My Digital Weblog

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Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a means of advertising through digital channels such as websites, social media, search engines, mobile applications and emails. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavour that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how customers behave compared to traditional marketing. As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people increasingly use digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent.

With the use of online media channels, digital marketing is the method by which organisations endorse brands, goods and services, whereby consumers heavily relies on digital means to research about the products of their choice. In order to achieve the true potential of digital marketing, marketers have to dig deep to discover strategies that will make an impact to the products they advertise. One of the key objectives of modern digital marketing is to raise brand awareness, the extent to which customers and the general public are familiar with and recognise a particular brand. Enhancing brand awareness is important in digital marketing, and marketing in general, because of its impact on brand perception and consumer decision-making.

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Blockchain and Digital Identity

Digital identities are comparable to real-world identities used by people around the world today: driver's licenses, passports, passwords, and so on. A lot of websites today demand some form of verification from customers, one of which is KYC ( Know Your Customer). As a result of this we leave private and personal information in the care of “trusted” parties.

Every time we take action online we leave a considerable amount of digital footprint. The more platforms used, the more digital footprint will be left. Internet platforms that deals with payment transactions such as PayPal, cryptocurrency exchanges, Amazon Pay, Square, Stripe, and Venmo require users to disclose personal and financial data in order to use these services. The problem of the conventional identity system is that human data is always stored in different databases, and generated at different times. Some personal data changes over time (e.g. residential addresses) and therefore it is not the same in all databases. The result is that many individuals ‘digital clones’ already exist across different databases.

Many blockchain solution has been proposed to this effect, but there is one that is of interest to me which is Hydrogen Platform and Snowflake Identity Protocol. Blockchain is a technology utilised by digital currencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and the likes). The technology allows digital information to be shared, but not ‘copied’. This means that each piece of data can only have one owner.

Individual Identities is safe on the blockchain as it is nearly impossible to hack and the data is not stored in one location (database), but on different databases. If I can edit my Identity and it reflects on all the websites that have my identity/information without having to edit my address in say 100 different websites, this make identity verification easier and efficient. With the rise in blockchain technology, I believe it will be used for digital identities in the nearest future.

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Content Management System

A Content Management System (popularly abbreviated as CMS) is a software application that help users to create, manage and modify content on a website without altering any code. One can run this software application without the need for a specialised technical knowledge, because it helps you build a website even if you don’t know how to code or not familiar with any programming language. It also allows multiple contributors to create, edit and publish contents. Having a content management system for your website allows you to have control of your content. Apart from web content management, CMS as well deals with other functions like Document management. 

A Content Management System typically has two major components: A Content Management Application (CMA) and A Content Delivery Application (CDA). The Content Management Application allow users to add, remove, and modify contents from a website without any permission, while A Content Delivery Application compiles the content and updates the website. WordPress is an example of a Content Management System that was built with PHP and MySQL. There are other CMS like Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Squarespace, Wix, Ghost etc. Prior to working with WordPress in my Web Authoring Module, I made use of Wix to design and manage my personal website. You can learn more about CMS HERE.

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E-COMMERCE

DO YOU KNOW ABOUT E-COMMERCE OR E-COMMERCE WEBSITES?

E-commerce is also known as Electronic Commerce and it is an act of buying and selling of products and services online or over the internet. Electronic Commerce is not just all about online or internet marketing, it also makes use of technologies such as online transaction processing, electronic funds transfer, electronic data interchange, supply chain management, mobile commerce, automated data collection systems, inventory management systems and lot more.

Also, Modern Electronic Commerce uses the World Wide Web (www) for transactions, even though it may also make use of other technologies like email. Amazon is an example of e-commerce website and you can purchase various products, books, music and download it in form of a digital distribution such as iTunes store, flight tickets, financial services like stock investing, cryptocurrencies, online banking, as such it is considered as a very disruptive technology.

It is therefore obvious that e-commerce is responsible for our participation in online marketplace, our buying and selling, online shopping through websites or mobile applications, our conversations through voice assistants, live chats, chatbots etc, foreign exchange trade, gathering of demographic data through the web and social media. It is clear that e-commerce is huge because almost everything can be purchased through e-commerce today, and this is powered by the web and the internet.

