Whether you have a website which represent your business on web or it’s the website itself doing the business for you (like ecommerce website for example), make sure that the website is available to your customers all the time they log in. A down website is the biggest turn off and surely gives a bad image to company. Imagine I have to buy a laptop and I start checking out some popular brands of laptop on website, I am opening abc, xyz etc laptop brand websites and suppose xyz brand’s website do not open or throw up some error! I am definitely not going to buy this brand because if they can’t keep their site running, their product and service will be terrible. However, this is your website visitor perspective, but in real the company is not responsible for its website uptime but it’s the web hosting company which is responsible. What you need to do is choose the best web hosting brand which offers 100% uptime hosting and never let you down even on extreme load. Talking about load, here in website it means more traffic on your website. Like for example if you have an e-store selling gift items then your site will experience more traffic before new year and Christmas because people will be buying more gift items in this period. If your webhost is doing fine all year but fails when your website receives more traffic then you are losing a lot of potential customers. Websites like E-store, online video and community sites should be put on dedicated servers preferably for best performance. Cloud hosting is another preferred technology which guarantees uptime of your site by using multiple servers so that if one is down, there are many others running to keep your website live. Cloud hosting plans are best for personal and small business websites.

How to type in Hindi? Or any other regional language? I faced this problem when I was working on a project (www.amarprakashnews.co.in) which needed some text in Hindi language. I used Google Translate to get Hindi version of words like Home, About Us, Contact Us etc but when I copied it, it displayed in browser as ????. So here is the solution step by step to get your regional language like Hindi or any other language up and running smoothly on your web pages.

1. How to type in your language?

If you are using windows, just go to Control Panel and double click the icon which says “Regional and Language options”. Now select the language in which you want to type from the drop down menu. When you will click ok, a language toolbar will appear in your taskbar. If it doesn’t then just right click on the taskbar and in Toolbars option select Language bar. Now your Language bar will display EN and on clicking on it once, it will show the second language which you selected. Select your preferred language from this language bar to type in that language. If your desired language is not in the list then you may need to install that from the Windows installation disk.

2. I can type now but its displaying as square boxes or question marks

Install font! If the language in which you are typing need special font and your computer does not have it then it will display as square box. For example if you want to type in Hindi, then you should have Hindi font like Kruti Dev installed.

3. I have fonts but web page show it as ?????

Due to some reason if you place a regional language text inside script pages (like index.php of wordpress), it will show as ????. Proper way to fix it to have full language file built for your regional language but if you need only few text to show in your language then here is the workaround which always works. Get help of any online Unicode code converter. There are many but [www.rishida.net/tools/conversion/] is a good one. In this converter, put your regional language text in “Mixed input” field and click on the convert button. Now copy whatever you get in the “Hexadecimal NCRs” field and paste that in your web page or script page. Now you will not see those ???? anymore but your regional language text in proper way.

It’s a nice plugin allowing you to show featured post in a nice box with some effects. However most people can’t make it work in their blog. I have successfully used it in some of my own and clients blog (e.g.: www.gadget5.com) and experienced problem too and I found some solutions that work.First thing to do is download the latest version of the plugin and extract it in your plugin folder. Delete and deactivate older version. Now reactivate the plugin. If everything is fine, it should work but if it doesn’t, here are some troubleshooting tips:

Problem: No featured content gallery box at all.
Solution: 1. Check that you have placed the code <?php include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>In the template file like header.php, index.php, sidebar.php etc. One must not place this code in widget box from dashboard as it will not work. Get hold of a HTML editor and open up template file and place this code where the box fits and suits your blog look. You may want to alter some CSS settings but that’s a different story. Tweaking with CSS is only for fine touching the layout.
2.  In the wordpress admin dashboard, go to settings and click on “Featured Content Gallery” link. Now check that you have assigned category or post ID (any one of either) which you want to display as featured content. Also make sure that post ID or category you have assigned have some post with images in it.
3. In “Slide Transition Times” option if you are unsure of duration time, leave them blank. It works fine.
4. If you are doing all this on localhost (wamp / xampp) then try uploading your theme on some webhost and try it with latest version of wordpress. Sometimes it just not works with localhost.

