I need a professional website. Anyone out there offering this service?
These guys, Australian, Norwegian and Taiwanese did some good job for us:
I know a British guy in Taipei that builds websites for a living. He’s very professional I would say as I have seen a few sites that he has done and they are all very nice. If you want to get in touch, then send me a PM and I’ll give you his number.
[quote=“X3M”]These guys, Australian, Norwegian and Taiwanese did some good job for us:
http://www.bluetree.com.tw/[/quote]
Absolutely horrific website, though. Also, PHP mongers 
PHP mongers? And that would be a problem because…?
First, let me preemptively accuse myself of :offtopic:. That said …
Because PHP is a laughing stock in the professional software industry. It’s a poorly designed hodgepodge of features from other languages, many of which don’t work right[1]. It’s full of security holes – it’s incredibly difficult to write code which isn’t trivial to exploit. It doesn’t have proper support for classes (even PHP 5’s are dubious), modules, or other namespaces, and so large systems become exponentially more difficult to work with.
People who say things like this:
… are either incompetent or lying 
Don’t even get me started on MySQL.
[1]: Did you know that PHP doesn’t have arrays? It just has hashes with integer indices. Did you know that 0 == ‘none’? Did you know that “0” == 0 and 0 == “”, but “0” != “”? For more, see here (not that I would advocate Perl either, but at least it’s not a joke language).
Edit: As a little example, check out these two bugs from the phpBB bug tracker. A major high-visibility open-source project, seven years of development, five developers on the core team … and two huge gaping SQL injection vulnerabilities in easily-accessible places. And that’s just from the first couple pages of the public bug database - lord knows what they have hidden away on the “Security Tracker”.
The code in the second bug is terrifying, constructing SQL manually and handling quoting with replace() calls. I can see four or five ways to exploit it just off the top of my head, and I don’t even know much about breaking code.
This doesn’t happen in other languages - we have proper database interfaces and SQL injection simply cannot happen, anywhere, ever.
Thanks for the replies. I also want hear opinions about the building of a site by using templates. I have domains from godaddy and they offer this service for a few bucks a month. I have no experience in building a website so I am still leaning towards going with someone that knows the game and has credentials.
Brendon, I totally disagree. That was hardly an expert analysis on the state of PHP.
Whitetiger, you shouldn’t have to deal with the specifics of how the site is built. You need to find a good designer who will take care of all those things for you.
The first thing you need to do is come up with a budget and a description of what you need in a site. The more detailed the better. This will allow a designer to get you a solid idea of a price and what can be done on your budget.
You will then need to do a request for proposal for the designers that you find. There is no right or wrong price. The ranges you will likely be given will be all over the place. An amateur who charges little will give you an amateur looking site and might charge next to nothing. The best will charge higher prices but make your business look like a leader in the industry.
Listed below is a URL for guidelines for a request for proposal from Veerle who is a top notch provider. That info will give you an idea of what is expected in a request for proposal. Let me know if you need any more help.
Indeed, I am not an expert in PHP. The simple things terrify me so much I’ve never learned it. If I’m wrong, tell me why
Lalalalal fingers in ears.
Ask Tash or the guys from www.ideas2earn.com
Of course you could learn some basics and make something horrible as I have done at www.theWowww.com or just pm Tash.
I think major sites like Ning, Yahoo, Digg, Flickr and a huge list of others would disagree with this point. These sites have chosen PHP as a platform and in some cases have staked millions in that decision. The sites in the list may not all use PHP exclusively, but they do use it to some degree.
From a programmers perspective, there are no “laughing stock” of programming languages. A good developer simply sees a programming language as a tool. There is no reason to get worked up over a tool, a tool is simply right for the job or it is not.
PHP is a highly successful language. Just about any hosting provider you choose has PHP available. The characteristics of PHP make the language much easier for this type of situation than languages such as Ruby or Java which are either much more memory intensive or simply do no work well in shared hosting environments. For this reason you could say that PHP is the best solution for a great number of people.
This is no fault of PHP. A good developer can write secure code in any major language and any bad developer can write insecure code in any major language. Take a look in the security tracker for ExpressionEngine which is a major PHP and MySQL driven content management system. There has only been one very minor exploit found in the history of the product.
Again, this is so untrue. You canot say that you are totally safe from creating insecure code because of the language you have selected. If you believe this then I would never select you as a developer.
