Simplify Site Maintenance with SSIWritten by John Calder
© 2004, John Calder http://www.TheEzine.netServer Side Includes (SSI), for many marketers, are a bit like U.S. National Security Agency - it's something you've heard of, but you don't understand completely what they do. In this article, rather than bore you with technical details, let's just take a look at benefits and drawbacks of implementing SSI on your site, to see if learning technical details is worth trouble. SSI has several capabilities, but for our purposes, we just want to make our site easier to maintain. For example, if we want to change a color, we normally have to make that change separately on every page of our site. Five or ten pages isn't really a problem, but what if you have 100, 200, or thousands? Even a simple addition of a menu item will take hours, and chances of making an error increase. SSI will let us easily make such changes, one time, and apply them across your entire site. Here's where SSI comes in. Let's just imagine that we take one of our web pages, and divide it into three sections, a top, middle, and bottom, much like a sandwich. The "meat" of sandwich is our content on each page that's different. But "bread" is same on every page. What we can do is move top "slice of bread" to a "top" file, and bottom "slice" to a "bottom" file.
| | Diabolical DesignWritten by John Calder
© 2004, John Calder http://www.TheEzine.netYou can find guides and tips on good web site design everywhere. In 1998, Vincent Flanders co-authored a book with a unique twist. It was called "Web Pages That Suck", and Mr. Flanders followed that with a similar co-authored book in 2002. In that spirit, we'd like to offer you our top five tips on diabolical design - how to create web pages that look like h-, well, you know. 1. Use javascript and Flash. Lots and lots of it. Make sure you ignore fact that my browser isn't 100% compatible. If you can, try to crash my browser. It's not always 100% compatible, and I really like color in that little Windows error box anyway. 2. I like a lot of gratuitous graphics too. Include lots of large files that take a while to download, especially over dialup. A long while. It would be an especially nice touch if you can have some heavy zig-zag and grid backgrounds, something that blends in with your text for that nice, unified look. And whatever you do, don't forget little animated GIF files! They're cute, and especially distracting, so I'd like a lot of those too, please, all around your page. 3. If I do manage to get to one of your pages, please be certain that you've fixed font sizes with CSS. Make them, oh, about 8 or 9 pixels high, bolded. That should do it - well, except use lots of different colors and font styles, just to prove to me you can. While you're in CSS file anyway, try to get rid of some of that extra white space by adjusting line height (the space between lines of text) so that it's only 1/2 it's normal space. There's no use in my having to scroll down page - make sure it's all above fold, OK?
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