Which web design code is best for search engine optimization? HTML, Visual basic, PHP, etc. What are the pro's and...
63First off, let me say that I am not a professional Web developer. I do it for fun.
With that said, I would be suprised to find that server side Web application scripting or straight HTML had any advantages over each other. The reason is that when the bots come through to index your page they read through the HTML for the information they need. When the bot or a browser calls your page with server side scripting it will be rendered as HTML with the end result being basically the same as if your page was simply written in HTML. The only real pros and cons come in when you begin to discuss the costs which come in design, maintenance, hosting, development, and so on. Straight HTML will be the least expensive because it requires the least specialized skills and running environment, but it is also the least versitile. User interaction is limited and maintenance is more difficult because when something needs to be changed the HTML page has to be edited and then manually uploaded to the serverServer side Web application development is a very different subject that requires specialized skills, specific server environments, and is much more difficult to host for free. The positive here is that since the pages are generated when a browser calls them it is possible to write applications that allow very dynamic user interaction and content maintenance can be made very easy. These kinds of applications can also use more advanced features such as database usage. My personal preference is ASP.net using C# as background code because professionally I am a C# programmer, and I can simply use existing skills to write my Web applications. If you're interested I can show you a very simple example of some of these Server side technologies in action as well as the HTML that is generated when the page is loaded.CommentsLoading...
Ok, so now I'm going to risk embarrasing myself :). Ignore the layout. Design is not my strong point, and my wife is working on something more presentable.
I've written the site in ASP.net with a c# code base behind it. The first thing to note is that when you hit the home page at the top you'll see a quote. Each time you refresh the page you'll get a new quote, but if you view source on my page you'll see that the quote and the citation are wrapped in a <div /> and a <cite /> HTML tag. What's actually going on here is when you load that page it calls to the server and builds most of that page from scratch, writing out the HTML and sending it back as static HTML to your browser. The google ads and the navigation menu are inserted in to the page using <!--#include /> statements which make it very easy to standardize common elements across the site and the layout is done using css, which also lets me make a change in one file that applies across the entire site. If you go to the guestbook page you'll see a guestbook that is fully contained within the site. It reads and writes to an xml data store (xml instead of a database because I don't get much traffic). If I actually needed it it would be trivial to use a database as my datastore instead of xml, but you'll see if you view source on the read guestbook page that it simply looks like static xml, but like the quote on the home page, when a call is made to the page it updates on the server and comes back to you on the browser. The user validation is an outside application that is free to use.
I've got a more complex management tool that does use a database and has a blog-like functionality built in, manages the guestbook and quote display, and runs authentication and data storage against a SQL database. My site has been down for quite some time, I've just brought it back on line over the weekend, and I'm still working out some permissions issues which are keeping the management portion from working.
Just one more comment here, if you're interested. I got bored last night and threw together a very minimal rss reader. Again, the difference here is that although you can find many rss readers that you can embed in HTML, they are often javascript applications that may not be compatable with all browsers, or the end user may have javascript turned off in their browser. In either case they will not work. What I've done is made the server side code load an rss feed, parse it, build the HTML out of the links to embed in the page, and serve HTML to the browser. If you view source on the links page you'll see titles and links that point back to my most recent hubs. In the page it is static HTML, but each time you load the page the HTML is dynamically built, so you actually have live data displayed.
WeddingConsultant 4 years ago
Thanks for the answer CJensen. Your response was pretty clean-cut and easy to understand.
As far as your question at the end there- sure, can you show me a very simple example of some server side technologies in actino as well as the HTML generated by the page load?