How to Build Websites for Fun and Profit!

Programming with Javascript and beyond

As you get more comfortable building standard HTML content you will no doubt want to begin adding interactive and/or dynamic content. This will require some knowledge of programming. Don't let this scare you and you don't really have to learn to program, but you should familiarize yourself with the basics to a couple of web based programming languages so you can, at the very least, alter existing code to suit your needs.

Be sure to note that there are simple code examples to be found at our scripts domain. There you can find both Javascript and PHP examples that you can use to easily get used to inserting codes and altering them.

What's the difference between Javascript and PHP

I actually use both these languages together as they are quite complimentary, being that Javascript is a client side language and PHP is server side. Before the days of AJAX this is how one could easily communicate information from the visitors browser back to the server for further analysis et cetera.

What this means in regards to Javascript is that; when a visitor comes to your website and views a webpage, the server will send the page data to your vistor and after the page is downloaded to their computer their browser will then interpret the Javascript. On the other hand, when working with PHP the process is different. PHP is a server side scripting language, which means that the programming code is interpreted/parsed on the server before being sent to the visitors browser. For instance, if you wanted to place a date function that displays the date you might want to consider this aspect. If you use PHP to display the date then the web visitor will see the date where the server (and PHP interpreter) is located. However, if you use Javascript to display the date, the visitors browser would show him the date of where he/she is at regardless of where the server was.