about :: f a q

• what exactly does corax design do?
• I want to manage my site myself; can you help me with that?
• can you provide a glossary of these web terms?
• how do you register a domain?
• How do you host a domain?
• Once you design the site, how does it get to the internet?
• Can I have an email address associated with my domain name?
• Does my website have to have ads?
• I want to have a blog, with an easy user interface; not Blogger or Wordpress, but at my own domain. Can you do that?
• Can you use my favorite font all over the site?
• How much do you charge?
• How do we work together?
• What does the client need to provide?
• What sort of software do you guys use? are you Dreamweaver fanatics like lots of the other web designers?
• So you type all the code by hand?
• What sort of code is this, that you're typing?
• What's the rest of your software regimen?
• How long have you been designing websites?
• Where did you learn all this fascinating stuff?

we provide the services to develop and manage a website:

• domain registration

  we'll act as your agent, and secure you a domain among ours that we manage, or find you your own contract

• web hosting

  you'll need to set your domain address up on a server-computer somewhere; again, we'll secure you the best possible hosting arrangement for your needs, at the lowest possible cost.
  generally, hosting runs from $5 to $50 (on up, for a huge site) per month, depending upon your storage and bandwidth needs.

• website design

  we consult with the client to determine:
  • what is the site supposed to do?
  • how is the site supposed to look?
  • how is the site supposed to work?
  and then we generate everything: all the html files, the stylesheets, the script libraries, the images and other content...

• website maintenance

  We can manage the content on your site, and attend to updates, and supervise the technical reliability.

• website add-ons

  Need multiple email addresses? Want to see google ads on your page? Want to drive your page rankings up?

• multi-media editing

  Our extensive background in graphic design, as well as sonic research, etc., provides us with ample tools to manipulate and optimize your multi-media content.

• copy editing

  We're skilled editors and proofreaders; perhaps our most developed set of skills, even (since, first and foremost, we must declare ourselves to be writers — half a million words a year, going back some years. Writing, we know. We can do all the text stuff in-house, also being blisteringly-fast typists.
  And we get a charge out of it.

we're here to connect you with the web; we help you learn how to fish; hell, we managed it.

Presently, we're working with a couple of clients on just this issue: managing a website requires a fundamental understanding of html; having that enables us to work freelance on other's sites — in the Spring of 2010, I did a lot of work on soundkayaks.com, enabling the client to manage discounted sales and traffic as a result of promotions. We were able to trawl and sniff through the code and insert our tweaks, because we knew what we were looking at.
Understanding html is much easier than people generally think, relegating such a simple phenomenon to "oh, it's a computer language!" However, html is quite straightforward; it's merely a matter of putting "tags" around content so you can control how it appears on a screen, and how it provides the user access to data.
have a look at our manifesto on it.

There are other resources, though, and even Wordpress to consider, as long as we can install the raw files on your server or ours, so we can modify them. Like driving the bus instead of having to sit on the aisle.

domain

a unique web address.
"www.coraxdesign.com" is a unique domain.

hosting

the files associated with your domain residing on a hard drive with access to the internet are "hosted" on a "server."

server

the remote computer which responds to requests from the browsers of internet users for files associated with your domain.

user

a person connected to the internet with a computer using a web browser.

browser

the software on your computer which retrieves, interprets, and renders files from the internet. Internet Exlorer is the worst example of a browser; Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome are good ones.

html

Hyper Text Markup Language (see html: an overview), used to process internet data. Web pages are generally written in html.

css

Cascading Style Sheets (see css: an overview), used to position and apply style (colors, borders, font-styles, text formatting) to html.

javascript

a machine language used to interact with elements in the html, providing an interface between the user's computer and the server, generally to dynamically insert content into pages which have already been loaded by the browser, and typically prompted by user-action. jquery is a library of javascript applications.

Plenty of domain registrars out on the web; not to worry — and they all want your money. Go to one of the sites, where you'll find a search box, into which you can enter your desired domain; the registrar checks the (obviously pretty huge) database of domains looking for a match — if it finds none, you're on your way. A few clicks, enter a credit card number, and the domain is yours.

Again, plenty of web hosts out there; usually, registrars provide hosting and other internet services — however, before you arrange hosting for your domain, it helps to have an idea of what your site is going to be all about. We provide hand-holding, here, as well.

Through a simple file-transfer process, much like moving files around on your own computer. once hosting is arranged, the designer accesses the server by logging in with user name and password — just like checking webmail — and transfers the design files (the html, stylesheets, javascript codes, image directories, etc.) to the directory on the server. Now, anyone with internet access, and knowledge of the web address (the domain name) can access the files with their web browser.

Of course — typically, registrars include one email address per domain, but if you require more email addresses, the host will be happy to provide as many as you need — for a fee.

Nope — mine doesn't. that's one way to get your site to generate some revenue, which can make a dent in your hosting fees, but there's the impact on the user to consider.
We all like pages that load fast, and what about content "above the fold?" Often, sites I visit take too long to load the content, busy rendering the banner ads. When the content finally does appear, I often have to scroll down to even see it... which is bullshit. Let's keep that to a minimum.
Avoid the ads, if it means you lose control of the visual rendering of your page to such a degree.

Under most circumstances, that's pretty easy. we like to be in on the hosting decisions to enable that, but sure — not too difficult.

That depends — if your favorite font is something like "Tuffgrrl," or some other obscure, decorative font, then chances are that's out. For one, we wouldn't want to make awful aesthetic choices — but if your favorite font is arial or helvetica, or one of a handful of others, then it's no problem at all. For more on the reasons why, check out Fonts on the Web, here at the site.

