Your website really can make a huge difference to the success of your business. So you need to make some pretty wise choices during its construction to prevent it being dead in the water before its even finished. The thing is, the decision im talking about is one that the client doesnt usually get involved in, but as you’ll see, perhaps they should.
A client recently had some work done on his website. As he discovered later to his cost, the web designer had changed the format of the website from straight html to Microsoft SharePoint Web Designer. Now for those of you who dont know, the computer that the website is stored on, the server, needs to have something called extensions added so it can use Microsoft SharePoint Web Designer webpages. But, as my client discovered that puts you in a difficult position. Now he cant find anyone to work on his website because few, if any, professional web designers work in the Microsoft SharePoint Web Designer format, and of course to change it back to html he is going to have to pay again. Its not a good situation to be in.
So the aim of this article is to give you some idea about the different webpage formats there are out there so you dont make the same mistake.
So what are your choices? Well, the main three are:
ASP – Professional level. Sophisticated and very flexible. If you wanna have a database or anything like that ASP is probably the way to go. You will need to be or hire a good programmer though to learn and use it and for that reason it tends to be fairly specialist and therefore relatively expensive.
HTML/CSS – Professional level. Arguably the most common format for websites. Ive grouped them both together because at this point they are often used together and are at a fairly similar level of programming. Fairly easy to use and learn in programming terms.
Frontpage – Amateur level. Simple and basic but hard to get professional results. Software is cheap but the extensions required on the server will usually be an extra cost.
I use html/css in case you were wondering and i highly recommend it for the reasons ive already given above. Discuss which format will be more suitable for your website with your web designer BEFORE they start your project and save yourself a lot of stress and money!