The current twitter account of the game reached 1,300+ followers within a few hours. It was great to see the response of the people who played the game and how quickly the word was spread out. The mastermind behind this idea is my good friend @prosopopeio. For the first game the prize was Dexter: The Complete First Season in DVD, which was given to one of our participants successfully completed the puzzle within 24 hours. Next week we’ll start another game, if you want to have some fun, win prizes and at the same time pimp your twitter profile, I highly recommend you to checkout Tweezzle.org!

If you can create amazing scripts from scratch and loves to spend time writing endless lines of code this tutorial is not for you. I’d really like to be able to create my own applications from scratch, I’ve tried learning some programming languages before (PHP and Ruby on Rails) and hope that someday I’ll be able to master one of them so I can rely on my own skills to create and debug websites. But as of now I just can’t get past xhtml and some css. You see, I’m more of a design/marketing guy. I highly suggest you try learning one of the main web development languages before trying to create a website, and I’m not talking about html.

I decided to write this tutorial for people who have great website/service ideas but have no technical expertise on how to create them. I’m not a coder but I’ve been able to manage the development of a few websites that turned out exactly as I had them in mind. Remember, I’m not a coder so I might be very wrong about some of the concepts and/or terms I use here, I will just state what has worked for me so far.

You don’t need to know how to write code in order to create a website. Getting things done will probably happen faster if you do. But you can still manage to have a website online. Even though I can’t code a half-decent website myself, from all the hours/day I spend surfing the web I know exactly how a website should function and I bet you do to.

1. SELECTING THE BEST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE:

There are many languages out there to choose frome: ASP, PHP, Perl, Ruby and so on. On one of my attempts at learning a programming language I’ve googled “The best programming language” and couldn’t find it. I’ve read somewhere that the best language is the one you are most familiar with. In other words, you can develop awesome websites using whatever language you choose as long as you can work it to do what you want. What I noticed though is that PHP is very popular among programmers and is probably the one with the highest number of free scripts available. I also recommend PHP because most of the hosting companies support it and you can run it on a linux server, which are the cheapest. Some amazing websites have been developed using php including Facebook and Youtube.

2. CREATING THE CODE:

Ok, if you are reading this you probably don’t know how to write code, so what we have to do is hire someone to do it for you. There are many ways you can find the right people to do the job, here are a few resources:

• GetAFreelancer
• Elance
• SitePoint MarketPlace

I really recommend GetAFreelancer, it’s my favourite place to find talented programmers.

There are more places you can go to find amazing programmers to work for you. If you want to develop an open-source project try SourceForge, people may help you for free over there.

3. EXPLAINING WHAT YOU WANT:

It’s not easy to pass the idea to someone else if you are only going to use words, I suggest creating a design of the website and sending images of how you want things to work. Explain every single detail because programmers will quote depending on that, this is very important specially if you have a limited budget. You don’t want to ask programmers to add things later on the project because they will charge more for any extra  work.

4. IT’S BEEN DONE BEFORE:

Try searching for available scripts at HotScripts. There are a lot of scripts available there that might help your programmer build your own application. Instead of having the programmer create everything from scratch ask his opinion on some of the scripts you find that might make his work easier. Sometimes it’s cheaper to purchase a script and have it implemented to your project than creating it.

If you have a good idea write it down and create a layout kinda like a sitemap. Explain every section and functionality of the site in detail. It’s good to use websites as reference when explaining for ex: “The comments system should look like Youtube’s.” You probably want a lot of features that already exist in a few sites out there, skip the trial and error part and just design something similar (unless you have a better concept in mind). It’s great to see an idea becoming a reality, once the site is ready you will need to market it, that’s the next topic I will write about. Stay tuned, and if you have any suggestions or tips please comment below. Thank you.

eBookCritique.com

So check AdVitorio.com out!

According to Wikipedia, screen display resolution is also set to change, 640×480 was the standard resolution from 1990 to around 1996. 800×600 was the standard resolution until around 2000. Last time I checked, the majority of active computers have their resolution set to 1024×768, but new PCs are coming with even higher resolution settings, so that too is set to change.

Other than the resolution issue web designers should also take into account the browser differences. Internet users with the same resolution might customize their browsers using different settings like toolbars. There’s also the browser issue: IE, Firefox, Opera, etc… they all display websites in different ways. To get around this resolution problem you should create liquid designs, which uses the available space on the browser window to display the page’s content. Of course not all pages have the same design concept, in some cases you will not be able to create a liquid design, it really depends on the lay-out.

