A lot has changed since I first started building websites in 1999. Websites have become more like full-fledged programs and offer many features that can sometimes be challenging to implement. Reusing code saves money and enables programmers to provide more robust and feature-rich sites for their clients. This website began simply as a way to keep track of bits and pieces of PHP and other code that I had written. The Internet community of web programmers is built on the sharing of code and solutions. finalwebsites.com was my contribution to that community. The free code snippets and tutorials are for anyone to use. But, not everyone has the time or expertise to incorporate these solutions into their own projects. If you need additional help or are looking for someone to build a new website or web application for you, I offer those web development services as well.
PHP MySQL Web Applications
When it comes to building PHP and MySQL web applications, the key is finding someone who understands how marketing, web development, Internet security and web hosting must be coordinate into a unify plan. Ideally, that plan identifies any open source or commercial products that can be utilize or if the project will need to be custom built. When beginning a new project, I ask my clients a number of questions. I generally start with these five questions:
- Do you have an existing website?
- How do you currently attract customers to visit your website?
- What do you see as your requirements for your project?
- Is there an open source project or commercial product that covers some or all of your requirements?
- Do you have the budget for a custom solution or will we need to work on finding lower-cost alternatives?
Before you hire any web developer, these questions (and quite a few more) should be asked and answer. Don’t worry if you can’t answer the last two. That’s part of what I do.
WordPress Development
- WordPress plugin and theme development
- Integration of WordPress and 3rd party web applications
- Building complex WordPress websites
- Building web shops using WooCommerce
As part of my professional WordPress offerings, I help my clients navigate through the thousands of plugins to find those that offer the most functionality with the least amount of resource consumption and security issues.
Search Marketing
Search engine optimization is no longer about hiding keywords within the text or buying links. Maintaining rankings on the top search engines requires constant studies of trends, new techniques and your site metrics. You could do it yourself. Or, I could do it for you and let you get back to work on building your business.
Web Hosting
I offer a variety of white-glove level web hosting services. Packages vary based upon client budget and resource requirements.
What is a website?
Websites are files store on servers, which are computers that host (fancy term for “store files for”) websites. These servers are connect to a giant network called the Internet.
Browsers are computer programs that load websites via your Internet connection, such as Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, while the computers use to access these websites are known as “clients”.
What is an IP address?
To access a website, you need to know its Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is a unique string of numbers. Each device has an IP address to distinguish itself from the billions of websites and devices connected via the Internet.
What does HTTP mean?
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) connects you and your website request to the remote server that houses all website data. It’s a set of rules (a protocol) that defines how messages should be sent over the Internet. It allows you to jump between site pages and websites.
When you type a website into your web browser or search for something through a search engine, HTTP provides a framework so that the client (computer) and server can speak the same language when they make requests and responses to each other over the Internet. It’s essentially the translator between you and the Internet — it reads your website request, reads the code sent back from the server, and translates it for you in the form of a website.
What is coding?
Coding refers to writing code for servers and applications using programming languages. They’re called “languages” because they include vocabulary and grammatical rules for communicating with computers. They also include special commands, abbreviations, and punctuation that can only be read by devices and programs.
All software is written by at least one coding language, but languages vary base on platform, operating system, and style. All languages fall into one of two categories: front-end and back-end.
5. What does front-end mean?
Front-end (or client-side) is the side of a website or software that you see and interact with as an Internet user. When website information is transfer from a server to a browser, front-end coding languages allow the website to function without having to continually “communicate” with the Internet.
Front-end code allows users to interact with a website and play videos, expand or minimize images, highlight text, and more. Web developers who work on front-end coding work on client-side development.
What does back-end mean?
Back-end (or server-side) is the side that you don’t see when you use the Internet. It’s the digital infrastructure, and to non-developers, it looks like a bunch of numbers, letters, and symbols.
There are more back-end coding languages than front-end languages. That’s because browsers — at the front-end — only understand HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but a server — at the back-end — can be configure to understand pretty much any language.
