I've recently begun looking at Google Analytics as a way to gather some additional information about our website users to inform redesigns and site enhancements for the three Illinois statewide websites. Google Analytics is a free tool for websites with under 5 million pageviews per month and involves adding a couple snippets of javascript to all the pages that you want to track on a web site (most easily accomplished by adding it to a global header file). 

Google's webmaster tools are another service offered by Google that allow webmasters to monitor how Google is indexing their web sites.

Features include a set of diagnostic tools that report a list of any errors Google encountered while spidering a web site, such as pages not found, pages that timed out or where unreachable or pages that are forbidden by robots.txt file. You an also view what Google is using for its version of the site's robots.txt file.

Why Unicode?

Americans, of all income levels, ethnicities, and ages are adopting the Internet far faster than any other information technologies of the past¹. Our client populations may have limited access to the web, though not as limited as we may think. We can serve those in the middle via the web- families with too much income to qualify for legal aid, but not enough to hire an attorney. We can better serve our client through the creation of updated and relevant legal content in our their own languages.

There are a number of ways to edit content on web pages. The easiest is to use a content management system that uses WYSIWYG HTML editors to edit content. But for HTML editing there are a number of other options:

Creating a website requires at least a domain name so web users can find your site, space on a server, and bandwidth.

Domain Name Registration:

The first step is to register a domain. Most nonprofits use domains with a .org extension. You should also consider buying the same domain in .net and .com and possibly other extensions to avoid someone else uses the same domain with a different ending. Below are some common registrars:

Design Patterns are common ways to think about particular software development problems. A couple of really popular design patterns are the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern used in many object-oriented applications and the Front Controller pattern, heavily used in Fusebox-based applications (particularly in Fusebox3 and earlier), and DAO (Data Access Object) patterns.

Probably one of the most critical phases of web application development is testing the application to make sure that it works the way it is supposed to. And re-testing should take place every time changes are made.