Ever Fantasize About Hiring an Assistant for Your Small Business?
Perhaps Your Website Can Do the Job for You!
Having a website for your small business can help customers learn about your business and make contact with you, but did you know having a website can also improve the efficiency of your business? One powerful way to do this is to take advantage of server-side languages like PHP to automate some of your manual business processes. PHP can help you accept payment via credit cards on your website. It can process orders and send emails for you. It can store and retrieve information from a database. It can make your website dynamic, changing what your clients see based on choices they make. It is truly like having a virtual assistant.
If you'd like to talk about how adding PHP to your website
could help automate your business processes, please contact me.
If you're curious about how PHP works to accomplish all these tasks, please read on.
(Warning To Technophobes: some technical jargon is used below!)
Let me first explain how a website works. The actual code lives on a server. This is what is called "hosting". If your host is DreamHost, for example, DreamHost has a server, a computer somewhere on the planet that has the code for your website's pages. When a client enter your website's address in their browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari), the server sends (or "downloads") the code to their browser. Their browser reads the code (written in "HTML") and like magic, the website appears on your client's computer screen.
But servers can do much more than simply deliver HTML code to browsers. There are computer languages, like PHP, which run on the server (they're called "server-side scripts") and they can perform behind-the-scenes activities, like stagehands that run around behind the curtains during scene changes of a play.
PHP is amazingly versatile. I created the diagram below to help clients understand some of the power of harnessing PHP. PHP scripts can "talk" to databases using a database language called "MySQL". Databases can store any kind of information you might need to run your small business. PHP works with MySQL to put data into the database and retrieve it when needed. PHP can be used to pass data between pages of a website, generate HTML for dynamic webpages, or even interface with ecommerce systems such as PayPal. The interface to you or your clients is HTML, the standard web page language, which means you or your clients simply fill out forms on your website and hit a button and PHP does the work.
Whew, you made it past the technical jargon part! The good news is that you don't have to worry about what PHP and MySQL are doing or how they are doing it - it's my job to make it all happen behind the scenes in a matter of seconds. You simply need to understand how your current business processes work, and have a desire to automate them.
Aldebaran Website Design, Seattle WA
206.523.6560
Jill@AldebaranWebDesign.com
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