The first step in designing a website is understanding your audience. This is easier than it may sound. Think big. Really big. Not in terms of traffic, necessarily, but the longevity of your site. How many sites developed in 1995 still exist, dinosaurs of the Internet? They are obvious, and even painful to look at. But how do you come across them? In the majority of cases, they persist out there because they offer something that still hasn't been replicated. Data. Content. Originality.

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PHP code for web sites and web applications should always be optimized. A poorly-written PHP web site may work just fine without too many concurrent users, but as soon as traffic starts building up it could buckle. There are an unlimited number of ways to implement anything in PHP, but certain functions and techniques are much more efficient than others. Every PHP developer should spend some time learning the most efficient ways to code, and luckily there is a great tutorial article with 52 PHP programming tips and benchmarked examples for efficiency and faster code.

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Here's a quick but extremely useful tip for PHP developers. When working on plugins or extensions for an existing framework, use the print_r() function on the API objects to find out what data structures they contain. Great PHP help tip.

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