Database driven web site design & development

Ellipse Design specilaises in database driven web design. A database driven web site, as the name implies, uses a database to store the content of the web site. The web site may consist of a number of normal HTML pages and a number of templates. As these templates are displayed, code embedded in them queries the database and retrieves data which in turn is displayed within the template.

In this way it is easy to maintain large web sites. For example a company has 1000 products in its inventory and wishes to display these on a web site. If such a site was to be written using HTML then we would require 1001 web pages. One web page to display the entire product list and then 1000 pages to display each of the products. Obviously this would be very difficult to maintain. If we wished to increase prices on all products by 10% for instance, then every page would need to be modified and then uploaded to the web server. Updating 1000 pages takes some time.

If such a site were written using a database then we would require 2 web pages, one to display the entire product list and a template which displays each product as and when requested. The template would contain code to search for the required product information from the database and display it as a web page. Such a web site would be easy to maintain as changes to the product information is simply a case of modifying the information in the database.

Generally an administration system is used to maintain the data in the database. This will contain functions to add, delete and modify data in the database. Database driven web sites are written using a scripting language such as ASP (Active Server Pages) or Coldfusion. A specialist ISP (Internet Service Provider) is required to host such web sites but these are widespread and in the case of ASP inexpensive.

Of course not every project requires a database driven website. Web sites which dont change very much can be designed using HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Such web sites do not require specialist hosting.