Again, PHP is a tool. It has certain characteristics that make it good for some situations and horrible for others. PHP can very well be low cost, scalable and reliable. Those are loaded words though because each can mean very different things depending on the situation. This subject can be highly complex and to state that someone is incompetent to think that PHP is good for the above reasons is wrong. You cannot make blanket statements like that, especially when you do not have the expertise to back them up.
I’m gonna quote you a little out of order here.
I have no particular response to this. Large companies make all kinds of decisions for all kinds of reasons, which are rarely based on anything resembling sanity.
[quote]From a programmers perspective, there are no “laughing stock” of programming languages. A good developer simply sees a programming language as a tool. There is no reason to get worked up over a tool, a tool is simply right for the job or it is not.
This is no fault of PHP. A good developer can write secure code in any major language and any bad developer can write insecure code in any major language. Take a look in the security tracker for ExpressionEngine which is a major PHP and MySQL driven content management system. There has only been one very minor exploit found in the history of the product.[/quote]
From a programmer’s perspective, every language should be a laughing stock. PHP is just laughed at by more tribes than most. But this is goes beyond cultural relativism. Your argument seems to be that PHP is okay because every language is okay. And sure - you can write an excellent web application in Brainfuck if you try hard enough.
Nevertheless, some languages are conducive to fast development and robust code, and some are not. Perl people commonly make the same argument as you - “That guy’s Perl code is a mess because he’s not writing it carefully enough”. But crappy spaghetti code is a much more common phenomenon in Perl than in other languages, and you have to ask why.
Windows is a highly successful product. Dell is a highly successful brand. Sym are a highly successful scooter company. What are the common themes? Low barrier to entry. Good marketing. Social engineering. Does this have something to do with the conversation?
Show me some statistics. Simple benchmarks seem to show PHP as a little more memory efficient than Java, but hugely slower. Meanwhile it’s a little faster than Ruby, but loses on memory most of the time.
Again, this is so untrue. You canot say that you are totally safe from creating insecure code because of the language you have selected. If you believe this then I would never select you as a developer.[/quote]
Perhaps I should have phrased that as “assuming that you are not an idiot and actually use the provided interfaces, SQL injection simply cannot happen”. Would you care to dispute that one? Does PHP have equivalents? If so, why are they not being used in huge projects like phpBB?
Of course you can write insecure code in any language if you try hard enough. But it is easier and more common in some languages than others.
My statement was that someone is incompetent if they think their work is fast, scalable and robust because they are using PHP. I hold to that one.
My views on PHP are based largely on the opinions of people I know who have huge amounts of PHP expertise, along with other languages. Out of curiosity, what other languages are you proficient with?
Anyway, here’s a blanket statement, coming back to my original example: There is not one single SQL injection attack possible against any code I have written in the last five years. Not one, anywhere, no matter how hard you try. As someone who writes PHP, can you make the same claim? Are you sure?
I don’t really want to go much further. We are already off topic and this thread is certain to decend into a flame war. Anything we have to say here has already been battled out in countless forums and mailing lists across the net. We are covering no new ground. I just wanted to make a point that PHP can in fact be a good language in certain circumstances. There are no right or wrong tools, they are only right or wrong for certain situations.
whitetiger,
What is the purpose of the site. b2b, b2c, informational…
Some specifics would help indentify what you would need.
Php and Mysql are popular because they are economical.
Can’t really complain about free stuff you know.
Seems kind of silly if you ask me when people put down stuff that is free in the first place.
First up, I’m a novice when it comes to websites. However I am interested to know what the professionals use to build websites for the site and databases.
Is it .Net and Microsoft SQL?
Regards
Michael G
[quote=“mkegruber”]First up, I’m a novice when it comes to websites. However I am interested to know what the professionals use to build websites for the site and databases.
Is it .Net and Microsoft SQL?[/quote]
I’m not sure whether that’s sarcasm, so I’ll assume it isn’t and risk “YHBT. HAND.” if I’m wrong.
Firstly, I really have no idea what a professional web developer is. If it’s someone who makes a living writing webpages, then I guess the answer is “whatever the heck you like”. If it means someone who writes webpages really well, the answer remains about the same. These days there are fairly decent frameworks around for doing web and databases in lots of different languages, and there are more coming out all the time.
