Website implementation- PHP, ASP, JSP, JAVA or just plain HTML

REbuilding a site, what should I use?

[JKelley]

The situation is my company before I began to work for them paid for a web site to be built for them. I am not going to disclose what they paid but I will say that it was in the 6 digit range. Well to sum it up they are not happy at all with what was given to us as a final product, further more the functionality of the site is not there. The site was coded in .net (at which I displayed my concerns about when I was hired), we were not provide with the source nor access to the database. In addition 9 domain names that relate to our company have been registered under the company name of which built our site and they have refused to release the domain names to my company. I know I can file a Domain name dispute ICCAN but my company has decide to wait on that to see if they finally do release them to us although it has been 6 months. That is another issue. My problem now is that since my company has waited this long to have them fix our site so that we can add content and nothing has been done, they have decide to just scrap the site as it is and have me rebuild another one. The site as it is has 60 English pages and will have an additional 30 English pages in the rebuilt version with globalized content for 9 other languages that pretty much mirrors the English site creating a total of 900 pages to be created. I realize that this is probably best to recreate this site using a database. This is where I am stuck, I have don’t have experience enough to choose what format to do this in, PHP, ASP, MySQL or any other database driven language. The layout of the site is fairly simple and it is not an eCommerce with products, we just merely sell translations (that of which we are good at) a large majority of the site is just large blocks of text that stay with in a basic format. I understand that this seems to be a fairly simple format but I am clueless at where to start. I have already checked out our servers to verify that it can handle PHP, ASP and MySQL, so that is a start. I am not a programmer but I am believe that this really can not be beyond my capability of figuring it out. As it is I have roughly 900 sites under my belt but none of them using a data base that I created the source for. Most of them are static or flash driven or have been built static and programmers added the database functionality behind it. If there is anyone out there that could give me some advice on this I would very much appreciate it.

[edited by: heini at 6:35 pm (utc) on Feb. 5, 2003]
[edit reason] No urls please / thanks and welcome! [/edit]

[txbakers]

If your server is a windows server, you can use ASP very easily.

A good tutorial can be found at www.w3schools.com

[choster]

Welcome JKelley. You'll get lots and lots of opinions on this one; everyone has their favorite technologies, languages, platforms, etc.

It would help to have a better sense of what resources and business arrangements you have. Where is your site hosted? What operating system is it running? Do you have regular IT staff, and what environments are they accustomed to? What is the purpose of the site-- shopping cart, document archive, brochureware, etc.?

Investigate the content management system industry, which ranges from $50 Perl scripts that hook into MySQL databases to full-fledged enterprise solutions that can exceed $5,000,000 with Oracle plugins and installation/customization consulting.

[JKelley]

Well, I am the IT staff among with any web development, including re-engineering websites with Multilanguage content. I have some experience with data bases but not creating them. As for the OS we have a redhat Linux box and a windows server that supports MySQL, PHP ASP OBDE .NET and a few other things. My company has really just become fed up with the fact that we have created hundreds of multilingual websites but yet because of the back end app that is coded in ours we can not get one up.

The application coded in our site was suppose to be a some type of multilingual tracking system, although the way it has been coded it does not allow us to add content or change content, further more it blocks us from putting up the other languages. Hence why they are having me redo the site. I kind of dread the thought of delivering a site in the same condition that it already is in. ..It looks fine, but that’s just an appearance.

[BjarneDM]

First of all :
Start with the design of the site and get approval for that.
Don't do *any* coding before you've got managements approval of the design.
Basically : use KISS - Keep It Simple & Stupid . Make sure that it's easy to get from one part of the site to any other. Put yourself into the shoes of one of your potential customers and ask yourself this question: what do I want to know if I were a customer - or even better yet: ask one or more excisting customers for what they would like to see on your pages if they were comming to your site for the first time.

If you have no experience in designing web-pages, there's no way around getting hold of and reading a few *good* books covering the technologies you'll be using on the site. Which ones to choose depends on what you already know.

And use KISS to code the pages - make it simple for yourself and get a very basic site running - and then add further functionality as you get experience. Web page design might look simple, but trying to implement a lot of functionality all at once will only break your neck. Start with a fairly static page design. Ask management what they want first of all, and do that. Then add one thing/page at a time in easy to increment stages. Keep interactive pages like forms for one of the last stages, as these invariably will involve serverside scripting. And once your pages get interactive, you'll have to be vary of crackers having fun!

And do go with the standard approach! *Don't* use any proprietary techniques! Always make sure your pages validates to the standards. In the long run designing pages to the w3c standards will save you a lot of headaches. And *test* your pages in as many browsers as possible to make sure that they are working as expected in all of them.

Test all of you pages on an in-house server and get management approval before going online with *any* changes!

As to the pages themselves:
You'll have some blocks of information that'll be common across a lot of pages.
Use SSI , PHP or ASP to include these in your pages. That way it'll be easy to change this information across the whole site
A database is only necessary if you have dynamic contents like a search function, bulletin boards, web-shopping

As to scripting:
*Don't* under any circumstances trust anything that get passed from the browser to your serverside scripts and databased! *Always* validate all values passed! *Don't* rely on hidden form fields to pass correct information! *Don't* rely on client-side javascripts only to validate form fields - the final validation *has* to be made on the server!

Keep functionality high: don't serve plain 404s but try to discover what the user intended. If all else fails then at least automatically redirect your user to the frontpage. Eg, I've just gone from *.html pages to *.php because I added some new functionality and am preparing for a multi-language version of the site I administer. This means, that a lot of people at present are entering the site with <page>.html instead of <page>.php, so the first thing the server does when discovering a 404 situation is to exchange html with php and see if that shouldn't work. Likewise, pages get added and removed irregularly, and the old pages aren't kept online as they are simply outdated and without interest to the browser, but of course people do find references to these old pages, and enter the site through these, thus I use a script to back them up through the site structure until they get served something near what they seached for.

As for the multi-language thingie:
How do you want to design that one? It's possible to design a site in such a way, that the user is served with the language chosen, and if that page hasn't been translated yet, then serve the default language. This will mean some serverside scripting and cookie handling, but not a database.
Do you want localised domain names too like : <company-name>.<language>?