Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2017 September 20

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September 20

How eCommerce Mobile App Boost Retail Business?

Online Solution help to increase business sales. Anyone can guide us how can build online solution in a day. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.131.106.130 (talk) 05:30, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

In one day you could build a web site to display your company name, logo, history, description, address, phone number, hours, e-mail address, a map, and a printable coupon. If your product line is small, you could also list that in a day (if large, just give an overview instead of listing each product). But any type of online sales are going to take longer to set up than a day. However, those things you can do in one day will still give you lots of bang for the buck. And you can, of course, always add to the web site later. StuRat (talk) 18:01, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

When promoting a single store, create a game what features the products on stock and comes up with non disturbing ads, most likely in the game without interrupting it. When promoting the stores of the town, create a shopping list app, capturing the users needs and have a daily copy of the products on stock to be compared with customers shopping list. For example a diet monitoring app asks users for the products they eat an calculates the nutritionell values and it also captures the food, the user prefer. As the former paper work changed to EDIFACT, you just need a copy of PRICAT messages, and optional reports to not to guide to much customers to the same store making it getting out of stock, if the app is an success. Also calculate shopping time and fuel cost. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 19:39, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Disabling autocorrect in Microsoft Word

Is there any way of disabling all type of autocorrect in Microsoft Word? For example, when typing mathematical equations, word constantly modifies them and I haven't find an option to prevent this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.251.245.226 (talk) 14:48, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

In addition to completely disabling it, I would think they would have some way to disable it temporarily, say when quoting somebody. StuRat (talk) 19:57, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Straight from the source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/291473/how-to-turn-off-autoformat-options-in-word. OldTimeNESter (talk) 21:34, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Website Development References

Hi there, I'm looking for direction towards resources with regard the design and coding of a new website. Up to this point, I have gotten by on downloading software or using basic templates for website frameworks, but for this latest project of mine, that is not going to be good enough, so I thought this'd be a good time to learn some of the basics of actually creating the sites for myself. The site I am aiming to make is relatively simple, a few pages, banner images and other pictures, some menu bars, text boxes, picture galleries, things like that, but I am not sure where to start looking for guides and other helpful content to show me the way to put all this together. I've looked through the Wiki Books section, but it seems this part of it is less fully developed than other areas I've used that for before, unless I was looking in the wrong place. Any pointers towards where to find lessons on putting these basic parts onto a webpage would be greatly appreciated. I already have experience with domain names, hosting, FTP, things like that, but when it comes to knowing how to turn a blank page into the layout and content I want, I seem to be a little out of my depth.

86.12.115.74 (talk) 18:16, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

It sounds like HTML and (optionally) CSS may be all you need, as you didn't list any interactive functionality beyond flipping pages (which would then likely require JavaScript or even something more). My suggestion: Find a web site similar to what you want, view the source, copy it, and then modify it to fit your needs. I've found this to be the quickest way to get started. W3schools offers free guides on these topics. And then you can ask us, and me specifically, any questions that come up. StuRat (talk) 18:20, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

The worst thing anyone in this position can do is to read anything from the w3schools site. It's the Daily Mail of accurate web tutorials. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:11, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

It's free, geared towards beginners, and offers step-by-step examples you can modify. What don't you like about it ? StuRat (talk) 19:50, 20 September 2017 (UTC)ń

It's woefully inaccurate. Also just not very good even as a tutorial. Those who've learned to do something from w3schools almost never have any real understanding of the topic, and often they've been taught something that's the opposite of true. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:04, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

• For training, I've found the "Head First" series to be particularly good. Head First HTML & CSS. O'Reilly. ISBN 0596159900. You do need to sit down and read them, but it doesn't take that long. The HTML & CSS one covers markup coding, the Web design one is also good, but really is about high-level design for larger sites, not coding. They're very much a tutorial, not a long term reference. I've a set which has loaned out around members of a whole team. They also have the advantage (which is rare) of being accurate. There are any number of web tutorials out there, nearly all of which are just too badly wrong to be usable.

For reference, Hakon Lie & Bert Bos' Cascading Style Sheets. ISBN 0321193121. is still the CSS book of choice. For references, use the W3C/WHATWG canon sources themselves. Stick with HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 3.0, then add bits of HTML5 as you need them.

These days, front-end smarts are increasingly necessary, so frameworks like jQuery are hard to avoid. I find myself using Bootstrap and Angular, so maybe something on them too.

If you can, general design guides (again, stick with good ones!) are worth reading. If you're doing grids, read some real grid theory first. These days, something on Responsive Web Design could be useful too. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:10, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I see we have very different preferences. Sitting down to read a book would do me no good, I need to learn by step-by-step additions to my knowledge base, and practice what I've learnt at each step. StuRat (talk) 19:53, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Then try the Head First series. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:04, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Have you thought about using Wordpress? You have to pay a bit to get a good theme, but it is *much* easier than coding the site yourself, and very easy to customize. I suggest this because if you hand-code it yourself, you'll need to make sure it works in each of the commonly-used browsers, as well as on mobile devices: that can be tough to do, and the CSS can quickly get out-of-hand. OldTimeNESter (talk) 21:39, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I'd especially recommend that if you want other people to take over the site or add content rather than be stuck with doing everything yourself. And if you're not doing that why do all the learning to do a good site yourself instead of using good tools produced by others? I have set up a few sites myself at a low level but I use Python and a database to generate the HTML and CSS and JavaScipt and PHP and to do various other things needed to get them working well and keeping up to date. However I have decided to use Wordpress for new sites and just do coding for any extra facilities that I think I really need rather than having to do everything. There's a few things I do currently that would be difficult in Wordpress and it certainly won't be as fast but machines have got much faster since I started and its facilities are good enough. Dmcq (talk) 09:26, 21 September 2017 (UTC)