Internet marketing is booming at rapid pace and looking at the present scenario today this industry has become multi-billion dollar industry. As business is getting more competitive the demand for online information and website development has increased dramatically in last couple of years. Presently every business firms whether it is small or big is looking for well presentable website that could explain about products and services offered by them. After having a sheer look at the present scenario, today website plays an important role of online identity for a company in online marketing. These days' websites act as visual interface and business card. By developing effective online profile of your company, you can create better corporate image of the company.

It is essential to understand that having an online presence means your business is open and you can convey your message easily. Now since every website represents a company and further help in attracting potential customer's attention, a bad website development or design may deject your customers to judge your online presence seriously. So it is very important to develop web that are well designed and have enough functionality to hold its visitors for longer time. This is one area where Flash web design solutions or Flash website development plays an important role and further gives an edge. If you want to provide a big and better impression to your visitors and want them to visit your site then using flash in your website is the answer.

Integrated with 3D Graphics, Video and Audio, it enables you to have a fully interactive multimedia experience for any website. Moreover, it facilitates designers to develop animations and interactive images that can be embedded into a web page. Any website that is developed on flash gives better interactivity as it can be used to give animations interactive features. In addition to this, flash website also improves the scope of website graphic content by creating animations. Web solutions that are developed on Flash provide facility to incorporate sound as a background element or as a synchronized element. A flash site can be loaded in a one go, and once it gets loaded it is easy for any visitor to go through different areas of the site without reloading.

Currently flash is not just a part of website, but has covered a long way and is now considered as a web template. Now you have flash templates to create any website which are better-looking than html web templates. Html web templates are plain but flash web templates are more interactive. Apart from this flash web templates have more user friendly navigation and amazing flash effects. Today where the time taken to make some decision or go through any website is getter shorter and nobody has enough time to go through the entire web-content a flash template can give them a better idea about the company.

This technology is getting its world-wide acceptance. Website that is developed on Flash has become very powerful, and today developers have begun to understand its potential in online marketing industry. Thus, flash technology is right answer if you are looking for the excellent web design solution for your website. In fact flash gives a sparkling touch to your website.

Lex Parsimoniae is Latin for "Law of Parsimony", which pulled out into its simplest form is the The Law of what can be spared, should.

This is a theory that I have been studying for the past year and through observation believe that this can be applied to all situations that require a more efficient, functional solution. This paradigm has many names, but is best know as Occam's Razor. His razor suggests that when resources are limited or when speed of function is essential, design / complexity trade-offs should be based on what does the least harm to the probability of success, however that is defined.

Form is Function

There is a school of thought that beauty in design results in good function, but I prefer to subscribe the fact that just concentration on the functionality will by its very nature, create its own aura of design. Sometimes, the focus on functional efficiency inspires a feeling that goes beyond aesthetics and ultimately give us the sense that its form is of a higher echelon.

Barrier To Entry

The brain is an amazing piece of kit. One of its most amazing functions is its ability to optimise when processing data. Each brain has been trained over many years (or maybe it inherently has the ability) to simplify individual objects into groups. Instead of seeing each individual blade of grass, the mind sees a field. Millions of pieces of data grouped into one object because it knows, to comprehend millions of pieces of grass would take and enormous amount of effect. Effect that could be focused elsewhere. So it generalises to make life easier. This sort of information overload can happen in design as well; Too much will distract from your likely objective. Remember that 7 Second Rule? If your web app or website has 7 seconds to impress then wouldn't you prefer showing off your functional muscles? How useful your app is? and not long it takes to load the really cool (bandwidth crunching) design? Remember how it easy it is to make your mind up about someone when you them for the first time. Same rules apply.

Just Do It!

What are your objectives and goals? Hopefully, when developing a web app or website, to make your (or your users) life easier! And let's remember, this 'thing' we call the Internet is broken. So don't break any further with dodgy CSS and bloated javascript. Functional Turn Around is the most impressive aspect for me these days. Spend time developing how the app works, refine it, refine it again, then again. Then when it works, design around the edges. If you like Latin phrase then try this one:

"entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", or "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"

For more information about Occam's Razor and various other development theories, read this Design and Development Blog at www.gammatan.co.uk

Don't be fooled by seeming simplicity. A lot of developers get comfortable with a certain way of designing a database for their web applications that they miss out on techniques they should rather employ to make things run faster and more efficiently. A lot of developers don't bear in mnd that the small site they are creating now might grow into something incredibly large and complex, and the database they designed has become bloated and doesn't scale well to meet the demands of the increased traffic.

This article hopes to provide web developers with a few techniques to help make their database and queries faster and more efficient.

1. Avoid Character Types

When you are designing a database, it is so easy to set all data types to the VARCHAR type as it can then contain any data you want; numbers or text. But character data is amongst the most inefficient data type you can get. If a field is only going to contain numbers, then make it one of the appropriate types (INT, DOUBLE, etc).

