There are quite a few ways to make your website interactive and there are a number of technologies you can use. Here, we'll give an overview of some of the more popular and more recent ones, so that you can learn more about these technologies and how you can use them. It’s important to note that the most important thing about these technologies is their flexibility. Some of them can be used in highly interactive ways, as well as more traditional ways. Essentially (and we’ll explain this concept in more detail as we go through the technologies) each of these allows a webmaster to migrate from static, unchanging content to dynamic content. Whether this dynamic content is in part or in sum user-generated or highly interactive and intuitive is up to you, the webmaster. Also, please note that these technologies are often used in combination. For example, it is common to take advantage of the features of AJAX when working with ASP.NET 3.5 to create interactivity. We’ll describe the technologies and give you some examples of where they are used, so that you can better apply them to your own sites or ideas.

We can break these technologies down into two main categories:

Client Side

This means that these technologies run within the web browser of the user browsing your site.

• JavaScript
• AJAX

Server Side

These technologies run on your web server. Sometimes you need to configure your web server in a special way with your internet host to get them to work:

• ASP.NET
• PHP
• Databases

Use the navigation on the left to get started exploring these technologies and how you can use them.