I am always baffled when I see companies spend huge amount of money reinventing the wheel in .asp or anything that runs on an IIS server. It’s also unfortunate that a lot of these companies have leaders that really don’t understand the dynamic languages that power the internet and web apps. There are many reasons to avoid using any of Microsoft’s technology, and I believe it’s only appeal is name recognition. That was the reason for using it at the last web company I worked for. “The clients know Microsoft” were his exact words.

Reason #1 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
I wouldn’t say you are shooting yourself in the foot by using .asp but more like blowing your leg off. A search for “Tampa Web Design” on Google Jan 29, 2010 reveals 1,890,000 results and only 10 will be on the first page of Google. The top two sites were developed using PHP and only one of the top 5 sites was written in asp and overall only 3 of the top 10 websites were using Microsoft technology to run their websites.

Google has announced that speed is a factor in their algorithm and they have since released mod_pagespeed for apache which is an automation of web cache best practices which you could do manually on a Microsoft server but chances are if your web company is using a Microsoft server in the first place they are not going to have an in depth understanding on the technical issues related to search engine optimization

Apache servers which power PHP, Ruby, CGI, etc. serves up 60 percent of all websites on the internet. Microsoft’s IIS comes in a distant secont with 22 percent. Google’s web server which was built from Apache runs 6 percent of sites, mainly only Google websites.

Search engine optimization is so important because it can account for a large amount of traffic up to 90% or more. Building your website is never the hard part part. Getting relevant visitors is a much more in involved task and you need to set yourself up for success in the beginning.

Now is a perfect time to redesign your website!! Have you bought a new computer since you last updated your website? Have you bought a new vehicle in your fleet? Have you moved to a bigger office? Well..don’t leave your website behind. I meet a lot of business owners who use the godaddy site builder as their company website, or better yet something they made in frontpage. Web Developers never use frontpage. How can you brand yourself with godaddy’s logo right there on the bottom of your website? Who is going to take serious as a legitimate business if you have someone else’s logo on the bottom? When is the last time you updated your website? Did you just build it and leave it..5 years ago? Search engine spiders will ignore your website if they never find updated content. People tend to also do the same thing. Business that don’t take their websites serious often have a difficult time getting out of the mom and pop stage a.k.a. start up. You can pawn it off as non important or one of those things you will get to later. But the reality of the situation is that everyone looks at your website before doing business with you. What is your website saying about you? Is calling you an amateur, or saying your the best in this industry?

Just one more reason to demand a developer that uses Coldfusion or PHP for your dynamic site.

Check out this article in Wired Magazine:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/04/microsoft-datab.html

Unless you can determine the proficiency of your programmer…You taking a huge risk with the integrity of your data. Possibly exposing all your customers information and opening yourself up to potential legal issues.

Alex A.