Choosing a Website Developer
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Web Development has generally come to be known as a broad term used to describe all the areas of developing a website for the World Wide Web. This can include the graphical content, coding, backend programming and Web server configuration. Amongst web professionals however, this term is used more specifically to refer to the non-design aspects of building web pages, for example writing mark-up languages and coding. Web design is therefore more concerned with the look and design of the final product, whereas development deals more with how a web site functions behind the scenes.
Over the last 10 years web development has grown from a fledgling industry into one of the fastest growing and most important aspects of our modern lifestyle. Where in 1995 there were less than 1000 web development companies in the USA, over 30000 were known in 2005, and this figure is expected to grow by over 20% by 2010. The growth of this industry is being spurred on by large businesses who recognise the power of the online market and wish to automate as much of their business workflow as possible.
It therefore goes without saying that in order to run a successful company in today's digitally dominated market place, one needs to have an effective web presence which makes use of the most relevant technologies in the web development field, such as search engine optimisation; web coding technologies, i.e. PHP, ASP, SQL and Javascript; software design and e-commerce systems. Whereas the initial design and layout of your website plays an undeniably important role in the way potential clients perceive your company and product, it is the interactive user experience, as well as the information you as a business can gather from these user experiences, that will assist in developing and improving your web site as a powerful tool to your organisation.
There are many companies today offering services in web development, and in order to understand which one will be the best choice to your organisation, you need to first have a basic idea of specifically what it is that you require. There are many backend technologies that provide effective ways of assisting in the way information is relayed and gathered through your website. It goes without saying that different companies are aimed at different markets, and therefore need to provide and retrieve different kinds of information based on their individual needs.
Some of the most common scripting languages used in web development today are PHP, ASP, SQL, and JavaScript. Below follows a brief description of each of these and their predominant use in websites.
PHP (Hypertext Processor) - is an open source reflective programming language. It was originally designed by the Danish-Canadian Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to display his CV on a dynamic web page and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his site was receiving. It has since then evolved into a high level scripting language for producing dynamic web pages. PHP is used mainly in server-side application software, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. The PHP model can be seen as an alternative to other frameworks such as Microsoft's ASP.NET, ColdFusion and Sun Microsystems' JSP.
ASP (Active Server Pages) is Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically generated web pages. Programming websites using ASP is made easier by the fact that it has built in objects. These objects correspond to groups of functionality frequently used in the creation of dynamic websites. It has to be noted that although ASP.NET takes its name from ASP, the two differ significantly. The latter is a set of web development technologies marketed by Microsoft.
Choosing a Website Developer (Part 2) >>
