Inventiv Designs Database Driven Site

Objective:
Develop a community directory website with a focus on client maintainable content areas in conjunction with a searchable database.

Background:
The concept of the community website is nothing new. Founder Annette Olsen had in place a basic listing of the local business' in the Stacy area but was unable to get to the level she had envisioned. In the summer of 2006, Annette Olsen contacted Inventiv Designs to look at updating the current Stacy-Lent website.

With the partnership of LCN, Inventiv Designs saw an opportunity to expand on the idea of the community site and develop a business directory in conjunction with the community aspect. As the idea began to take shape, LCN was the leading force in bringing the project to life. LCN developed a multitude of features normally unutilized in a small town.
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Advantages of Database Driven Sites
A database-driven approach is not just a better technical solution, it actually changes the way companies can utilize the web, taking advantage of the true benefits it offers. Having a site’s content stored in a database prepares that site to head in any direction in the future. These overlooked advantages of database-driven sites are important to sites of all sizes. Even when a client’s site is small, or they don't think they will change much content, at some point they will want to add and upgrade their site. The database approach ensures that past work is not thrown away as a site grows and changes over time.

How database-driven sites work
A database-driven approach to web development simply refers to the use of a database for storing a website’s content. It involves the separation of a site’s content (words and pictures) from its design (the look, feel, and navigation). The design is most typically stored in template files. When a site visitor requests a page by clicking a link, a script runs and populates a template with the appropriate information from the database before displaying the populated template as an HTML page to the customer.

By contrast, a static website is comprised of a series of HTML files. These files are self-contained documents that appear the same to all users, regardless of where, how, when, or why they are viewing the document. A single static file holds all of the data for a particular page (text, images, navigational structure, etc) and the design and content are intertwined. When a site visitor requests a page, the HTML file is passed from the server to the visitor’s browser. On a static site, visitors are simply viewing documents over the internet, in much the same way they might open files on their own hard drives.

To further illustrate the basic difference between static and database-driven sites, let’s say that a particular site contains 25 product pages. Using a static web development model, a programmer would need to create 25 separate HTML pages with the same basic navigational structure, each containing an individual product’s specs and information. To add a new product to the site, the programmer would need to create a new copy of the product page file and insert the new product’s information into the appropriate places within the file. To make a change to the structure of all 25 product pages, the programmer would need to adjust each of the 25 HTML pages by hand.

Using a database-driven approach, the programmer would build a product table in the website’s database. This table would contain a series of columns with pertinent information about the product line. For instance, the table might have the following columns: “product identification number,” “product name,” “product size,” “price,” “availability,” “description,” and “image.” The programmer would then create a template file to use the information from the product table. This template file would contain the basic structure of a product page, identifying elements like the navigation system, where a product image is placed, where the description and other information goes on the page, and how all the data is to be formatted. When a user visits a particular product page, the template grabs the data associated with that product’s identification number from the database, plugs the data into the template and presents the user with a complete product page “on the fly.”