Absolute URL :
Dictionary meaning of word absolute is : not dependent on any thing ie independent having its own existence, same is the meaning of absolute urls.
An Absolute URL is, thus, something that is independent or free from any relationship from the rest. When you use an absolute URL, you point directly to the file you give exact location of the file.

eg : “sitename.com/images/welcome.gif” is an absolute url as it specifies that an image file welcome.gif located in the images directory, under yoursitename domain.
You should always opt for absolute url when referring to other site.Generally such url are long and hence are not much preferred by lazy webdeveloper they like to use relative urls. While changing directory structure you need to rewrite whole path of the new directory and file which can be cumbersome but as far as SEO is concerned spiders like to crawl absolute url.

Relative URLs :
A relative URL points to a file/directory in relation to the present file/directory.
They have short urls as they are referring to root directory/subdirectory.Relative urls helps webmaster to maintain the site without rewriting the whole path again and again if they had made any changes in directory.

eg : ../image/welcome.gif is a relative url (The initial two peroids (..) in the url instruct the server to move up one directory (which is the root directory), then enter images directory and finally point at welcome.gif file )
Relative urls are to used wisely otherwise an error may occur and the intended file may not open.Relative URLs are short and does not require to write whole path so due to its short typein nature they are more popular and are commonly used by webmasters.

As a professional webdesigner you should always make your visitor to move smoothly through your site. They should be aware of where they are and where they can go.Your website should be flexible. You can achieve this by implementing proper navigation scheme for yor site.
Your navigation can be considered as a road map for your site. If your site is poorly built for navigation then there are much chances of loosing visitor, if they get lost in your site.
Tips for Web site navigation :
Title: All navigation links should have a short and descriptive title making it easy for the user to understand where it links.

Importance : The primary navigation should not have more than 6-7 links. Keep only the most important links in the primary navigation and leave the rest for the secondary navigation.

Uniqueness : Always try to make your primary navigation links more unique by using some graphics or different links style.

Alternative link : If using graphics or javascript links, a text alternative should be available. Some people might have the graphics turned off or javascript disabled when browsing the Internet. In such cases an alternate option should be available.You can have a text menu and the bottom of the page could be included.

Keep it minimum: On every page there should be a reasonable number of links. Pages with 20-30 links are harder to use than pages with 10 links. Visitors don’t have the time to click on all of them to see if they are interested in the information secluded behind them. The best approach is group similar links in categories and let people discover them click upon click.

PHP Mychat is the fantastic tool for chating.Steps to install it are as followos:

you can donaload this software from source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmychat

Download phpMyChat-0.14.5.zip

1. wget http://www.tech-geeks.org/contrib/bbutts/phpChat/phpMyChat-0.14.5.zip

2 unzip phpMyChat-0.14.5.zip -d /home/username/public_html/

3. Setting up the database.
mysql_setpermission

Name of database :
Username :
Yes to password :yes
Enter Password :
Confirm Password :
Host :localhost
Yes to create :yes
Create Another :no
Exit :0
4 In browser, go to http://yourdomain.com/chat/setup.php3

5.select GO for auto setup.

6 - Fill the database

host=localhost, database name=yourdatabasename,
username= , password=
select GO to continue

7 - Fine Tuning Options.
Select the options you want and when finished
Click OK

8 - Go to admin Register Panel
Here you need to Enter a login and password to use for chat database admin.

9 - When prompted, copy and paste the generated text file into a
text editor.

10 - Edit the file with your database login and password.
(note the instructions to keep the at the end.)

