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Behind the scenes is all the fun stuff that I get to do to make your site work.
Active Server Pages: This high powered scripting language is commonly referred to by the acronym ASP. ASP and Visual Basic Scripting(VBS) interface together to bring some of the most high power, in depth, hardcore sites on the internet. This is not a language pairing for the meek and timid. The capabilities of ASP and VBS are absolutely phenomenal. A few of these awesome capabilities are: database access, e-commerce shopping carts, classified ads, message boards, forums, news tickers, and more! If you have seen it done somewhere on the web, and/or you want dynamic content, then you want ASP.
Databases: You may already have a database, be wondering if you will be needing one, or may not even know what purpose a database could serve for you. Two types of databases to deal with for the web are Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
Chances are that Access will more than fill your needs. There are a few things that will need to be checked out first if you already have a database. A properly designed Access database can typically support around 10 simultaneous connections on the internet. After this point it has a tendency to start breaking down, and behaving in odd ways. If your site has large amounts of traffic then you may need to upgrade to SQL Server 2000.
SQL Server 2000 has been recently benchmarked as the fastest database in the world. This is the full on real deal. If you have massive traffic, with your database constantly being pounded with requests for information, then this is what you are going to need.
So what about this talk about properly designing a database? A relational database needs to be normalized. This is the key part to making an Access database able to survive the rigors of data access on the web. Normalization is also the key factor in how fast your database can respond to data requests. I will not go into the gritty details of how this is done, but suffice to say that(very loosely) normalizing is that act of removing duplicate information. This also helps to improve data integrity and not waste as much space.
HTML: The very building block of the web. Without this virtually no website would be possible. The HTML language provides the very structure of a website. You could think of it as the girders that hold up the concrete of a building. With the concrete being your graphics and content.
DHTML: This extension of HTML has allowed for some pretty sweet possibilities and effects. The most likely use of DHTML that you have seen are those nifty drop down menus that seem to be so prevalent today. There are a myriad of other uses for DHTML, but there is one drawback that has really kept it from taking off on a huge scale. Due to a certain web browser design company not adhering to the set standards for DHTML, developers are forced to write their code twice. Once for the browser's that adhere to the standards, and again for the "rogue" browser.
JavaScript: Here is another language that had some nice potential but due to limitations in browsers, never reached it's full potential. Web browsers give their users the ability to turn off JavaScript, thus making any JavaScripts on your page null and void. Some common uses of JavaScript however, are changing an image when you move the cursor over it, form validation, scrolling tickers, and interfacing with DHTML to produce some cool effects.
If the above was too filled with technogeek jargon, and you want to know what it all means. Simply put, you will get a website that not only works well, but will exceed most if not all of the competition. It will be in a word... Effective.
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