Problem: Box appears but there is no image and only text or none.
Solution: 1. In the admin dashboard of wordpress, go to All post and edit the featured post. In the option below look for “Add New Custom Field:”. If you can’t find it please click on the “Screen Options” button and enable Custom Fields option. In the box below “Name” of custom fields option put “articleimg” and in value box put the path to image. You can copy and paste the image path from the post (check HTML view). The path will be something like this:  http://your-blog-domain/wp-content/uploads/year/month/image.jpg If the text is missing from featured box, again go to custom field’s option and in name put “featuredtext” and in value put the text you want to display in featured box.

Problem: It works now but box color, border color and text color is not right.
Solution: In admin dashboard of wordpress, go to settings and click on the Featured content gallery link. Now in the boxes below “Gallery Style” make sure that you have put proper hex code of color you want. Hex code is in this format: #FFFFFFF for white, #000000 for black and so on. Don’t forget to prefix hash symbol “#” before every code. To know exact hex code for your desired color you can use this useful small tool called ColorPix which can be downloaded free from: www.colorschemer.com/colorpix_info.php

Working with iframe is always fun for me, it amuse me how easy it is to integrate external content in your own webpage. People say iframe is bad and I agree with it to some extent. Iframe at some places become necessary evil like for a webpage which has to display offers from an external affiliate page or to load a heavy picture gallery which you have on your expensive unlimited hosting on a website hosted on some slower host etc. The root cause of people thinking iframe is evil because some bad guys of internet started using it as an easy way to include malicious files on web pages. But let’s not blame iframe here and when it’s used for good purpose, it has only one problem left and that is with its height. What happens that since one has no control over the content of iframe so the height of the content may change and the iframe height may need to be adjusted frequently which is not feasible in cases where height can change more frequently and at any moment. When height of content becomes more than the height set in iframe code, it shows a scrollbar which looks bad and if you hide the scrollbar, the content gets chopped off from bottom. jQuery has a solution to this problem but it only works when the iframe link is hosted on the same domain where it its used. Now this is pretty much useless as why will someone use iframe for including something that is there on his own site? So problem still remains the same. So for now we have two options, one is to live with scrollbar or to make the height quite large so that it fits the content even if becomes more in height after sometime to avoid scrollbar.

In webpage designing when you have to make a rounded corner box, you have an easy option to put whole box image or go thru difficult option of using just rounded corner images and placing them on each corner using CSS. But now you can have perfectly smooth rounded corner boxes without any use of image. All you have to do is define the box as a DIV and then have few lines of CSS for that DIV. Here is an example of what I am talking about:

HTML:

<div id=”rcbox”></div>

CSS:

#rcbox {

width: 300px;

height: 300px;

background-color:#3CF;

-moz-border-radius: 20px;

-webkit-border-radius: 20px;

border-radius: 20px;

}

OUTPUT:

Yes it’s just that simple and beauty of this CSS is that if you want more curvy box then all you need to do is just increase the value of ‘border-radius’. Obviously the height and width of this box is also flexible and can be changed in CSS to desired value.

All new browsers support this CSS except old IE versions.

When it comes to making website on your own and you don’t know what all web programming is all about, you end up giving the work to some professional. Now when you contact a professional web designer, what they first do is the requirement analysis. This is a required step as the web designer doesn’t know anything about your website requirements so he does a series of requirement analysis. This is a good practice but you end up wasting a lot of time and this is a known fact that no matter how much requirement analysis is done, you will not get 100% accurate results and at end you have to get changes done and at some places compromise and adjust according to what you get. Sometimes these web designers will not deliver website on time or end up with a buggy website. You can get rid of all these shortcomings by trying easy website builder where you can yourself make website without any need of knowledge of HTML and programming. Since you know your business best, you get exactly what you need and without any type of requirement analysis thus saving lot of time and effort.
With this website builder you can make an easy website but not miss on any advanced features like ecommerce where you can accept online payment using credit card or Paypal. You can integrate product catalogue to display your products and also provide support just like you see on other popular websites. All these ecommerce features are very easy to integrate on your website when you use this website builder. Templates are available for almost every niche and you can just choose anyone of them and personalize it by adding you brand logo. If you don’t have a logo you also get a logo builder which lets you create professional looking logo in minutes.