Web development with web 2.0? Its more than design, but how much is the coding work? ?

I have passionately studied the art of the web revolution of design and trying to understand the applications as well. I am a graphic designer and moreso an entrepreneur with a tech passion. I love incorporating technology to save workload or to innovate further than standards. My basic question for the moment is how much does it cost and what is required to make a website more web2.0 efficient. There should be a database, cgi, or maybe even .asp or .php, but i wanna know what exactly…that would help create small interactive community from scratch. I would like users to interact, leave realtime messages, and have a profile page…. all this without the healthy prices of trying to create the next myspace, but a subcultured community. Is this up someone’s alley or does anyone specialize or know the answer? would love it from the land of computer nerds… thx

There are different answers depending on your situation.

Firstly, what is “web 2.0″. Personally, I hate that phrase, but what it is really about is User Experience (UX), and what is that? Well, it’s about making things functional *and* aesthetically pleasing at the same time. UX encompasses the full range of User Interface (UI) design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This is also referenced to as “rich” interface design and what you end up with is a “rich internet application”.

There are many technologies that allow you to do this and depending on where you are in the process of developing your website, might influence which technologies you go with.

Given what you have said, it sounds like you’d like to add a few of these features to your website … you mention ‘real time messaging’ and ‘profiles’ and probably include commenting and so on. What you’re starting to develop is social networking and I would say that Facebook, MySpace (though I personally don’t like it) and Bebo are good places to find examples.

So, presuming your website has pages of content and you want people to be able to leave comments or discuss the contennt in real time, the most straight forward way to do this would be to add some Ajax to your HTML pages. The Ajax calls services (implemented as scripts perhaps) on your server that read and write to a database in a context that is specific to the page of content. The cheapest technologies I can think of to do this would be PHP, MySQL and JavaScript and there are plenty of script kiddies about who could probably add something cool to your web pages for a relatively low price.

If this isn’t something you want to try out yourself, you could use a service like rent-a-coder.com. You post your requirements and people bid for the work. You choose someone to do the work and pay the money in to escrow. Once the work is complete you release the money from escrow. I’ve used this service several times for various things including windows applications, web design and graphic design.
http://www.rentacoder.com/

The next level, is to look at the design of your website and see how you can translate what your website does in to something more akin with a desktop application. This is really where rich internet applications comes in and then you’re looking at Flex (Flash for developers), Silverlight or advanced Ajax websites, for instance. My personal preference is to combine Flex on the client with Java on the server. This can be done on the cheap using Linux, open source Java servers, Flex (the SDK is free, but the builder isn’t) and databases like MySQL. However, we’re talking about a level of complexity far in excess of the first example I gave.

The next level, is “enterprise” level applications which cater for many many users and are scalable. This is the difference between the cheap solution and enterprise, scalability. If you want to be able to support millions of users (e.g. Facebook) you’ll be combining various technologies on an infrastructure which needs to be able to grow as your site gains popularity, so lots of hardware and a complicated software setup. This is when you start to pay the big money.

Hope that helps.

Landing Page Design Cost

Are You Still Using Merchant Provided Landing Pages

When you first decide to market a product or service as an affiliate, more often than not the merchant will provide a set tools for you to use in your campaigns.  These range from banners in all sizes, text links and maybe some form of interactive tools.  Sometimes they’ll provide landing pages or at the very least banners large enough to serve as stand alone landing page, or, you can mix and match banners to create a landing page of your own.

This is all well and good, in fact, merchants who want their affiliates to succeed should provide these tools.  However, by using the exact same tools as every other affiliate on the Internet you really have no way to set yourself apart from them and create a unique presence for your campaigns.

To avoid this and give your traffic a unique pass through from your site to the merchant site you have three options.  Create your own creatives, hire someone to create them for you or to purchase premade landing pages or creatives that target the niche you’re marketing.

When it comes to pre-made landing pages, one of the nice things about many on the market is they provide you with a low cost alternative to hiring out the work and a way to set yourself apart from affiliates marketing the same programs you are.  In addition to that, if they’re designed correctly there will also be a creative way to easily insert portions of your own text or information to make the page even more unique.

More often than not, pre-made landing pages and other creatives are easy to modify.  Designers typically make it so that all you have to do is insert your affiliate link and your good to go.  If the landing page has a section for unique text or selling points, more often than not it’s simply a matter of putting your text in.  Usually, after these quick edits you can save the page and upload it and it’s ready to send traffic to.

By going outside the norm and using landing pages or banners that you create yourself or purchase, will give your traffic something new and something they haven’t seen before which increases curiosity and click through rates.

About the Author

Premade Landing Pages are a low cost, effective way to add unique advertising creatives to your campaigns. If you’re looking to spice up your PPC or other campaigns, take a look at some of the latest available: Affiliate Landing Pages.

Have you ever bought shoes …?

http://www.office.co.uk was a good experience? Without realizing that it landed on your page with a blog design and really fell in love with some their shoes But I'm in the United States and the United Kingdom (25 pounds extra for shipping). I agree with shipping, but I wanted to know if anyone else out there bought them? Thank you for sharing!

I'm from the UK .. and yes, they are good: D But if I were you, I would copy the name of the shoes .. paste it in google .. and see if American sites selling them. They can give you a hell of a lot cheaper than the following:!}

Video landing page designed to get results

Tagged with: google • news • tools • web2.0 • webdesign

Filed under: Uncategorized

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!