Flow Fire

Archive for November, 2011

In the website design world it is not surprising to find website design professionals arguing about the merits of Macs or PCs when it comes to designing websites. It is true that both systems have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to creating graphics and performing the programming that is necessary for any website design to take place. It is also true that in many cases, you will find both platforms in the offices of professional web design companies. However, for the average person who may be trying to design their own site, this dual technology may simply be something that they cannot afford.

Why do they use both platforms?
Because these systems engender so much loyalty in their users it can be surprising that you would find both in a design office. However, when you consider that a website will be viewed on both systems you will see why it is important for website design professionals to be able to view their work on both a Mac and a PC. However, unless you have access to both platforms, knowing which may suit you best is important. Here are a few things to consider.

The Apple Macintosh
This has long been the system of choice for website designers and graphic design professionals in general. Macs have long been the top choice because they enable a designer to edit images and make changes at an incredibly rapid rate. In this they still outshine many of the PCs that are being created today.

In the past, the image editing software that was best for creating images and programming websites was only available on a Mac. This has since changed and programs such as those made by Adobe are now available for PC as well. However, you can expect to pay a premium price for these machines. They can be substantially more expensive, especially for a Power Mac that has the computing speed and memory to be able to work with large images and the programs used to edit or create them.

The PC
This is an affordable solution that is generally much less expensive than a Mac would be. In addition, many people who will be viewing your site will be doing so from a PC. Therefore, creating your website design on a PC so that you can see what it will look like when it is live can be incredibly useful.

Now that PCs are capable of running many of the same programs that a Mac can (such as Adobe and CorelDRAW) they are quickly beginning to hold their own in the website design arena. They also tend to be good all-purpose machines making them appealing to any company that needs their computers to do more than just graphic design.

By choosing the right technology you will often find that the website design process can go quite quickly and that it will be easier to build the kind of website you want to promote your company and the goods or services that it offers.

If you don’t update your website regularly, then it is not achieving its full potential. Search engines, and people, look for new content, and if your website is ‘stale’ it is obvious to all. By building your own website you have control over content, and can update it whenever you like.

That, of course, raises an issue. What can you do to enable a constant stream of updates to your website that will show that it is fresh and up to date? Well, on of the ways is to use an automated scheduler.

Be Prepared

Sometimes when you’re creating content for your website, you work in quick spurts. It’s possible to add a lot of content at one time. Its best though that you don’t publish all of that content at one time. First of all, regular visitors to your site may get lost in the deluge, and second, if you space out your updates, your website will always have new content.

So, how do you make sure that all of your content is spaced out at proper intervals? That automated scheduler we talked about earlier. Using a scheduler, you can set up exact publishing times for content, whether it be every day, every week, even every hour. Also, scheduled publishing can incorporate seasonal changes.

Maybe you want to have certain color schemes or graphics for one part of the year, then maybe a few snow-related graphics for winter, well you can do it with the scheduler. Or maybe you’re running an arts and crafts website and you want to have different articles and how-to instructions for different holidays. Well you can set the scheduler to add the relevant content at the exact time that you want it.

Easy Up

Getting your website updated, or even published for the first time, is very easy with a web design program that is designed to work with FTPs (File Transfer Protocol). Once you have a domain name, you can simply enter your username and password into the web design program and it will take care of everything for you. No tedious transfer of individual files, no getting your site up and then realizing that you forgot an image file that makes your site look horrible.

If you have the top website design program on your side, all you need to do is click your mouse to load all of the files needed to automatically upload your web pages.

The chi-square distribution is commonly used to make inferences about a population variance.

If a population follows the normal distribution, you can draw a sample of size N from this distribution and form the sum of the squared standardized scores (chi-square). This random variable chi-square follows the chi-square probability distribution with n degrees of freedom (df ), where n is a positive integer equal to N-1. The degrees of freedom parameter determines the shape of the distribution. With more degrees of freedom, the skew is less.

CHIDIST

The CHIDIST function returns the area in the upper tail of the chi-square distribution. You use the CHIDIST function the same way you would use a chi-square distribution table. The CHIDIST function uses the following syntax:

=CHIDIST (x, df)

For example, if you pull a random sample of 16 from a population and want to find the probability of a sample chi-square value (x) 25 or larger, you would enter:

=CHIDIST (25,15)

The function returns the value 0.049943, meaning that a value of 25 or more should in the long run occur about five times in a hundred.

CHIINV

You can use the CHIINV function to create confidence interval estimates of a population variance. That is, you use the CHIDIST function if you know x and want to find the probability, and you use the CHIINV function if you have a probability and want to find x. For example, if you’re creating a product and weigh a sample of 18 units to find a sample variance of 0.36, you may want to construct a 90% confidence interval estimate of the population variance for the product. With a sample size of 18, you have 17 degrees of freedom.

To find the upper limit, enter:

=CHIINV (0.95,17)

To find the lower limit, enter:

=CHIINV (0.05,17)

These formulas return the values 8.67175 and 27.5871. Multiply the sample variance of 0.36 by the degrees of freedom and divide this product by each of the values returned from the CHIINV function to find the lower and upper limits of the confidence interval. You can take the square root of these values to establish interval estimates of the population standard deviation.

CHITEST

The chi-square test is used to test independence of two variables. You can use the chi-square test to determine whether there is a significant difference between observed and expected frequencies. For example, if you want to find out whether soft drink preference differs between male and female drinkers, you can construct a null hypothesis that soft drink preference is independent of the gender of the drinker, and create a worksheet range, or table, of expected results based on a sample of 93 male drinkers and 85 female drinkers. You can then create a table of the results of the actual study findings.

TIP: You can use the Microsoft Excel Fisher’s test function instead of the chi-square test for analyzing contingency tables with two rows and two columns. Fisher’s test always returns the exact P value, whereas the chi-square test returns only an approximate p value. Definitely avoid the chi-square test when the numbers in the contingency table are very small (in the single digits).

The CHITEST formula uses the following syntax:

=CHITEST (actual range, expected range)

where actual range is the data in the actual sample results table and expected range is the data from the expected results table.

The formula returns the p-value. You reject the null hypothesis if this value is less than your level of significance alpha. So if your level of significance is .05, you would reject it, but not if your level of significance is .025 or .01. The test for independence is a one-tailed test, so a level of significance of .05 corresponds with a 95% confidence level.