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Website development is the process of creating a website. This article discusses the non-technical aspects of Website development that should be known to customers of a website development company. A website is a collection of web pages that can be seen within a web browser. Your website is essentially your place to publish information about what you do, what you sell or what you want to “promote”.

What is a web page ?
The smallest unit or instance of internet for a internet user is called a web page. Just like the smallest instance of a book for a reader is a single page in a book. Unlike normal paperback pages, web pages have a lot more to offer.

A web page on the internet can contain text, images, videos, links, animations, resources/files or interactive components. Just like a normal book allows the reader to move from one page to another, links of web pages enable a user to move from one page to another. Links(technical term hyper links) are jump points that a user simply needs to “click” to reach another page. A link on the internet will usually contain an under line or a mouse over hover effect(hover effect means the link will flicker or change form when you fly your mouse over it.

Resources on a page may include links to download-able files , documents, software etc.

In a paperback book, you can usually read content. However, some pages in the book, may also require you to fill data, a crossword puzzle for instance. These are called interactive pages. Unlike books however, web pages are also capable of displaying results based on the data that your fill in. Such pages that “generate” data from your input are called “dynamic” pages. Dynamic pages may also read inputs from “databases”. A database is essentially a collection of data stored in a particular format. For instance, A database of books, might contain BookID, BookName, AuthorName, BookPrice, BookDescription. Information about a sinle book in a database is called a “record”. There fore a database is also a collection of records! More details on databases and their connection with website is described later in this section under the topic “database driven website”. For now, a webpage that reads information from a single record from a database and displays it on the internet browser is a dynamic page.

How does the web page know which book to display on the web page ?
The book to display is identified by a paramater which is “unique” for every record. The webpage accepts a “unique identifier” to a record and displays the information about that book. In this case, the unique identifier is the INPUT and the information about the book is the OUTPUT.

How does a web page accept input ?
An web page can accept by two means, either using “a web based form”, OR by passing the information through the URL of the page. The URL of a page is the unique address of a web page. Every page on the internet has a unique address. Just like you have a unique email ID or a unique phone number. A URL is a unique identified or a webpage. Remember that just like the BookID was the unique identifier for a book record,

What is a website ?
A website is a collection of pages of information that are linked together by “hyperlinks”. A hyper link is a clickable link, that take you from one page to another. A page on a website is called a web page which can contain text, images, videos, animations, resources or interactive components.

Static Websites
Static websites that those website where the content of the page will always remain static, which means that the page does not contain any programmatically controlled content like the one discussed in the book records example. Instead a page will change only when a website designer manually changes the content of the page.

E-commerce websites
E-commerce websites are those websites that permit financial transactions from the website itself. A shopping cart from where you may have recently bought a gift, is an e-commerce website. Your favorite website to book air tickets is a e-commerce website. An online university, that provides training to students through remote video classrooms and charges a fee using a credit card is also an e-commerce website. Your online bank account is an example of e-commerce. Essentially, a website that supports the technology to exchange money between two parties in liew of a product or service is an E-commerce website.

Exchanging money on the website is a specialized task and requires expertise and experience to prevent frauds. Some basics of e-commerce security are discussed below. If you are planning to get a e-commerce enabled website for your company, you need to ensure that your vendor pays attention to the following
Customer Account information should be stored in an encrypted format.
All money related information should travel over SSL and not plain text.
No credit card information should EVER be stored on an internet database.

A detailed explanation of guidelines of developing an e-commerce website is beyond the scope of this article, instead please refer to guidelines of developing an e-commerce website for more details.

Portal development
A web portal is a website that focuses on an agenda. The agenda can be a region, a company, an industry, a sport, an event. Another important aspect of a portal the ability to find extensive information on the primary agenda that the portal focuses on. A portal on travel industry should include information about leading travel agencies, modes of transport, business and leisure travel, destinations, travellers etc. Portals have made a lot of contribution in popularizing internet among the masses.

Website development technology

A database driven dynamic website is a must for the success of a website. Static websites are no longer possible to maintain or rely on for your business. Your website requires latest technology and technical expertise to become an effective tool for your business.
Several popular options are available to create a dynamic website, a detailed explanation of these technologies are beyond the scope of this article, but have been discussed in individual articles.

LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL PHP)
This is currently the number#1 most popular method of creating a website on the internet. The reason, it is cheaper, easy and quick to create a website using LAMP. However, when you want to develop larger scale applications, LAMP may not be the idle choice and you’d benefit replacing MySQL by PostGreSQL and some alternate language for development of specific utilities in other languages instead of PHP. Important to note that all components of LAMP are Open Source and FREE !!, which has also been one of the reasons for the phenomenal success of the LAMP combination.