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MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

It’s about to be a long story 😊

Today, I want to share with you the book I read by Howard Gardner named “Multiple Intelligences” which also talked about the future minds, and the characteristics and expectations of 21st century learners (The App Generation). I am inspired by this particular book because it explains intelligence in not just a single viewpoint, but the writer presented it from multitude of viewpoints which gave me a greater understanding of the book. Now, I understand that Multiple Intelligence (MI) is in different categories, and an individual may be very good in one area of intelligence and not so good in another, but the human brain works in diverse ways and can accommodate variety of things. Multiple intelligence is categorized into various types and there are different ways we human beings portray these various intelligences.

The first is the Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, which is the intelligence of some individuals who are predicted to be good in calculations, coding, programming etc. The second is the Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence, which is the intelligence of individuals who are upright in languages, history, literature etc. The third is the Musical-Rhythmic Intelligence, which is the capacity to understand, criticise and make music. The fourth is the Visual-Spatial Intelligence, which is the ability to find your way around environments to manipulate spatial configuration in your mind. For example, an artist.

The book also pointed out that in this generation, we see digital things doing the work, which has made things seem easier, just like the Mathematical Intelligence where you see a lot of young people making use of digital devices like calculator. The Bodily-kinaesthetic Intelligence is the fifth and it deals with using the whole body to make or solve things. There is also the Interpersonal Intelligence, which is about how an individual understands other people while the Intrapersonal Intelligence is about understanding yourself. There is also the Naturalistic Intelligence that helps one to make significant difference in the world of nature, for example, between animals, plants etc. The intelligence that got me so into this book is the Existential Intelligence. This is the intelligence of philosophical questions like: What is the purpose of our existence?, Why do we die?, What will happen to us afterwards? Etc. Now, I understand the fact that intelligence should be weighed by how we deal with things.

Also, I learnt about the future minds i.e. the minds of the 21st century learners which contains skills, values, attitudes and knowledge. These minds are categorized into five types. The discipline mind which deals with the mind that masters major schools of thought, the synthesizing mind is the mind that has the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines, the creativity mind is the mind that has the ability to solve problems, the respectful mind is the mind that appreciates human nature and the ethical mind is the mind of self-fulfilment.

This book is so enlightening. It opened my mind to a lot of things. It also talked about the fact that the characteristics and expectation of the 21st century generation of learners are based on smart phones, mobile devices and the internet. Young people now rely on applications to tell them what to do and how to do it. We are known to be app-dependent rather than being app-able i.e. learners are more graphic creative rather than being literature creative by depending on software to teach and learn. This generation prefers an online interaction to a face to face contact, and feel much better communicating on social media. This is so true! I hope you learnt something... By the way, what category of intelligence are you?

[mydigitalweblog]

Digital News

You may have probably heard a lot of news about Brexit... Yeah! Britain Exit (Brexit) was the withdrawal of the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 (UK) from the European Union 🇪🇺 (EU) and the European Atomic Energy Community at the end of 31st January, 2020 under Boris Johnson’s Government. Till date, the UK is the first and only country formally to leave the EU, after 47 years of membership within the European Union. Do you still hope or think that the UK will return to EU? Drop your thoughts in the comment section ✌🏽

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Static and Dynamic Websites

Hello Everyone... Welcome to ✨2021 ✨💃🏽

This is the first day of the year, and I’m here to give you a brief difference between a static and a dynamic website. I’m so excited! I hope you are...

Static in a neutral sense means fixed, while dynamic means flexible (That’s understandable). A static website is a website with contents that appears in the same way for every user because it is usually created with HTML and CSS in a simple text editor, while a dynamic website on the other hand is more complex and functional because its contents are displayed in different forms and interactions based on the website algorithm, and it is created with advance databases and programming along with the HTML and CSS. 

So basically... A static website uses only client-side HTML and CSS but a dynamic website uses both client-side and server-side languages like PHP and MySQL. The choice of a static or a dynamic website depends on the purpose of the website.

You can learn more here!

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Responsive Web Design

WHY THE NEED FOR A RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN ?

Prior to 2010, majority of websites were designed for desktop, laptops and other ‘large’ screen devices, but due to the proliferation of smart phones, tablets, and other mobile devices, users started opening websites on their phone browsers which wasn’t responsive enough at that time. Then, web developers came up with the idea of creating website in a more responsive manner, that will be compatible with different screen sizes.

