Hi,
If you have plan for a website to grow steadily from small website to large website that serves the community. In this case which language you will choose for your site to save you from headache of changing it in the near future and just stick with it?
English - English (UK), English(USA) is quite common. Translation in various popular languages is also available on may tools. It may help to popularise it in those countries, where english is not used.
coldfusion
I assume you mean programming language and not the language for the displayed content.
In either case, (x)html will be involved as a minimum.
in terms of ease of scaling up and maintaining your website in the future the best single piece of advice I can offer is to not use tables as your method for building the “skeleton” of your page layout and to use validated html markup and css.
in terms of back-end programming, my skills are in javascript, php and sql and all are fairly easy to scale up or scale down provided you are at least reasonably skilled in using them.
I don’t think it’s the actual language so much that influences scalability and maintenance, it’s the way you design and build your code. Any language, including javascript and php, can be a nightmare to maintain in the future if it wasn’t carefully built in the first place.
I would also discourage developers from using 3rd party wysiwyg or cms applications to build the websites for them unless you really have to.
Imho it is much better to code it up yourself, if you can, so you can customise it totally rather than be restricted by any limitations of 3rd party applications.
PHP Isn’t going anywhere but up and out. It’s growing and expanding every day, it’s the most popular development language on the web. Aside from that, other languages, ie: .ASP and Cold Fusion are oldhat and can not run on any server. They require special softwares on the backend.
Your best bet would be to stick with PHP / MySQL.
HUH ?!?!?
I like PHP and MySQL fine and think its a good choice.
What I’m questioning is the “cannot run on any server”. There are plenty of hosts that support other languages.
And the “special softwares” requirement, well, PHP requires the PHP engine.
(X)HTML and CSS are really a prerequisite for learning how to build, grow and expand a website. Yes you can avoid messing with it these days and still build a website, but you will run into design issues in the future and knowing how to fix them yourself will definitely save you a headache.
From a development standpoint, I would make sure you set out exactly what you want your website to offer feature-wise before you start building anything. Most websites do not require a bespoke CMS, but some do - and you will want to find out which CMS is right for you if any right at the start.
There are many CMSs to choose from, each with a different focus. Wordpress for blogging, or ModX for simple sites, or vBulletin for forums, or Drupal for very complex sites, or Silverstripe, or ExpressionEngine… Picking the right tools for your development will save you a lot of time going forward, and a knowledge of the relevant database/language for it will definitely help as well. Many of the most popular scripts are PHP and MySQL based, but ASP, CFM, and other options also have their benefits and specialised tools.