Let's face it. Plain and simple. Anyone who is in business, is in business to make money. Not friends, not enemies, not relationships. Money, money, money.

I have seen many a site be built only to realize later that it won't make money for the owner. Most often these sites are created in a programming language like Cold Fusion, Active Server Page, sometimes PHP (which originally was created as Personal Home Page) Java and some other imaging software.

My advice is to create your site in static HTML, or PHP, or not to utilize back-end databases, unless it is absolutely necessary. Generally, it is more successful not to, and the little bit of updating on a small database is basically just as easy when you don't have a database at all and just update the pages.

I don't want to steer you away from databases, or say they won't work. Done right you can make it happen, but it's extra work, extra expense, and often, not as successful as the same site created as static HTMl or PHP.

My observation has been that the site done in static HTML is more successful than the sites done in dynamic database driven software.

Here is a basic scenario that is repeated all too often. A businessman runs a successful business offline and sees the Internet as a way to expand his horizons, and profits, garner new business, and make a tidy sum of money. He investigates the possibilities and runs into scores of web designers who all tout fancy graphics, flash, java and a host of other real snazzy sounding names that nearly sell themselves on web creation. I want java ... oh yeah, some flash too!

So this businessman gets sold by a web designer on how great the site will be, how people will be impressed when they see it, how he will be the owner of a state-of-the-art website and, and, and, and .....

So time goes by and the designer sets up this database for the 100 products inputs data into a database, sets up a main home page, a privacy policy, a terms of service and a contact page and lets the businessman know his site is all set. Here are the keys.

Now what. Well, as the scenario goes, you now own a website with all your products in the database. The systems offers a really cool way to update the product prices, changing products, removing products, adding products and generally changing the design colors of the site and all what not. Wow, what a system, this is really a great system, is what I generally hear. But the underlying complaint always bubbles to the surface after the initial break in of the site. I'm not making any money, and I can't find my site in the search engines.

No kidding? You can't find your site? Geez, why not?

Well, upon inspection I generally find that the main home page is not built so a search engine will index it for the market you are in. The most important keywords are probably not even present. When I click on a link I see this huge long URL that contains about 150 characters, including numerous instances of the dreaded URL characters of &, =, ?.

When I arrive at that page, I will click up above in my browser to see the page as it is listed in the Google cache. Hmmm, it doesn't seem to be listed here. The site is not in the Google cache.

Well, let me make a long story short. These dynamic URLs are very difficult to be indexed by a search engine. The spiders choke on those characters, stop and do not proceed. Sometimes a fail-safe is built-in that redirects a spider to another page if it cannot find the intended page. This is not a very good fix for the problem, but it's better than nothing.

So, what has transpired is that Joe Business has decided to enter the online world of eCommerce. He got sold on a snazzy and jazzy website, that has served him well for his work, but does not meet the requirements of search engines and search engine spiders. He has in effect, opened up a store front at the very end of a dead-end road out in the wilderness where noone ever goes. He has paid quite a tidy sum to this designer as well. Now he is out money and not making money.

We can't really blame the designer. He is doing his job, as best he knows how. He doesn't know about SEO, it's not his job. What he really knows is that he has installed this bit of software before, and he's worked all the kinks out of the installation. He can now do it in record time, and he is still charging the same big bucks for it. His design time is minimal and all is well in web design heaven.

So, this is a basic scenario of what happens when someone goes into the online business and meets up with a designer to have a site built. But, you may be asking, what does any of this have to do with the language of web sites. It has all to do with it. The above scenario is relevant to many, well, actually all, of the main languages used to set up eCommerce web sites for the online businessman who doesn't know any better. All of them .asp, .cfm, .js, even .php in some cases.

Now I don't want to completely steer you away from these, but I do want to level the playing field into facts and figures. If you use these languages, make sure your designer allows for the URLs to be static in nature and NOT dynamic in nature. You do not want the dynamic characters in the URLs. Make sure your designer understands this. Tell him I said so and you won't take it any other way. You can still use the database, and the fancy backend, and all will work OK. If you don't have those dynamic URLs the search engine spiders will find your content.

I have seen .cfm (Cold Fusion) sites where the URLs were not completely dynamic, the content on the static page, like the main home page, was fully accessible, and the code was as well. Those sites were optimizable and easy enough to work with that I could get the job done without spending 40 hours in the first week just getting used to how things work.

PHP is generally the easiest to utilize, simply because it was really made for the web. Spiders can easily read the included text and it works seamlessly with MySQL databases, which are of the most popular and usable. You still need to have your designer pay attention to the dynamic nature of URLs and keep them nice and static. This is where a designer that is also a programmer will make the difference between success and failure.

ASP (Active Server Pages) is the same, when done right it can be workable. JS, for javascript, just doesn't work. Spiders can't read the javascript at all. They don't get it, and you won't get listed. Fortunately pure javascript sites are few and between these days.

Another really bad way to create a website is with a graphic interface program that takes anything you type into it and creates a graphic image out of it. In the long run you wind up with a web page that is nothing but image. Like a photograph to a blind person, this page will not get indexed and you will never, ever, not in a million years, be found online by anyone.