A responsive website is flexible in nature, and it is all about creating web pages that looks good on all devices. It is an approach that proposes that web design should respond to user’s behaviour and platform based on screen size and orientation. To design a website, there should be a width either in pixels or percentages, but to design a responsive website, the width must always be in percentages because it is the fraction of a unit. Media queries are utilised in creating a responsive web design and it is more like an ‘if statement’ that tells the website the type of display that should be delivered based on screen size and other parameters given in the media query. There is usually a breaking point when the design starts being inconsistent with the screen size. These breaking points (values) are noted and serves as the basis for the media query. 

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WEBPAGE VS WEBSITE ~ THE DIFFERENCE !

If you are new to the digital world or not, you might be making this common mistake of interchanging webpage and website. Yea, I have experienced this severally because they seemed the same to me, but now I know these two words are different. The thing is, once you know the difference, you’ll understand why you should differentiate them. So let’s learn this together! A webpage is like the page of a book containing informations, while a website is the book itself. Did you get that? Okay! To be clearer, a website can have several webpages that starts with the same url but with different endings. For example: www.bunmi.com/about, www.bunmi.com/product, www.bunmi.com/contact us. All these are webpages of a single website www.bunmi.com. Knowing this can help in the aspects of digital media campaigns, I remember looking for a product online and google directed me to a webpage were the product was, google didn’t direct me to the website for me to start searching... isn’t that amazing?

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HTML to CSS

In my previous posts, I’ve been writing about HTML but now let’s talk briefly about CSS. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets with an emphasis placed on the “Style”. While HTML is used to structure a web document, with structure elements like (header, meta, nav, div, main, article, aside, footer etc), CSS gives style to the document with colors, fonts, page layouts etc. I would say that HTML is the foundation of a web development while aesthetic comes into the website with the use of CSS, because CSS brings in style to your web pages by interacting with HTML elements. For example, in HTML, paragraphs are created using <p>Hello Everyone</p>, but you can give style to the paragraph by changing the color and font size using p { color: blue; font-size: 10px; }. Also, to use an external style sheet by adding CSS to HTML, you will need to link the CSS file to the HTML file using: <link rel=“stylesheet” href=“style.css”>. The “link” helps to link the HTML file to the CSS file in relationship “rel” to the stylesheet located at the hyperlink reference “href” which is named style.css in my example. Though, it could be anything else that you wish to name it, but must end with “.css”. 

You can learn more on: https://www.w3schools.com/css/

[mydigitalweblog]

Great Web Development Software for Web Developers

WordPress – It is the most popular online publishing platform, which currently powers more than a third of the internet. With WordPress, you can start a blog or create a website in minutes without any technical knowledge. WP is a blogging platform developed in PHP language and supports building your website on your own server with PHP / MySQL database. As one of the best web development tools, the software can be used as a CMS (content management system) to set up a business website. Almost everything on WordPress.com is free, and what is currently free will remain free. 

Mockplus – It focuses on tools for fast design, effective collaboration, and graphic design system. It also provide web developers with an all-in-one product design platform to design faster, smarter, and simpler web design templates with drag-and-drop simplicity, mobile support, and customisable desktop services with a mission to keep users focused on the design itself and not the tool. The software has delivered a host of unparalleled features for better design and development.

Adobe Dreamweaver – This is a web development tool from Adobe Systems, available for both macOS and Windows. It allows users to create and publish web pages almost anywhere and it supports HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more. It is one of the most reliable web development tools I know. In addition, it provides a pleasant environment for working on the Internet, which is combined with a code editor with live view. Another great feature of the software is that it offers a free trial, which gives you time to test and see if it is right for you.

Figma - It helps team and individuals create, test and produce the best designs from start to finish. It is a visual design application that runs in a browser, but it's actually much more than that. I will say this is probably the best tool for team based business projects. It provides you with all the tools you need for the design part of a project, including vector tools that can fully describe such as scripting capabilities and code generation. Although Figma is a browser-based platform, there is a desktop version for Windows and Mac OS. 

Bootstrap - Bootstrap is a free and open source CSS framework that first refers to mobile and responsive web development. It has standard CSS and JavaScript design templates for writing, forms, buttons, navigation and other visual components. Bootstrap is a popular and powerful framework designed for future developers to create beautiful web page layouts including HTML, CSS and JS. With the most advanced development features, Bootstrap has been well received by discerning users around the world.

