PHP & Web Development

Web design is the process of designing a static web page using HTML (hyper text markup language), which is the standard language used for creating web pages.

Web development is about making an interactive web page, one that can change in response to user input. An example of this would be something like Yahoo's web page that can be tailored with the My Page option so only the information that you want to have on your opening page shows. This is generally managed through the use of a database that stores individual preferences for each person, so your Yahoo web page would look different than mine because we have different things that we are interested in different things.

How is something like this of use to you? Well, let's say that you offered personal information for people on the Stock Market, as an example. I would be interested in the 7 stocks that I am playing with, you would be interested in the 5 that you were working on. If you could sign in to the web page and have your specific information showing up and none of the other junk, that would be cool!

Or what if you had a database that had daily tips that it rotated through and you didn't want to have to actually go to your website and change it every day when it could be automated. And it can! You could make it so that if you have 200 tips that a random number generator would determine what the tip of the day was, or maybe you like to prepare tips in advance and so you set up two months worth of tips and they would be changed daily. Without you ever going to the website -- automatically. Neat, eh?

Now take this page that you are reading right now. This is a static HTML page. Why am I using that when I am pushing for web development pages using PHP? Speed in loading. How long did it take for this page to show on your computer? Probably under 1 second. It's fast. Also because there are limited graphics on the page also. As soon as you get fancier pages they will take marginally longer to load, and the number of images that you include will also increase the length of the loading. To see what I mean about a dynamic web page, click on the this link to see what I am talking about, and then compare it to what you were just seeing here.

A PHP web development page to compare to this oh so dreary page you are looking at now

Want More Information? Please contact us: Ask for more Info

Back to Top

Home