You can definitely generate more business with a quality website. This may be the first line of communication between you and potential guests. A user friendly, well designed website is one of the greatest assets imaginable today for any business, organization or community group.

The great advantage of website development for a company is that the website will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can be viewed from anywhere in the world. So anyone can collect suitable information from the website at any time.

In today's business environment and to beat the competition large companies definitely need to develop a website. Many business owners use the excuse that their business is "word-of-mouth" and they do not need a website. But a great way to reinforce the personal recommendations of other clients is through professional website development.

Website development helps your company to increase product knowledge, maintain communication between you and potential clients, sell your products or services, generate leads for the business, increase the popularity of your company and much more.

Website development could provide all the information about their business, their products and also have provisions to sell their products online. Customers could be kept informed of up and coming promotions and product developments.

In the world today, not having a website is like not being listed in the telephone book. A website provides added visibility and credibility among consumers. When searching for a web designing company you will want to make sure they are able to provide everything you need. If your website is e-commerce based, you will want to make sure your web design company offers more advanced features such as search engine optimization (SEO). If your business is still lacking a website it is not too late to get started. Building and marketing a website can be done at a very affordable rate. Invest in your business today.

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.

Reusing pieces of HTML code is a common way of making web sites (or web applications) more consistent, reliable, and more manageable. Even a small web site consisting of perhaps 20 or 30 web pages can benefit from reusing code for header and footer sections, for example. If the same header or footer is used across all the pages on the site, it makes sense to put the header and footer code in separate files, and then call those files to insert their contents where required.

PHP offers two statements that can be used for inserted the contents of one file inside another: include() and require(). These two statements are virtually identical, with the only real difference being that if require() fails, it gives a fatal error, whereas if include() fails it just gives a warning. For this reason I tend to use the include() statement as it just seems slightly more friendly.

So, to include the contents of a file called header.inc inside a web page called index.php, you would just need to insert the following line of code (wrapped in PHP opening and closing tags) inside index.php.

Include 'header.inc';

As PHP takes no notice of the extension used for the included file, you can use whatever extension you want to. Be careful though, if you put passwords inside an include file with a .inc extension, they will be visible. You can get around this by putting include files that contain sensitive information outside the document tree to prevent people from browsing to them.

In Part 2 we'll look at the use of functions when developing web sites and applications.