Database Driven Websites - Part 3

Visual design changes

Most companies and organizations are generally so relieved just to make it through a web development project, that the last thing they want to think about is the next phase or revision of the site. It’s easy to overlook the impact that a current development project will have on future work. However, the way that a website is structured, designed, and built, can have an enormous impact on how it will be able to be modified in the future.

One of the primary advantages of a database-driven model to website development is the relative ease with which it allows a site to be redesigned. When redesigning the look and feel of a static site with a thousand pages, each of the thousand existing pages must be altered and reformatted to reflect a new design. A database-driven approach, by contrast, offers a significant amount of flexibility. A site may have a thousand pages, but use only a few dozen template files. Therefore, to apply a new look and feel to the all of the press releases on the site, only the one template file needs to be altered and the new design will be reflected on every press release page. In this manner, a database approach builds a strong base for a site to grow and change easily over time.

Advanced searching capabilities

Over the years, we have come into contact with many sites that have great content, but are virtually unusable because their search features don’t allow users to find content quickly or accurately. Frequently the search mechanisms are slow because they must search through hundreds or thousands of static HTML files. Or they are inaccurate because they don’t allow users to weigh certain pieces of information more heavily than others. For instance, someone may want to find an articles written by a particular author, not necessarily all the articles that contain that author’s name.

Databases are built for searching. One of the primary benefits of a database-driven approach to web development is the advanced searching that it enables. It is significantly faster to search through a thousand database records than a thousand HTML pages. Additionally, since content is broken up into logical data fields within the database, users can search for very specific content. Advanced queries such as one that would locate, say, all of the articles in a database that have an author named “John,” a title containing the words “buy” and “sell,” and were published in 1997, are fast and manageable with a database approach. These types of queries would be virtually impossible to facilitate with a static site. For content-rich websites, it is often the quality of the search mechanism, as much as the quality of the content itself, that keeps visitors coming back.

Leverage content in multiple locations

With a database-driven approach, all site page templates can access any information in the database. This allows companies and organizations to leverage content in a variety of site areas. For instance, you may decide to create a calendar of events on your site. With a typical static website model, the calendar would have to be maintained by hand, removing events from HTML pages as they pass and duplicating the information by hand anywhere else on the site where it is useful.

Using a database-driven model, each individual event would be stored as a separate entry in the database. Calendars could then be dynamically generated and displayed based on the current date and time, so that site visitors would see only events from a particular swath of time. Additionally, the information could be displayed in a variety of places on the site, or using an assortment of views, without needing to duplicate the calendar data.

For example, if you wanted to highlight a few upcoming events from the calendar on the home page, the home page template could be modified to grab, say, three upcoming events from the database. Or you might have one calendar view that shows weekly information, another that displays a monthly overview, and another that gives detailed descriptions of specific events. Since all of these various templates draw their content from the same events table in the database, the information only ever needs to be entered into the system once. This aspect of a database-driven site allows for more effective management of content and reduces the possibility of conflicting information appearing in two places on a site.

Readability and usability

Many small and mid-size companies that want to put their content online are choosing to use PDF documents as a temporary solution. However, PDF documents are designed for printing, not viewing. Web usability guru, Jakob Nielsen writes, “No matter how tempting it might be, you should never use PDFs for content that you expect users to read online. Forcing users to browse PDF documents makes your website’s usability about 300% worse relative to HTML pages”. He cites large file sizes, missing hypertext, inability to search, lack of navigation, and lengthy download times as the primary drawbacks for widely using PDFs.