HTML forms are a means of collecting information. People fill in a form and/or select something. Then they click a button. Forms don’t actually process information.

Background colors and images can be used for stylistic effects and can be an important element in the design of web sites.

Okay, you have the perfect website. Everything looks great, the links all work and you’re raring to go! What now?

That’s right — PROMOTION!!!

When writing scripts, it is extremely important to have to ability to transfer information from one script to another. A common method to do this is with the GET convention. Search engine Web spiders, however, tend to ignore pages whose URL contains GET method parameters. If you’re not sure what a GET method parameter is, here’s an example of a URL with GET method parameters:

The great thing about the POP mail protocol is that it is a well-documented open standard, making writing a mail client to collect mail from a POP box a relatively painless process. Armed with basic knowledge of POP, or SMTP it is possible to write proxies which do a variety of useful things, such filter out spam or junk mail, or provide an e-mail answering machine service. Unfortunately, in trying to write a standalone client for Hotmail, the world’s most popular web-based mailing system, the fact that no POP gateway exists rapidly becomes a problem.

Have you ever noticed that when you look at your browser favorites menu or the address bar, some entries have their own little icon beside their URL?

You’re not ready yet to shell out $100 bucks a year for a web hosting service, so you want to stick with a free website. However, you dislike the long and messy URL addresses that usually are associated with them, and you’d rather use your very own domain name. Fortunately there is a solution, and it is called URL forwarding.

Ask Shari anything about search engines and see your answer published in DevWebPro’s weekly SEO Corner column.

Have a question? Ask it here.

Just because you work out of your home office, doesn’t mean you are less professional. Still many people today will not take you seriously if they see you talk from the “first face” (“I” instead of “we”, “mine” instead of “ours”).

There is a remedy for this problem. You can create a professional, more corporate look on your web site using the skillful techniques I will share with you here.

1. Create a high quality logo on your web site. If you don’t consider yourself a good graphic designer, hire a professional. The owner of gotlogos.com can give you an excellent quality for only $25.00. There is no good reason not to have it done.

We all do it – we recommend this web site or that software and we have a link that looks like: http://affiliate-site.com/your-user-name.html and by making the recommendation we might earn a 25% commission if our referral decides to make a purchase.

When you join any kind of affiliate program, you’ll be given a unique referral URL. Usually this is in the form of: