When it comes to building websites you need to understand what you fundamentally wish to achieve. This should be front and center. This way you stay focused on your overall goal which will help you stay on track when it comes to research.

One thing a lot of people fail to remember when building a site is that you will need to effectively communicate with people. Sure you will be doing a lot of keyword research but behind those keywords are people who need something and you need to communicate with them.

The mechanics of the site will be based upon the keywords you choose. This will determine the navigation and overall theme of your site. Getting this right is really important. This will also help you to achieve good rankings on the search engines.

For effective keyword research you will need to visit multiple sites to determine how best you can position your new site. Everyone will tell you that you need low competition keywords with high volume searches - while this is sound advice it can be tuff to achieve but that does not mean that you should not do it.

Where I change the game a little is by starting with the article directories and looking for keywords with articles that achieve high number of page views, this way I know I can write an article and get immediate quality traffic without having to wait for the search engines.

This can bring you advertising revenue and sales. When it comes to building the site itself there are lots of site building software out there. The one I had the most success with starting out helped me to get into the search engines and took care of hosting and good link development along with a solid site structure.

To learn how you can put this work for you select any of the following links.

Sites that require users to log in to access certain information and/or purchase products add an additional layer of potential complication to the usability process. To avoid potential visitor confusion and the possibility for errors, it is important that any login process requires little or no thought on the part of the site visitor.

Once logged in, you must be sure that visitors are able to find the information they want and expect to find. My Account pages need to provide visitors with access and ability to view and change personal information, as necessary.

Login Access

Access to any login page (or the login form itself) should be available consistently across all pages of the site. Be sure the form or link is obvious and easily differentiated from other areas of the web page.

Security

If the information behind your login contains sensitive data, you need to use the appropriate security protocols, assuring visitors that that you take their information's security seriously.

Registration

If visitors are not already registered a link to a new user registration form should be present. It's also smart to have a global link to "register" for any new visitors to the site.

Account benefits

Non registered visitors should be treated to benefits of account registration. This information should be located on the same page as the new user registration form.

Lost password

All login forms should contain an option to reclaim passwords and/or username should they have been forgotten. This information must also be passed securely.

Remember me

You can provide additional convenience (though less security) by giving visitors the option of checking a "remember me" box which will allow them to stay logged in indefinitely.

Privacy

Provide a link to your sites privacy information/policy near the login form submit button or email field. This gives your visitors confidence that you will treat their information with respect.

Status

The visitor's "logged in" status should be displayed at all times with a ready access to logout at their convenience. When additional security is necessary it's a good idea to automatically log them out after a set period of inactivity.

Change info

Once logged in, visitors should have access to change their user information, including usernames, passwords, contact info, payment details, etc.

Change confirmation

Once the visitor has submitted their information to be changed, provide a confirmation screen that shows the old and new info. This prevents errors and helps insure information remains accurate.

Financial details

Provide links to relevant financial information such as transaction history, invoices, balances, payment methods, etc. Provide printable version of this information.

Up-sell opportunities

Visitors that are logged in provide you an interested, captive audience. Consider discreetly utilizing up-sell opportunities - without being overbearing.

Subscribed services

Provide visitors access to the information/services to which they are subscribed. Also provide additional subscription options, if applicable.

Information management

Allow users to change the way they receive information, providing alternate methods such as snail mail, HTML or text based emails or to turning off communication entirely.

When visitors create an account with you they are making a commitment to you to enjoy the services or information that you provide. It's important not to let the usability process break down after visitors are committed. In fact, it's even more important to treat registered visitors respectfully and appropriately, ensuring they have access to the information they need. This develops long-term relationships and keeps them coming back.

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.