What Are the Best Programming Languages for Modern Website Building?

Having a fully-featured, user-friendly website for your business has become a must-have in this modern world. This has been made especially so due to the fact that fewer and fewer people are actually out and about, shopping for goods and services. To make up for that loss, your website needs to be ready to accommodate the added usage, and be capable of delivering the goods.

If your site isn’t up to the task, it’s time to rethink, retool, and rebuild.

But where do you start? If you’re looking at a complete overhaul, you might be starting from scratch. Do your in-house developers have the skills for such an endeavor? If so, that’s great. If not, you might have to reach outside your company and either hire new software engineers, or even an outsourced team.

No matter the route you take, you’re going to need to make sure those working on your site are using the best possible programming language (or combination thereof) to bring to light the most powerful, flexible, and usable site possible.

But what languages should you use? That’s a crucial question to answer, before that first developer types that first line of code. Let’s take a look at some of the best programming languages, each of which is suited for modern websites.

JavaScript

JavaScript isn’t just one of the most popular programming languages on the planet, it’s a highly structured, dynamic language, capable of more than you think. With the help of the right JavaScript developers, your company can enjoy powerful websites that include things like:

• Built-in web applications that greatly extend the feature set of your website.
• Presentation addons that allow you to embed actual presentations into your website (with the help of the RevealJS library).
• Server applications to help expand your backend infrastructure offerings.
• Games.
• Three-dimensional shapes, thanks to the HTML5 spec.
• Mobile apps for consumers and clients to easily interact with your website from their smartphone.
• Show-and-hide information buttons.
• In and out zoom.
• Timers or count-downs.
• Audio and/or video.
• Animations.
• Drop-down hamburger menus.

Whereas HTML and CSS are great tools for making solid static sites, JavaScript makes it possible to turn those static sites into highly interactive portals into your business’ world.

Another thing to consider with JavaScript is that it’s the only programming language that is native to the web browser. So instead of JavaScript running directly from your server, it actually is offloaded onto the web browser, thereby minimizing the required overhead. JavaScript can be a tricky language to learn, so you might consider outsourcing to one of the many JavaScript development services.

Java

Java is actually ahead of JavaScript in many polls as the most popular programming language. One of the primary reasons for this is because it’s one of the most widely-used languages for Android.

And although having the ability to craft a mobile app for your website is a big plus, it’s the web applications and Java application servers that you will find to be indispensable for your business’ website. With this combination, you can serve up small web-based applications that can change your website into an actual platform.

Of course, with Java application servers, you can also create high availability Java Clusters for fail-over and load-balancing.

Python

Python can be implemented for simple and complex websites. And because Python is so easy to learn and use, there’s nothing in the way of your development team making it work for your site. Python is fast and includes a rich standard library for just about anything. That extensive library also makes it possible for developers to avoid wasting time re-inventing the wheel. And because Python has a number of outstanding frameworks (such as Django, Pyramid, TurboGears, and Flask), you can build incredible, interactive sites to represent your business.

Python can also be used to integrate machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) elements into your website without much work. Python is very popular for web development, with 46% of respondents of a recent JetBrains poll saying they use it for that purpose.

PHP

PHP is a server-side scripting language that was designed as a general-purpose programming language as well as a web development platform. PHP is a great tool for server-side programming for both static and dynamic websites.

One of the most important features of PHP are the modules available that help integrate it into various other tools. For example, using php-mysql, you are able to better create dynamic, data-based websites that work with the MySQL database.

And like Python, PHP has a very shallow learning curve, so you should be able to get up to speed with this scripting language in no time.

Ruby

Another all-purpose programming language is Ruby. However, as for website development, you’ll be wanting to get to know the web development framework, Ruby on Rails. By itself, Ruby is a language that makes it possible to create rich web applications faster than most languages. Ruby on Rails, however, helps you create web sites to serve up those applications.

To give you an idea of how powerful the Ruby on Rails framework is, it’s used by the likes of Airbnb, Kickstarter, Basecamp, CafePress, CrunchBase, Github, Hulu, Shopify, Soundcloud, Twitter, and Square. So if you’re looking to build a website that is powerful, user-friendly, and scalable, Ruby might just be the language you need and Ruby on Rails the framework for your task.

There are plenty of other languages out there, purpose-built for websites, but with these five languages, you can create an award-winning site that will serve your business well.