Choosing Website Codes: What Code Should my Website be Based on?

There are several different types of coding used to build websites. The basic code is HTML, which is still used for simple sites, and virtually all sites, including blogs, include some HTML.

However, HTML is rather cumbersome, because every page has to be built individually. If you decide to change the header, then every page has to be changed separately, which wastes a lot of time. And believe me, you will make changes.

For that reason, PHP is now very popular. In PHP, things like the header, footer, navigation, etc are all written as separate files, and then just called up on the page. This is called PHP with includes, and it is a very efficient way of coding a site. One advantage is that when the search engines crawl the pages, they see all the code as the page appears to a visitor. This makes PHP pages as search engine friendly as HTML.

There are some other options. PHP can be used to create dynamic sites that are based on a database, but ASPX is often used instead. In this case, every page is created from the database when it is asked for by the searcher. This can be search-engine friendly, but you need some care in the design.

There are options, including Flash. Flash renders all the content of the page, or the part of a page, as an image, which means that it cannot be read by the search engine bots, so it should only be used for parts of the page. For example, you might want to have a slide show of images in Flash, which is fine, so long as Flash is limited to those images only. If you use it for the whole page not only will it load very slowly, and you don't want that, but it will also make the whole page meaningless to the search engine bots.

One more alternative is JavaScript, which is very efficient for some things you might need on your site. Again, JavaScript is fine for small parts of a page, and is very commonly used these days, but as the search engine bots can't read that either, which is why it was used some years ago to write code that would be invisible to the search engines. In other words, it was used so they would not know that you were redirecting to another page, which was hidden, for example.

However, these days, Google bots can read that much JavaScript! If you do have JavaScript on the site, again limit it to where it is needed.

Overall, PHP is the best form of coding, as it is efficient, and simplifies the design, and ASPX can have a place with some types of sites.