MAMP - MAMP is a free local server environment that you can install on macOS and Windows with just a few clicks. MAMP provides users with all the tools they need to run WordPress on a desktop PC for testing or development purposes. For example, using your local NAMO DNS server, you can easily test your services on mobile devices. It doesn't matter if you prefer a web or Nginx server as your data server in addition to MySQL, or if you want to work with PHP, Python, Perl or Ruby.

Codepen - CodePen is a web development community for learning, testing, and discovering future code to learn and fix. It is a friendly development environment for future designers and developers to find design examples and inspiration. It allows users to write code in a browser and see the results as it is typed. It is a useful and standalone online code editor for developers of any intellect, and it is especially powerful for those learning code. It mainly focuses on future languages ​​such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and older syntax.

Weebly – It is the simplest and one of the most popular website development tool among people looking to start their own sites. Weebly is easy to use and targets personal, business and fitness websites. Most of all, it gives you the opportunity to do fieldwork without any experience whatsoever, choosing to edit HTML / CSS if you have programming experience.

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Art and The Digital World

Is Digital Technology transforming the art world?

Digital Technology is at the core of significant change in many areas of our lives even in the cultural field made up of tangible pieces of art. Digital art such as 3D virtual reality (VR) or computer graphic techniques, has become a medium that are now enabling artists to revolutionise traditional art forms. It is essentially a new tool that will serve a variety of artistic needs to push the barriers of creation and imagination. Now, anyone with a computer can draw and paint, which means that art is becoming less exclusive and therefore losing a sense of uniqueness or beauty, but some people believe that this is an opportunity for the young generation to use the knowledge of digital tools to deepen their interest in art and to enrich artistic emotions and experience. 

One thing I know for sure is that if you don’t understand something, you can’t create based on it. It is important to communicate these technological concept to artists, or in the long term they will have to rely on commercially produced templates to create their art. It is like the difference between knowing how to code your own website, and having to use a template someone else made. Digital art is really moving fast, new ways of promoting, selling and creating are quickly emerging and evolving. Websites like artsy is a great example of where you can showcase your work. Many people believe that technology is killing the traditional form of visual art. However, the limitless bounds of the digital world are actually expanding and transforming creativity. It is inspiring more people and creating a new form of art that will live on for centuries.

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DIGITAL MEDIA AND THE APP GENERATION

We are in the app generation and some would say this generation is totally involved with digital media. I recently read a book by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis named “The App Generation”, and this book explores what it means to be app-dependent versus app-enabled and how life in this generation differs from life before the digital era. It contains three vital areas of the adolescent life, which is identity, intimacy, and imagination, and there was a unique comparison of these areas before and after the digital revolution. It also shows that there are benefits of the apps: they can promote a strong sense of identity, allow deep relationships, and stimulate creativity. The challenge of this is that these apps go beyond the ways that the apps are designed to be used, and the power it produces are becoming wide in the view of greater creativity. Basically, these apps are now used as dependent crutches rather than just tools and some people now rely on applications to tell them what to do and how to do it.

There is no doubt that every generation marches to its own beat, and there are generation gap that exists in every generation. The context today is the changes that these software applications ‘apps’ have made in our lives and lifestyles because this is a generation that has grown up with an emotional aesthetic as instrumental as the technology. Still, we are responsible individually and in our communities and families to use technology in ways that open up the world rather than close it down. 

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The Internet of Things

So... let’s take a break from all the html stuffs. Do you know about IoT?

The Internet of Things or IoT contains everything connected to the internet, and it is made up of devices connected together. By the combination of these devices, it becomes possible to gather information, analyse it and create an action, which helps an individual to achieve a particular goal. This means that IoT is all about devices, networks, and data. The internet of things is making the world around us more smarter and responsive, merging the digital and physical universe. The term IoT is mainly used for devices that wouldn’t usually be generally expected to have an internet connection. Do you know what IoT does? It integrates the interconnectedness of human culture - our ‘things’ with the interconnectedness of our digital information system - ‘the internet’, that’s the IoT. Also, IoT is increasingly being used to define objects that talk to each other. It is made up of devices from simple sensors to smartphones and wearables all connected together. For example, my iPhone is connected to my mac, my AirPods and my watch. That is the connectivity I’m talking about. 

