Ingress Online is a Sydney-based web site design and development company specialising in
building high quality, easy to use web sites that can be updated by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
We are located in Glebe in Sydney's Inner West.
Design Services - Print and web
Based on the look of your web site or brochures would you buy from your company?
Ingress Design offers professional corporate branding and design services.
Whether it be professional corporate branding or web site design, we can design a solution that will reflect your image the way you want.
Interactive Business Web sites
Are you after something more than a basic web site?
Do you want to sell your products online? What about polls, blogs or maybe add a forum? We specialise in building interactive web sites to engage your web visitors.
Small / mini / micro sites
Do you already have a web site but need a micro site for a special promotion or event?
Ingress Online can create special smaller sites with added interactivity to capture your visitors for competitions, events or polls.
How a web site works
In order to make an informed choice about your web site, it's important to know how your web site works online.
When you surf the web from your computer with a browser (such as Internet Explorer) you are viewing a web page sitting on a server and possibly retrieving information from a database.
URLs (Uniform Resource Locater) are the Internet equivalent of addresses.
How do URLs work?
Like other types of addresses, they move from the general to the specific (from post code to recipient, so to speak).
Take this URL, for example:
http://www.cnet.com/resources/index.html
First you have the protocol:
http:/
then the server address or domain:
/www.cnet.com
and finally the directory:
/resources/
in which the file index.html resides.
the file name is index.html
When you view the source of a web page you can see how the developer constructed the page. This is useful if you want to find out how the page was constructed.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was originally very limited as to what could be done with it. However, over the years it has grown into quite an intricate layout tool. You can customise every character, colour, image, margin, shape, etc.
HTML pages are just text files and therefore do not need any special programs to write them. Although you can use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor like Dreamweaver or FrontPage to make it easier to code.
There are a lot of WYSIWYG editors out there that can develop pages quickly and easily. The downside is that they may have adverse impact on your pages and only work perfectly in browsers that the development tool is compatible with (E.G. FrontPage will make pages that work well in IE but might not work as well in Netscape).
That is why you should have an understanding of hand coding HTML.
File names
It is always a good idea to keep file names and directories as well as all the code in lower case as this makes it more cross compatible.
Windows-based servers and IE Browsers are much more forgiving when it comes to things like case sensitivity and leaving tags out. You will discover this as you go along. That is why it is always a good idea to view your pages in a variety of different browsers to ensure consistent look and function across your web site.
Internet/web site addresses
Every device on the Internet has a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address; it is how we know what information has to go where.
You can point the IP address to a certain domain name.
If you want a URL of http://www.mywebsite.com you can point the IP of the machine that is holding the files (http://123.456.789.012) to use http://www.mywebsite.com
This means that whenever someone types in http://www.mywebsite.com, they will see files on the server (http://123.456.789.012) this is usually done by the server administrator and the person who will host the web site.
File structure
IP Address - eg http://217.199.174.102
Domain name - eg http://www. mywebsite.com
Any other directories created below this folder are tacked on the end of the url. eg http://www. mywebsite.com/aboutus/