Dear Reader,

Site Rubix is a new website building tool recently released (Oct 2007) from Kyle and Carson at Wealthy Affiliate.com.

I have had a chance to use this website building tool, and I have to say it does do 'what it says on the tin'. It is very easy to use. You can choose a website style from an array of templates, drag and drop, add images, video, text, and actually publish your own site to your own domain with the click of a button. Because it is free along with Wealthy Affiliate membership you also receive free hosting.

The only thing you have to do independently is purchase your own domain, which is an easy thing to do. You can do this by visiting any number of websites which register domains, for example 1and1.com or GoDaddy.com.

The instructions for using Site Rubix are very clear, which is what you would expect from the Wealthy Affiliate team, although you will find it so user friendly you almost don't need to refer to the instructions except perhaps for the actual publishing step. This is when you actually make you site live and online, and again this step is not a problem if you follow the simple step by step instructions.

I would recommend Site Rubix as a website building tool, particularly to someone who is building their first site. There are no headaches involved, its quick to use, good functionality, you don't need to know http. All in all, its a pretty good system all-round.

When it comes to building a website you need to build it with one thing in mind and that is your visitors. Your website needs to be structured in a way that makes sense to those that visit it.

While visiting your website if they become confused they will merely hit the back button and you will be left with nothing. Your site needs to make sense and as a consequence you need to lay out the content of the site in a clear concise manner.

Avoid clutter and make sure that your navigational structure is easy to follow so that they can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Structure it in a way that they will follow the path that you desire them to follow.

Not only do you need to cater to your human visitors but you also need to take care of your robotic visitors. You want to ensure that the search engine spiders can read and understand the content on your site.

This will enable your site to become indexed within the search engines faster for your desired keywords. To ensure this happens you need to focus on relevancy as this will help all your visitors.

To conclude search for things that you like using the search engines and make note of the sites that you find are helpful in providing the information that you are looking for then use this as an example. This will help you stay focused and provide a good site with good layout and content for your visitors.

Functions are used to perform a well defined task that is normally repeated at various places within a web site, web application, or other software application. The function sometimes needs certain information before performing its task, and sometimes returns a value to the calling page or program.

An example of how to use a simple function in PHP:

 function showMessage() {
echo "{$_SESSION["message"]}"; }

The above example shows a very simple function that displays the contents of a session variable called 'message'. The idea being that while a user is using a web site, etc, various messages are generated and stored in the 'message' session variable. Whenever the showMessage function is called, the contents of the session variable are displayed. So, for example, when the user logs on, you could display a message saying that they have done so. Likewise, when they log off, a different message could be displayed.

Calling a function

To call the showMessage function, you would just need to include the line:

showMessage()

in the web page (wrapped in php tags to distinguish it from normall HTML).

Passing values to a function

Often, a function requires one or more input values in order to perform its task. For example, take the following example that takes two numbers as input, and adds them together. The result is then returned to the calling web page or program.

function addNumbers($number1,$number2) {
$answer = $number1 + $number2;
return $answer; }

In the calling program we would have something similar to the following:

$number1 = "5";
$number2 = "6";
$sumOfNumbers = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$sumOfNumbers";

Obviously, in a real program you would not have the numbers hardcoded like this, but they would be obtained from user input or by some other means. Notice also that although the name of the returned variable is $answer, the calling program makes no reference to that. We could, if we wanted to, change the calling program to:

$answer = addNumbers($number1,$number2);
echo "$answer";

which might make things slightly easier to understand.