One thing that really bugs me is receiving phone calls from Private or Withheld numbers, especially this time of the year.

I did a test last week and out of 79 phone calls received from such numbers only 8 were actually business queries, while the rest were people trying to sell me this and that, things that I probably never need anyway.

Some are really persistent and cannot take NO for an answer which force me to just put the phone down.
“Thanks, but no thanks, I am not interested in your offer.” – Is this message not clear enough?

Would you not love to be able to give them a slap through the phone? I one, do.

How many of you do answer the phone when the number is not displayed?

I for one took a decision not too any-longer. If it is that important, leave a message and we will call you back.
I do understand when you are calling another private person, but a business?
What have you got to hide?
What happens if you run out of credit or the line just drops?
Can I call you back to finish the conversation? Oh, wait – there is no number available.

For those who doesn’t know, we are going to explain as well as we can, the difference between web design and web development.

They might seem  to be the same thing but in reality they aren’t so lets break apart what and how.

Web Design, involves the basics of a website design which includes:

The well known HTML code (Hypertext Markup Language – the main programming language of the web),
CSS for styling and layout (Cascading Style Sheet),
Graphics to make up the look and feel of the website itself.

A professional web designer can create a very pleasant website, which can take your breath away with the quality graphics and a well-balanced layout.
The next step is the functionality of the website and that’s where a Web Developer steps in.

A web developer is the one responsible for how the website performs based on the user / visitor interaction, making sure the right context is displayed at the right time and makes the website responsive and sticky.
I have seen very large businesses having a very poorly performing websites which instead attracting customers, drives them away.
As a website is the business image on the World Wide Web (www), a poorly performing site could mark your business as unprofessional.
Is that what you are looking for? I don’t think so.

A web developer skills involves:

Server Side Scripting Language (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, etc)
Client Side Scripting Language (JavaScript)
SSI (Server Side Include)
Database Design(MySQL, MS SQL, etc.)
CMS (Content Management System) which allows the owner of the website to keep the content up to date.

An e-Commerce website is a great example.
If you have 1000 products that you would like to have it displayed on your website, just imagine having to pay a web designer to create those statuic pages, while a web developer can do all this with just one page.

Why is that?
Because a web developer will advice you on the best solution available by creating a database that will hold all your products.
Then he creates a page that will interact with the database, displaying these products one by one based on the user request.
They can be sorted and grouped into categories, type, make and model, which will make it a lot easier to find what you are looking for with just few clicks.

When the website is designed based on a database, your content / product can be found using a search form.

Recently we re-designed 2 websites that were created by some “web designer“.
The customer came to us due to the fact that he cannot be found in any search engines.
Both websites were more than a year old and only one of them had few pages in Google Search Engine.
When we took a look at them, both were inaccessible in FireFox, due to bad javascript code used to create the navigation menu, and one of them had more than 1400 html errors.
There was more errors on the page than the content itself.
It took us few days to clean up the code but in the end both website were more user friendly, more pleasant without the need of heavy graphics, and few times more responsive.
We created XML site-map for each website and submit it to Google and in just a matter of few days both should start coming up in the SERPS.

In conclusion, do your homework when thinking of getting a website done.
Should you be looking for a web designer or a web developer?

Everyone knows what Spam is. We all get unsolicited emails every day, and dealing with spam has never been a bigger battle.
Having a website that has any type of form means you are after opening a gate for spam.
Trying to close that gate and keep it close, for some people is a full-time job.
Below are some solutions that I found helpful:

1. Set a variable that will hold a number let’s say 6.
Set-up a session on form submission and increase the count by one anytime the form gets submitted by the same user, then check to see if it’s not equal or bigger then the variable you have set. If it is, display a message or redirect.
This is useful on contact forms.

2. On any other type of forms, like search, make sure you check the value of the submitted fields not to contain an email address
this can be easily done. 
e.g using php:

if(eregi( "^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$", $_GET["field_name"])){
   echo "You are not going to find an email address in the products table. Get real.";
   die();
}

3. Limit the amount of data a user can type into the form field by using the input attribute maxlength=”50″. 
You’ll be surprised how much you can type into an input field that has no “maxlenght” applied.
e.g.If you have a qty. field for a product to be added to the shopping cart you can limit the amount of data to 3 – maxlenght=”3″. 
Who would buy more then 999 products at a time?

4. Few months ago I was getting a lot of registrations on one of my website. Looking at all those new customers I noticed a similarity.
The first name and last name plus some other fields were exactly the same values, so i created a function that is checking the form for duplicate values:

if($x_first_name == $x_last_name){ 
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
# here I add the ip address to the ban table,
then email all the form values to myself,
just in case there was a mistake
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
}

It worked for me very well. Managed to collect few IP’s in the database and until now none were for real.

5. Never trust Javascript (client-side) for form checking. Always do more checking using server-side (PHP, ASP, …)

6. Always check the values submitted to contain exactly what you are expecting.
e.g. If you are looking for numbers, then make sure you only get numbers. 

7. Use Captcha Security to prevent automated submissions.
    A good example here: Captcha Security

:::::::::: more will be added on as I find them ::::::::::::