FMWebschool

Have you ever had the feeling of being on a roll, the world aligned with you, and creative thoughts are flowing directly from the frontal lobe into your fast moving fingers. The adrenaline has kicked in, you feel unstoppable! Just a bit more of this, and by the end of today you will have finished that project that has been lingering on for 3 months, with time left over for a peaceful evening… Then the unthinkable happens, yes it is the dreaded ringing of your phone, a ring later you see the caller id and recognize it as one of your top prospects - you pick up the phone…

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Firefox has been known for the past few years to be the choice of browser for a large number of web developers. It is known for its superior standard compliance when rendering HTML and CSS code as well as convinient navigation of multiple pages using tabs (which were already part of Firefox/Mozilla 3 years before IE7 has integrated them). In the future we will be posting a number of Firefox techniques to make life easier for developing web applications with PHP and FileMaker - however, this article will focus on a number of useful and easy to use extensions.

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You are a software developer. You have a client that hires you to develop a database system for their company. You work several months on the project and as you work through the development stages with your client, you are given nothing but green flags. Your client accepts your solution, and begins using it on a daily basis in their office. A month later, you receive a phone call, the client no longer wants the solution, it just isn’t what they had expected. You ask what the problem is and they reel off a list of problems that they see with the program.

The client then asks for a full refund. What do you do? What could you have done to prevent this?

Results and Goals

Let’s backtrack to the beginning of this process. You should never go into a custom programming project without clearly defined results and goals. You should develop a project proposal that gives an overview of the project - and then a clearly defined breakdown of each step of the project. I will not proceed with a project until I have a signed agreement from my client confirming that we both have a clear understanding as to what is to be accomplished. You need to have a complete understanding as to what the application is supposed to do, and how it is to perform. (more…)

We all often see pages that have a lot of HTML code that is messy, unoptimized, and looks horrible. However this post will not discuss or complain about the style of code - or whether it compares to MySpace or Geocities. I will address the sole consequences of decreasing its size during your project design with very little work and no rewriting of the current code structure. I hope that after reading this article, you will have an urge to run and clean up the code to make your website faster, your users happier, and your hosting company out of your hair!

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