You’ve finally hired a consultant. All the terms have been included in the contract which you and the consultant have signed. Cool. But it doesn’t end there. Remember to meet regularly with the people involved in the project. Make sure that everything is on schedule and that everything is working according to the terms you’ve agreed on. If changes are needed to be made, then be sure that you are informed accordingly and that you approved of the changes. If new documents are needed to be drawn up, then by all means, do so.

It is no problem if you prefer to work with consultants for your website. However, it still pays to be safe even if the consultant comes with excellent references. They best way to secure your transaction is by putting everything in writing. When asking for information such as quotations, make sure that ask for a hard copy, or even a file attachment through e-mail. Write up a contract specifying the terms of the services. Remember to secure the ownership of materials and content of your site so state that in the contract too.

First of all, never trust user input, you have to make sure that you’ve escaped all user input. In escaping it, you’ll add a backlash before special characters such as single notes and this will tell the SQL server that the particular character is a portion of the information to enter into the database and not the SQL code. A number of programming languages offer a system for adding backlashes to a string just like PHP having “addslahes.” You must not let a user verify your database layout and instead, keep member privileges in a separate table from member information. With this, it can surely lessen the possibility of SQL injection.

If you are hosting a personal site, then make sure that your page doesn�t have unnecessary large files. Remember that every time a particular page is requested, the same amount of files is forced over the internet. So for example, if your page is 100 KB-worth, then 100 KB of your bandwidth is used. Besides, if your site is designed to have pages go back to one particular menu page to access other links, large files can make your broses crash. Even if the page is already in the cache of the browser, it is till rebuilt every time that particular page is being accessed.

Use video and audio only when necessary. Images can be resized or save in a less but still acceptable resolution. Text can also be split to several pages. In this case, light is right.

A domain name can make or break your website. So before typing in anything on your form, be sure to have considered the following first:

Be sure that the topic of your site shows in the name. Put keywords there. So for example, if your site is about wine tasting, then it should have �wine� and �taste� in it. Think of at least three possible names and write them on paper. Keep the titles short but memorable. We want people to remember the site and not have them scratch the back of their heads remembering it. Don�t forget to check the availability of each name.

Although the probability of coming up with original material in the web is a little tough, what with the continuous appearance of hundreds if not thousands of niche blogs and websites out there, nothing beats original content. Original and quality content will attract a lot of traffic to a particular website, and more so if the content is continually updated. By maintaining quality and consistency of your posts, visitors can not help but return. It won�t be long before the number of visitors will grow.

Ahh� a term that many competitive professional bloggers love. SEO or short for search engine optimization, is a process that enables the number of visitors to a particular website to increase. This is done by making the site rank high in search engines� search results. The higher the rank of a certain website is, the more probable it is to be visited by users. I�m sure that many internet users agree that we only browse the websites that appear in the first few pages of search engine results. So what SEO does is to ensure the accessibility of a site to a search engine.

Image source: www.digitalphotoguides.com
Picasa is a delightfully easy way to organize, edit and share photos. It’s basic, yet goes beyond the basics of the basic photo editing software that is ususally bundled with a digital camera.

Advantages of Using Picasa
-Free!
-Easily upload images and video to Picasa Web Albums, free online web hosting.
-Beautiful and elegant interface including slideshow and timeline.
-Intuitive and straightforward navigation.
-Excellent set of easy-to-use editing tools and filters.

Robust set of features including labeling photos with keywords and star ratings, emailing images from within the program, Geotagging photos, creating videos, Photo CDs and backups, support for RAW files. It’s latest version has a slew of improvements and new features such as a Retouch tool to remove unsightly blemishes, face recognition with automatic red-eye removal, and the ability to add text and watermarks to photos.

Manually set the program to “watch” specified image folders on your computer hard drive.

Organize, rearrange and sync Picasa Web Albums from your desktop

Generally, websites have been designed to facilitate information dissemination and knowledge sharing like the World Wide Web. Its quality significantly depends on its content and the way it was published. And for your website to be a sure hit, you better make sure that you have accurate profiles to be promoted in your site and establish specific goals. In using thumbnails, 57×57 thumbnails are okay and better make it capture the content’s details and will give visual meaning for the headers of your site. It should be an active link as well. The simple, the better. Visitors should not find your site complicated, so simple words and navigations are effective. And of course you have to be straightforward, always go directly to the point, in that way your visitors will know the implications and benefits of your site.

The word is accessibility. In website design, it is the measure of how easy the content of a website is to access, read, and understand. One thing about this feature is that it is more of an interactive document that can be interpreted in different ways by different browsers on various platforms.

I have seen pages where the fonts become garbled, the size too small, and the color is too hurtful in the eyes. I suggest that when designing, it is best to stick to simple fonts and color since users� settings may override the document, therefore making the page appear differently from intended.