Web Programming For Online Marketing Strategy
Website programming, as distinguished from website design, is interested in creating functionality. Good web programming can make a web site both easier to maintain and easier to use, while creating more reasons for people to use the site in the first place. Programming is also a vital part of the website’s marketing strategies because it [...]
Website programming, as distinguished from website design, is interested in creating functionality. Good web programming can make a web site both easier to maintain and easier to use, while creating more reasons for people to use the site in the first place. Programming is also a vital part of the website’s marketing strategies because it allows you to automate user interface aspects that will entice the search engines to do your bidding.
Website programming takes a number of forms: front-end, JavaScript-type web programming; back-end, server-side web programming; and database programming, which is a type of server-based web programming.
The Online Website Marketing Front-End Strategy
Front-end website programming deals with creating useful interface elements and increasing the usability of stock HTML elements. A large part of this type of web programming that used to be handled with JavaScript is now created using pure CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The added hassle of making CSS work in multiple browsers is generally far less than the added hassle of doing the same in JavaScript, and of maintaining the endless, ugly, browser-detecting trash JavaScript code that was once necessary for, say, an image rollover or a drop-down menu.
Back-end, server-side website programming can be extremely useful for maintaining client sessions, separating content from formatting where doing so with CSS would still take up more time than it would save, and managing large amounts of information or structurally complex pieces of information. However, with server-side website programming you are faced with the issue of what language to use. Currently, PHP is the best general-purpose server-side web programming language, being the most widely supported and most reliable.
Programming For An Online Website Marketing Strategy
With WYSIWYG-type web programming systems like Tango and ColdFusion, development time for simple projects is often much faster than with full web programming languages, but this initial gain in programming speed is frequently lost entirely once a project reaches a certain level of complexity. The website programmer will frequently find himself forced to work around bugs in the proprietary system that do not exist in an open-source system like PHP.
The next step up in web programming systems is Microsoft’s ASP and .NET technologies, which have more potential to adequately handle complex systems than the simpler proprietary web programming systems, but suffer from the fact that they are produced by Microsoft. This means, as is the rule with Microsoft products, that they are somewhat more bloated than web programming languages need to be. It also means that when bugs arise, you are stuck with them until Microsoft’s programmers are able to discover and fix them. This is not the case with PHP. We always recommend PHP for server-side website programming projects.
Databases For Online Website Marketing
An offshoot of server-side website programming is database programming for the web. Website database programming is ideal when you are dealing with a large amount of data that must be relatively simple to update or find new ways to represent, such as online magazines or catalogs. Database programming for the web is done using the same server-side web programming languages as any other server-side web programming technology.
These are the nuts and bolts of your website marketing strategy. Even though marketing doesn’t seem to enter the equation, it is with you at every step. The programmer and the website marketer should be friends.