Services

I offer a wide range of website development programming services, from dynamic service-oriented websites to sophisticated, secure, e-commerce applications.

Below are some of the current services I offer or make use of, with a short explanation of what they are, since many people aren’t current on web technology.

PHP and MySQL

One of the greatest scripting languages ever built for the internet, PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (don’t ask why) and is a great choice for serious web development. MySQL (pronounced “my ess-que-el”) is a type of database PHP uses to create highly dynamic, complete, fast, and stable web sites. The two work very well together.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a “language” web developers use to design and display web sites. Not really a programming language, HTML web pages are really just text files that are understandable to web browser software (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Safari, Opera, etc). The HTML is embedded in the text file, marked off with a starting “command” and ending “command.” If you view the source of this page, or any page of any web site, what you’ll generally see is HTML.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a great way to improve the way browsers interpret how a website is supposed to look and act. It is again a text file that is either embedded in the web page or linked to it, and its common usage is to tell the browser how to display and style the web page, without having to embed hundreds of, say, FONT tags in the page. This makes it very easy to change the look of a page: Just change the style tag in one place, and the rest of the site changes! It makes pages load quicker, also, since the css file is loaded once and then “cached” (saved) on the browser. Not only that, but with a little creativity, it can make a site highly optimized for search engines.

SQL

Structured Query Language (SQL), pronounced “sequel,” is the granddaddy of database access “languages.” Though not really a programming language, it provides a means for web developers to access most any database with a fairly common and standardized syntax.

JavaScript

This is another web-only language that has been around for a long time. It is mainly used to make the user’s web browsing more dynamic or helpful, since it can be used for drop-down navigation menus, changing one graphic to another when a user points their cursor to it, or checking the data a user enters into a form you provide, among many other uses. Do not confuse Javascript with Java. They are two entirely separate languages. More recently, Javascript has become even more popular with “Web 2.0″ sites that use AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML - again, don’t ask)

Security Certificates (SSL)

Security certificates are a way for site owners to make it extremely difficult to capture sensitive information from website visitors, like your name, address, Social Security Number, or credit card information. Notice I said “extremely difficult,” not “impossible.” Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) makes this possible through encryption. I won’t go into details because it would bore you to tears. Suffice to say that it works very well, and can cost from as little as $50-$1000/year. This is not a profit center for me, as I only charge the cost of the cert plus my time installing it. But if you have information you want kept secret, you absolutely need it.