Responsive design is a method of applying different sets of display rules  to elements of a website based on the size of the viewport availale.

These rules are applied via Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) and can affect the appearance, position, size or visibility of specific elements such as navigation, sidebars, pictures and the main content.

A single code base is created for the website rather than building a different website to be viewed on mobile phones, tablets and desktop computers.

Responsive design isn’t just a technical issue. A good responsive design requires design decisions to be taken to determine which elements to change as the viewport changes.

To see an example of responsive design in action, visit www.smashingmagazine.com with your web browser maximized. Now slowly resize the window until it is as small as it can go. The layout changes as you do this and as the viewport reduces in size, different parts of the style sheet are triggered and applied to the layout.

In-app payments are a way of paying for additional features for software from within the application itself rather than at the time of purchase or install.

At the moment they are predominantly used in mobile phone applications such as games where a certain number of levels can be accessed, but to proceed beyond a certain level, you have to make a small payment.  The key feature of in-app payments is that the payment takes place within the application itself rather than having to go to the software creators website, make a payment and install a new version of the software of enter a serial number.

Software distribution is changing rapidly at the moment and we are seeing dedicated application stores set up for mobile phones, tablets and forthcoming versions of Apple OS X and Windows will have built in marketplaces that people can use to install software without leaving the desktop.

Most businesses strive to find ways to not just sell more of their product, but to maximise revenue from their products so in-app payments will be very attractive to software creators.

At the moment, PayPal are considered the leader in providing software creators with the ability to include in-app payments in their products.

Typekit is a font delivery and licensing service which enables web designers to use a much wider range of fonts in website than had previously been available. It is a commercial service which web site owners and web designers can subscribe to if they need to use specialist fonts in their HTML content.

Until recently, the HTML design process has been limited to a small range of common fonts that could be guaranteed to be found on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. (more…)

Ad Manager is a free service provided by Google that lets you manage advertising on your web site or entire range of web sites. It first appeared in March 2008 after Google acquired the DoubleClick.

Ad Manager can be used on any size of web site with and volume of traffic. A web site owner decides which ad slots are available on their site and the size of these ads placements. (more…)

Android Home Screen (image from WikiCommons)

Anrdoid is a free mobile phone operating system. It is based on the Linux operating system and was created by Android Inc, which was later purchased by Google.

The code for the Android operating systems is now open source and overseen by the Open Handset Alliance. Google is still seen as the main driving force behind the project.

Like Apple’s iPhone, Android mobiles support multi-touch interfaces  installation of new applications on the phone, many of which are free of charge.

Most Android devices are made by HTC who were the first mobile manufacturer to adopt the operating system.

An accordion is a layout mechanism used on a web site.

It is a means of saving space on screen by hiding information until a heading is clicked.

When you click on the heading, the information that has been hidden is revealed usually in a smooth animation.

Accordions can be used in navigation menus on your web site or to compact long web pages into on screen, giving visitors the option to jump to the section of the page they find most relevant.

One advantage of using an accordion on a long web page is that it although you only display the information in small chunks (great for your readers), all of the information is contained within the page (great for search engines)

An API is an Application Programming Interface, though as is the way with most acronyms, spelling them out makes us none the wiser.

The important bit of this acronym is the "Interface" part, because it describes what an API does. An API exposes part of a programme to another programme. It enables one programmes to ask questions of another programme and receive answers it can understand.

For example, Google Maps is a web site that you may be familiar with. When you enter an address, it will show you a map centred on that address. However, Google Maps also has an API which allows us to place maps on our own web sites. The question that we ask is the computer equivalent of "Can I have a map for these co-ordinates please?". The API returns the information required to build the map and draws it on the page of your web site.

You can use other people's API on your own web site or you could build and API to let other people access your own information and display it on their website.

For example. If you sell widgets on your  you could build an API that exposes some of the information about your stock levels and prices to your business partners.

Modern search engines take many factors into account when assessing how to rank your web pages in their index.

One factor is called back linking. This is similar to a peer review for web sites.

Back links are links on someone else's web site  to pages on your website.

If you write and article for another web site you should ensure that there is a link from that article to your web site. Likewise, if someone writes a review of your organisation or product, ask them to include a link to a specific page on your website.

So the more sites that link back to your site, the more influence it has on your own search engine ranking.

It's not all about quantity though. Search engines also assess the quality of the sites that link to you and the relevance to your own site so don't take a scatter gun approach to back linking.

All web sites have ongoing costs that they have to take into consideration. One of these is an annual or monthly charge for web hosting.

Web hosting charges can usually be broken down into storage space, bandwidth allowance and services such as databases.

The bandwidth allowance is the amount of data that you are allowed to transfer each month from your web site to you visitors computers. Each page on your web site may be about 20 Kilobytes and if you have 10,000 page views per month then you will transfer approximately 200 Megabytes of data.

Bandwidth theft is where another web site displays a file from your web site on their own web site. For example, if you have a nice photograph on your web site  that is 20 Kilobytes and another web site uses it on one of their web pages by loading the photograph from your server each time their page is displayed, this is bandwidth theft.

In this case they should either ask for your permission to download the photo and host it themselves or link to your page with the photograph rather than displaying it.

Camino is a web browser which is only available for Apple Mac. It is open source and is created by the Mozilla Foundation.