PHP

As noted on the Technologies main page, you probably don't have to be concerned about the programming languages, server environments, and so forth that are used for your website. It's our job to make your website work without you having to worry about such things.

We use PHP as our standard technology for dynamic and content-managed web pages. PHP is a free open-source scripting language that runs on both Unix-based and Windows servers. As a result, websites implemented in PHP can be moved to different web hosts with little difficulty. Combined with the broad capabilities and power of PHP, this portability makes it our default development technology.

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but this has been changed in recent years to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, following the GNU pattern of self-referential acronyms ("GNU's Not Unix"). If this doesn't really make sense to you, don't worry, we don't really get the joke either.

PHP is suitable for any website that needs to interact with the user or that is frequently modified by its owner. Web sites from small-scale personal web pages to large corporate e-commerce sites are implemented at least partly in PHP. Some well known examples include Google, Yahoo, and eBay.

Access to the current version of PHP, PHP 5, is a standard element of almost all Unix/Linux web hosting services. While PHP can be run on Windows servers, it is less commonly included in Windows Server-based web hosting services. In some cases, such as if you already have a web hosting account that does not include PHP, you may want may want to consider asking us to develop your site using ASP.NET. This is not often necessary, and we will consult with you to determine whether PHP or ASP.NET is the best technology to use for your site.