Make your website dynamic

Make your site dynamic! “What do you mean by a dynamic website?” – A website integrated with the database to generate information that visitors see is called a dynamic website. The antonym of dynamic website is a static website, which means that information displayed on the web pages is hard coded in them.

There are many benefits of having a dynamic website – the webmaster can make easy updates to information without fiddling with the source code of the website, generating different forms of information depending upon the visitor or input without creating separate pages for each possible output, give flexibility of adding as many pages as required without manually generating pages and uploading on the server, consistency while displaying information through out the website can be maintained, can offer different features for different type of users to avail services from the website respective to there domain, and the list goes on……

“How can a website be made dynamic?” – Embedding database related codes of any server side scripting language to the pages of website makes the website dynamic. Possible options for the server side scripting language you can use for your website depends on the operating system of the server on which your site is hosted. For Windows based server commonly used languages include PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, C#, Cold fusion etc., and for the Linux based server the options are PHP, Perl, Python, etc.

A considerable number of server side scripting languages are available to choose from but I am found of PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and always suggest it as the scripting language, the reasons for this liking are: -

a) First it runs on Linux as well as Windows server.

b) It’s a freeware so no cost of purchasing

c) The syntax is easy to learn and get used to.

d) It has a wide range of in-built features

e) Offers connectivity with most of the available database servers

f) Easy installation on server and easy configuration with other third party components

g) Is an object oriented programming language

h) It does not require any plug-in on client’s machine to get executed, it is complied on the server end and outputs the result in the form of HTML.

There are many such features which makes PHP not just my favorite but is a preferred language of many web developers.

“How to check if your server support PHP or not?” – Copy the piece of code below in a text editor and save the file as phpinfo.php, now upload it on your web server in the folder where you upload HTML pages. If it’s root of the server then type the URL http://www.yourdomainname.com/phpinfo.php in the address bar. If the output is a configuration then it means your server supports PHP and if it prompts to save the file then your server does not support PHP, you will have to ask your ISP to enable it for your domain.

<?
   phpinfo();
   ?>

Go to http://www.php.net/ to find more, learn and download PHP. Give it a try and you will realize how easy it is to use and to what extent it gives you the flexibility to make your website interactive and feature rich.

Maneet Puri having an extensive experience of web based applications has assisted him to implement various knowledge driven process for his clients, and at the same time he provides consultancy to his clients for their website maintenance. With this expertise he has successfully added KPO and website maintenance as verticals to the Web Development company he is heading.