Best "create a website" services with best SEO?

[fuzzybabybunny]

I'm looking for the best "Create a Website" services such as Weebly.

I want beautiful templates, easy customization, easy data entry, and great SEO potential.

Any ideas?

 

[Crusty]

I don't know for the rest of your criteria, but SEO is all on you.

Content is the ultimate king with SEO. It doesn't matter how well 'optimized' your site is, if your content sucks your ranking will suck. Doing the basics like unique page titles, descriptions and having a sitemap should all be standard practice for any tool you use.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Gotcha. Is Javascipt / Jquery able to do everything that PHP does? http://virb.com/ looks like a great service but it does not support PHP. They do support jquery and javascript though.

 

[Markbnj]

Gotcha. Is Javascipt / Jquery able to do everything that PHP does? http://virb.com/ looks like a great service but it does not support PHP. They do support jquery and javascript though.

Javascript and jQuery run exclusively on the client side, in the browser. By contrast php runs on the server side and typically processes data into markup and script that will be processed by the browser.

 

[Leros]

Virb sounds similar to SquareSpace. I've heard a lot about SquareSpace and never heard of Virb. A quick Google suggests that SquareSpace might be better.

Take a look at SquareSpace. Looks like they have a few tools to help with SEO. http://help.squarespace.com/custome...rease-my-site-s-visibility-to-search-engines-

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Javascript and jQuery run exclusively on the client side, in the browser. By contrast php runs on the server side and typically processes data into markup and script that will be processed by the browser.

Right. But in terms of pure programming functionality are they the same? I guess the downside to JavaScript is people can just steal your code and maybe it is more easily exploited since people can see the code all the time?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Virb sounds similar to SquareSpace. I've heard a lot about SquareSpace and never heard of Virb. A quick Google suggests that SquareSpace might be better.

Take a look at SquareSpace. Looks like they have a few tools to help with SEO. http://help.squarespace.com/custome...rease-my-site-s-visibility-to-search-engines-

Ah, nice, I'll look into it. If SquareSpace could support php that would be awesome, but I highly doubt it.

 

[Leros]

Ah, nice, I'll look into it. If SquareSpace could support php that would be awesome, but I highly doubt it.

You're looking for two very different things:
1) A service that lets you easily make a website with nice templates, etc (SquareSpace, Virb)
2) A webhost where you can run PHP

These are pretty conflicting things.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Right. But in terms of pure programming functionality are they the same? I guess the downside to JavaScript is people can just steal your code and maybe it is more easily exploited since people can see the code all the time?

Not really. For example:

If you need to look up something in a server database table or read from a private data file, that needs to run on the server.

All form validation MUST be done on the server, though you can have the JavaScript on the client pre-validate to catch things like missing fields or email and email-confirm fields that do not match.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Not really. For example:

If you need to look up something in a server database table or read from a private data file, that needs to run on the server.

All form validation MUST be done on the server, though you can have the JavaScript on the client pre-validate to catch things like missing fields or email and email-confirm fields that do not match.

Ah crap. That sounds like it might be important.

What if I just want to write to a log file on the server?

User fills out a form on the website. The submission gets formatted and emailed out to me. But it also gets written into a log file so that I can check it if my email server is acting weird.

Right now I do that with php. Can JS / jQuery do this?

 

[Markbnj]

Ah crap. That sounds like it might be important.

What if I just want to write to a log file on the server?

User fills out a form on the website. The submission gets formatted and emailed out to me. But it also gets written into a log file so that I can check it if my email server is acting weird.

Right now I do that with php. Can JS / jQuery do this?

Short answer: no.

There is a more complicated answer, embodied in projects like Meteor (http://www.meteor.com/), but that is a bigger discussion.

 

[Leros]

You seem to be confusing client-side and server-side programming. They're fairly independent things although they sometimes interact.

Javascript runs in the user's browser. It can make the page dynamic and more like an application as compared to a static HTML page. Javascript can also make web requests to the server.

If you want the server to do more than load static content (e.g. query a database, handle form submissions, etc), then you need software running on the server (PHP, Ruby, Java, etc).