Web Development Archives - We Rock Your Web

'Start your own website' written on a post-it-note on a dartboard

How To Build A Website From Scratch (In One Day) 2023 Update

Looking to create your own website but don’t know where to start and don’t want to pay a developer or designer thousands of dollars? We’ve got your back! We’ve written a comprehensive web series with details on each step of the process, and independently reviewed recommendations of providers. However, I know that for a business owner time is a precious commodity, so I’ve put together this express guide to get you up and running right away…

Network of servers drawn over a world map. Titled 'Who Has The Best CDN?'

Best CDN Providers 2023: Azure vs AWS vs Fastly vs Cloudflare vs Akamai vs Cloudfront vs Incapsula vs Rackspace & More

Two seconds or less. That’s how fast people expect a website to load. It’s common knowledge that a site’s speed impacts user experience, but how important is a quick website? While one to two seconds seems exceptionally fast, today’s website visitors are accustomed to short load times, and slower websites are penalized when users abandon a website in favor of a quicker, user-friendly option. In a world of instant gratification and content at your fingertips, a slow website could mean decreased site visits, reduced conversion rates, and low sales revenue.

A Complete Guide To URL Escape Characters

In order to prevent the misinterpretation of special characters such as a space, bracket (< and >), or % in the URL (which stands for Uniform Resource Locator – it is the address you see in your browser’s address bar indicating the location of the website you are visiting), browsers parse certain special characters using escape characters. This explains why when you click on a link such as: domain.com/page one.htm you see it parsed in the address bar as example.com/page%20one.htm. In this case the %20 is the escape character for the space…

Comprehensive Guide to Testing Browser Compatibility

Woman on computerIt’s important for any web developer to thoroughly test the rendering of their pages by various browsers in use today. The question is – how do we know which browsers are currently being used? There are many sites out there that offer various browser usage statistics, but more often than not, the data is simply a reflection of visitor-usage stats for that particular site. For specific client bases, this may not be a problem.

Exporting and Importing Drupal Nodes

Before Drupal, I used development environments where I could comfortably update snippets of content on multiple pages (at times literally hundreds) in seconds. Since delving into the CMS (Content Management Systems) world, and particularly Drupal, I have become fond of all the features, and especially the support community, that CMS users benefit from. However, I wasn’t able to find a way to easily update all my nodes.

Useful XML and XSLT Tutorial with Example Stylesheet

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is a meta language based entirely on user-specified semantics. It is therefore possible to create a page structure with user-defined tags and a DTD or XML Schema to describe the data. In other words, the XML describes itself. XML was designed to store, carry, and exchange data; not to display data…

What to Do When Firefox Stalls or Hangs

I have encountered this problem off and on. Read on for a list of possible reasons that cause Firefox to hang…

Drupal Multisite Configurations and Hosts

The ability for Drupal to run multiple sites from one account is a huge plus for admins that are deploying multiple Drupal installations. The simple reason for this is that all Drupal installations can be updated at once. Basically each additional domain “points” to the document root of your primary Drupal installation. All you need to do to update the files of each additional Drupal site is update the files in the root install once…

How to Vertically and Horizontally Center CSS?

Pre-css most centering was accomplished using the grid-like structure that tables provided. All fine and good, but the CSS positioning module offers layout options that tables could only dream of. Here’s how to vertically and horizontally center an element in pure CSS…

Looking for a List of Valid HTML Escape Characters?

HTML escape character lists often include characters between 128 and 159 – the problem is that these are Microsoft specific, and are reserved for control characters in the standard Internet character sets. In HTML they are undefined, and in XHTML they are completely invalid. Read on for a list of valid HTML escape characters you should use….

Joomla: How to Reset Super Admin Password

Before we begin, you must have access to your database. If you don’t, pass these instructions on to someone that does. It’s also a good idea to backup your database before making changes, just in case something goes awry…

Step-By-Step Guide On How To Setup MX Records

Setting MX records manually can be useful if you want to host your site on one server but handle email via another server or hosting company. If you have access to WHM (Web Host Manager – the interface you typically get with a cPanel-based hosting provider on a multi-site plan), you can usually set MX records yourself. If you do not, submit a support ticket to your hosting provider.