Also, wherever possible in your web development code, try to use numeric data types as opposed to characters. One of the most common things a script has to store are flags like whether someone answered yes or no to a question, etc. You could of course store it as 'Y' or 'N' but why not store it as 0 and 1?

The reason this makes a difference is when you have a database, for example, with over 500 000 entries, and are running a SELECT on that field, comparisons are processed a lot faster for numeric data types than character types. Also, if you need to return data to the calling script, numeric data is less memory intensive than character data. In addition, your web development language (PHP, ASP, etc) would also be able to process and perform functions on numeric data better than character data.

I am not trying to convince you never to use character data types. Sometimes it is a necessity, but if you can find ways to reduce the amount of character data processed by your SQL database, the better your server will cope.

2. Normalization

Normalizing a database is really quite a complex process. It is a process that describes a way to design a database structure to avoid repetition of data in your database and can lead to significant performance benefits if employed correctly. However, the entire process of normalisation is a bit beyond the scope of this article as it can fill books on its own, but any developer designing a database should seriously consider becoming knowledgable about normalisation and employing it in their own designs.

For a good tutorial on this process: http://www.keithjbrown.co.uk/vworks/mysql/mysql_p7.php

3. DateTime vs Timestamp fields

This actually relates to 1. a bit. The big difference to bear in mind here is that a field of type DATETIME is actually stored as a series of characters. A field of type TIMESTAMP is actually stored as an integer. So therefore, a more efficient way of storing dates is using the timestamp method. The timestamp has its drawbacks however. For one, you cannot store a date early than 1 January, 1970. Also, timestamps in your script will need recalculating to get to the character format. Because of this recalculation, it may not be better to store as timestamp. It really is a case of testing which format works better for your needs.

4. Use LIMIT where possible

In your queries, if you are doing a SELECT to a database and you only expect a certain number of results, using the LIMIT statement can speed your query up incredibly.

For example, if you have a table of users and you need to run a query to search for one users record, you can use a query like:

SELECT user_name FROM users WHERE user_id = 453;

This query is perfectly valid and will return the right result. But you also know there will only be ONE result. The query above will search the database, find what you want, but then still continue searching after that. It would run a lot faster if you could tell the query that once it has found what you are looking for to stop searching. LIMIT can do this, as this query shows:

SELECT user_name FROM users WHERE user_id = 453 LIMIT 1;

Imagine this scenario. You have a table called logins, that records every login from a user. It currently contains over 2 000 000 records, and you want to find the first time a user logged in. Now bear in mind that because this table inserts data over time, it is already sorted for by date. You could do the following query:

SELECT MIN(login_date) FROM logins WHERE user_id = 4876;

This will return the record you want, but SQL will now have to get all dates for that user, sort them and then return the lowest value to you. Our table is already date sorted simply because of the way it records data for us. So using LIMIT can be more effective:

SELECT login_date FROM logins WHERE user_id = 4876 LIMIT 1;

Because it is sorted, the first one will always be a users first login.

5. Avoid using LIKE

If you have tried to employ 1. above, then hopefully you will be in a scenario where you do not need to use LIKE all that much. LIKE is one of the most inefficient ways of searching a table. LIKE performs a text comparison search in a field and with no wildcards is as efficient as a direct comparison; i.e. WHERE name = 'Jane' is equivalent to WHERE name LIKE 'Jane'. It is when you start introducing the wildcard characters like '%' that things get really hairy.

If you do have to use LIKE, then at least try and make efficient use of the wildcards. These are '_' (underscore) and '%'. Let me explain all this with a real world example.

In a project I was involved in, we had a SQL database storing logs generated automatically from a mail server. Unfortunately, the mail server pretty much just dumped a very long string of text data into a field that contained the data we wanted. A script had to be written to find all logs that referred to a login by a user into the POP server. The only way we could do this was to search every record for a string in the msg field that had the text "User logged in" in it. The first query developed was something like this:

SELECT msg FROM logs WHERE msg LIKE '%User logged in%';

This query took on average of about 35 minutes to process. Obviously not an ideal situation. The way the LIKE worked here was that it had to parse through every single portion of each and every record in the msg field looking for text that matched "User logged in" anywhere in the text. We were able to determine eventually that the text "User logged in" occured at the end of that text in the msg field and so we altered the query:

SELECT msg FROM logs WHERE msg LIKE '%User logged in';

The '%' at the end was removed as we do not want to worry about text after because there is none. The query now only compares text to our string in the msg field at the end of the field and no longer parses through the entire piece of text stored in msg. The query now ran in under 2 minutes. (This was actually still too long, but how we optimised from there is a little beyond the scope of this article.)

Hopefully with all these elements put into practice on your next web development project, you can have a database that runs quickly, efficiently, uses as little resources as possible and wont grind to a halt when the load suddenly increases.