Web Browsers, Websites and Web Hosts

Web browsers and web hosts

What exactly are the relations between web browsers and web hosts? Well, before any website can be displayed on the web, the very first thing that need to be done is that their content need to be hosted on a web host in a coded form which can be understood by the web browsers. Web browsers then get the files from the web host and display them on the web. However, many things are involved when a web page is displayed on the web by a web browser. Very often, the same website can be displayed slightly differently in different browsers.

Here is an example. This is how the blog Header with the blog title and blog description is displayed in Internet Explorer 6 and FireFox 2.0 browsers:



This how the same blog Header is displayed in Flock and Opera browsers. Note that part of the blog description is hidden by the site search box:



Let me give you another example. In a blog, you have sections like the Header, the main column containing the posts, the sidebar where you can put various things, the footer. Now there is one common problem for which bloggers often asked help for. They will report things like their sidebar has disappeared. In most cases, what probably happened is the sidebar has been pushed to the bottom of the page, most likely in Internet Explorer. Refer to Troubleshoot sidebar pushed to bottom of page problem and Troubleshoot sidebar pushed to bottom of page problem Part 2.

There are things like templates which control how the web page is displayed. If your website is hosted by a web host like Personal Website Hosting, they offer products like website templates and flash templates which they say you can use to very easily and quickly make a quality website. Not only that, you can customize them to suit your needs and preferences. They also have Flash templates and Flash Introductions if you like fanciful websites.

If yours is a business websites, Business Website Hosting also have PHP-Nuke Themes, Logo templates and Corporate Identities in addition to the above templates.

You can browse through their huge inventory of templates at website templates.

How to enable Javascript

Sometimes we get questions like "How come I can view AdSense ads in Internet Explorer but not FireFox.

The answer is simple. Google AdSense uses Javascript. If Javascript is disabled, Google AdSense ads will not display. The solution is to check to see if Javascript is enabled or not, and if not, enable it. If it is already enabled, but you still can't see it displayed, then refer to AdSense Support. I myself have had similar problems like that myself.

Enable Javascript for FireFox browser

For FireFox browser, what you need to do is to click TOOLS > OPTIONS in the menu bar at the top of the browser. You will get a "pop-up". Click the CONTENT tab and you should see what is shown below:



The CONTENT tab and the radio button to enable or disable Javascript are highlighted with red circles. If you want Google AdSense to be displayed in FireFox (click BACK button to get back to this page), make sure the radio button for "Enable Javascript" is ticked. If not, click on the radio button to tick it and click OK to save the setting.

Internet Explorer

This will be added later

Flock Browser

The Flock browser is based on the Mozilla FireFox browser. I use multiple browsers for my work and often have a few browsers opened at the same time. For reasons, refer to Why you should have more than one web browsers. I started using Flock when I could not sign into Google Blogger with the updated Opera. See Problems signing into Google Blogger with Opera browser.

How to enable Javascript for the Flock browser will be added later.

Enable Javascript for Opera browser

This will be added later.

Browsers that have tabbed browsing

Ever since I downloaded and installed FireFox which have tabbed browsing, it has been my favorite browser. It still is, but I have started using other browsers which also have tabbed browsing. One of them is Opera. I invariably have more than one browsers opened in my computer when I am online for reasons explained in Why you should be using more than one browser. I have used Opera when I need to manage (publish post, edit, etc.) my Google Blogger blogs, but they must have auto upgraded it to a newer version. Now I am unable to sign into my Google Blogger account as explained in Problem signing into Blogger with Opera.

Now I use Flock browser. Flock is a web browser based on FireFox. It is frequently referred to as a "social browser" because it is able to interact with popular social networking web services such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Photobucket, and various popular blogging and news aggregation services. So far, I have had absolutely no problem with Flock.

Let us see how Flock with its tabbed browsing helps with sites like Coupon Chief, which is site that helps online shopper save on online purchases. If we want to keep Coupon Chief homepage opened, but would like to view the page listing all the categories, all we have to do is to right click on the "Categories" tab at the top of the page and select "Open in new tab", and a new tab will open listing all the categories that Coupon Chief have.

Want to look for products according to the stores? Right-click on the "Stores" tab, and another tab showing all the stores that are partnering with Coupon Chief will open without losing the other two. There sure is a very long list of stores there. Unless you are familiar with the store, you probably wouldn't know what the stores are selling, but you may be looking for flowers for your wedding anniversary to present to your loving wife.

No problem, just click the "Browse Coupons by Categories --- Coup.." tab of the Flock browser at the top of the page (under the menu bar) and you will be back to the page listing all the categories. Right-click on the "Flowers and Gifts" link and again select "Open in new tab" and the page listing all the flowers and gifts merchants will open in another separate tab. Slowly chose your pick.

The top of the Flock browser will look like this (click on screenshot to enlarge):



You can go from one tab to the other at will according to what you want to do. Just compare that to inconvenience of the old Internet Explorer 6 and under, which don't have tabbed browsing. It is only after a very long time that Microsoft finally caught up and came up with Internet Explorer 7, which have followed the other browsers and now have tabbed browsing. However, there is still one thing I don't like about Internet Explorer 7. In all the other browsers, when I want a new empty tab, all I have to do is to click "File" in the menu bar and select "New tab" and a new empty tab will open instantly. I do that in Internet Explorer 7, there is a significant pause before I get the new empty tab.