The IoT was initially most interesting to business and manufacturing, where its application is sometimes known as machine-to-machine, but the emphasis is now on filling our homes and offices with smart devices, transforming it into something that’s relevant to almost everyone. I hope you have the basic knowledge of IoT, as it is getting bigger and they are already more connected things than people in the world because it bridges the gap between the digital world and the physical world. Cheers!

[mydigitalweblog]

How to add links and images in html

Today’s post is about links and images in html 🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽Do you know the importance of links and images on a website? So let’s get straight to the point.

Links are created using <a></a> element, and the landing place of the link is controlled by an href attribute. This href is an hyperlink reference. There are two types of URL, the absolute and relative URL. An absolute URL is the entire address from the protocol (https) to the domain name (www.google.com). Basically, it's the full URL of the page that you link to. The relative URL, on the other hand, does not use the full web address and only contains the location following the domain. It assumes that the link you add is on the same site and is part of the same root domain. The relative path starts with the forward slash and leads the browser to stay within the current site. I also found out that a target attribute is used with a blank value as: <a href="https://google.com" target="_blank">Google</a>, in order for the URL to open in a new tab, so that users will not leave the website to another website, and this is mostly done when a link directs you to an external website.

Images are represented by <img> together with the source. For example, <img src =“boy.jpg”>, which shows that the image file is in the same location as the html file, but if the file is in a subfolder (e.g. images), then it will be <img src=“images/boy.jpg”>, and the alt attribute comes in as <img src=“images”/boy.jpg”alt=“A Boy”>. The alt attribute specifies an alternate text for the image, peradventure the image cannot be displayed. The alt attribute provides alternative information for the image, and if a user for some reason cannot view it (because of slow connection, an error in the src attribute, or if the user uses a screen reader. The alt attribute is basically for visual reason. You can also wrap images inside figure elements, and a figcaption is placed inside the figure element, and what it does is to give caption to images.

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Basic elements in html

So far in HTML, I have learnt that HTML documents consist of a tree of elements which are the foundation of web pages. These elements include paragraphs, headings, images, links etc. Then tags are used to determine the start and end of these elements. Most elements have a start tag to indicate where they begin, and an end tag to indicate where they end. A start tag is represented with <tag> while an end tag is represented with </tag>. HTML tags are like keywords that are hidden within the web pages. It tells the browser how the content should be formatted to display it. Every tag has its own meaning.

The first thing to be seen in an HTML document is <!DOCTYPE html> which shows that the file is an HTML document. Then the <head> </head> which contains the <title> </title>, and the <body> </body> which has all the contents of the documents like paragraphs (<p> </p>), headings (<h1> </h1) to (<h6> </h6>), the higher the number, the smaller the heading. Attribute is very important in HTML because it provides an added information about the content of the document. For example <html lang=“en” which shows that the document is in English language. Comments can as well be used in HTML like this: <!comment>. There are also semantic elements which adds expression to HTML documents. For example <strong> </strong> for bold, <em> </em> for emphasized text like italics etc. <blockquotes> </blockquotes> elements are used for long quotes. To break a line into another line, <br> is used without an end tag. Also, to create a list <ol> </ol> or <ul> </ul> is used for ordered or unordered list i.e. numbered or bullet list. For each item on the list, <li> </li> element is used.

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My understanding on how HTML works

I thought HTML was difficult but when I started learning it online, before I started learning it in college, I realised that it wasn’t so difficult. Now learning HTML in college makes it more remarkable, clear and exciting because having my course mates around makes it easy to understand with various questions and answers. I feel super confident about how my web development journey is going. Just so you know, HTML is a markup language. A markup language is a way of using a text to describe information, and it functions by the use of elements and tags. The code may seem a bit overwhelming if you are starting out, but the main point is that this code is an HTML document and your browser is translating this code into the webpage that you see. 

HTML is a language of content and structure. The content for example includes things like text, images and links while the structure is whether a particular bit of text is an heading or a paragraph. For example, if you are creating a text-based document using Microsoft word, your document would include a main heading that describes what the document is about, it may also include sub-headings and different sections of the document, and then a body. Yeah, that is how HTML works. I learnt a brief part of CSS to be the style of language i.e. how the content is presented. For example, its colour, size, position etc, but for now, I will be concentrating on the content and structure first.