The web is moving away from static sites towards dynamic sites, a trend that’s been in the works for a long time. You may have heard the term Web 2.0, this is the cutting edge of this trend, web pages that can be changed by the user on the fly, think Google Maps. But the trend is trickling down to even small sites.
Since most people want to make changes to their own sites and most of them don’t want to take a course in HTML programming and web design, I’ve been turning more and more to database driven, dynamic web sites. Usually, my client has no idea what I mean when I throw out those terms, understandably.
On the most basic level, a database driven, dynamic site is one that is created on the fly for each and every user from information stored in a database. For example, there’s Amazon.com. Unlike a static site, where you have a file for every single page, Amazon does not have thousands of files, one for each book, it has just one file that defines the layout for a book page, then fills in the info for an individual book from a database when a browser requests that book info.
But what does this mean for someone looking to create a small web site and keep it up to date themselves? It means that they can interact with the database (not as scary as it sounds as I’ll explain in a later post) and not worry about all the presentation details of the web site (colors, fonts, spacing, etc). When they want to change a word of a page or a description of an item, they can simply change the words in a database record and that change is immediately reflected in the site. The same goes for adding or deleting something (like a product) from the site.
It does require a different way of coding the site (using php instead of html, for one thing) and the site has to be well planned, or you’ll run into the old problem of not being able to put what you want up there, but it is a solution that lets you have a great looking site that you maintain yourself.
In fact, some people are already familiar with database driven, dynamic sites: every blog site is just that. And if you have a site that will have lots of content added to it, using blogging software (which is the database and the way you interact with the database) is a great way to quickly put that site up.
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