It wasn’t that long ago that most successful websites offered a passive experience. You clicked on a link, brought up a page and either read the text there or looked at the picture and then moved on. The experience was essentially the same thing as reading a book, but the Internet has evolved at an incredible pace and now dynamic websites are the norm. Don’t let the cyber-speak fool you, a dynamic website is another way of saying an interactive website. Through improvements in programming, almost all successful websites now offer an interactive experience that shifts the roll of the user from a passive one to an active one. Dynamic websites using PHP and MySQL are most common, so let’s take a closer look at these two important web developments and how you can use them to make your own web page a dynamic experience everyone will love.
Before we look at specific details on dynamic websites using PHP and MySQL, we should define exactly what PHP and MySQL are.
PHP, at one point, stood for Personal Home Page, but that was back in 1995 when this scripting language and command line interface was first thought up. Today, PHP is one of the most popular tools used in creating web pages, both for business and for personal use. Most popular content management systems, such as Wordpress, use PHP, so if you have your own blog, you may be using PHP and not even realize it!
MySQL is an important part of today’s dynamic website scene. It is a database management system, which means it helps websites supply new and appropriate information to users as they surf. A static or non-dynamic webpage doesn’t change or reconfigure when someone is using it, but a dynamic webpage changes, provides different options and updates based on what the user is telling it. Dynamic websites using PHP and MySQL make up the lion’s share of all dynamic websites currently online in the US today, and around the world.
It is easy to see why dynamic websites are preferable to static ones, especially for businesses. A recent study showed that the average website has less than three seconds to capture the attention of a user. A static website may grab hold of a user’s attention if they are particularly interested in the web site topic, but a dynamic website offers an interactive experience that most users prefer. A dynamic website allows the user to sign up, login, modify user preferences, customize their settings, upload data, and interact with other registered users. The whole appeal of the Internet, in many people’s minds, is the fact that the experience is interactive and not passive, like watching television. Dynamic websites using PHP and MySQL make use of cutting edge technology, and since PHP and many content management programs are open source, that means that anyone, anywhere can contribute their own code to create a whole use way of interacting with a web page.
If you are considering building and running your own website, chances are, you have a dynamic website in mind. You don’t have to have specific knowledge of PHP or MySQL to build a dynamic website in this day and age thanks to the many website building and content management programs that use templates, plugins and themes, but even without specific programming knowledge, both PHP and MySQL will be working hard to help make the web experience you are designing special.
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