Our rates run anywhere from $40 to $180 per hour, depending on the services you require, and your non-profit status, among other things.

Inquiries are most welcome; now and then, we lower our rates for projects that are particularly stimulating, or represent the need for more exploration of technique on our part, so check in with us to see what we can do for you, and how affordably, at that. We can generally put together a straightforward website for $500 - $800.

A site like this would run a few thousand (more hours invested). Flash programming, as you may have already discovered, is pretty expensive.

Well, we've got a few options:

• If you're in my area, we can sit down over tea or coffee and look at links and write notes together; a fun way to work.
• If you're not in my area, but you can afford my travel expenses, well...
• We can communicate via email; really, this becomes the preferred way to work, as the decisions are verifiable, the text is copyable, and everything is much more clear.

  I've done work for a woman who lives around the corner from me, and we only met once — the rest was email... almost.

• There's always the telephone, but it's counter-productive, in my opinion. Good for chats and calling fire trucks, neither of which need concern us in our endeavors to design a beautiful website.

We've explored the tasks of the designer and developer; the client plays an important role, obviously.

• Whether they know it or not, the client has a clear idea of what the site is to do, how it should look, and how it should function.
• Generally, I suggest to clients that they find a bunch of sites they like, for whatever attributes: the style, the navigation, the colors, the presentation of the content… and copy the links to me for some background.
• The client will need to make the font and color choices, with assistance from the designer. One client couldn't make up her mind about colors, so I suggested that she put me on to a favorite painting, or a dress she liked… she gave me an Ecuadoran handbag she was fond of; I scanned it and pulled the palette for her site from the handbag.
• The client provides much of the content — the images, the text… or, if they require it but don't have it, that's where our team of content generators comes in (although we had to let the squirrels go -- although industrious, too unpredictable). We can arrange all your media content, write and edit your copy…

We're hand-coders; granted, that involves clever copy-paste, and use of libraries for scripting and whatnot, but we set it up with the following:

• brain;
• pencil and a notebook;
• laptop with a speedy processor;
• our favorite text editor, Notetab Pro 6.1.

That's right. However, we copy and paste as much as we can, which calls for clever strategies, of course, creating the pieces before making and distributing copies.
we also are making more use of existing jquery libraries.

xhtml, html, css, php, some javascript, and actionscript 3.0 (Flash).

Nice question. Really, it takes surprisingly little software, and a really low level of sophistication, to generate and propagate a website.
As I mentioned above, I use a simple text editor (although mine, a swiss-made product, has some nice bells, whistles, and utilities). That's all you need to create html, css, php, or other web files. For me, though, it's Notetab Pro.
I do all my own image generating and editing, too, so I work with some nice image editors:

• Adobe Photoshop CS2, a favorite bitmap editor. I hire myself out as a specialist.
• Adobe Illustrator CS2, the preferred vector software. great for generating master images and design.
  I get by with CS2, rather than the expensive upgrade... I did spring for new Adobe software, though...
• an old favorite, The GIMP. really, I get misty-eyed, thinking of my old friend, the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). it's open source, a small (30MB, compared to Photoshop's 350MB), free download, highly versatile, and does some things Photoshop can't. since I can't afford multiple-user licenses for the Adobe products, I rely heavily on The GIMP when I'm working away from the lab; all the high-end software and equipment hums along in the main facility, but the laptop is where most of my action happens, and sometimes, I have to generate or manipulate an image on the fly.
  during our stay in Amsterdam, the GIMP was my capable ally.
• We're also working with Adobe Flash CS3 Pro, now. as I was told, it's a steep learning curve, and that's correct. but many young lads have gone and written some brilliant games and other applications with Flash, so perhaps this clever, old cat can dance along to that tune.
  we haven't had much time to devote to Flash study, but wrote a nifty, little media player for one of our sites, JTCG.
  There's a snap of it; you can see that I used characters found on the keyboard to make the GUI; volume down and up, play, and pause.
• We transfer files to the server with Smart FTP, one of many fine FTP (File Transfer Protocol; see the glossary) programs you can download on the web. Although you can get free FTP software, I bought a license for this one, since I like it so well.
• We use Firefox as our development browser, since it has many excellent tools suitable for web developers. If it works well in Firefox, we can depend upon it doing fine in Safari and Google Chrome, as they're fine, standards-compliant browsers. Internet Exlorer is the tricky one; we have to constantly test the designs in IE to ensure that some inadvertent, yet correct code, didn't get under IE's skin and make it break your design out of some kind of weird, binary spite.

I suppose since I wrote my first "Hello World" html in 2002. I was writing html and generating web pages, but only on my own computer; I didn't start putting things on the web until 2005.

As a lifelong and passionately-devoted researcher and scholar, gaining access to the internet was like Dorothy stepping out into Technicolor Oz, or Alice falling down the rabbit hole… which was just what I did (see my essay, Rapid Research, at 23crows.com). You can have a look at my CV at bartoncole.com; several years ago, I determined I needed to explore other revenue streams, so began studying website design.
I scouted around on the internet, finding many fine tutorials, and dug through library books, and — as I had done with locks and clocks as a boy, to learn their mechanisms — I copied the code from lots of websites, pasted it into my text editor, took it apart and put it back together, rather like Dr. Frankenstein. A marvelous education. My early efforts are pretty clunky!