15 What I have learned this semester

I knew HTML pretty well before 10 grade, and visually know what do to do and what not do for designing a website. But PHP is very new to me I learned NEVER leave a space between < and ? and php in your PHP code, and always remember your ; after each line of php code or your webpage will throw up all over you. I have I've made a lot of "flat" websites: a place for people to read, listen to music, and view pictures of whatever the website is about. But I've never thought about the design principles of e-commerce website, for example I would normally not have a "buy now with 1 click" button like Amazon does because I would want the visitors of my website to make sure before charging their credit card. Since a lot of websites are e-commerce websites I have to starting thinking of design that's not just good for the visitors but also for the business. In addition to that, I learned how the changing (or lack of changing) laws, regulation, and policies play huge rule into e-commerce. How the Automated Clearing House might not be needed for electronic purchases and how e-commerce hurts government funding (even though the law is on online businesses side states governments might not like e-commerce because it deprives them of their sales tax (see blog 8 Amazon vs. State Sales Tax)). This class required me to use WordPress (see blog 13 Drupal, Wordpress, & Joomla) and Microsoft Expressions. Normally, since I'm old school and can make a whole website from notepad, I hate programs that auto-code things for you because if you want something very technical done it won't let you go in and fix it the way you want it and a lot of auto-coders often add a lot of unnecessary code (Front Page was well known for that, made a table for everything). Microsoft Expressions, though annoying at first getting used to their style sheet with so many <div>s and I would often write code that pops up so I had double end tags, but has been useful and lets me go in and edit things the way I want. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal I'm still debating with if I like them or not. They're it not just place for pre-made website layouts for people that don't have a clue how to do HTML but it does more with widgets. WordPress is for people that don't know PHP and other computer languages. I don't like how you can't go into the code and edit the layout and style at all, but at the same time it does more PHP than I can and has some neat widgets (like old school HTMLgear). It was especially interesting learning about web servers (see blog 11 Apache & Microsoft IIS web servers), because on summer a lot time ago I tried put several of my websites on an old computer because I ran out of room on Geocities and Angelfire and tired to turn it into a server. I managed to get the website up but only on my home network, I never manged to launch it to the web (probably because I didn't want to pay for anything and couldn't figure out how make a free domain name).