Programming a REAL Internet Site with ASP and HTML: Book I: HTML and Basic ASP - Softcover

Bosque, Marcelo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0595271766 ISBN 13: 9780595271764

Publisher: iUniverse, Inc., 2003

Synopsis

Ive seen many programming books in my life. All of them have something in common: They just explain theory and show examples made up by the author. Some of them are inspired and their examples are smart. Some others look completely beyond reality.I wanted to make a different book, so I started to think in alternative ways to explain the subject. I am a university professor, so I asked some of my students questions like:Imagine a cool programming book. What are you expecting to learn in an utopist work like that?Most of them wanted to read something Understandable. So, the first premise of this book was:TO MAKE SOMETHING EASY.The second point they marked is that they wanted to learn things based on real facts. So, the second premise for the book was:TO MAKE SOMETHING BASED ON A REAL CASE.Thats how the main idea of this book came to light.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Marcelo Bosque (L.A.) is graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, where he teaches as a professor. He is also a visual artist, and writes scientific and technical books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What do you want?

In this book we are supposing that you are a professional Web programmer. That doesn t mean that you are a real programmer in your life (perhaps you are a student, or just a fan of high-tech). However, the attitude that will be taught to you here is the way a professional programmer should behave.

If you are working for a living as a programmer, the customers come to your company and ask for the services of it. The visit becomes in a new project, that is assigned to several analysts or programmers. In old times, it was usual to have vast groups of people for a project:

*A PAO (Personal Account Officer), that was in charge of public relationships. In other words, he was the one who had to speak with the customer. He was the one that had the meetings with the customer.

*A project leader, that was in charge of the work,

*Some systems analysts, that used to make the "analysis"

*Programmers, that had to write the source code of it.

Nowadays, we are in an era of flexible employment. It means that you have to make everything (for the same payment).

In other words, you have to be a PAO - leader - analyst - programmer, or at least an analyst - programmer. In this book I will simply use the word "programmer", but I imply any possible combination of the PAO - leader - analyst -programmer work.

When you are working for a customer, it is extremely important to try to know what he wants BEFORE programming anything, because many (or most) of the customers don t know exactly what they want. This is a non-written rule of the programmer.

It is very important for you to remember it. It will save you a lot of time, and many programmer s working hours of your life.

Many of the customers don t know exactly what they want when they ask for your services.

What happens if I don t follow this rule?

When you have an interview with the customers, they generally tell you vague and ambiguous sentences about their desires. Words like "Cool", "on fashion", "vivid colors", "I want something like the ZZZ.com page", "not very postmodern", "just as the style of XXX.com page" are spoken by the customer during the interviews he has with you.

You start to work based on those sentences, and after many, many hours of your sweat, when you show them what you ve done, they just tell you:

-"Oh, I don t like it, this is not what we talked about "

It is in these moments when you start to think about becoming a farmer and use the rest of your life taking care of chickens and pigs.

So, the important lessons to be learnt here are these:

*You have to talk to the customer many times, just to get his feedback.
*Never work too much without showing him what you ve done, because he can change his mind and ask you to do again the work.
*Try to "persuade" him to give you as much information as possible about what it means to have a "cool" site, what is his "style" and what is the "image" he wants to project with the site.

Let s go back to our example:

You are the programmer and I am the customer.
Suppose I tell you:

"Well, I want a formal site not so formal that nobody will see it, but not a site with many pictures, buttons and things like that "

One thing you have to realize is that many times the customers start talking about the way they want the site to look like, but they don t tell you what information the site has to exhibit.

So, you know until now that I just want a standard site. I don t want too vivid colors, or animations in it.

That s ok. Not every site needs those things. If you want to make a "serious" site, it is better to do something without too many exuberant add-inns.

The standard structure for a classic site is a page with three frames in it.

The frames are hidden windows placed in the pages by the programmers. When you have a frame structure for a site, in general the one that contains the titles remains fixed, and the inner frame changes every time the user selects an option from the menu.

There are other possible structures for a site, but we would need a book just to talk about all of them, and it is really worthless to do that. It is enough for you just to know that the most popular sites in the Web are designed using a frame structure (and three is the general number of frames they use).

Structure of frames in a standard page

FRAME 1: Titles or Horizontal Menu
FRAME 2: Vertical Menu
FRAME 3: Body of the page

So, at this point you (the programmer) should have to suggest me (the customer) to do a site based on a three-frame design.

If I say "yes", you can go on with the design.

In general, the customer doesn t care about the "structure" of the site, so you don t have to worry about it. However, some of them could tell you they like the "XXX.com" site that has another structure. This is the point you have to check now.

Many inexpert programmers start to do the site without asking the customers. Imagine what would happen if you had designed a three-framed site and I tell you: "Oh, no That s not what I wanted, the XXX.com site looks better ".

All your work was worthless.

Edition details

• Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0595271766
• ISBN 13: 9780595271764
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168