by Wayne Ramsey

Created on: April 05, 2007   Last Updated: April 10, 2007

Developing an incredible website that truly stands out can take a great deal of work and a lot of desire. Most of this work is going to come in your efforts to learn the many different scripting languages that are available for you to code your website. Without a solid knowledge of one of these languages, developing even the most simplistic of websites is going to be incredibly difficult.

Throughout this article, I'm going to discuss the various types of major coding languages that are used for the design of a website, and the benefits and drawbacks to using each.

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language
This is by far the most popular of all of the programming languages. It is an essential part of any website and is generally going to be the base by which all other languages are built or initiated. HTML is your basic language that tells how a page is going be setup and how everything on the page should act. This language is generally capable of being created by a computer based software such as Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe Dreamweaver, and a variety of other software titles as well. While these are great programs, they only the cover the most basic of HTML and generally cause a great number of coding areas between the different browsers. Learning to hand code is extremely important.

iHTML - Integrated Hyper text markup language
While similar to standard HTML, iHTML is somewhat different as it is a server side language, that allows users to interact with the site through custom scripts that communicate with databases. While it isn't as popular as the other languages that I will discuss below, it has a great number of browsers that fully support it's full functionality which can make it incredibly useful.

PHP
Probably the most widely used internet scripting language that allows users to interact with a website. This language was created specifically for use on the internet, and because of that, is extremely versatile. The large majority of major websites online today utilize PHP for their major hard coding. This coding can also be used in conjunction with HTML and often times you will find HTML pages with PHP scripts inside of them. PHP is also the fastest scripting language, being able to communicate with databases much quicker than other languages.

ASP - Active Server Pages
ASP is a technology that is no longer really used by serious coders anymore. While it provided a great starting point for communicate between users and websites, it was incredibly slow and didn't allow for

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