My 10 Favorite Scripts
By Al Williams
One of the great equalizers of the World Wide Web is that your cousin Lorraine can make a Web page every bit as good as (or better than) the largest Fortune 100 company. This puts tremendous pressure on all companies to create the best possible Web presence.
In times past, just putting together a simple page was all you needed to put your firm on the Net. Today, the Web-savvy public wants you to impress them. If you don't, they'll go somewhere else.
A lot goes into a successful Web site: content, graphic design, navigation, site promotion -- producing a site is less like programming and more like making a movie. But programming has its place. The best sites are interactive. They take your order, or search the customer-support database. Or maybe they just remember your favorite restaurants or background color. To do this, a site needs some sort of script. A script is a program that controls what the user sees in the Web browser (see the box titled "Scripting Languages Compared" for more details).
Scripts, like most programs, can range from the very simple to the extremely complicated. But if you aren't up to writing your own, take heart. There are plenty of scripts out there for the taking. Where? On the Net, of course. You might have to make some slight modifications, but you can't beat the price.
In this article, I'll show you a few of my favorite scripts. Some of these I've written from scratch over the years. Others I've adopted from somewhere and modified. You can find these scripts in action at www.al-williams.c
