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What is ASP?

Description: If you want your website to be truly interactive, you need to know what ASP is all about.

The acronym ASP is short for Active Server Pages. As the name might suggest, the existence of ASP has meant that you can do a lot more with your website that was previously possible. It gives you a whole new way of communicating with your website audience, and makes it possible to design your website to be more interactive, instead of being a static site which merely displays information.

It's important to find out whether or not the server you are using supports your use of ASP before you get started; if it doesn't you will need to change to one that does. This is because the web pages will change depending on the information entered by the website user. If the server isn't able to handle these changes then the application doesn't work. This is because the server has to be able to transform the web page into html to send back to the person requesting it, ie. your website visitors.

ASP enables websites to be dynamic and offer far more in the way of useful content. It also enables the content of certain areas of a page to change when necessary. For example some websites may use ASP to ensure that whenever the same page is refreshed, the visitor will see a range of different adverts compared to the ones they saw to begin with.

ASP is also extremely useful for creating forms on websites, and making it possible to create membership driven websites. In this case the Active Server Pages will allow the member to type in their own user name and password when they return to the website. Once that information has been recognized the web page will change to display some of the member's personal information instead of displaying a purely generic page.