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   This Section is provided to give a background to the technical issues that face anyone putting up a web page. It is meant to give those new to the whole WEB thing a bit of background to help understand the compromises involved and the advantages of the WEB. It currently covers the following main topics :-

   THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Well basically it all started with the USSR! Sort of. When Sputnik sent it's now famous beep's back to Earth on a Ham Radio frequency the USSR made sure that the whole world had good access to it's signal. One of the nations that heard it was the USA. In response, to being basically beaten to the punch, the USA set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency to do high level research on Science and Space technologies (read Military). The people involved in these projects needed to use powerful computers but may not have had direct access at the time. A network was then installed that would allow contractors to share computer resources. This was originally called ARPANET. While this was the main reason for the network the researchers were soon keeping in touch in other ways to help collaboration on projects. This collaboration involved sharing files, sending electronic mail and exchanging software over the network. There was no particular protocol at that time to standardise communications between disparate platforms. In the early 1980's the TCP/IP protocol suite was developed. This meant that anyone using TCP/IP knew that they could communicate effectively with anyone else using this protocol. Since this standard was available to everyone it was quickly adopted by all concerned on ARPANET.

The inclusion of TCP/IP in the University of California - Berkley's popular BSD UNIX operating system (which was almost free to universities) helped spread this protocol to many universities around the globe. Soon not only government defence contactors were sharing information but so to were a lot of universities including the students. ARPANET had grown by now to include thousands of people in universities and government agencies. By 1988 ARPA (Now called DARPA) decided that the whole experiment was over and handed the "NET" over to the US National Science Foundation which took over the Backbone operations in the US. Australia had there own backbone with CSIRO and other universities. Now while the amount of computers connected to the Internet was becoming larger the cost and the technicalities of use were beyond non technical people. It wasn't very exciting either. Basically at that time the Internet was full of research information and some personal message and it all looked very "DRY" Until:-

NCSA Mosaic. This was the grandfather of the Browser. A bunch of people the National Centre Of Super Computing Applications (NCSA) decided it would be a lot easier to get all the information (pictures, words, text formatting) together in a way that enabled people to share information that looked a lot more like the printed version but with a lot more thrown in. A few of the people involved went on to form a company that released a product called Netscape. The first universally available popular commercial browser that enabled people to basically point and click their way around the Internet. While the original Netscape was a far cry from today's browsers it still had the most important parts in it. With this single piece of software the Internet was opened up to your average not so technical user and the boom began. By the Mid 90's the rate of growth of people " Getting Wired " was staggering. A whole new vocabulary popped up as Marketing guys and those that were just plain excited started adding new words to the dictionary. Surfing, The WEB, Getting Online, Geeks, Cyber Punks etc. etc. It is easy to forget that this whole thing is just basically a communication medium at heart. It has become a lifestyle statement to a lot of people. The landscape has changed a lot out there in Cyber Space in the last few years. It is no longer just a matter getting online and making a million dollars. It has almost become a commodity like the Telephone and the Television. Maybe one day it will be renamed the telenet (that almost happened) but for a long while it will be the World Wide Web. This is where the www. bit came from in most internet addresses but it may surprise people to know that www. is not at all a must for your domain Name.

If you haven't had enough, see these links :- (Will open in a separate window)


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   THE BROWSER
The browser is what most people are used to using on their own personal computer. The two most popular browsers at present are Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. There are other very competent browsers around but these two make up the bulk of the browsers used. The ratio of use of these two is approximately 35% Netscape and 65% Internet Explorer. Both browsers do things to your page slightly differently (which can even have the most hardened web designer pulling their hair out) so it is best to avoid using technologies in your web page that limit your exposure to one browser or the other. (unless you actually want to alienate a large chunk of your audience)

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   THE WEB SITE
Web pages are basically held on a remote computer and "served" up when a browser requests them. They are generally made up of a collection of images and text files. You pay some money to host your web site on the remote computer and the host computer then distributes the request from users all over the world. It is also entirely possible to have your Web Site hosted anywhere in the world if you wish. The term World Wide Web means just that. The money you pay to an Internet Service provider pays for the maintenance, data security, expertise and general daily overheads associated with maintaining a server. One important thing that is often overlooked in this regard is the expertise available, on site, to enable any problems to quickly be sorted out and keep the service running almost permanently. While the cost of design and implementation of your site may be similar to that of traditional paper set-ups, your distribution costs, convenience, customer reach and capacity to make changes quickly are vastly superior to paper based methods.
While it is possible to get reasonable control over layout on your website it is not as straight forward as it may seem on paper (Not that that is always straight forward either). The first thing to realise when you think about your site is that you will have to make a range of compromises in this area. You may want your page to look exactly the same as your printed material but often this may lead to way to much time wasted by your potential customers. If you are not an expert on web design please be understanding that not all things are possible. While more and more technology is becoming available to solve this problem it will take a while for the technology to filter through to most of your potential audience.
So while you have a potential audience of many hundreds of millions of people you will want to make sure that you maintain the FEEL of your site you want but without being rigid about layout. You can usually find a good compromise which will make most people happy.

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   THE COMPUTER
The computer that is reading your web site will probably fall into three main groups. Computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems, commonly known as PC's, Those running the Macintosh Operating system, commonly known as Mac's and those running the Linux operating system which is a Unix variant basically freely available to anyone who want's it. All these various platforms can run Netscape but only Mac and PC's will run Microsoft's Internet Explorer. What is not widely known is that Netscape is the king of platforms and is more widely available than most browsers in this regard.

Now here is the rub. Even with the same model browser they will do slightly different things on each platform. Some of the differences are operating system related and some are due to slight variations in the browser. One difference that is most noticeable is the way the images look on different systems. On a PC images will tend to look a lot darker than on a Mac. You should always bear this in mind when describing colour on your site. The other problems have to do with the actual physical properties of the computer viewing your page. You can have a whole range from people with an old slow computer with a small screen to users with the latest high power graphic's accelerated high resolution wide screen flat panel display's. All of these people must be catered for. The more technology you put into a site the more limited your audience will be.

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   THE USER - Your audience
The First rule of any communication media is to know your customer well. When you design a page you are following the same rules as you would with any other communications media. Your image is specific to your business and your web site's style should reflect your image. If you are targeting a corporate market and your other media reflects this there is not much point designing a web page that looks like it belongs to a teenagers KeWl WarZ site. Same works the other way around. A surf shop will still want to look like a surf shop online.
Probably more importantly your site may be an aid to decision making or it may be an entertainment site. Whatever the case you must make it as easy as possible for your users to get the result they are after as quickly as possible. If you require your users to find one piece of special software after another just to get your page to work then you are inviting trouble. It is best to keep your site as simple as possible to achieve the desired effect. Some very popular sites around are still basically just text based with a few graphics. Multimedia masterpieces have there place but in most cases you are burning a lot of money in the process and it may actually put off potential users who sit there for what seems like an eternity waiting for something to happen. Most people would like to know as quickly as possible the answers to their questions. Those that use your site as a reference or to source goods and services are not going to be impressed with a 60 second wait. The longer a person has spent online in their lifetime the more intolerant they will be of this kind of thing.

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