There are many factors that you need to consider when hiring a webmaster, you need to ensure that you will get customer satisfaction as well as good value for money. You would hate to choose an inexperienced webmaster who cannot meet your requirements because you would have to go through the whole process again to get the job done. It means if you made any partial payment you may lose that which will then lower your budget when looking for another webmaster.

Firstly you have to identify the places that you can find these talented webmasters who have the skills to complete you job. There are many relevant forums such as DigitalPoint, WickerFire and Web Talk Forums where you will be able to post exactly what you need and people who are capable will get in contact stating a price if you haven't set a maximum budget. Aside from the forums there are specific websites that aims to connect freelances with clients so that you can get all your work done much easier and in a timely manner. You could also ask your friends and family to see if they have been in the market in the past for something similar and found a reliable good webmaster, this will also take a lot of the risks out because you know that they are here to make a living and not out to scam unsuspecting people.

If you are going to search the forums or websites for a webmaster you should be very cautious about what you state in your thread and make sure you don't miss any important information out that may prolong the process.

This is the kind of information you should always state when creating a project on a forum or freelance website:

• Exactly what you need doing, try to include as much detail as possible as it will make it easier for the webmaster to quote you an accurate price. It will also prevent the conversation in between telling the webmaster what they need to do. If you can do this successfully they should have everything they have to get started as soon as you accept the quote.
• Deadline, one of the most important things for a webmaster is to know the maximum deadline. This will also remove the factor of them having to rush a job to get it done to an unexpected deadline because if the webmaster was to miss any deadlines it will look bad from their side which may deter many other people from using them in the future.
• Maximum budget, this is quite important in the fact that it will eliminate any webmasters that charge over your budget so is well worth putting into the pitch somewhere.
• Any additional information that you feel will be beneficial to the chosen webmaster.

After you have set your project up you will get overwhelmed with responses and quotes from people who believe they are capable of meeting your requirements. You then have to go through the responses one by one to see if anyone stands out from the crowd, your budget will be a major deciding point at this stage because if anyone has quoted an amount over your budget you can discard that right away.

You should always ask for samples of previous work so that you will be confident in your decision and don't choose anyone that is simply after your money. Any reputable webmaster will have a portfolio showcasing their talents and strengths ready for you to take a look at. Each forum or website will have a rating system in place so you can see how successful they have been since starting as a freelance webmaster. Take a look at their history and feedback to see what comments past customers have left as this will be the only information you can rate them on.

When you have found the webmaster you want to take on, the next step is to arrange payment. Many people will require a 50% upfront or a deposit of some sort to show the webmaster that you are serious about this and want the working doing. If you are new to the freelance website/forum you will not have built any reputation or feedback so they may request full payment upfront to secure the job. Check their feedback before you make any payments but if it seems to be 100% positive then everything should run smooth.

You can use payment methods such as escrow or paypal to make things a little safer as if you don't get what was promised you can file a charge back and have a good chance to get some, if not all of your money back. Try to build a good reputation on these websites so that in future if you need any work doing it will be a lot easier to have a smooth transaction.

What is PHP?

PHP stands for PHP: HyperText Preprocessor, it is a server-side scripting language, and as the name goes, it is to create dynamic and interactive Websites for your visitors. Maybe you currently make your Websites in HTML? HTML alone cannot create dynamic Web pages, HTML is clearly defined as a static language, as it is always static and mainly is used for structuring (or styling, in some cases) a document (or a Web page, if you like).

What do we mean by server-side scripting?

You may already know, but HTML is a client-side language, so the browser translates the HTML code into "bytecode" that the computer can understand, and so the computer translates bytecode into what we can clearly understand, text, for example. Server-side scripting is a little different, a little bit more added to the story. As with PHP, server-side scripting languages have an interpreter inside a machine, that translates the code (in our case, PHP code) to HTML code (that the browser can understand), and then the same process will take place with the browser translating the HTML code to bytecode, and so forth. With server-side scripting languages, you don't need anything adding to your browser or computer, as the interpreter inside the machine that hosts the particular Website does most of the work.

