These days of Wordpress blogging we see a number of new technologies surfacing in the market. PHP is one of them. It has now become an essential skill for any web designer wherever they may be located in the world. PHP is an open source language that means its free of cost to use and is always being developed and perfected further by developers around the world.

PHP applications are fast and secure. PHP is a server side language and this makes it a hell lot secure than a lot of host-side languages. That’s one of the reasons for its wide usage.

PHP being free is a huge boon for small web design agencies and freelancers. What PHP allows these freelancers and agencies is the ability to experiment and implement new features for their clients. Prior to PHP some of these features were only possible with bulky and expensive language platforms and technologies. Wordpress is one such huge success story. Built entirely with PHP, Wordpress allows free blogs to people around the world. PHP is also compatible to most operating systems. However, a lot of PHP programs run better on Linux but that’s just a developer’s choice based on what they are trying to achieve.

PHP is used primarily more and more for creating active web pages in larger and more complex sites. The PHP pages integrate well with other technologies now widely being used online. What’s great is that PHP is free and learning curve is not huge that makes it such a wonderful choice to create big and expensive projects. You can create fast, secure and active web sites with PHP in no time once you have mastered the language.

One of the biggest benefit of PHP is its compatibility with MYSQL, which is the most common used database in dynamic sites and portal these days. Older languages do not interface with MySQL as well as PHP. So PHP+MySQL has become the combination of choice for most portals and complex sites. Being a server side language it controls and communicates with database faster and securely without any risk of data leakage through language queries.

Probably the best quality that PHP has is its open-source nature. What that means is that there is a whole army of developers around the world constantly working on the code to improve it and making ot better and better to cope up with emerging technologies around the world. So, soon as something new comes up anywhere in the world people just notch up the PHP code to match eth required. Also, people code functions and modules in PHP that are like small pieces of re-usable codes that can be instantly used by other designers. It’s like using the wheel invented only once.

Victor Solovey is a leading usability and accessibility tester. He works for a leading design company. Krishna likes to review sites for usability. Victor can be contacted to do psd to xhtml conversions quickly.