Ming

 I am reminded of a site from years ago called "Mikumix" that was entirely based on JavaScript and Flash. This meant that there was no CSS or really any HTML, but nevertheless, it worked really well, and everything was interactive. I guess there are many ways to make a useful and well-designed page, so long as the user experience(and security) is taken into account.

 There are tons of services you can pay for to help you rank your website higher on Google searches. It's interesting that this is a whole business these days. Google won't tell you exactly how its search algorithms work, but that said, having a site that is friendly to search engines would certainly help. Lessons on ads are useful too. I have been on sites with intrusive ads, the kind that take up half a page or more, before minimizing makes me really want to avoid the site. 

We certainly use the internet for e-commerce a lot these days. I think it's a normal thing for everyone now.  Security on it a paramount, but I think most of us don't think about it very much. Sometimes we hear stories in the news about some website being hacked and customer data being stolen, but that might be the extent of it unless we were personally affected, like getting unrecognized charges on our credit cards. Luckily, an additional layer of security comes with credit cards in that you can dispute a charge with your card company, unlike debit or cash, where if the money is spent, you're probably not going to get it back. On the project website, I found tables to be very useful. I had tried to put text and an image in the same cell, but it was difficult to align them. Having the image in a separate cell makes it far easier to align everything.

 Chapter 11 on web multimedia brings me back to the Myspace days. That site had allowed some HTML in the profiles of each user, and one of the popular things to do as a teen was to add music to our profiles that would automatically play when a friend visited your profile. Of course, a lot of it was copied/pasted, and there were sites where you could add your music, then it generated the HTML for you that you pasted into your profile, so very little understanding of HTML was needed, but nevertheless, I remember having fun with it, and I liked to think I learn a little bit from playing around. 

 I'm familiar with the general process of development, having been a part of various projects that required setting targets, milestones, testing, and maintenance plans. As such, the standard system development life cycle is mostly clear to me. I really do think such a cycle is needed to be successful, and no step should be missed. I have seen bugs and errors be missed and cause issues during go-live. I can only imagine how much worse things can be if any step of the development life cycle is missed.