Web engineering lecture 5

By
Kiramat Rahman
Department of Computer & Software Technology

Out Lineon your web site?
 What to put
 How to design your website?
 How to make a website interactive?
 How to code your website?
 How to create search engine friendly web site
 Securing your source code frequently
 How to choose a hosting type?
 Hosting Platforms:

11/5/2012 UoS 2

What to put on your web site ?

 This totally depends on your business and nature of
your web site. Here is a list of pages that you might
want to create for your web site.
 Attractive Home Page : Always required for every web
site.
 List of Product and Services along with complete
detail.
 Complete Pricing Information.

11/5/2012 UoS 3

What to Put on Your web site?
 About your company and nature of business including
your achievements.
 About your staff and if possible their experience.
 Your complete contact information.
 Frequently Asked Questions.
 Success Stories and Feedback from Customers.
 Finally, make your site useful and interesting for your
customers. Your site visitors are your customers and
they should find each and every thing they are looking
for. Customer satisfaction should be prime concern.
11/5/2012 UoS 4

How to design your web site ?

 You should not simply start developing your web site
otherwise you will end up with a bogus web site. First you
should put a complete plan and your design on a paper or
in an electronic document.
 Here are few points which can help you to design a better
web site:
 Consider what technology you are going to use to develop
your web site. Adopt one which gives you better flexibility
and rapid development opportunities and then design it
accordingly.
 Design a generic framework so that in future you can
enhance and modify your web site by putting minimal
effort.
11/5/2012 UoS 5

How to Design your website cont..
 Design a site to keep required performance in your
mind. If you are designing database driven web site
then lot of effort has to put to design good database
schemas.
 Keep your design as simple as possible so that any new
developer should become familiar with your design as
soon as possible.

11/5/2012 UoS 6

How to design your website cont…
 Identify repeatable components of your web site and
then keep them separate and try to use them wherever
possible.
 Identify the nature and qualification of your site
visitors and give importance to look and feel
accordingly.

11/5/2012 UoS 7

How to design your website cont..
 Think in a way, if you are a site visitor then what and
how would you like to see this web site? If same site
belongs to somebody else then would like to spend
some time on such site ?
 You should create a search engine friendly web site.
 Once again....your presentation should be unique and
attractive otherwise there are lot of web sites available
on the Internet and it will be difficult for your to retain
a site visitor for more than a minute.

11/5/2012 UoS 8

How to make web site interactive
?

 Many statistics shows that if you are able to retain your
site visitors for a long time then they do bigger
shopping and comes again and again.
 So make sure you have done something for your site
visitors to do on your web site. Though offering a lot of
quality information can also serve as a great visitor
magnet and will generate more repeat visits.

11/5/2012 UoS 9

? Cont..
 Here is a list of interactive tools you can add to your
web site completely FREE and without any
programming skills:
 Poll
 Forum
 Guest book
 Chat room
 Greeting cards
 Tell-a-friend about this site
11/5/2012 UoS 10

? Cont…
 Feedback form
 Live customer service
 Daily joke or daily cartoon
 Daily news headlines
 Site Search Engine
 Mailing List
 Automated Frequently Asked Questions
 The list can go on and on, depending on what will
attract your type of visitors
11/5/2012 UoS 11

How to code your web site ?

 Finally, when you start coding for your web site you should
be well aware of the following tips for a better web site:
 You site should meet all the quality requirements defined
by W3C. Today we are using XHTML to develop any web
site. XHTML is just a cleaner version of HTML.
 You should keep validating your source code using W3C
Validator.
 Keep your source code very clean and understandable.
 Do use appropriate comments but avoid using to many
comments inside HTML files.

11/5/2012 UoS 12

How to code your web site ?
Cont…
 Keep your style sheets and JAVA or VB scripts into separate
files and then include them where ever is required.
 Do not use to much graphics in your web pages.
 Try to keep your web pages static instead of generating
them dynamically.
 Make sure there is no broken link on any web page.
 Test your developed web page in major browsers like
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape etc.
 Test your all the scripts for all the possible scenarios. Do
not host any page without complete testing.
11/5/2012 UoS 13

How to create search engine
friendly web site ?

 This is very important for you to make your web site
search friendly otherwise you will be away from a large
chunk of your customer base which comes from search
engines like google and yahoo.

