html vs. php

[Dave Kovaleski]

Hello all master coders,

I have been doing my site exclusivley in html. What is the big differences bewteen php and html? What are the advantages/disadvantages? What, if any would be the penalty from going from an html site to a php site? Would this hurt the PR I have already gotten as well as the search results? Woud it appear to be a whole new site?

Please discuss.

Thanks in advance.

[brandonre]

Hi Dave, I recently changed from html to php pages as long as you redirect your pages you should be fine, I did take a hit initially on my pagerank for my interior pages but you should be fine in the long term. It is a lot easier to make changes to my website with php.

[jasoncrouch]

I am interested in hearing more about this topic as well. Switching to php seems to be a good change for functionality and for making changes and utilizing newer web tools, but I have had this site up since 1998 and I don't want to jeopardize anything either.

[Aaron]

Here's how I do it.

.htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1.php [L]

Example: http://www.coastalmobile.com/mobile-...iners-cove.htm

That page has an .htm extention - however those properties on the page are dynamically generated.

This way you can have the page appear as if it's an .html page to the search engines. Just as long as you have an apache webserver this will work perfectly and the searchengines, and users will never need to know that it's actually a php file. One of the big advantages I find with a php site is the ability to easily do includes (there are ways without php ) - but anyways - It's always nice to have PHP.

[Dave Kovaleski]

Thanks for the responses so far, but I am still in that dark of what the main advantage is of php, any explanations?

[Bigtoe]

I hope the advantages of php don't outweigh the advantages of CSS. I have just started converting my site to CSS. So far, I love it.

[Dave Kovaleski]

Well, I know nothing about php but I can say with confidence that I am sure php and css work together.

[jasoncrouch]

I know very little about either one - just html. I would love to know which way to head with any future changes. I get the feeling that it really doesn't matter, but I'm not sure.

[Bigtoe]

Cool.

[VRI]

Any dynamic scripting, like PHP, will afford you exponentially greater flexibility with your site with no downside. There is no conflict with php and css... just look at an REW site to see.

PHP/ASP/CF etc will allow you to pull/calculate data on the fly and process it on the server so it's spit out as plain old html to the browser/search engines.