One of the most confusing decisions that IT policy makers of companies come across is which way to go .NET or PHP. Both have their merits and limitations. Deciding one is entirely dependant upon your budget, technical skills, requirements and your overall corporate methodology.

PHP is the most popular open source programming language used to build web-sites that rely upon dynamic content. PHP is free and so are almost all of its supporting tools, platforms, databases and even OS. Being Open Source it got good support, code snippets and helps at various on-line open source forums. It even got Zend optimizer which compiles the code and makes code much faster and hence making it almost equivalent to other compiled web programming options. It is fairly easy to get a PHP programmer and many of the times if you have budget constraints, you can get freelancers with excellent skills in PHP.

.NET is really a framework, that consist of a framework with support of various programming languages e.g. C#, ASP.NET, VB.NET etc. Like many good things except air, water, sun nothing is free in the world and so is .NET However it does come up with excellent support from Microsoft, provides excellent help documentation, has excellent professionals (though none of them are cheap - Sure you know one of the resource is outsourcing it to us:)) to sort out any issues. Also since it is a complete framework it is used for things way above than building simple web-sites.

So, in summary if you have limited IT budget and your requirement is to build a site or some other similar web based applications, then PHP may be a better choice. However if you have some budget and your requirement goes further beyond a simple web-site, and you are looking for some great dedicated support and dependency upon more solid programmers, .NET is the way to go.

Nitin Tripathi

We are into the times of Web 2.0. The web has changed. Sites are getting more percentage of traffic through Web 2.0 sites than good ole Google.

So now its time to change the link building strategies.
Here are a few of the action items that I can think of. If you follow all these, sure within short span of time, you will start receiving some good traffic from all Web 2.0 sites.
1)    Sure G still is supreme and with G, conventional link building still works. The links from .edu or authority sites are still key to rank in Google.
2)    Digg – Digg.com is fast emerging as a big traffic feeder for many sites. Quadszilla has posted a nice article on how to make to Front Page of Digg.
Randfish in his article mentioned how top users at dig are controlling the front page of digg.
Not all stories can make it to the front page, however with proper strategy, you may start receiving nice traffic from digg
3)    Pick up your favorite top 10 Web 2.0 sites and start submitting your articles and sites into them. These sites can be Netscape, reddit etc. Submit each and every article of your sites to these story / article submission Web 2.0 sites
4)    Create profiles at Social Networking sites and put your relevant site URLs in your profile. Be active at these sites; create a huge circle of friends. Do post the comments freely.
5)    Create profiles at all forums, put your URLs in signature and be vocal at forums. Don’t Spam, but participate in the forums wherever you can. It does bring in some good quality traffic.
6)    Link Exchange with quality blogs. Bloggers are the people who really appreciate the content and quality of your site. If you have nice content, you may get links from very popular blogs.
7)    Bookmark each and every single article of your site with relevant tags at social bookmarking sites e.g. del.icio.us
8)    Think about unique strategies specific to your site, so that you can put some pictures, videos etc at youtube, flickr type of web 2.0 sites
9)    Publish a few articles and news items at your site. Submit those at sites like lipstick.com
10)     Create some applications/ widgets for facebook and enjoy some free traffic from facebook as well?

Nitin Tripathi 

Disclaimer: By making this post, I am not saying that only Ugly stuff sells. All I m trying to do is give a few examples where Ugly looking websites / communications did better than beautifully worded / looking content.

I always shared the opinion that professional communication, professional look and professional talks are the key to success. However in my experience of running a web company for 4 years, I have realized that at times ugly sells more than beautiful. Here are a few examples:

> We were running some PPC for ringtones. Landing page was very beautiful highly graphic oriented page. We achieved 50% click through rate on those pages. However those pages were really not scoring very high on Google QS and PPC was typically higher than our high content very ugly looking pages. Those pages were real ugly looking; all they had were extreme garbage text and an image to save the page. Big G loved it, QS was higher and PPC was less. Consumers, when they come to that landing page, probably they were provoked to click on image, because page was so ugly. We achieved a Click through Rate of 75% – 80% in these ugly landing pages.
>In other case, one of our friends was engaged in bulk emailing. He was trying to sell a service and his email was full of CAPS, slang and type Os. He was getting tremendous response from his mailing. However later he realized that may be he should be more professional, so he started emailing a well crafted email. He tried this fancy email for a week or so and didn’t get even a single positive response. Later he moved back to ugly email and he was back in business.

What these experiences tell is in cases where repeat customers are really not the key, at times being ugly can be helpful. It provokes consumers to take an action. Once consumer takes action, if you can capitalize the response of consumer, it can be indeed an excellent strategy.

Nitin Tripathi