HTML

HTML is the grandad of the Internet (quite a young grandad as it is only 20 years old, but I think you understand the metaphor!). It stands for the 'Hypertext Markup Language' as is the integral part of the World Wide Web. It differs from normal text that we would write on a day-to-day basis by the fact we add some 'mark up' to it.

You can think of 'mark up' as being additional information to support the actual text, for example you can state that a piece of text is actually a title or a link to another page. This was originally designed to support searching and the organisation of information; by stating that a piece of text was in fact the title for the page allowed that page to be indexed using the title.

HTML is pretty easy to use and is something that most people can get to grips with in a short space of time, however to make it really work for your business it needs to be dynamic. What we mean by this is that the content needs to be constantly changing and react to your inputs. Web pages that are written in pure HTML are often referred to as 'static pages' meaning that their content doesn't change, or that it requires a person to manually change it. Dynamic pages use technologies such as ASP.NET and PHP to allow them to be produced very quickly depending on what the user does. It is these technologies that have allowed eCommerce to become a reality and have allowed businesses to have custom web based applications created for them.