What is SQL?
 by: John L

What is SQL? SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is the lingua franca in the database world. SQL is a standard that is used by all database vendors and programmers to define, extract and access the information that is stored in databases. SQL began life as an IBM creation but was standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ANSI/ISO SQL in 1988. Since then ANSI/ISO SQL standard continued to evolve. The ANSI-SQL group has since published three standards over the years:

1. SQL89 (SQL1)
2. SQL92 (SQL2)
3. SQL99 (SQL3)

SQL is a query language. It is English-like and easy to use. However, although there are more than 90 SQL reserved words, most programmers seldom use more than the following handful of commands – SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, FROM, WHERE, HAVING, BETWEEN, LIKE, OR, AND, NOT, IN, ORDER, GROUP and BY.

For example, if you had a database table named “employees” and you wanted to retrieve all records where the employee has the last name “goodman”, you would use the following SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM employees WHERE lastname = ‘goodman’;

There are many different categories of SQL statements but the basic ones which all programmers should be familiar with are the SQL statements that:

1. Create tables and manipulate their definitions
2. Query the table data
3. Manipulate the table data

SQL is predominantly used by 2 types of users – programs and humans (keying in the commands through a database client) – to pass instructions to databases. SQL commands can be keyed into a database client like the MySQL Query Browser or the SQL Server Enterprise Manager and executed to either return a result or modify records in the database. SQL can also be used in conjunction with programming language or scripting language like Microsoft Visual Basic or PHP to communicate with the database.

Although SQL is a world standard, it is unfortunate that most database vendors have come up with different dialects and variations. This is because every database vendor wants to differentiate their database products from the crowd. One good example is Microsoft SQL Server’s TRANSACT-SQL. TRANSACT-SQL is a superset of SQL and is designed for use only with Microsoft SQL Server. Although it does make programming much easier for software developers, it is not compliant with other databases like Oracle or MySQL – making TRANSACT-SQL programs non database-portable. As such, although many of these features are powerful and robust, it is good practice to exercise caution and limit your SQL use to be compliant with the ANSI/ISO SQL standards and ODBC-Compliant.

Courtesty of SQLPrimer.com – http://www.sqlprimer.com.

editor@sqlprimer.com

10 Prominent Website Mistakes
 by: Maricon Williams

Nowadays, sites are getting better. With minimal design and highly maintained archives they continue to offer comprehensive services. However, prominent mistakes on several websites are still apparent.

Here is a list of the website mistakes that scares visitors away and ruins the business reputation.

1. The under construction sign. Putting an “under construction” sign on your website marks you as a struggling beginner. Websites are supposed to grow in time. If your site is not yet ready to be shown in public, then don’t publish it.

2. Visitor counters. Visitors generally are not bothered by the fact that many other people have visited your site. However, if the visitor counter shows a low number, that can be a psychological turn-off to people, if it’s too high, people might think that it’s fictitious. The best way to do is not to include in your website. If you really want to know how many visitors you have had, check your statistics.

3. Lack of copyright statements. Everything you write and create on the including your website is copyright-able. Make certain that you include copyright statements on every page, and appropriately update the copyright year.

4. Overuse of technology. There are some really great and cool new technologies available today but they can tend to distract the visitors. In times that you have to choose between new technology and simplicity. Choose the latter for it is anchored on the website’s functionality.

5. Passive verbs. Use active verbs and active sentences when writing your site’s copy. Active verbs are powerful and lend energy to your site. The more conversational the website is the better.

6. Long sentences. Long sentences are tedious to read. Better keep it short and simple so that it can easily be retained.

7. Lengthy pages. Keep your pages brief and concise. People are easily bored of reading, so you have to adjust to their attention span. If you have a lot to say, you can create a series of pages with good navigation to explain your topics.

8. Not identifying the benefits of your products or services. There are two reasons why people make purchases. First is to get rid of pain and second is to get pleasure. They want to discern how your products and services will help them with their definite pain/pleasure situation.

9. Neglecting to ask the visitor to do something. In marketing, this is known as a Call To Action. There should be a space designated to tell your visitors what you want them to do next. Sign up for my newsletter. Order now.

10. Accepting as true the maxim build it and they will come. Once you’ve built your website you have to let people know about it. If you don’t deliver them to people, then your website is not worth the money you spent to create them!

maricon@rushprintingservices.com

Breathtaking Color Power!
 by: Maricon Williams

Colors convey character, emotion and intention. You are what colors you choose. Thus, your choice of colors should reflect the message or feeling you to hope to convey to the viewer.

Red – Red is hot color. It is an established color of love, urgency, courage, danger, passion, blood, intensity, aggression, and competition. It is best used as an accent color. This color does not usually blend well with greens or purples of the same intensity, so if you use red with these colors, modify the brightness or intensity.

Blue – Blue is a color of peace, tranquility and wisdom. It also conveys honesty, truth, loyalty, power, coolness, health, harmony, and confidence. Blue is a safe choice for most uses, and goes well with the majority colors. Don’t use blue if your site is food or drink related, since there are hardly any blue foods and drinks.

Beige and Gray – These are neutral colors. As neutrals, they can be combined with almost any color and still come across well. Both make for very readable backgrounds, but be sure to use glints of bright colors or the site will appear uninteresting. You can also accent beige or gray with dark colors. It will create an illustrious, professional look.

Black – Black entails death, seriousness, solid strength, elegance, sophistication, rebellion, evil, power, and mystery. It can be powerful, aloof and intimidating. However, black is very useful in separating things such as graphic images. Black can make colors explode!

