Print Article for : Make A Php Website

[M55]Make A Php Website

by Matt Hedges, Mat

Many folk are viewing this content as they wish to find a good web hosting service. Naturally, they would like the best offer available to them. For any firm or person, choosing the right web host is a massive decision, which can have an impact that lasts a long time. This is due to the fact it will be a feature in your business for a long period of time.

In the present times, PHP web hosting has become very cheap and offers a host of benefits which make it very attractive.

Some important points will follow later but knowing a small amount about PHP would be good. There is no doubt PHP is a popular language, used for programming and capable of being placed into HTML. Some of the reasons for its popularity can be seen here:

a. It is free.

b. It is simple to work and operate.

c. It is a fully object oriented language.

d. It can be used on a variety of platforms

e. It is very fact on the Linux server, which makes it great in building difficult web applications

f. It works well with programming of an advanced nature and can be easily used with pages of a web site.

g. PHP is able to be used successfully with MySQL.

In order to choose a PHP web hosting service, you need to take a number of factors into account. First of all it is not all that easy to get a satisfactory PHP web hosting service. Most of the web-hosting companies are in the business for a quick buck. They don't really care about the service, so situations like your PHP domain hosting being down for 2-3 days, and you not being able to do anything about it, because no support was available, are quite frequent. Most people go through a long trial and error process, before they find the right PHP web hosting solution. This is because the best web hosting companies are usually not very well known.

These factors make selecting the best PHP provider a very hard task. However, it is possible to find some advice to follow.

A good PHP web hosting company will provide the following features:

a. Technical Stuff: It will provide you with all the technical applications you may need, like MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, Cron, CGI etc. You may not know what all these mean, or what they are used for, but that's all right, its good to have these stuff, as you may require them in future.

b. Bandwidth. This factor will determine how many visitors you can have on your site and 75GB is a very fair amount to have.

c. How much it should cost. Free does not always mean the best and low in price doesn't equate to low in quality. It should be possible to get a satisfactory service for $10.

d. Statistics of web use. You would be surprised how important it is to have information regarding how many visits you have and who or what is linking to your site.

e. Script installers that were created with PHP web hosting in mind. Again, these are vital for many firms and need to be considered. This provision should be given to you by your provider at no extra charge to you. If a provider seeks a fee for this service, tell them that this will not be happening.

Coming to the free PHP web hosting service providers- they can have a number of disadvantages associated with them. Since the web hosting company is providing the services for free, it is not possible for them to sustain the services for long, without any source of revenue. This revenue is generated by them, through advertisements put upon your website. These advertisements can be in the form of:

a. Advertisements on banners

b. Pop-up ads

c. Advertisement frames

The web site owner would have no control over these advertisements. This would clearly be a bad situation for a great number of firms to be in. Anecdotal evidence tells of the time one firm had advertisements for a rival product appearing on their site and this is not good. Unfortunately, as the service is free, there is not much that can be done to complain about it.

You will also find that these free hosted sites crash a lot. This is because they host a great number of sites.

Furthermore PHP web site hosting companies, that are offering free services are generally not able to offer the range of features, that even a cheap web hosting company can.

These factors suggest choosing the paid option is the way to go. Although it may cost a bit, the benefits will make it worthwhile.

In order to zero in on the right cheap web hosting service, you will have to keep the following things in mind:

i. Attempt to balance the price of the service with the services. A cheaper option may lose you some services but can you live without them? If not, then you have to pay. If you can live without guaranteed uptime or support options, you could cut these out as long as you know what is vital for you.

ii. Many websites choose to run blogs, shopping carts or forums. If you want to offer these, then installation tools are vital and this is where Cpanel is required. Cpanel is perfect for working with MySQL databases and providing support centers.

iii. Having access to support services. It is vital to always have a support service available. Who knows when a crisis may hit your firm and you need to be able to react.

iv. How much disc space is available: The amount of content is on your site will impact on the disc space you need. Bear in mind any expansion before deciding what disc space you need.

v. Accounts for email purposes: Do not hesitate to get rid of a web host firm that provides cheap or shoddy email accounts. There are many rival firms who want your business so feel free to go with them if you want.

There is always more research to be done and it still matters at this stage. You should look for firms providing offers. Does a firm with 30 day money back guarantee sound appealing to you? Would you be more interested in a firm that provides a guarantee of uptime? These firms are not always easy to find as they all require a level of money to make these promises. However they are available and if you can find them, they could be a good reason for choosing that firm.

These ideas should be added to your own research to make a decision on who best to sign up with to meet your needs and budget.

After all your choices and signing with a provider, how can you tell you have made the correct choice? It isn't hard, if you are satisfied with the price being low, having all the email accounts you need, having support always available, having statistics regarding traffic and the option of PHP and windows, then you can be happy with your choice.

PHP can be very useful in your webiste design, I use PHP for my websites difficult functions such as forums, blogs, chat, user forms, and shopping cart interface. But did you know you can use simple PHP for your website navigation systems?

The use of PHP for your websites header, left side navigation, and bottom of page information can be a great asset. Now I know what you are thinking, PHP can be complicated and intimidating to many of you, but first let me explain.
Using simple PHP include commands is a method any webmaster at any expertise level from novice to expert can implement with ease.