11 - Save the file using the name config.lib.php3

12 - Move the file into the
/home/username/Public_html/chat/config/

13 - Now chatroom is ready at http://yourdomain.com/chat.
http://yourdomain.com/phpMyChat.php3

enjoy….with chat

CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets, invented in 1997, CSS are just now starting to be widely used among browsers and Web developers are learning to be more
comfortable with them. It used to describe how an HTML document should be formatted. The primary purpose of Cascading Style Sheets is to separate the content of a webpage from it’s layout, therefore facilitating an easy method of adapting the pages’ content to the device on which it is displayed. Styles define how to display HTML elements. Styles are normally stored in style sheets while external style sheets are stored in CSS files. Style sheets are a very powerful tool for the Web site developer. With CSS, designers and users can create style sheets that define how different elements, such as headers and links, appear. These Style Sheets can then be applied to any Web page. CSS is also used in applications built using XPFE. CSS is typically used to provide a single “library” of styles that are used over and over throughout a large number of related documents, as in a web site. CSS is considered a web standard as it is developed and maintained by the W3C. Like HTML, CSS has different version numbers, called levels.

Getting your site into Google index seems to be easy but it’s not that easy as it seems so. The most effective way of getting a website in Google index is to link to it from another site already indexed. There are other ways too of getting into the Google index without taking the chance of getting caught up in a link farm and risk losing position.

Try using Google Maps/Google Authentication. Google Maps have been around for a while and can be submitted at http://www.google.com/sitemaps, but you may also want to take it one step further and authenticate your web site at the same time. It’s as easy as adding a premade Google meta tag or uploading a .html file.

Google says that the authentication is for three main purposes

Crawling Information - This is to make sure your web site is accessible to the robots. You are able to see if the bot has had issues with HTTP errors, pages not found, URLs that aren’t followed, URLs restricted by the robots.txt file, URLs that timed out and unreachable URLs.

Robots.txt Validation - This is to assure that the bot can access and read the file.

Content - A neat section of information that shows you how the Google Bot sees your web site content.

All in all the Google Authentication is a great tool for webmasters and best of all, it’s a free service.

When creating a web site in HTML it is important to remember that popular browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and others are capable of displaying web pages even if their code is not 100% compliant with the accepted standards for HTML as set down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

So, while a page may look fine onscreen, it could be riddled with HTML errors causing serious obstacles for the search engine spiders who visit your site to index it.

HTML coding errors are especially common with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) design programs such as Microsoft FrontPage or NetObjects Fusion and, since this type of software is often used by web designers with little or no experience of HTML, most of the time they can go unnoticed and thus cause long-term damage to a site’s search engine performance.

For those designers with only a minimal knowledge of HTML this can present an almost invincible problem since they cannot tell compliant code from its non-compliant counterpart.

But there’s nothing to worry, the W3C site includes a number of valuable tools designed to help web designers check their sites for any flaws and make the necessary corrections.

The most important among these are the HTML Validator and the Link Checker.

The HTML Validator detects and lists any coding errors present within a page and lists them in detail, thus enabling even designers with minimal HTML experience to make the necessary adjustments.

The Link Checker examines all links within the page both to other pages in the site and to images which are to be displayed onscreen.
Once again this enables the designer to pinpoint bad links or broken resources and take the required steps.

It should be noted that most quality web design programs have inbuilt link checking utilities which perform the same function, so a little reading up on your software can be of great help.

The TIOBE Programming Community index tracks the popularity of various programming languages. The index is updated once in a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings.

For example the PHP has moved up a spot to 4th in the ratings in the month of october

Where PHP stands currently

Position (Oct 2006): 4
Position (Oct 2005): 4
Ratings (Oct 2006): 9.863%
Delta (Oct 2005): +0.19%
Status: A

The status ‘A’ means it is a mainstream programming language language.

The full list can be found here: http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Some more interesting facts about that list: Java, C, and C++ makeup the number 1,2 and 3 respectively. F#, a Beta microsoft programming language also made it to the list at number 56.

The first official beta of F#, Microsoft’s programming language has been released 3 months ago. This variant of C# with many functional aspects is already at positioned at number 56 of the TIOBE index.

What is the Google Sandbox?

Google Sandbox refers to a hypothetical mechanism that factors a website’s age (or lack thereof) into its ranking on popular keywords. It is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.

How to find out if your website is sandboxed?

