2000. This isn’t much of a problem to your average user, but you would be shocked at the number of businesses still out there running Windows 2000 boxes. I have nothing against Windows 2000, it’s possibly the best Microsoft product ever made in my opinion, but as long as Microsoft won’t make IE7 available for it then IE6 simply won’t go away.

From a designers point of view this is a bad situation. We find that we first of all write our sites in generally compliant standard browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 8. We then need to go back and tweak the code to make the site render properly in the half effort called Internet Explorer 7. We then have to go back again and make considerable changes to make it work in Internet Explorer 6! This wastes an awful lot of production time, time which could be better spent doing other things.

So, our choice is either to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 and try and force Microsoft to undo their evil, but risk alienating up to 20% of users still accessing the web with it, or carry on supporting this antiquated browser and lose valuable development time on every single job trying to bend it into something it can never be.

At Elmnet the jury is still out, but the day that IE6 is no longer a factor in my web design projects will be a very happy one. If you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck with IE6 then you will have already seen our upgrade your browser page. We aim to make our websites accessible to all in IE6, although we won’t be too upset if it doesn’t look it’s best – you have to draw the line somewhere.

One of the most important aspects of web design here at Elmnet is the build of standards compliant sites. This means writing code in the standard as specified by the W3C Consortium. To do this we need to write a site in two parts. The first part is the content, and this content is usually drawn from a database and displayed in a page. The second part of the site is the design, and this is controlled from a separate style sheet. What we change in the stylesheet only affects the way that the site looks, not the content held within it. The content and design are kept apart and only come together when the viewer browses to the site.

There are two ways of looking at standards compliant web design. One is to not bother and just go ahead and write non standard code. This is fine today, but next year when the next generation of web browsers come out we shouldn’t then complain when our sites don’t work in them.

The more sensible option is to write code which conforms as closely as possible to the standard of the day. Modern standards compliant browsers will always support standards compliant code so in theory at least you have a site that will work as it should for years to come. It’s an investment in the future!

While we’re on the subject of standards compliant browsers, I haven’t even touched upon the subject of Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 and the horrendous web legacy they have left behind them. It will crop up soon though!

To validate or not to validate, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of illegible captcha scripts,
Or to take arms against a sea of anti-spam questions,
And by opposing end them?

Erm, what? To anyone not familiar with the numerous anti spam solutions available to protect email forms this may appear as understandable as Shakespeare does to me. Briefly, a ‘captcha’ system involves a user typing in the distorted letters and numbers displayed before a form can be processed. The anti-spam question asks a simple question (usually basic maths) to which you enter the correct answer and off you go. These methods are supposed to be a way of ensuring that it is in fact a human that is filling in the form and not one of these nasty automated junk mail spam bot thingamybobs.

So, what’s the problem? Well, anyone asking obviously hasn’t tried to use one before. They are a big obstacle to accessibility, even users with 20:20 vision have problems with them so goodness knows what the visually impaired make of them! At Elmnet we’ve used them before, but we now have a different approach and are going through our customers forms one by one. It will take a little time to get around everyone but we have a plan.

We built a series of web forms for Paul at PLJ Properties. The forms had a lot of work to do. They have to input the information entered to a database, add the user to a mailing list and send an email of the forms contents to the site owner. Needless to say we don’t want to have to waste our time with the spam robots filling in forms with random phrases and spam hyperlinks so we added a captcha protection system. It wasn’t particularly good. We then removed this and added an anti-spam question. This seemed to do the trick, but it wasn’t the most graceful of solutions. Then we tried a bit harder and came up with something quite simple – we validated our forms correctly.

This is a simple procedure that eliminates the need for captcha or antispam. How it works is that we specify what kind of inputs are allowed in certain fields. For example, ‘forename’ and ‘surname’ can only contain letters and spaces, and certainly no numbers. ‘Email address’ has to be in the correct format for an email address. ‘Telephone Number’ must contain only numbers and spaces and be of a certain length, and the ‘Enquiry’ box can contain all characters but it can’t contain ones starting with ‘http://’. A favourite trick of spammers is to insert hyperlinks into webforms in the hope that they will appear on the web in some shape or form.

If the entries of the webform match this criteria then it is allowed through. If it doesn’t then it’s not. Simple! No squiggly letters to fill in, no questions to answer, no blocks to useability or accessibility, just common sense!