I’ve been designing websites using Corel for a long time, and just recently started working with Photoshop. I gotta tell you, if you are starting right now, go with Photoshop. This software is perfect for web designers, it let’s you slice images, export for the web, create animated gifs and so much more. It is as if Adobe developed the software with the web designer in mind. I once read that the best design software is the one you are good at, and that’s really true. I have seen beautiful designs from people using different software. In the end, the software is not going to create the design for you, the most important thing is to have creative and artistic skills.

UPDATE: An awesome free website to check how your site looks on various browser, operational systems and resolution is http://www.browsershots.org – try it!

To develop a website first you need to have an idea.

Step 1. Ok, you had that great website idea.

“This is going to be the next Google!”

Step 2. No matter what your idea is, there are four things you need:

Web Design
Programming
Marketing
Support

And yes, I’m this fast paced.

You don’t need to know every little detail on those subjects. Of course, it helps a lot when you have done past work on some of the above mentioned areas. I mean, you don’t need to be the best, just have a notion of what’s best, keep an eye on the latest trends and follow the standards. You probably will need some help from people to work on one, if not all, of the areas above. To find them you can post listings on job portals, freelance websites or even try to search on google for portfolios.

Web Design

It is the look-n-feel of your website. The basic design structure of a page is composed of a header, body and footer. Sounds simple huh? Well it isn’t. A good designer has at least 2 years of experience on creating website designs, I’d suggest you to look for someone who’s experienced with the latest software, standards and SEO techniques.

Programmers

They make your website run. Give it functionality. Most of the time what you want is already out there. Something you can adapt to your idea, for example: you don’t need to create a newsletter system from scratch, there are plenty of scripts out there. You can also use a framework depending on your site. If you are going to sell products, there are a lot of e-commerce scripts. And some good ones for free!

Marketing

Advertise, make your website well known. Manage the competitive aspects of your site. Get you on top of the search engines and use techniques to send you visitors. Techniques which are too numerous to mention, but I will try to cover as many as I can in the future.

Support

Will take care of customer inquiries, emails, complaints. This is the human side of your website.

Now that you know this from now on you’ll never need to go through this step again. From 1, the Idea, go straight to 3, the Layout.

Step 3. Layout

You’re smart and beautiful. I bet you didn’t expect me to say that. Ok, enough joking around. The layout of your website is created by joining all of those areas and putting them all into one place. I mean, write every little aspect down so you know what you need and where to go. A lot of the website functions are added during the development, but you need to start from here. For an instance, Let’s say you want your website to have a newsletter.

1 (Web Design). You will have to ask yourself “Where is this going to fit/ be displayed?” In a box on the left, or at the bottom of every page? You need to think where everything is going to fit.

2 (Programming). How will it function? If you want to get a ready-made solution look for “newsletter scripts” on google or hotscripts.com. You might even find a free version, GPL, of the script. But if you want to go the other way and create a custom made newsletter. Then you’re stupid. I’m sorry, well sometimes you can’t find what you want. So you need to explain everything to your programmer, or do it yourself if you got coding “5killz”.

3. (Marketing) Using the newsletter example, in marketing. This is how you are going to approach the “email list” you have. Are you going to ask your visitors if they wish to receive advertisement or only site related news or features? How often are you going to send and manage messages?

4. (Support) Once your clients got that email, they will try to contact you, or just purchase an item, but eventually they will contact you. And it doesn’t matter if they are asking a question related to a product or for a discount. You need to send them a prompt answer. If possible offer instant messaging options. Why do you need to make your prospects wait 24 hours to give them an answer? This is the information age,
people want things now. They can get instant answers on the phone. Why can’t they get their questions answered fast over the internet too? This is crucial.

I just wrote how I work, I go from an idea to something real, managing every aspect of the creation and maintenance processes. In the near future I’m going to write more detailed information on all the points mentioned in this tutorial. But if you are in a hurry, contact me and I will do the hard work for you.

1. SmoothGallery 2.0 – Allows you to have a set of galleries. This feature alone made me select it, because we will need a multi-gallery website.
2. Webtwo Ajax SlideShow – It let’s you zoom the freaking picture!! It adds a real professional look to your website..
3. (E)² Photo Gallery Made With Mootools – I almost chose this one for the second section of the website. It has a cool slider under it.