It’s All Greek To Me: Choosing the Right Web Language

If you are building your first website or working on your portfolio of thousands of pages, choosing the proper language which language will make up your site is one of the most important decisions you will make.  There are so many languages that compliment each other or clash.  Largely, your decision should be based on the functions and features you plan to implement as well as the knowledge you or your web designer have of your chosen language.  Also, you will want to ensure that your low cost web hosting supports your chosen language.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself or your web designer in the process of choosing a web language:

• Will my site need to communicate with a database? If so, what type of database?  Many websites rely on the functionality of a database to save and retrieve data.  Sites such as blogs, forums, and e-commerce stores simply could not function without utilizing a database.  However, languages like HTML, Javascript, and CSS are unable to interact with a database as they are mostly mark up and surface languages.
• Will my site need to be secure? If you are taking valuable information from your customers (such as credit card data or other confidential information), you will need to build your site on a language that take this security into account.  For example, you do not want to process a credit card authorization in a simple HTML form.  You would want to utilize something encrypts the data so you are not putting your customers or clients at risk.
• What kind of dynamic elements or animation will my page have? Flash sites have swept the internet by storm and are very aesthetically pleasing.  However, they require a completely different language, Actionscript, to be built upon.  Dynamic elements such as counters, clocks, shout boxes, roll-out menus, require a myriad of different languages such as CSS, Javascript, and PHP.
• How hard will the language be to update, troubleshoot, and modify? If I am hiring a web designer, will I need to re-hire him every time I need to make a change?  Is this within my budget?  Complex languages with all the bells and whistles come at a much higher cost.  They require more skill, time, and trouble shooting to utilize to their complete capabilities.
• Does my low cost web hosting support the language with which I would like to develop my website? Some languages such as PHP require server support and installation.  For example, if PHP is not installed on your low cost web hosting server, you will be unable to utilize it.

If you are a programming genius and ready to code your two page informational website in ASP or Coldfusion, you might want to reconsider.  Bigger, just because it is accessible, is not always better.  You can cut down on your costs by reducing the bandwidth and processing power needed to load your site by utilizing a simple markup language.  Over complicating your site can be just as bad as under facilitating your needs.

A brief list of available programming, scripting, multimedia and markup languages that can be utilized when building your website includes:

• HTML
• XML
• Javascript
• HTML DOM
• DHTML
• VBScript
• Ajax
• E4X
• WMLScript
• SQL
• ASP
• ADO
• PHP
• .NET
• SMIL
• SVG
• Flash

Along with support from your web hosting provider for these languages, you must also consider user support/browser support.  For example, Flash requires a plug-in to be installed on your viewer’s browser in order for the page to be displayed.  The Flash plug-in is fairly common in our current market, but it creates accessibility issues and can present a very large search engine optimization problem.  Search engines read the raw text and code of a website.  Since Flash is a multimedia application, the search engine cannot properly read its contents without some type of manual assistance.  This is just one of the many considerations to take in when utilizing more advanced programming languages.

A great deal of discount web hosting companies offer paid or free, but limited web consultation services.  Should the need arise, you might be more comfortable consulting an experienced web designer about the structure and architecture of your web presence.  Once your web site has been finalized, ensure that your affordable web hosting can fully support your site languages before bringing your site online.  Plenty of budget web hosting companies offer twenty-four hour technical assistance to answer questions like this so that you do not make a decision too quickly that could hamper your business.  In such an instant world, it is often difficult to stand back and evaluate the scenario before making a move.