What Technologies to use?

It is an unfortunate fact that most people are technophobes and switch off when technical issues are raised. To a certain extent that is understandable, technologists love being mystical and creating TLAs for everything (that's Three Letter Acronyms).

The Internet is all about cutting, or even bleeding, edge technologies, but these need to be backwards compatible with existing architectures. There is no point in creating a wonderful mechanism for delivering interactive media, if all of your prospective audience need to purchase new hardware or software to use it. You would not have a market for your product.

The technologies that companies wanting web sites are interested in fall into two main categories: Client Side and Server Side.

Client Side Technologies

Client Side Technologies are features built into your web site that require support in the Internet Explorer, Netscape, or other browsers that your clients use. There are significant differences of support between the various products and versions of each browser.

Client side technologies require the server to send all the information to the browser then they decide what to display, often resulting in the transfer of redundant data.

Typical technologies are:

Javascript: Allows interactivity common functions are rollover buttons but can be very powerful
Java Applets: Small programs which are downloaded from the server and run on your computer.
Cookies : Can allow servers to remember your settings and preferences amongst other things.
Flash Animation: Creates interactive and animated sites

Server Side Technologies

Server Side Technologies are where the real work can happen. The server side technologies do all the processing on the server then present the results to the browser resulting in much leaner targeted data.

Do you have a database you want on the web? Using some of the wide range of features available on the web server can achieve this.

Typical technologies include:

ASP, JSP, ColdFusion scripting applications enabling powerful database enabled web sites to be created.
CGI: perl, PHP scripting languages enabling web sites to have interactive features, and to interface with other web applications.
SQL Server, MySQL, mSQL, Access database applications enabling the scripting engines to obtain data.

Of course the best web sites are a combination of client and server technologies. Careful integration with a good graphical design creates superb sites.