Back in the “dark ages” of the Internet, circa mid 1990’s, building a website was a considerable task. There weren’t a lot of software programs available for non technical types, such as myself, to create websites. If you were a programmer and knew html you could build a site easily, but if you didn’t know html, the Internet programming language, you either needed to hire a professional or learn html and muddle your way through. Personally I’m not into hiring outside help and I wanted to do it on my own. It took hours and hours of trial and error over dial-up connections to see the end result. When you see your first creation you feel two emotions; a sense of pride for accomplishment and sadness because your site is so pathetically simple.

Since that time life has changed dramatically, but there were a few changes before getting to where we are today. Some of the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs that were better but still difficult to manage and create websites that looked the same on all monitors, operating systems and web browsers.

A major breakthrough took place in the mid 2000’s that would change everything, XSite Pro went on the market. It was introduced as a new generation of web design software programs specifically built for speed and functionality. It was targeted to Internet Marketers and Small and Home based businesses. Being an “early adopter” I purchased my first copy. I was creating multiple websites within minutes. I was so impressed with it that I took one of my early web sites and re-created it in XSP so that i could update it and add new functionality easily. What took me weeks to do I was now doing in a few hours, with, I might add professional results.

The early version of XSite Pro was light years ahead of the competition. It changed the approach to creating websites to something the average person could understand. You no longer needed to be a certidfied HTML programmer to get professional results. Making changes and adding functions could be accomplished with a few clicks and viewed immediately on your desktop before publishing. I have to say I was totally hooked on XSP.

A few years ago the developers at XSite Pro announced a completely new version of their award winning program. Since I had such great results with the first version of XSP I wanted to see what XSP 2 was all about. The features list was impressive. Creating payment acceptance from within the program was a new and attractive feature. Creating and displaying RSS feeds was another function as well as many more that are really too numerous to go into here.

The best part of XSite Pro 2 is that you still don’t need to understand one line of code or script to get a fully functioning website up and running within hours, not weeks or months. This is a distinct advantage when you are trying to promote affiliate products, or your own product. There is also payment functionality built into XSP 2 for accepting payments on your website.

I couldn’t enumerate all of the features of XSP in this article, so I’ve put a direct link below to the features page at XSite Pro. One feature that deserves mention is the cost, XSP 2 won’t cost you a small fortune to buy. In fact it’s far less than most of the web design software available today. You won’t need to add additional plugin functionality, it’s already there. There are also dozens of professionally designed templates to use with one-click implementation.

Do yourself a big favor and just check out the XSP 2 features page link below. You’ll be happy that you did.

Check out he features page for XSite Pro 2 to see a complete listing of all of the XSP 2 features. Already sold? Go directly to the XSP 2 purchase page. I think that you will be impressed.

PHP Web Development has come a long way since it was first developed as little Perl extensions. It started off as a simple script for a home page and has grown into what is used on 200 million websites.

Flawed and hard to use for development, PHPs newer version does not have the language support that come with older versions. As for developing, the server you use and the server it is sent to are probably not compatible.

PHP does have its defects. One such defect is that the newer version, version 6, does not support as many languages as version 3. Designing in PHP is not easy. You are designing on a server that you cannot control and that normally will not support your project depending on the server that is used.

It is not a rule but develop on a Linux. The server on your computer is similar what the server is like that your program will be run on. Most localhosts are Windows based. When you put your program or website on the internet, it runs on a Linux host. That may not sound like a big deal, but it is. Servers that are Windows based are not case sensitive like Linux based servers. When you set up your site on a local host and your link is http://name.com/folderName/ it may look great. You check to make sure it works and it does. So, you deploy it to the webserver and guess what? It does not work. You will get the wonderful page not found message even if it does exist.

Linux systems are more stable.

If you just cannot tear yourself away from Windows, try to get the development environment as close to Linux as possible.

SVN and CVS are basically two sides of the same coin. SVN and CVS save your work on a system allowing you access to prior versions if necessary. You are going to need access to this. Some would say that SVN is only needed when several people are working on the same project. Basically, it gives all of them access to the file simultaneously. The SVN will deal with any conflicts that arise by combining all the work together when it can. There are those that SVN is the way to go even if you are working solo. If you ever need to go back to a prior version of a project and restore the project to a particular point, you can.

Hopefully you can tell just how relevant this information is developing as well as PHP. It is suggested that to do these two things in the order listed when getting started in developing your application that will be in a structured and controlled environment.

Visit the Macresource Computer Training website for PHP and MySQL training courses in London or call 0800 1950 502.