Yellow – Yellow is the brightest of all colors and has the greatest illuminating power. It is a warm and cheerful color. In addition to cheerfulness, yellow can also convey caution, optimism, idealism, cowardice, and imagination. Too much yellow can be an eyesore. Be careful using yellow with greens and purples of the same intensity. It might tone down one or the other.

Green – Green connotes youth, fertility, ecology, nature, health, growth, money, safety, healing, and food. However, to other viewers, it may connote envy, insects, and reptiles. Green can be well suited as a secondary or accent color.

Brown – Brown implies simplicity, earthiness, comfort, durability, and stability. However, like the neutral grays and beiges, a site that is mostly brown can be very dull. However, a site that had a light brown/beige background, a rich brown secondary color, and bright or dark red accents can give the impression of being very professional.

When choosing colors for your web site. Choose wisely because colors have a larger impact on the viewers. To know its impact, try this test: Open your web site and write on a piece of paper as many words and images that you can think of. Now, have another person to do the same. After that, compare your notes. If you made correct color choices, the list should be almost impossible to tell apart.

maricon@rushprintingservices.com

10 Ways to Achieve Superior Web Site Design
 by: Maricon Williams

In order to achieve online success, one must have effective and reliable products and services and great web design as well. Many people are judging the book by its cover this is the reason why your website should also be superior.

Here are 10 ways to carry out in order to ensure that your website design will turn out to be a superior one:

1. Keep those banner programs away. Avoid plastering your pages with every banner program you can think of because it is like broadcasting to the whole world that you are a neophyte in the industry. Besides, it is useless when you are just starting out.

2. Proof read the whole site. Poor grammar and spelling is a manifestation of being unprofessional. If you can not pay attention to small things like that then how can the potential customers know that you can make a product or service great? Always have some rounds of spell check and have someone proof read the site. That way you can be assured of its content quality.

3. Evade “clip-art” type graphics. Learn to make your own graphics that will exude your business character and identity. You can get your hands on with Adobe Photoshop. However, if you are short on money, Macromedia’s Fireworks is a good alternative.

4. Forget about yourself! Nobody wants to hear about you. They want to hear about your products or services and how you can help them. So instead of focusing on yourself, focus on the functionality of your website. That will give lots of visitors that can turn out to be your customers.

5. Keep a consistent design. Inconsistent designs, backgrounds and navigation systems make the visitors feel lost. They will feel as if they have transferred to another site. To avoid this thing to happen, utilize a consistent web site design.

6. Stay away from excessive backgrounds. If you do not know what background to choose, stick with a plain one and blend it with a well contrasting text. The result will be an easy to read website.

7. Use small images. Use images that are small in file size. To do this, you can compress your images to a more reasonable size.

8. Keep your font size readable. Have your fonts at reasonable size. The content fonts should not exceed size fourteen and should not go down lower than size twelve. Using gigantic fonts are the biggest indicator of someone who knows nothing about designing online!

9. Keep your site clean and organized but not boring. Don’t scare your visitors away by crowded and messy website with neon colored texts. If that’s your kind of web site – my golly – change it! And you got to do it fast before a number of visitors already transferred to your competitors.

10. Check with every browser. Every web browser interprets code differently. Some may display the page perfectly however, some may do it atrociously thus, to be safe check with different browsers to test the compatibility.

maricon@rushprintingservices.com

Examining the Substance of Studio MX
 by: Mart Gil Abareta

To all web designers out there, this article is for you! I guess you already heard about Studio MX (I think so!) – the ideal bundle for professional web designers, bringing together Dreamweaver MX for page design, Flash MX for animation and interactivity, and Fireworks MX for editing and optimizing graphics. With all these components, it certainly provides professional functionality for every aspect of web development.

I must say that the integration between the individual products is generally very good. It begins with the interface which uses common elements such as dockable, collapsible panels and a dynamic property inspector, so that you can switch comfortably between products. On a technical level, the key feature is roundtrip support. You can embed Fireworks graphics and Flash movies in Dreamweaver pages without losing any information, letting you later reopen an element in its original application with all its features intact. Also, in effect, the combination of Dreamweaver and ColdFusion provides an easy path into dynamic, Java-based web development.

Moreover, Flash MX also has potential as a rich client, with an interface driven by embedded JavaScript. Through a technology called Flash Remoting, Flash MX offers support for web services. The Studio MX bundle makes it relatively easy to set up ColdFusion to supply these services and for Flash to consume them. While it may seem strange to think of Flash as a rich client moving beyond the web page, it does make some sense when you consider that it is cross-platform and very widely deployed. In addition, ColdFusion itself can consume web services hosted on other platforms.

In addition, you can now take advantage of drag-and-drop visual tools and components, code libraries, and extensive code editing support for developing applications using HTML, XHTML, XML, ColdFusion, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP or PHP. Its integration with ColdFusion MX gives you a fast way to develop Internet applications that incorporate Macromedia Flash. Also, creating each element of the web production process such as developing graphics, laying out HTML pages, coding application logic, building rich user interfaces, and assembling complete solutions is really made easy in this all in one suite.

Indeed, Studio MX makes it easier to design and develop rich, interactive sites and Internet applications delivered across major platforms and devices with improvements to common tasks, a more consistent user interface, and deeper integration across the products. With it, you’re going to work in a familiar, customizable environment with consistent user interface elements, including color management, drawing tools, code editing, a common Property Inspector, and panel management, all making it easy to move between the applications.

Taking everything together, Studio MX is an essential development tool for every web designer.

articles@ucreative.com