Erhard Smit

There’s been a lot of discussion about this topic and I guess everyone have different opinions about it. I am a fulltime freelance developer and do projects with PHP and ASP.NET so I may have a more neutral opinion about the two.

In the old days if you asked me to compare PHP and ASP, I would have said PHP without any hesitation. ASP was cumbersome to me with way too much overhead and lacked the OOP aspect. But these days with the newer .NET frameworks it’s much harder to make up my mind.

Both languages have their own pro’s and con’s. I come from a C++ background and writing code with C# and PHP both give me a lot of satisfaction, so on the style and object oriented coding level they are both on equal ground for me. I know ASP.NET has much better OOP support, but for what I need and the projects I do, PHP is fine. Without comparing too much low level differences between the two engines.

The things that stand out most about PHP are:

·         Platform Independence – And yes, I know there’s the mono framework that supposedly makes ASP.NET independent. Well in my opinion, if it was not natively build to be platform independent then it’s not. I don’t like hacks to make things work.

·         Easy Deployment – I’ve never once, deployed and ASP.NET application from a dev environment to a live environment without any issues. With PHP it’s almost always flawless.

·         An Abundance of Resources – You always find answers to questions, problems and third party classes to do things much easier than with .NET resources. Due to the open source nature of PHP development.

The things on the other end that I like more about ASP.NET development:

·         Access to the .NET Framework (CLR) – The libraries has everything you need built-in. There’s no need to download a class to do nicely formatted emailing or encryption, it’s all there.

·         Better UI controls out of the box – The grid components make it quick and easy to slap together a data viewing or editing screens. I suppose with add-ons to PHP like jQuery the same can be achieved.

·         Good Debugging Support – I am using Nusphere’s PhpED for development and it comes close with its debugging functionality, but nothing beats Visual Studio’s debugging support.

So which one do I choose?

Well, if I were new to web development and had to choose. I’d choose PHP. But I would also invest the time to learn ASP.NET in C# of course, not VB.NET.

I’ll continue to support both languages in my business. There are times when PHP is more suitable and others when ASP.NET makes more sense. A lot of my Government work also requires ASP.NET because of their licensing agreements with Microsoft. So it makes sense to learn both.

If you’re interested in quickly running through a comprehensive crash course in PHP with step-by-step examples visit http://www.php-skills.com

To learn ASP.NET go to http://www.ASP.NET for learning material.

Good luck!

As a freelance web developer, I often have to explain to my customers why certain ideas for their site just won’t cut it. Here are a few pointers:

Web usability according to research, was proven to be the most significant factor in web design. In fact, it is the influential element that keeps visitors returning to your site.

Usually the most overlooked aspect when designing a website, nonetheless in actuality, usability has power over the web. When your visitors can not easily navigate your site, chances are, he will not utilize your library in search for information and just go to other sites.  Note that all sites are just a click of the mouse away. Hundreds of thousands of other online stores that offer the same services or products as you are crowding the internet, making online shoppers more selective and choosy when concluding whether to stay and continue their browsing or just leave.

The internet offers online shoppers ample freedom and various choices; nobody will ever waste their time on a poorly constructed website.  In order to provide web usability, you must involve or think of your prospect clients in designing it.

Not like a traditional “brick and mortar” store, a lot of online stores or websites do not permit their visitors to “walk through” inside the site as they can in a traditional store set-up. While this may seem an unworkable task to accomplish, if done correctly, a “user-friendly” approach to web design will easily accomplish this task.

When online shopping, all things must to be located where visitors expect them to be at. The practice of flooding a client with abundant item choices all at the same time and making them search for certain items that they need, is most definitely not the concept of web usability.  

Your visitors must be taken into consideration all throughout your planning as well as designing process. Bear in mind that web usability must never be considered after the construction of a website.

Fixing and then testing your website only after construction is useless and will not yield satisfactory results. Your best approach would be to combine a replica of “pervasive usability” unto your web design and construction process.

According to surveys, here are top 12 reasons why visitors want to go back to your site:

• Easy navigation   74%
• Quick download time  65%
• Frequently updated information 58%
• Content quality    57%
• Content quantity   30%
• Content organization  40%
• Prompt customer service  40%
• Website search tools  25%
• Layout of homepage  20%
• Enjoyment   19%
• Website appearance  18%
• Inclusion of animated graphics   9%

Basing from these reasons, here are usability tips to help you design your website:

1. Become familiar with your visitors based on their preferences.  You need a website with personality as well as content quality that accommodates your visitor’s taste; you should understand and recognize their color choices, technical skills, etc.
2. Create obvious and simple interface. The more apparent and recognizable the web interface is, then your visitors never have to undergo frustration in guessing how your site really works, and instead on concentrating on the interface, they should be concentrating on your site’s content.
3. Website readability.  Create “easy to read” paragraph, not using small text or font size. 
4. Quick loading.  You need a fast downloadable page as visitors hate to wait.
5. Avoid hidden navigation, as your visitors need to know where and what to click in order to go someplace.
6. Get visitor feedbacks so you will know what is working and what does not.  Learn from your prospects.
7. Investigate on website visitor performance.  Determine how long it takes to perform a certain task? It should not take too long, the faster the better.  If not, work on your user interaction so to improve performance.
8. Provide a help section.  If your website visitor does make a certain mistake, then they truly will appreciate it if you provide ways to assist them.  “404 page” is great for directing “spiders” to crawl unto your webpage.
   Testing for usability

Testing for usability is not complicated and very inexpensive to carry out. The easiest answer is to design a simple sequence of undertakings for web users to carry out trials.

Invite people or friends to your workplace, then request them to navigate your website, watching and observing while they surf.  Do not wait when your website is done before you test it; test it now.

The work can be simple like finding out a product’s information or finding out how a certain firm can be contacted or one can order a product and finding shipping policies information.

After testing, fix any problem and test it again.  Continue testing and refining web usability of your website until such time that there are no problems found, that the experience is efficient and pleasant.

Remember that website usability is concerned to not just the appearance of a site, but more importantly how your site performs and particularly, it gives emphasis on the experience of your visitors.  

For quality web design and development, email me today for a free quotation.

To all my clients, family and friends: May your world be filled with warmth and good cheer this Holy season, and throughout the year! Wish your Christmas be filled with peace and love. Merry Christmas!

My first public beta release of Login Manager is available here to download. After the installation run LoginManager.exe and watch your system tray for the Login Manager icon  . The program runs entirely from here so it’s easy to access at any time.

To start using it you have to add some logins. If you just want one huge list of logins you can quickly add one by clicking on the Add Login menu option, or alternatively use the Login Manager to manage a more complex hierarchy of logins.

After the login is added you can access the login by clicking on Logins->Choose your login.

There are currently two options in the program, one to automatically login to the site or alternatively just to show your login information.

Any questions and suggestions to make this program better will be welcomed!

Example Login Screen for cPanel:

System Requirements: Windows XP/Vista and .NET Framework 2.0