Dollar for dollar when you consider any other advertising money you spend, an effective website will return more on your investment, but you have to have a web strategy in order to achieve this return. We (NSNA) can help you develop and manage that strategy.

The web is the only marketing vehicle that does not cost you more for additional air time, or large content, or adding color. It is the only truly interactive marketing vehicle available and your existing and new prospects are using the web to do their initial research. You need to be visible on the web. Today a company without an effective website is similar to a guy that 10 years ago just scribbled his name and phone number on a scratch paper, because he thought business cards were too expensive. If he was not willing to invest in business cards then how serious is he about being in business, really?

The web is even more critical for small companies with limited marketing budgets than it is for large ones. You sell a technical product in a rapidly evolving marketplace that businesses do not purchase every day. As such, it is even more important that you been seen as “the source” for information on how to buy the products and services you sell.

{deleted proposal specific content} …yet there are few differentiators being discussed when I go to your website vs your competitor’s sites. There must be some compelling reason for me, as a business owner, to want to deal with you rather than a competitor. But I do not see that discussed anywhere on your site. There is nothing to help educate me about the changes in your market.

Take a look at your website… does it give me specific reasons why I should do business with you and not your competition? Is it up to date? Does it stand up against the 8 reasons why most websites fail?

In general, there are four main coding languages that are used today by most sites and several smaller or less used languages.

The main languages are:

1. HTML
2. PHP
3. ASP/.NET
4. Cold Fusion

The lesser known and used languages, include:

1. Perl – An older language from pre-internet days. Limited to some degree, but it has its uses
2. JSP – Java Server Pages. The ability to use this is fairly limited based on server architecture
3. C#, VB.NET, J#, C++ – These are all backbone languages for ASP/.NET and are pretty evenly spread amongst the ASP/.NET developers. While these are all more widely used than Perl and JSP, they aren’t in and of themselves, web programming languages.

For you other web developers out there, before you get your chest all puffed up and fill your lungs with hot air over my exclusion of Javascript (and AJAX), this will be discussed in more detail on another post. Relax and breath.

There is one rising star that is gaining ground quickly and will likely outshine more than one of the more popular languages due to it’s intelligent construction and use of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) methodology. This “new kid” is called Ruby on Rails and is only partly new. The Rails framework has been around for many years, but the Ruby implementation is still a child in comparison to it’s more senior languages.

For this article, we will focus on the main 4 languages; what they are and what they do.

HTML
Hypertext Markup Language. This is the basic and standard language of the internet. Nearly all web pages are based on HTML. This language is developed and maintained by the W3 organization (www.w3schools.com/html). This language is processed by the desktop computer’s browser. While you can create some incredible web pages and presentation, you won’t get too much in the way of dynamic action without one of the following.

PHP
Post Hypertext Processor. This is one of the more popular server-side languages. It’s popularity comes mostly because it’s an open source language and developing in PHP is fairly simple. It’s format is clean and logical. It is well optimized and developed by a large community of developers. PHP is very secure and maintained consistently. PHP allows web site owners to process data on the server, such as retrieving and inserting data from and to a database or forms on the web pages. PHP processes the data, then converts it into HTML, which is then transmitted to the desktop computer browser for display.

ASP/.NET
Active Server Pages / .NET. ASP and .NET are Microsoft’s answer to other server languages like PHP. ASP and .NET are essentially older vs. newer versions, ASP being the older, and original, Microsoft server language, whereas .NET is a more up-to-date and modern version of the language. Some would argue this point as .NET can be very different from ASP, but for sake of simplicity, just go with me.

In general, ASP/.NET can only be used on Microsoft Windows based servers, thus making it a bit more restricting in terms of availability.

ASP/.NET are also considered secure and flexible, offering a similar functionality as PHP, though, their methods are different. ASP/.NET typically uses more interactive scripts in the desktop browser for processing and transmitting data for the server to handle, thus spreading out the load between the server and the desktop.

ColdFusion
Developed by Macromedia, ColdFusion runs only on a ColdFusion Server. This makes it extremely limited in availability. Additionally, ColdFusion Server is a licensed product, which means that the server host must pay for the ability to host ColdFusion sites. This usually means that ColdFusion is used more by large companies rather than individuals.

ColdFusion’s code system is designed to build the web pages from “pieces of content”. These pieces are chunks of html code combined with the data from a database.

ColdFusion has lost a lot of it’s following over the past few years due to a lack of available developers and servers.

Conclusion
What you use when you build your website will largely be based on what your developer knows and what is financially possible. Generally, there are a lot of PHP and ASP developers out there, if you don’t already have one. Their prices vary greatly, based on their level of knowledge. While a good developer may not be cheap, it’s worth investing a bit more in one with a higher level of knowledge as you will end up with a more professional, reliable application.