What's the fuss with server-side scripting languages, then?

The thing that makes server-side scripting a must nowadays is because it can generate dynamic Web pages, but what do we mean by dynamic Web pages? Well, imagine you wanted to start a forum, and you used HTML. Okay, you used a form to submit the data and it is sent to your e-mail address, and you have to edit the static Web page every time you want a new post added. That, to me, would be the most annoying job of creating a Website. However, with PHP (or any other server-side scripting language, for that matter), can be completely automated, and you'd not have to edit your file even once! The thing that PHP does, is sends the form data to a different page, saves it in "pre-defined" variables (things that store a value), and using something called a "while loop" that continually loops all the posts saved in the Web page - and that's it! PHP stores the posts in a MySQL database (something that holds data, if you like, like member accounts, etc) and uses that as long-term memory.

But if we're talking about server-side scripting languages, what makes PHP different from the rest? Well, simply put, PHP is probably the best thing that has come into the server-side scripting genre. If you have heard about other scripting languages like Perl or ASP/ASP.NET, you'll come to find that they are extremely hard to learn from. Put it this way, the majority of Web developers that use ASP.NET, for example, are those who have come from a different programming background, like have known VBScript, or other languages that's in relation to ASP.NET, the same with Perl. The difference between PHP and the rest, is PHP is incredibly easy to learn, especially for the newbies towards this industry, and PHP has took several steps to ensure an easy introduction to those newbies to the world of programming. Let's do an example, lets see which is the easiest to understand, out of PHP, VBScript and Perl, by doing a simple "Hello World" program, that outputs text to a Web page:

PHP:

echo "This is some text that'll be shown in a Web page...";

VBScript/ASP.NET:

Response.Write("This is some text that'll be shown in a Web page...");

Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "content-type: text/html nn";

print "This is some text that'll be shown in a Web page...";

Okay, now I am not going to say things like "well, obviously PHP is the easiest to understand" - as obviously, we all have different preferences, but what I can say is, that they all do the same thing. Which seems the most logical to you? In my opinion, the two most logical ones for me is PHP and VBScript/(ASP.NET).

Now it's up to you which one you want to go ahead with, experiment which one is best for you, after all, we all have dfferent tastes.

Good luck!

Below are a few resources to get started with PHP:

# - w3schools.com

# - php.net

# - mysql.com

Millions of websites being launched year after year can only signify two important things. One, the importance of being on the net, regardless of whether yours is a small business website, a home page, an ecommerce or even a portal, and two, easy availability of variety of free templates which make website building a child's play.

In this article, let us try to explore whether templates, free or paid, offer suitability and ease of working and why they are taking the newbie web owners and builders as well as professionals by storm.

Website templates are pre made web designs into which you can start filling in your information straight after downloading. Easily, this eliminates the cumbersome task of having to design an appealing layout and more than that, it does not want you to have any knowledge of HTML at all.

At this point in time, you might be tempted to ask, if this is all, how good it is over HTML editors which don't require a template to be downloaded for every time you are building a website? True, they don't require you to possess knowledge of HTML but they still rest the task of creating an appealing layout upon you, juggling with color schemes, and placement of different sections on your page etc which are really not your job. It is precisely here that the website templates fill the void- import web templates into your favorite HTML editor and get-set-go with site building.

Conventional method of web designing is out of date as it takes a lot of manual labor a web entrepreneur can hardly afford to waste. When web presence matters to you for reasons beyond passion, you would never want to waste time and efforts on designing your own templates or even purchase them in bulk.

Free templates are in no way inferior to paid templates but you have to be choosey about your source. They do not limit your aspirations; instead you can have a variety of them such as free CSS templates, PSD templates, besides the plain HTML types. The very reason these templates are a matter of big business today is their aesthetics, functionality, easy of use and of course, the huge demand.

Free templates also make business sense considering the number of websites the ordinary people launch every month. To get your business off by launching hundreds of websites you know what makes sense and what not. Choose your templates without compromising on your needs and let the cost be condoned by the world.