The real answer which you probably don’t want to hear, and which I may well get flamed from all angles for giving, is that the tools are irrelevant, and what matters is that you are very good at writing computer programs, of which dynamic websites are a subset. Becoming good at this takes about ten years if you’re lucky. At that point you’ll be able to evaluate the available tools for yourself and choose what best fits your style.[1]
Personally, I’ve been using Python almost exclusively for a while now. It’s a language with many problems, but fewer problems than anything else I’ve tried. The good news is that it’s also an excellent choice for a first language: it’s very easy to get started with. The bad news is that web frameworks in Python are a huge mess at the moment, though Django and Turbogears have been getting a lot of good press lately. I use (and sometimes contribute to) Nevow and associated things, which are wildly obscure and I wouldn’t recommend to newcomers.
Ruby is a reasonable language too (though it has too much syntax for my tastes), and the .net stuff is not horrible. I’d avoid Java because there’s so much overengineering.
As for databases … I dunno, really. I like SQLite for stuff that isn’t doing complicated database things (i.e., almost all websites), and PostgreSQL for heavyweight stuff. But DBMSs are pretty interchangeable so far as I can tell.
[1]: I’ve never known anyone with decent credentials freely choose PHP. There are some very good people around writing PHP code, but it tends to be forced upon them by employers or clients.
[quote]First up, I’m a novice when it comes to websites. However I am interested to know what the professionals use to build websites for the site and databases.
Is it .Net and Microsoft SQL? [/quote]
Basically given your position you want something that is popular enough that you can hire a competent programmer to do the heavy lifting and you can do the support.
So C# with ASP.Net and MS-SQL (enterprise edition) would be common enough that you would not feel too locked in with any particular developer or support provider. VB instead of C#, if you’re adventurous and cutting edge… 
The goal is of course to create a site anyone can maintain, not something based on a 4th or 5th generation language with some obscure architecture that only a handful of people know about. Since the learning curve might be shorter for some of the more user friendly stuff, but it not popular among developer because they usually lack the control programmers want.
So basically keeping these factors in mind, it is safe to say robust commercial websites will for the most part be MS base, since it is pretty standardized.
Once you venture into Unix and the land of free stuff, well you best be ready to deal with boutique programming houses, specialized host support shops, and odd ball developers.
The assumption implicit in this approach is that you don’t want to build a long-term relationship with your developer. The generic-code-many-cowboy-developers approach is certainly one way to do things, though it tends to cost more money in the long term for a poorer quality result.
Is it? Explain why. I’m buying a motorbike that not just anyone can maintain. My family own a piano that not just anyone can maintain. I’m typing this on a computer that not just anyone can maintain. Where did you get the idea that software is somehow so devoid of quality that you should always go for the lowest common denominator?
By the way, do you know what generation the .net languages are?
[quote]So basically keeping these factors in mind, it is safe to say robust commercial websites will for the most part be MS base, since it is pretty standardized.
Once you venture into Unix and the land of free stuff, well you best be ready to deal with boutique programming houses, specialized host support shops, and odd ball developers.[/quote]
Perhaps you’re joking - once again I’m not sure. Most webservers run Apache, and most Apache installations are on *nix systems. Microsoft are a relatively new player on the Internet, and the only thing they have going for them is people in expensive suits.
Why am I the only person on this thread who actually backs up anything he says with links and statistics?
It isn’t, I sell a software application for private property lenders (http://www.loanalert.com.au) and I’m familiar with the issues of requirements, support and documentation.
I have a few “web apps” in mind and was curious what would be a generic and stable enough environment. While I would normally not do the programming myself, I feel more comfortable if I can understand it so I can make small cosmetic changes (add a field etc). As a newbie I have read up on the PHP+MYSQL combo, though I was looking at .NET as an alternative (thinking if it is used by enough, then the skill pool is big enough).
I’ve been look at http://www.openlaszlo.org/ with some curiosity to see what I might be able to achieve with this in terms of online applications.
Have you seen this? what are your thoughts.
Regards
Michael G
[quote=“mkegruber”]I’ve been look at http://www.openlaszlo.org/ with some curiosity to see what I might be able to achieve with this in terms of online applications.
Have you seen this? what are your thoughts.[/quote]
I haven’t seen it. I can give you my suspicions based on its website and the Wikipedia article. I could easily be wrong.
It looks good for what it is. What it is, is a lego toolkit. If your needs happen to match its abilities, things will be easy and great. If they don’t, things will not be so good. If they start out okay and then change beyond it later, you are in a bunch of trouble.
It is apparently based on a declarative “language” called LZX so obscure that there isn’t even a Wikipedia article on it. “Declarative” here can be taken to mean “better hope it lets you declare the things you want” (as opposed to actual declarative languages).
I continue to recommend finding a good programmer and working with him or her 