Web

I find it fascinating how often I.T. is assigned to the task of building a website. For the uninitiated, this may seem like a logical thing to do. After all, a website is technology and requires programming and stuff, right?

Wrong.

A very small part of a website is programming. A very small part of a website is technology. Oh, it might take a lot of work. It might be a requirement for the site to function properly, but I.T. should really not have a say in what the customer sees… the face or the marketing aspect of the site.

In my opinion, here are the top five components of a website… in order of importance.

In the course of designing websites, I often get requests from clients that simply go against normal design conventions. I think that the struggle that most people have is that design conventions have changed but nobody told them.

Design from the 90s like large logos, starbursts and bright, obnoxious colors were great when the web was in its infancy and pages were built by amateurs. Your clients expect more from businesses today and don't want to look at a site that doesn't take into consideration current design principles.

Remember. Bigger isn't always better... it is just bigger. More color doesn't necessarily mean better.. it is just more.

FTP, or file transfer protocol, is one of the standards for communicating large amounts of information via the internet. If you have a website to load, or just some files to load that you want to have accessible from a website, using FTP is the easiest way to get your files online via your webserver.

In order to load files appropriately to your web server, you'll need a good FTP client. There are a number of clients available, some are free, some cost money. On the Mac, Fetch is probably one of the best available... but costs a few dollars. You can use Filezilla on just about any platform. On the Windoz side I prefer to use WinSCP.

As a side note, when we build websites, we allow our clients to use our content management platform to add images and files directly to the page without having to use anything but the web browser. But, usually, there are size limitations. We only allow the upload of files less than 1mb. If our clients want to add larger files, they will want to use FTP.

As more and more content is moving web based... especially information that you want to share with your clients on your web page, I think that it is important to understand how easy it is to load content on your web server using FTP.

Since most of my clients are on Windoz platform, I'll provide simple instructions on how to setup your FTP client using WinSCP as the client, upload your files and link to them on the web page you are building.