ASP (Active Server Pages) is a server-side language that allows you to build a dynamic website. As your tutorial mentioned it does not require any special browser capabilities, as the output rendered is simply HTML. This is opposed to JavaScript, which also can give a site dynamic capabilities but is run on the client side, requiring proper support from the clients web browser.

A dynamic site can retrieve data from databases and can change content based upon time and date, something you could never do with simple HTML. Try implementing a simple search function in HTML only, it can't be done.

ASP is a Microsoft product and was a great way to build sites in the late 1990's - and it still is a viable technology. But nowadays ASP has been superseded by PHP, which is also a server-side programming language with a number of advantages over ASP. PHP integrates beautifully with HTML and is an open source product that is supported on virtually every web host.

As you built your site with WordPress you are actually using PHP, as WordPress is written in PHP.

Bill

Thanks so much for that information. So I'm ok using Wordpress. I've heard about problems with security on Wordpress? It's not something I need to worry about with this site but it might be in the future.

There are security concerns with every platform, including WordPress. One of the disadvantages of open source software (like WordPress) is that being open source means it's source code is available to anyone. That includes malicious hackers, who unfortunately use their talents to find security holes in the design and exploit them.

The best thing to do with WordPress is to ensure that you are always running the latest version, and that you always upgrade when a new version is released. Try and minimize the number of plugins you use, they often create additional security leaks and can also become problematic when a WordPress upgrade is performed. Keep in mind your plugins also get updated occasionally, often to resolve security or incompatibility issues.

Security should be a concern for you now, any site on the Internet is vulnerable to security breaches. My one and only (for now) Warrior Forum blog post deals with a security incident I experienced about a year ago, if you have the time I invite you to read it. At the minimum make sure you have a backup and restore plan that could rebuild your site if attacked, and use secure passwords.

Best of luck with your site.

Bill

Thanks I'll check out your blog post about security. Best of luck to you as well in 2010!

ASP is essentially a better version of PHP. The only problem is, is that the cost for say MS SQL and a Windows Server is so much more then just a regular MySQL database and a cheap shared hosting account. That is really the only reason PHP has superseded ASP.

Because of this also. There is less ASP developers then PHP, (Although in a corporate world, you would struggle to find many places wanting financial systems done in PHP). So when it comes to things like wordpress, it needs to be the most accessible it can be, thus we have PHP.

As someone using asp going back a dozen years, and ASP.Net as long as it's been available, I think I can clear up a couple of misconceptions here.

The original Active Server Pages system is comparable in many ways to the earlier versions of php. Both have fairly simple programming languages and fairly simple runtimes. These allow scripts on a web server to dynamically generate web pages.

The server script can connect to a database, validate user input, create customized or up to the minute results, and so forth. The server script generates html that can be displayed by any browser. ASP allowed a choice of programming languages but most commonly used was VBScript, a variation of Visual Basic.

ASP.Net makes "old school" ASP utterly obsolete. ASP.Net is a portion of the dot-Net framework, an extremely massive programming system that incorporates many features far beyond original ASP and also far beyond PHP.

.Net allows the use of many different programming languages, including PHP for compatibility; VB.net, another variation of Visual Basic; C#, which provides a great deal of modern technology; C++ for extremely detailed control of the machine; and many lesser known languages that can be very useful for particular types of problem-solving. If programmers follow a few guidelines, components can be written in any .Net compatible language and used and extended in any other .Net compatible language.

The ASP.net runtime offers a huge collection of very powerful and sophisticated functionality. Some examples: a model-view-controller framework; easy separation of business logic and presentation; a choice of drag & drop IDE's with resuable custom controls; several state management options; master pages; ability to automatically shut down memory leaks; ability to control all aspects of the page rendering pipeline; configuration management through xml files; workflow management; and much more.

The .net runtime allows the same languages and functionality to also run inside the browser, with Silverlight; on the desktop, with Windows Forms; on servers handling automated web requests, with Web Services; and much more.

.net is available for the Unix world with Novell's Mono project, and also for the Mac. But many low-budget Unix web hosts don't make it available.

The depth of engineering detail, advanced tutorials, beginner guides and intermediate help forums for .Net most likely far exceeds what is available for php.

However, making the most of .Net requires that one have a pretty good understanding of software engineering principles, best practices and architectural choices. This puts it at a level of sophistication that is more challenging than the much lower barrier of entry to just toss something together in php.

PHP doesn't have to be used to just toss something together, but it often is used this way because it's easier to do so and more widely known in the Internet marketing and free software worlds.

Chris

I don't think that the previous website designer of my site is using asp.net. He had pages ending in .asp and so I think it was built in the .asp of previous years, not asp.net . Please, take this with a grain of salt as I am not very knowledgable in tech!

This is sort of off-topic but wondering what I can do about the 404 errors this site is going to get when people click on the old links that ended in .asp. Any ideas? I am submitting a new sitemap. Is there any way I can let Google and other SE's know about the changes?

Thanks for sharing your wisdom,

Eunice

Eunice, you're right that original asp has files with an asp extension. For asp.net, the file extension is .aspx.

Wordpress provides a built-in way to handle 404 (not found) errors. Each Wordpress theme has a file called 404.php. Here's a tutorial on how to customize that file, how it works along with .htaccess, and what all the http error codes are:
Creating an Error 404 Page WordPress Codex

Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I just love Wordpress...they think of everything !

I didn't get a chance to read everyone else's comments, but advantages of ASP...
None, it's a dieing language. (.asp not asp.net)

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