Finding out if your website is ‘Sandboxed’ is quite simple. If your website does not appear in any SERPs for your target list of keywords or if your results are highly depressing even if you have lots of inbound links and almost perfect on-page optimization, then your website has been Sandboxed.

Why do you get sandboxed?

Some sites have gotten out of the sandbox in a week, while others can take up to a year or more. No one knows if any one contributing factor gets you out sooner rather than later. Some point to the age of inbound links, or the frequency with which your site acquires them. Some say that getting too many inbound links too quickly appears artificial, and is flagged as spam. But others argue that Google can’t know how fast a site should acquire links. A website that received national news coverage, for example, could acquire hundreds or thousands of links in a day. It’s likely that no one outside of Google fully understands how the sandbox works. The problem has been noticed and discussed for nearly 2 years, and no one has given a satisfactory answer. What’s crystal clear is that Google has made it so complex that it cannot be reverse engineered.

Website interactivity with your potential customers is of utmost importance and there are many ways of doing this. Information is key here so you should try and provide as much information as possible so that visitors feel confident in doing business with you.

At the very least you should provide an email address, but beware of a simple hyperlink on your webpage as this will quickly get harvested by the spammers and your inbox will be clogged in no time. The email address can be disguised by just stating it in text without the @ symbol, or you can use a simple script that does not reveal your actual email address to a browser. If you get an enquiry, be sure to always respond as soon as possible. Quite often big businesses are not able to do this and you will boost customer confidence if you reply to an enquiry promptly.

A ‘contact us’ form on the website is another good way to interact. This way you can find out more about your visitor and where they come from. Form scripts are readily available on the net, but be sure to use a secure one.

A telephone number is an important contact detail to include, but it is surprising how many sites do not give this information. You may not wish to put your address on the web site if you work from home, but it is easy to set up a post office box number address if you prefer.

You may also like to include a newsletter sign up facility to harvest the email addresses of potential customers, but not everyone wants to reveal this information. If you are normally on line during your business hours you could set up an on line help system so that a customer could ask a question and get an immediate response. This is a big commitment but can work very well

When the Internet first began gaining popularity, W3-Compliance wasn’t as necessary because there were fewer browsers, fewer users, and overall fewer technologies in use. With the growing popularity of the internet, new developmental tools are created daily. With these tools come new challenges - marketing, design, cross-browser compatibilty, etc. All of these can be a daunting task for those who aren’t well-versed in the W3C Standards.

There are numerous technologies used by programmers like ASP, PHP, and Javascript to name a few. W3 has a set of standards for both XHTML and CSS, and making a website W3-compliant ensures that all viewers will see the site exactly the same way no matter what browser they’re using. Validation also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because clean code means easier search-engine spidering.

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a technology often used in sites with many pages to make aesthetic changes easier. The style sheet is an exterior file that runs interdependently with the HTML of a site. The style sheet serves as a template for the entire site’s color and font schemes, while also controlling borders, sizes, and more. Being able to edit a single file, instead of 100s of changes in many files saves a lot of time. Validation is essential to get the most out of a website. A user can upload or copy/paste their CSS file to the W3C site, and they’ll be given a list of any errors it contains.

Another of the technologies becoming more popular is Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML. XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0. XHTML conforms to standards moreso than HTML. As such, it is more search-engine and user-friendly:

- XHTML documents conform to XML. XML Tools can double as XHTML tools.
- XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0. It is more user-friendly and streamlined than HTML.
- XHTML is a combination of HTML and XML in that it can run scripts and applets that use both the HTML and XML DOM (Document Object Model)
- As XHTML grows, XHTML 1.0 documents will be able to interoperate among other XHTML documents making it a more browser transitional language.
(Source: www.w3.org)

Using the standards of web development lined out by the W3C is imperative for users to get the most out of a site. Often, making a webpage W3-compliant is the first step of SEO, a marketing tool to get the most out of your advertising money. Validation is easy, and can be completed if a user has a basic knowledge of HTML-editing and FTP. Using these tools, coupled with the set of W3 standards can save a lot of money and help the site’s overall functionality.