11/5/2012 UoS 14

Securing your source code
frequently:

 While developing your web site it is very important to
keep a backup of your complete source code. Many
times it happens that you may delete any file by
mistake so if you are keeping its backup then you can
restore previous file and start doing your work.
 This is a very good practice to take backup on hourly
basis or at least on daily basis. Keep this backup on
different machine or media. This is very likely that
machine may crash anytime and it will result in a very
serious situation if you are keeping your backup on
different machine or media.
11/5/2012 UoS 15

How to choose a hosting type?
 Web hosting means to put your web site content on a
Web server. Hosting your web site on your own server
could be an option. But this will become very much
expansive unless you are hosting a site like yahoo.com
or google.com. So this tutorials does not cover how to
set up your own hosting server.
 Buying a server space or renting a complete server
from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) are most
widely used options. This section guides you to choose
a hosting type and makes you aware of other related
concepts.
11/5/2012 UoS 16

Hosting Platforms:

 You can go for any of the following two most widely used
hosting platforms:
 Windows Hosting Servers : If you are a Windows lover
then you will find many hosting servers running different
flavors of Windows and you can buy space from these
servers. Normally Windows hosting server are more
expansive because of lot of software incensing costs are
involved with these servers
 Linux Hosting Servers: If you want to go for Linux then
opportunities are unlimited and they will have to pay less
then what you will pay for Windows Hosting Server. There
are many ISP who provides Hosting Servers with different
flavors of Unix.

11/5/2012 UoS 17

Hosting Types
 There are many options available and you can select
any hosting type based on your requirement and
budget. Following are most widely used hosting types:
 Free Hosting: Yes, this is true there are many service
providers who will give you free space on their web
server with a condition that you will allow them to run
their advertisement at your web pages. So if you are
OK with this option then you have nothing to pay for a
space. There are some web sites like
geocities.com, lycos.com, myspace.com etc. who give
you space to build your web pages
11/5/2012 UoS 18

Hosting Types cont…
 Shared Hosting: With shared hosting, your web site is hosted
on a powerful server along with other web sites.
 On a shared host you will have your own user ID and password to
login to the shared host and you will be allowed to work in your
work area.
 You would not be able to touch any file or directory belonging to
other host partner.
 Even you would not know how many sites are hosted on your
shared host.
 This type of hosting is very cost effective and good for small web
site where your space and speed are not very important.
 Here traffic on one site will affect the speed of all other hosted
sites.
11/5/2012 UoS 19

Hosting Types cont...
 Virtual Dedicated Hosting:
 This type of hosting is better for medium size business.
 With virtual dedicated hosting you will have a dedicated
bandwidth and dedicated RAM for your site.
 You will be given root ID and password to maintain your
Web server.
 You will be complete owner of your virtual dedicated
server and will be able to install or de-install any software.
 This type of hosting is created on a single server but it is
managed in such a way that every user will have dedicated
speed and bandwidth.
 This is bit more expansive but really good one for medium
size business.
11/5/2012 UoS 20

Hosting types cont…
 Dedicated Hosting: This type of hosting is very similar to
virtual dedicated hosting but here complete machine will be
allotted for you.
 They are more expansive than virtual dedicated hosting and
should be considered when you have a very high traffic
requirement.
 Collocated Hosting: This is very difficult to set you dedicated
resources like high-security against fire and vandalism, regulated
backup power, dedicated Internet connections and more.
 So collocation is the option which allows you to put your
machine in a service provider's premises to avail all the available
facilities.
 This is also a very expansive option and should be opted when
you have very high traffic requirement.

11/5/2012 UoS 21

Hosting Component
 When you buy a Web server space then you should be clear
about the follows.
 You should do price comparison between different service
providers based on the following components:
 Disc Space:
 A small or medium web site will need between 10 and
100MB of disk space.
 If you plan to keep lot of audio and Video on your web site
then you need plan to buy more space.
 Before buying server space you should check the options
available to expand your disc space if you need it in future.

11/5/2012 UoS 22

Hosting Component cont…
 Monthly Traffic: A small or medium web site will
need between 1GB and 10GB of data transfer on
monthly basis.
 If you plan to keep lot of audio and Video on your web
site then you need plan to look for more data transfer
capacity.
 Check different options based on your requirements.
What are other options available in case you cross the
given data transfer limit.
 Your site should not be stopped in case you reach to
the given limit.
11/5/2012 UoS 23

 Processing Speed: If you are buying space on a
shared machine then you can not guess how much
speed will be given to you.
 In that case only way is to see other hosted sites with
the same service provider to know about their hosting
quality.
 But if you are buying virtual dedicated server or
dedicated server then you should consider how much
RAM is being allocated to you.
 Your pricing will depend on the given processing
power to you.
11/5/2012 UoS 24

 Connection Speed:
 Now a days very fast connection speed is available from
most of the service providers.
 So choose a service provider who is giving better
connection speed in terms of bits per second.
 You can have connection speed ranging from 64Kb per
second to 2.488Gb per second.