Advantages of tabbed browsing

I love FireFox as it allows me to do tabbed browsing. What is meant by tabbed browsing? Let us take this interesting site Coupon Chief to use as an example. This is a site which helps people shop for things online and save money at the same time using coupons. If you are reading this page, you are most likely to be interested in things connected with the Internet, software and Computers. In the same window I can have pages (tabs) opened in the same window.

For example, I am interested in Computers and Software in the site linked to above, you will find a lists of categories of different products on the left sidebar. Under the "...by Category" section, 7th down the line you will see the category "Computers and Software" at the time of publishing. You can click on "Computers and Software", but it will mean you will lose your current homepage of that site as the new page opens in the same window. However, if you right-click on Computers and Software, a "menu" will appear where you have a choice of



Open Link in New Window
Open Link in New Tab

plus other choices. Chose "Open in a New Tab", and the page listing all the computers and software will appear in a new tab in the same window (second red arrow), and your homepage of "Coupon chief" will remain in the first tab in the same window (first arrow. Click on screenshot to enlarge so you can see the arrows better):



There are other categories listed which is likely to be of interest to those who blog or surf the Internet, like Wireless and Internet. Right-click on that and chose "open in new tab, and the page for "Wireless and Internet" will open in another tab (third red arrow in the screenshot above). I use a wireless modem router and wished I had bought that via Coupon Chief for I may have save some money using their coupon that way.

There is another section "Coupons by Stores", and I see 9 stores listed in that section. You may be interested in a store like Dell Home. Right click on this link or in the link under "Coupons by Store" section, and choose "Open in new tab" and "Coupon Chief - Dell Home" will open in another new tab (third arrow in screenshot above) listing all the Dell products you can purchase and save some money using coupons without losing your other pages.

Or perhaps you will prefer to see a list of all stores where you can save some money using coupons. Right-click on the "Store" tab at the top of the page and chose "Open in a new tab" and a page listing a long list of stores will open in another new tab in the same window.

You can easily navigate to any of the above named pages the same window at any time in by clicking on the tabs highlighted by the red window.

Search website which have no sitesearch box plus Yahoo search, etc

You may often want to search for information on a website which did not provide a site search box, which is not a rare occurrence. In such cases, having FireFox with the Google toolbar will be a great help, for you can use the built-in Google search box to search only that site:

.

I find this very helpful in searching for information. In addition to searching only the site, you can also chose to search the whole web, search for images, search groups, news, Google Map, search for button, search your Gmail Inbox, even add search types such as Yahoo search, CNN, BBC News, Fox News, Yahoo mail, You tube, Google Earth, weather, etc. They will probably add more choices later.

Do not print background color and images of a webpage

You may sometimes want to print a page from the web. This you can do by clicking FILE > PRINT from the menu bar at the top of the browser. Sometimes the webpage has background color. It may also have colorful pictures which you may not want. If you just print the page as it is, you will be wasting a lot of ink, especially if the page you want to print have a black background.

If you want to save on ink, click FILE > PAGE SETUP from the menu bar at the top of the browser and untick the "Print background (colors and images)" option before you press the "OK" button.

Fonts and FireFox

In FireFox, you can either set the browser to use the font and color specified by the webmaster or use the font and color specicied by you. To set this, in the menu bar, click on Tools > Options, then the CONTENT tab (see screenshot on the left) in the "pop-up". In the second section is "Fonts and colors" where you can chose your preferred font by clicking on the "down" arrow and selecting the font from the list that had been installed in your computer. Click on the font you prefer. You can also specify the font size by clicking on the "down" arrow for the font-size and selecting your preferred font size. If you want to specify the color, click on the color button and select your text and background color. These will be the choices if the webmaster of the web pages didn't specify one.

Irrespective of what you set, you can chose the font and color the pages (what is specified by the webmaster) specify, in which case your computer will search for the first defined font, and if that is not available, the next, then the next, and so on.

A wise webmaster will specify a browser safe font family for their web pages, a list of which you can get from here:

http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
http://www.webspaceworks.com/resources/fonts-web-typography/60/
http://www.ahfx.net/weblog.php?article=22

If you are the type of surfers who go to websites where the webmasters uses unusual fonts, you may want to download and install extra list fonts into your computer. A link to one such site is given in this post Special fonts for your blog clickable graphic header without having to remove the text blog title. The link is entitled "Urban fonts". If you want more, you can always google for them using the search box above by typing in "download font" or some other search terms and ticking the (.) Web radio button.

The importance of a domain name

IP address like 218.111.16.127 are how surfers get to your site. They have often been compared to telephone numbers, a very good illustration. However, IP address like the one are, first, hard to remember and doesn't tell much about a website compared with http://www.buydomains.com/. For this reason, there are Domain Name Service (DNS) which translates domain names (computer hostnames) to IP addresses.

Domain names serve another important function. Search engines uses it to help determine the nature of your site. It is thus important to have relevant key words in the domain names to make your site more easily found by search engines. Thus before you register a domain name, it is important to do some keyword research.

All this is well and good. You do your research and have decided that a particular desirable domain name is what you want, but when you proceed to try to get that domain name registered, there is a high possibility that you will find that it had already been registered and not available. What do you do then? You can try to be creative and come up with alternatives or you can turn to http://www.buydomains.com/ which have 800,000 domain names registered for sale. Not only that, they also offer flexible financing where you can pay for the domain name over a period of 12 months.

However, http://www.buydomains.com/ doesn't just sell domain names. If you are creative and good at thinking up of desirable domain names which may be well sought after, you can register it with http://www.buydomains.com/ who will help you to sell your domain.