Features and components

These days it is quite rare to find a web site that consists entirely of simple, static web pages. Normally most sites offer at least some degree of interactivity. There are many examples of interactivity, including:

  • forms for users to fill in, which email the data to the web site owner
  • databases which contain details of many products on offer
  • ability for web site users to send files to the web site owner via the web site
All web hosting accounts offer the ability to store static web pages. If you want the interactivity however, you need to ensure that your host offers the relevant components. Here at UKcentric we offer many components that are installed on all our servers. These are available to you through web site scripting. Web site scripting means we offer you the ability to program your web pages to behave in certain ways, using our components.
For example, let's say you want to set up a bulletin board to allow your users to hold an online conversation amongst themselves. This would require a database to store all the messages, and the ability to send an email automatically to you when someone has added a new message so that you can review it.
In this situation, we are using at least two components: a database and an email component. All our hosting packages allow you to store and display data from a Microsoft Access database, via your web pages. What's more you can set up a form and program our email component to send the results to an email address you specify.
Storing and retrieving data and sending emails are all done via special script which is embedded in your web page. We offer support for several scripting languages, including Perl, Active Server Pages (ASP) and .Net (ASP.NET). The latter two languages are from Microsoft, so if you have any familiarity with Microsoft languages such as Visual Basic, you will be at home here. Furthermore, .NET in fact supports many different languages such as C#, a variant of the C++ language. (Check hosting plans for availability of .NET).
If none of the above means anything to you - don't worry - there are thousands of programmers out there you can engage to help you out (ask us - we can probably recommend somebody). What you need to know is that our servers do support such interactivity.