.NET
.NET platform is a proprietary language that was launched by Microsoft as a successor to ASP technology. While .NET provides a lot of ready-made tools and components to assist developers in their work. The underlying idea of depending your whole online business on a single company does not go down very well in my personal opinion. .NET has a lot to offer to companies who are willing to risk their existence on the promoter company, but the ever growing popularity of OpenSource technologies such as PHP has created far more free support for OpenSource tools as compared to proprietary languages.

JSP and Java Struts
JSP and JavaSturts is Java’s response to development of internet websites. JSP enjoys the support of very well maintained and easy to use IDE environments. Easy availability of manpower in JSP and strusts is a key factor to their success. The syntax and

ColdFusion
ColdFusion is now the proprietary platform for development from Adobe. Earlier this platform was being promoted by macromdia(no acquired by adobe). ColfFusion enjoys support of a robust IDE from the parent company.

Perl
Perl is a time tested development language that was once the best tool to develop website. However the complex syntax of the generated code, many times makes it a very expensive code to maintain. This has been the foremost reason for the decline of the language. Perl undoubtedly remains the best language for development non-web based scripts in Linux and text parsing utilities. Wherever data parsing is required, Perl should be your first choice

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails has been around for a few years, but recently has been receiving a lot of attention. The recent development IDE for Ruby has also been a contributor of its success. This platform still requires a better IDE and more free scripts on the internet to make it a significant competition for PHP.

Python
Python is a good choice for many web development projects. It gained more popularity ever since google started using python for development of its sub-projects. Python is very easy to write, very easy to debug and very cheap to maintain. Another major advantage of Python over PHP it that python comes with a compiler to protect source code and enhance security. A major deterrent for Python explosion has been the lack of an easy to use IDE for python. Python unfortunately does not have easy availability of manpower, which forces companies to switch to alternate platforms of development. In due course of time when training institutes start focusing on Python, it is likely to become much more popular choice.

What platform should you insist on ?

• If budget is very important to your project, choose LAMP. If you expect the website to have more than 50,000 visitors / week or if you website is required to handle more than 5,00,000 records, go for PostGreSQL and PHP.
• If you already have a current software in java, go for JSP or Struts.
• If you want easy manpower and good commercial technical support go for .NET
• If you know what you are doing and are confident of pulling it off, only then go for any of the other options.

Important aspects of website development, while choosing your website development vendor.

• Security
• Scalability
• Search Engine Optimization
• Portability
• Maintenance
• Administration

Security

Security is a key consideration of a website development project. A website development company should be chosen if they have experience in developing secure websites. The content of the website whereever should be password protected. A thumb rule here is no person outside the group of webmasters or administrators should be able to modify any content on the website without approval from the administrators. When you negotiate your deal with the website development company
Scalability

Your website needs to be scalable. Scalable means if your website is fortunate enough to reach the top in its category, can it handle the traffic of visitors ? Was the website development project planned with careful insight so that popularity of your website does not cause loss of potential business because the development company did not envisage the popularity. It is important for you to question your website development company to find out the limits of your website and the time/effort estimates required to scale the website to the next level.

Search Engine Optimization

A website needs to be accessible to search engines as well as optimized so that publicly accessible portions of the website driver more visitors to your website. Your wesite development company needs to understand this requirements and design website in a search engine friendly manner. You contract with the website service provider should clearly include the measures that will be taken by the website development company to ensure Search Engine Optimized pages.

Portability

Portability of a website refers to the dependencies of a website on other technologies. A website may not be 100% portable, but it should be portable to an alternate technology with minimum effort and downtime. The world of internet changes very dynamically, Operating Systems, development platforms become obsolete within a matter of months. Is your website development company prepared for such an event ? What measures have they taken to ensure that the product that the develop for you is not entirely dependent on a single entity or person.

Maintenance

Maintenance of a website is a critical component of the success of any website. A common mistake by customers is to pay more attention to the development of the website as compared to the maintenance phase. The inclusion of a maintenance phase is your website development contract is a must. Usually the maintenance cost is 20% of the development cost and includes technical support from the development company, change of labels etc. Maintenance usually does not include changes to functionality or additional features.

Administration Website administration in this article refers more to administration and management of 3rd party components that support your website. This primarily includes the upkeep of software installed on your hosting providers servers. Administration staff of the website require clear documentation on how to get the website up and running in case of an emergency or failure. The website development company must provide information on the tasklist for deployment of the website on a fresh server and restoration of website data. You as a customer need to know if the administrator clearly understand the tasklist and have been trained by the website development company to perform the same.

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