Whether you are a hosting guru, web developer, or client, it's always interesting and valuable to pick the brain of someone who has successfully made his or her mark on the industry. After all, we all want to gain as much insight as we can into why some business ventures make it while others don't.

If you attended HostingCon.2005, you probably had the chance to meet Chris Wells and his associates at the InterWorx booth. As president and CEO of both NEXCESS.NET and InterWorx, he is in the unique position of having a role in both the hosting and development fields.

Any programmer will tell you how important it is to maintain readable code. Not only does this make updating easier for the original coder and anyone that follows, but it makes commenting much more sparsely needed.

Naturally, this is all easier said than done. That's never truer than when your code consists of two different languages intertwined. For instance, adding just a few PHP features to HTML can quickly have your entire file looking more like PHP than HTML.

Fortunately, PHP offers us a way around this when it comes to control structures like if, for, and switch. Using a bit of alternative syntax can make your code more easily readable regardless of whether you are a PHP programmer dabbling in web design or a web designer dabbling in programming.