5 Things You Can Do With ASP
by Tiara Rea
ASP is a truly affordable addition to Lunarpages’ already incredible prices, so I thought I’d give you Lunartics 5 helpful tips for cool things you can do with this amazing scripting language. ASP is pretty amazing technology, so if you’re ready to learn to script, read on!
1. Form Validation
Ever finished filling out a Contact Form on a website but were promptly greeted with a message informing you that you must fill out the “phone number” field in order to submit the form? Well that’s a perfect example of form validation, and it’s a really cool feature you can add to any form on your website with ASP. For ecommerce websites, this is an incredible tool that can assure you get the information you need to follow up on sales leads, that you’re contacting the proper people with the correct information, and that you keep up to date with your customers’ emails, phone numbers, websites, and addresses. Using ASP makes adding form validation easy. There are many great tutorials online that you can choose from, all completely free! That’s another benefit of ASP.
2. Cookies
Mmmm…cookies… Okay wait, not those kinds of cookies; I’m talking about the small file cookies that can be embedded into a user’s browser. Cookies can be a great addition to a site if you’d like to add a personal touch to say “Hello Mike” when Mike Smith logs in or can even be great tool to track visitor behavior on your site. Cookies can track a customer from their first click on your site to their purchase on your order page. For example, for our Affiliate Program, we use cookie tracking to track each sale our affiliates earn – in this case, after the user clicks on their link, a cookie is stored to track their sale. Adding cookies with ASP can be a valuable solution for social networking sites, major ecommerce ventures, and even personal websites.
3. Ad Rotation & Management
Are you selling adspace or plan to do so in the near future? Ever wonder how sites with multiple advertisers easily rotate and manage these ads? Well, now you can add that functionality to your own site with a simple ASP Ad Rotation script. This will help you sell advertising space on your own site and maintain which advertisers get rotated when and even for how long, which can mean the difference between a mediocre site with several cluttered banners amd a successful business managing ads in an professional manner.
4. Printer-Friendly Pages
Printers are not always able to format webpages exactly as you’d like and since everybody has a different printer, sometimes you can end up with a printed page full of sidebar banners, a second page with text from the footer, or even just the web address, and even a last page with jumbled content. Especially if there is important information that your visitors need to be able to easily print, adding a Printer-Friendly Page script with ASP will ease the frustration and add a nice alternative to banging your head against the printer. ;)
5. Username Suggestion
If you suffer from Common Name Syndrome like our good friend Mike Smith, you’ve probably often had this problem. You just clicked submit on a form to get a new username for a popular social networking site. You really wanted to get “mikesmith”. Unfortunately, you get an error in bolded red letters that says, “Username Taken”. The form doesn’t offer you any suggestions, and now you have to wonder if “smithmike” is also taken. Okay, maybe you’re more creative than that (think mikepsmith or mikesmith07) but for the creatively-challenged this kind of guessing game could take forever and cause a great deal of frustration for your visitors. ASP to the rescue! Just install a username suggestion script which will help your customers come up with popular alterations of available usernames directly related to their searches.
These are only 5 cool things you can do with ASP, and there are tons and tons more if you check out “ASP” in Google. Even a simple search through LunarForums could yield some extra, awesome results!