Advanced Web Design

The language in the image backing this page is Javascript, the language of the web, admittedly hard to recognise in this “minified” form. It is now the only language supported by all browsers, so if your website needs dynamic behaviour, it has to be done in Javascript. That said, it’s surprising how many websites make very little use of Javascript, as most of the apparently dynamic behaviour they need can be handled not in the actual browser (“client-side”) but by any of a much wider range of languages running on the server – the program that delivers what you see to your browser (“server-side”).

There are sound reasons to try to minimise the dependence on Javascript, as the language has a somewhat chequered history; it was released to the world in the mid 1990s while Brendan Eich, its creator, was still working on it and it never really got an unambiguous specification. It’s still true that some Javascript code runs brilliantly on some browsers but goes haywire or stops working altogether on others!

If you’d like a website – and yes, I can do that for you – I’d recommend you use the simple policy I used to develop this website, which is to use WordPress with a first-class “theme”. I’ve not done any programming on this site – all the facilities I needed were provided by the theme and by “plug-ins”, which are special-purpose bits of program that run on WordPress to extend its functionality.