11/5/2012 UoS 25

 Email Accounts:
 Make sure you are going to get sufficient number of e-
mail accounts.
 There are many other options available which come
along with your e-mail account.
 Like, will you get IMAP, POP and E-mail Forwarding
options available along with your e-mail facilities.

11/5/2012 UoS 26

 Emailing Support:
 Apart form having email accounts it is also very
important that your web server should have a facility to
send emails from back-end.
 In case your site visitors want to contact to you using a
form provided by you then you will be able to use that
emailing facility to send email to your designated
account.
 In simple terms you should make sure that SMTP
Server is setup and working on your Web server.
11/5/2012 UoS 27

Hosting Component cont….
 Latest Technologies:
 You should make sure that your web server is equipped
with all the latest technologies.
 It should have latest version support for
PHP, PERL, ASP and JAVA etc.

11/5/2012 UoS 28

 Databases:
 There are many databases available MySQL, Oracle, SQL
Server etc.
 So you should choose your server based on your database
requirement.
 If you are buying space on a shared server then you need to
verify how much space will be allocated for your database.
 Many ISP does not give more than a limited space for
databases.
 So if your site needs lot of database size then you should go
for virtual dedicated server.

11/5/2012 UoS 29

 Server Uptime:
 This is very important to buy a web server from a
reliable and reputed ISP.
 You should make sure your ISP is giving you 99.99%
server uptime.
 If there is server down then there are many service
providers who gives you compensation in case your
sites goes down more than a limited time.

11/5/2012 UoS 30

Hosting Component cont..
 Backup & FTP:
 Make sure your Service Provider is giving you or more
ways of taking regular backup of your web site.
 If your site is changing everyday then it becomes very
important that you should take regular backup of your
web site.
 Many service providers do it on your behalf but they
charge very little cost for this service.

11/5/2012 UoS 31

 Control Panel:
 Just make sure what type of facilities you will get to
maintain your hosting account.
 If your service provider is providing your an easy to use
control panel or some other similar tool.
 Using a control panel you should be able to maintain
basic operations related to your web site specially like
log your service request, your reboot request or any
other problem.

11/5/2012 UoS 32

Hosting Component cont..
 Customer Support:
 Before finalizing a deal with your service provider you
should make sure they will provide your required
support.
 You can get this information using Internet forums or
from your friends.
 There are many service providers who give you 24x7
support for any technical or non technical problem.

11/5/2012 UoS 33

Ecommerce Website
 Ecommerce is a way of doing business through Internet.
Specially when you are selling your product or services
through Internet then you are doing ecommerce.
 So if you planning to put a web site which will have
transactions likes buying or selling items or services then
 it means you are going to setup an ecommerce web site.
 If this is the case then I don't think this guide will help you
upto a level where should be able to setup an ecommerce
site because there are many more things which should be
considered while setting up an ecommerece web site.

11/5/2012 UoS 34

Ecommerce Websit cont…
 Still you can start from here : E-commerce hosting are bit
expansive but they should not be treated as expansive that
you can not start an ecommerce web site.
 Now a days it is very easy to set up an ecommerce site only
thing is that just get in touch of any good service provider
and start gathering basic information.
 There many service providers who help you to setup your
virtual store and charge you unexpectedly very low.
 Even now google also has started google account service in
which you can sell your products through them and all the
money will come in your account without any hassle.

11/5/2012 UoS 35

Ecommerce website cont….
 While finalizing your ecommerce hosting setup, to
avoid any future risk you should be very clear on how
to handle the followings:
 Customer Registrations
 Customer Transactions
 Product Catalogs
 Customer Orders
 Order Security

11/5/2012 UoS 36

Ecommerce website cont…
 Server Security
 Server Maintenance
 Server Backup
 Server downtime
 Inventory Control
 Shipment Methods

11/5/2012 UoS 37

Ecommerce website cont.…
 Payment Methods
 Foreign currency
 Credit Cards
 Taxes issues
 You should take this list and discuss it with your
service provider as well to understand how they will
support you to handle all these items.

11/5/2012 UoS 38

Q&A

11/5/2012 UoS 39

Web engineering lecture 5

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Web engineering lecture 5 (20)

Web engineering lecture 5