When you look at a webpage, you see it as one page, with various elements (masthead, footer, content area, sidebar, etc.), and in straight html, you code it as one page, with the DOCTYPE declaration at the top, opening and closing tags for various parts of the page. With themes, though, these parts are divvied up and each one becomes their own page, functioning under a model similar to the Model View Controller.

Facebook is tremendously popular, having over 1 billion users and 55% global penetration rate as of mid 2013.1 With that exposure and audience, your business can’t afford NOT to be on Facebook, if only to increase brand awareness in a popular medium. There are nearly 700 million users on Facebook every day, with an average of 645 million weekly local business page views. Once you build an audience, your impact increases.

The term “blog” comes from “web log,” which, similar to the “Captain’s Log” made famous by Star Trek, is merely a series of articles or posts or entries chronicling something ongoing, similar to a diary, but out in the public eye, for everyone to see. Content is not limited to merely personal journals, but pretty much any subject you can imagine (including a Technical blog!). Essentially, it’s self-publishing, for the web.

Plugins are a big reason why WordPress has gotten as powerful and as popular as it has, for they extend the functionality of WordPress in many different ways, including adding shopping carts, boosting SEO ratings, adding widgets and calculators to make conversions, etc.

For my Capstone project I chose to do a cookbook, as I’ve been accumulating recipes I’ve made on little pieces of paper in a huge stack in a bookshelf in my kitchen. I took the plunge and coded my project in PHP using the artisan framework Laravel. Laravel for PHP is like JQuery for Javascript–it’s not a language, per se, but a complex library of functions that one can hook into to create applications more quickly and securely–Laravel does some heavy lifting, but has a large learning curve, especially as it is all object-oriented. I could (and probably should) devote a whole blog to Laravel.

The rise of content management systems, or “CMS” (as I will hereafter refer to it), has enabled many people to start webpages, particularly blogs, by themselves, without having to learn any technical knowledge or programming languages, or even design. All they have to do is provide content, and BINGO! instant gratification new website created–in many cases without even needing to set up a hosting account. It has never been so easy for a novice to set up a web page, and have it look fairly decent (thanks to templates). Why? All because of Content Management Systems.

API stands for Application Programming Interface and is a set of protocols and functionality, implemented on an internet connected system, which allows other software (usually apps) to request information and calculations from it. Essentially, APIs help build applications, and function similarly to plugins or widgets for WordPress–they add functionality, but without having to be in a CMS framework. you can plug code right into html–with some javascript and jquery to help, to install APIs into your website or application. They are often the go-betweens in the communication between people and services.

Whole Foods was largely established by John Mackey, CEO and co-founder, mainly because he was passionate about food and eating healthy, and wanted to offer healthy eating choices to people, for he, himself, had grown up largely on TV dinners. Now, that’s a great personal perspective to come from, and usually he would be a great proponent of his own store, except that when you combine his “hippie demeanor” with extreme, right-wing libertarianism (Ayn Rand is one of his role models) you have a complete disconnect with many of the potential market who would shop at Whole Foods, which has a largely liberal, left-wing customer base.

When landlords of older houses hear the phrase “up to code,” they shudder, because if the City singles them out to pass inspection to make sure their rental property is up to code, it often means some expensive or tedious repairs within a short timeframe. But luckily, good coding doesn’t involve expensive materials or labor (unless you’re hiring someone else to do it), but organization, logic, and attention to detail (and of course, knowledge of the language in which you’re coding). It also helps to use which language is most appropriate for the task. For instance, avoid writing a lot of styles into the HTML–save that for the CSS, which is much more powerful at styling.

Recently, the big news was that Getty Images–a huge stock photo company that has been around for many many years, and got really big doing print design photography–recently came out and gave permission (with certain strings attached) to use their vast library of images on blogs and non-commercial web use.