Ever since I debuted my Content Management System a few weeks ago, I've gotten much positive feedback and some questions. Most of the feedback came from web designers who loved the idea of custom-built solutions and wanted to know more on how they could build their own CMS, or just be able to more effectively modify existing solutions to meet their clients' needs.

This is the start of a series where I'm going to dive into the "need to know this" ideas of PHP that I mainly use in much of my code work. As this series progresses, you'll learn how to pull and display data from a database, add new data in, edit it, and delete it when you want. I'm sure proficient PHP coders won't be interested in this series, but this is ideal if you're just diving in and want results faster.

In the past, it was necessary to refresh a web page when submitting a form, mainly because the methods of POST and GET needed to have the data inserted via HTTP or querystring.  Most never took too much issue with this except when the age of video and other streaming media came about.  Imagine how annoying it is to be halfway through that film trailer and you post a comment, only to have the video reset to the beginning so your comment is added.

Thanks to the development of AJAX, we now can rid ourselves of the idea of a page refresh for almost any reason.  You can see Google searches come instantly without your page changing, or Facebook statuses post immediately without the page refreshing.  I personally feel that this is the standard of things, and those making web forms should know this.  Now I'll show you how I did it.

It's amazing how much one site or idea can change the way we use the internet.  The consumer changed web addresses from IP numbers to domain names.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) took us from links that look like a mass of variables and numbers into "pretty permalinks" with text now in there to make one have a clue of where the link takes them.  Now the age of Twitter has made us seek ways to shorten links down for easy posting.  Thus the need of services like TinyUrl and bit.ly.

Like anything on the internet, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil things for many.  The moment that a few hackers started to spread viruses around via shortened links, many web sites opted then to get their own shortened URLs to pass around.  After all, ampor.co/kd8fj90C does seem more trustworthy than bit.ly/d798Ghe.  With the first link you know it's me.  With the bit.ly address you take your chances when you click.

Like it or not, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a reality and a term anyone working in the internet must be familiar with.  If you're a developer or producer of web sites, then you more or less have to work, read, and study to become a literal expert of what brings results.  Worse off are how many tips and tricks that come out are soon made obsolete when search engines change up the game.

Outside of having a good hierarchy of information (headings, paragraph tags, lists, etc), meta tags, and all the advice on using keywords in your content, a new trend that's become more a must now in web design is the practice of using permalinks.

HTTP cookies have been around since 1994, but didn't gain heavy acceptance until the late 90s.  Now it seems any site you visit now asks you to make sure the cookies function is turned on in your browser.  Message forums, social network sites, ecommerce, email even.  You can't hide from it.

Despite how widespread they are, many designers and developers do not know how to make them and why they can be very useful.  Most of the time with 3rd party back-ends being using to create sites, one doesn't generally think of doing things on their own.  I still think it's important to know how to do things on your own because you never know when the knowledge will prove useful.

CSS and broadband connections have empowered the web designer/developer now more than ever to take design to bigger and better limits.  One trend I have been following and thus brought into the design of this site is the use of large photos as full-browser backgrounds.

Now when I say "full-browser", I more or less mean the full space you see open in your browser, with or without added toolbars and other add-ons.  I know some like to use added functions to make the site fully fill the screen, but I don't believe many actually use this function when surfing the net.