There’s a reason why some people are described as artistic; moreover, there’s a reason why the more talented ones make a nice salary—having the talent and natural artistic ability to be a good (or great) designer is not easy. I am not one of those artistic people; however, I am frequently asked to play the role of designer when working with technology. And, if I’m guessing correctly, you are asked (or soon will be asked) to play that same role. Indeed, those of us working within technology fields are asked to wear many hats that often are outside our direct area of expertise and experience.

The interesting (and frustrating) thing about HTML is that it is not by design a feature-rich tool set for manipulating graphics. Indeed, the very opposite is true; in its original (and, for the most part, subsequent) incarnations, HTML was designed for very simple text markup, not for exact or otherwise sophisticated graphic design. Still, many people think of HTML as a graphics tool. Although the Web is by nature a communication medium that invites the utilization of graphics, tweaking HTML to fit your graphical presentation requirements can be a challenge.

However, there are some things you can do to strengthen your work. Using tables, frames, and other goodies in the HTML tool bag, you can actually create some pretty sharp-looking Web pages. This chapter will focus on some of the most basic (but critical) design issues by looking at a variety of basic text-formatting techniques.

WordPress makes controlling the content of a website easy. It can be done by you, or you can train another person to do it, because the Admin area is as intuitive as it is powerful. WordPress gives you the keys to build sites easily with all the modern features that clients crave. And because WordPress is free, open source, and has fostered a giant community around it, you’ll always be in good hands. WordPress has changed the face of publishing content on the web, and we are all reaping the benefits. For all these reasons and more, we can safely say that WordPress is amazing.

How to Optimize and Secure WordPress
Out of the box, and with a full cup of common sense, WordPress is a reasonably se­cure software package. But if you are up to snuff as a web designer/developer, you understand the importance of security and know that it is up to you to do every­thing possible to keep your site safe and secure. There are a slew of precautionary measures you can take to help with security, and we’ll show you all of them. Things like locking down sensitive files, checking file permissions, and using various mani­festations of "security-through-obscurity."

While we are at it, we'll customize our sites to streamline and optimize the effi­ciency of WordPress. Many of the things that can make WordPress faster are also things that can make any site faster, like reducing HTTP requests and optimizing images. But there are many WordPress-specific things you can do as well, like cach­ing data, keeping your database optimized, and reducing the number of database queries.

HTML is an evolving technology—so much so that it will probably evolve itself out of existence. Now don’t panic: All technology—even widely successful technology such as HTML—moves on to greener pastures. The key to this transition—as these series of articles will stress continually—is planning for that inevitable transition to make it as smooth as possible.

XHTML is the planned successor to HTML. The current W3C recommendation is XHTML 1.0; additional recommendations are currently under. Because XHTML 1.0 utilizes the feature set of HTML 4.0 (and 4.0.1), with some general modification you can use it in existing browsers.

Why should you be interested in XHTML? Consider the following:

There are so many capabilities you can work with in ImageMagick! We are going to study the most popular of them and then we will see how to use these features as programmers in our practical projects. Some of the topics and features that will be studied in this book are summarized as follows:

•    Format Conversion: Convert an image from one format to another (about 100 formats supported)

•    Text & Comments: Inserting descriptive or artistic text in images

Keeping in step with the mission and goals of the W3C, HTML continues to be an evolving technology. Indeed, since the early days of the Web, HTML has seen some major changes in both its infrastructure and its implementation. Given the explosive growth of the Web in general and the tremendous (did someone say infinite?) range of applications that are being Web enabled, HTML has needed to keep pace with these changes to deliver on its goal to be a primary vehicle for the successful implementation of all of the Web’s promises.

Along the way, the W3C has presented various recommendations and related initiatives and work on HTML and HTML-related standards. From early tag standards to the now recent pairing and collaboration with HXTML, there is much you should be aware of in terms of how HTML has developed and how that development has been spearheaded by the W3C in many cases.

The history of HTML has gone through four basic iterations over the past several years. They are