Most find editing PHP a frightening endeavor, but never fear, I will show you how.

A lot of us still use tables when designing our web pages instead of CCS, below is a veiw of the basic setup I will be discussing in this article:

Go here to see Image http://www.newcybertech.com/images/Artica1.jpg

As you can see from the image above, all the content surrounding the main content of each page will be shown in PHP and this is what this article is all about. The benefit of this technique will be when you update any of the surrounding PHP files, the results will be reflected on every page on your website that you have setup in this fashion. This sounds great right, but hold on, there is one more benefit.

You may say the same thing can be accomplished with robot include commands, but there is a catch to that.

The problem with the robot include command is that this content can not be seen by search engine robots. We all know that content is king to achieving high search engine rankings, so why hide the content you have? That's why what I am about to teach you and using PHP for your website navigation is so important.

?All the information and links included in your navigation PHP can be seen and indexed by all the search engine robots for higher rankings.?

Now on to how it all Works:

Please read below if you need this information, if not browse down to the steps to generate PHP navigation on your website.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, better known as PHP, is a highly popular, server-side scripting language that can be embedded directly into HTML coding.PHP can do anything that CGI can do, such as process form data and auto generate dynamic content, but PHP can do much more.It can be used on all major operating systems and supports most web servers.PHP is used by inserting PHP code inside your web page's HTML code. When the page is called, your server automatically executes the code. What's more, your visitors don't need any special plug-ins for the code to run, as it will be displayed just like your HTML coding.As PHP is a server-side scripting language, although your visitors will not need to install any new software, PHP must be set up on your server.

Following is a very simple script that will test your server to ensure PHP is installed. It is a standard PHP function called phpinfo, which instructs the browser to print out information in regard to the set up of your server.

To use the script, simply copy the following three lines of code and paste them into a plain text editor, such as Note Pad.

< ?
phpinfo();
?>

Save the file as phpinfo.php and upload it to your server where you store your HTML files.

To run the script, simply point your browser to the script address. It should look something like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/phpinfo.php

If PHP is installed on your server, you will be presented with a page of information about the PHP installed on your server.

If PHP isn't installed, you will be prompted to download the file. In this case, you'll need to contact your web host and ask them to install it, as it is free to download and install.

You can learn more about PHP and download it at

http://www.php.net/.

Steps to generate PHP navigation on your website.

First of all you need to enable create a php file with html includes using the php include function. This is easily done by adding one line to your .htaccess file for your apache driven site and have php parsed in html files. To do this logon to your websites FTP account, go into the .htdocs file, find the .htaccess file, edit it to add this one line of code to the file:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html

With that, you can have php blocks parsed in your html files so long as you put the php code in php tags. Example below:

php Code:
<--- ?phpinclude("somefile.php");? --->

We will get into how to use the above command a little later in this article .
Now on to the steps:

Step 1.
Build the the following pages in your favorite HTML editor:
A. header.html
B. left.html
C. bottom.html
D. right.html (optional)
Or you can name these files what ever you like, but I will be referencing them as the above for this article. Once you have these pages built to your liking, we now start implementing with PHP. First build a new Index.html page, you can name it TEST or something until you get it the way you want it. Set it up with tables to look like the page below:

Go here to see Image http://www.newcybertech.com/images/Artica2.jpg

Step 2. Now here is the trick, rename each HTML page you just built, ?header.html, left.html, bottom.html, and right.html (optional)? to the .php file extension. You can do this by opening each .html file in a text file editor such as Notepad and save as .php to the same directory as the .html files on your server. You will now have a copy of each file in HTML and PHP format.

Step 3. We are now ready to use the new PHP files, in each table around your main content we will insert the <--- ?phpinclude("somefile.php");? ---> Command functions.
See example below:

Go here to see Image http://www.newcybertech.com/images/php.jpg

Step 4. Open your new index page in your favorite browser and you will now see all the HTML pages you built come together as one page by using PHP.

Go here to see Image http://www.newcybertech.com/newcybertech.jpg

Step 5. Editing the new PHP navigation pages is easy, all you need to do is edit the HTML file you built in you favorite HTML editor. When your are done just copy the pages HTML and then paste it into the corresponding PHP file. To do this open the PHP file with a text editor and replace the HTML with in it with the edited version of HTML and save it as .php again. Now your PHP file is updated to match your edited HTML file.

In conclusion:
Now when ever you update your website header and navigation pages the results will be reflected on every page on your website that you have setup in this fashion. And as a added bonus all the information and links included in your navigation PHP can be seen and indexed by all the search engine robots for higher rankings.

You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your ebook or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the author bylines are included.

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About Author

Both Matt Hedges & Newcybertech are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Matt Hedges has sinced written about articles on various topics from About Web Hosting, About Web Hosting and The Internet. Author: Matt Hedges. Hedges, a veteran of the website hosting industry and helps small business owners find the on the Internet.. Matt Hedges's top article generates over 40500 views. to your Favourites.

Newcybertech has sinced written about articles on various topics from . About the Author:Craig Freshwater is the Webmaster/CEO for http://www.newcybertech.com covering Webmaster Resources, Web Site Promotion, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design and Profit.Visit The Newcybertech Weblog http://www.newcybertech.com/Blog And N. Newcybertech's top article generates over 1300 views. to your Favourites.