Frequently Asked Questions

Everyone has questions when it comes to Internet and new media development, be they general questions about the medium or more technical questions relating to the technologies available. This section intends to provide answers to some of those common questions.

If you cannot find an answer to your questions here, then you can always contact us directly. We would be more than happy to hear from you.

General Knowledge

What sort of information should I put on my web site?

There are so many different types of business with so many differing requirements, but one thing remains constant to all with respect to the Internet medium. You need to discuss the strengths you offer to your clients, you need to communicate exactly who you are, and you need a mechanism to allow your web site visitors to contact you via your web presence. If you can fulfil these three main requirements, you've made a start!

I have a lot of material I want to incorporate into my web presence; how can I make it available?

You can present your material on your web site in a variety of different ways depending on the nature of the content. If you have general information about your business it would be ideal to display it as succinctly as possible in a simple, readable format. If you have a lot of technical information on your products and services, you might choose to distil a portion of that on your web site itself and allow people to download more comprehensive technical documents in a widely accessibly document format such as PDF.

You might also choose to present the information to users in a more context-oriented way, such as by first collecting a small amount of information about that user, and presenting the information that you know to be relevant to them as a result. A more strategic approach is often a vastly more effective way of communicating your information and retaining interest in your site.

What sort of technology should I use on my site?

Often, simple is best when it comes to utilisation of 'client-side' technology on your site. That is; text and images! It may sound a little static and perhaps boring, but you would be surprised as to just how far we can stretch these two simple devices!

Occasionally, it may be relevant to incorporate some more dynamic aspects to your web presence, such as video and animated imagery, which again can be achieved in a small variety of ways. However, the main thing to be aware of is the potential for your users to not have the capability to view your exciting videos and animations.

What is meant by 'standards-based' development?

There are technical standards the stipulate how things should be developed and constructed in nearly all aspects of modern society. Development for the Internet is guided in particular by a set of standards that stipulate the format in which web pages should be arranged. That is, the 'code' behind a web page should be based on a standard. Unfortunately, the scope for governance by standard is quite limited in technical development (meaning that quite often, there is no standard at all to stipulate how something can be built!) and even more unfortunately, the standards that DO exist are often ignored.

Generally speaking, not conforming to a standard often leads to poor development practices, broken or badly formed web pages and web sites, increased maintenance costs and a reduction in the ability for you to reach a wide target audience.

Internet Systems

What is a server?

A server is usually a physical machine connected 'somewhere' on the internet that allows 'users' to connect to it and take some information from it. There are a myriad of different types of server that perform vastly different roles. There are database servers, web servers, mail servers and file servers to name a few. The common aspect to all types of server is that they generally allow a user to connect to it, and retrieve information from it as a result.

What is the difference between a client and a server?

Generally speaking there can be many clients to one server. A client is a user that attempts to connect to that server to take information from it. For example, viewing this web page, you are (or more accurately, your web browser is) considered to be the client, and the computer on which this web site is stored is considered to be the server. You 'call' the server and ask it to return to you a copy of this web page.

What is an IP address?

An IP address is a number (IP stands for Internet Protocol) that identifies a machine on the network. All machines on the network have a number, be they clients or servers. However, the number that is typically the most important in the equation is the server IP. Until very recently, IP numbers were of a format like 111.222.333.444 (i.e. a series of 4 numbers up to 255 separated by dots). However as the Internet increases in size and popularity, the reality is that there will soon not be enough numbers available to uniquely identify everyone! As a result there is a very strong push to migrate to a new series of numbering that allows for more unique combinations.

What is a DNS address?

DNS stands for Domain Name System (or 'Service' or 'Server'). In simple terms, DNS is a mechanism that translates an IP address into a more meaningful name, such as www.mybusiness.com. Your web server is always accessible by its unique number, however this is difficult to remember, and often meaningless to your customers as a means of finding your web address. For example if your company is called "Acme Shoe Company", users would have a much better time remembering www.acmeshoecompany.com, rather than 123.255.254.121 for example!

What is meant by the term 'server-side' technology?

A server – such as a web server – has only certain software installed on it that empowers it to perform the function of a web server. As you would expect, there are many different types and brands of software in the marketplace that do similar things and are competing for your business! When you come to develop your web site, you will have to make a series of choices as to what type of 'server-side technology' you wish to use. For example, you will need to identify what type of database server you wish to use, what type of programming language you might wish to use and what type of operating system you want the server to have.

What is meant by the term 'client-side' technology?

As you would expect, this is a similar concept as the definition of server-side technology, however it relates to the types of software that the client uses. In some ways, this is not nearly as important to you as a business wishing to maintain a web presence; however there are some extremely important concepts to remember. Most importantly, you cannot control what sorts of operating systems, browsers and so on your clients use when looking at your web site. You have to try your best to cater to all of them. Thankfully, this is not quite as difficult as it first sounds, but there are a few challenges that we as developers need to take care of when developing a web presence on your behalf!

What does HTTP stand for and what is it?

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It is the mechanism by which web page documents are transmitted to a web browser. You will notice that almost all web browsers prefix any web address you type in the browser bar with 'http://'. This is telling the browser to contact the server in this specific protocol. There are a few different ones that can be used, http is generally the most common.

What about HTML?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language – and this is the format in which web pages are written.

Enabling Technologies and Technical Languages

What is a scripting language (or programming language) and why do we need to use one?

This gets back to the concept of a server-side technology. One of the aspects of a technology on the server-side is the type of programming language that we use to 'construct' web page documents dynamically before sending them off to the client. A scripting language can do things like sift through the results returned from a database and display a table of information to the user, 'validate' user input and return dynamic messages to the user and so on.

If your web site is simply a set of pages that never change and don't collect any user information, then you may not even need to use a language of some sort to display the pages, but if (like most people) you want your site to collect user details, return results from a database or display more dynamic content, then you will almost certainly need to use some type of server-side language to perform this sort of functionality.