Small businesses that want to present large amounts of data on their
websites should consider storing that data in a data management system,
rather than "hard coding" it on static web pages. For example, if a
business wants to provide a comprehensive list of all the products and services
that it sells, it would be preferable to store that data in a spreadsheet or
database and then dynamically generate the web page when pages are viewed.
This approach is also useful if the data is volatile (e.g. products for sale
are frequently added or dropped; prices are changed. When data is
stored in a database, the information presented can be dynamic filtered base
on the selection criteria added or the specific webpage that is visited.
To generate dynamic web pages, special business web hosting functionality
is required. The web hosting package purchased must either support a database
management system (e.g. MS Access, MySQL, SQL Server), a spreadsheet (e.g.
Excel) or a flat file that contains embedded data (e.g. XML database)
The business web hosting functionality must also support a
server-side scripting language that can dynamically read the data from the
database, filter
rows, sort rows and integrate the result set dynamically into a web page. The most
widely used scripting languages used yy small businesses for dynamic web
pages are PHP, ASP and
ASPX.
Because dynamic websites are more complex and therefore more expensive to
create, it is best to avoid them if possible. It is unlikely, for
example that a small hotel that offers two or three types of hotel rooms,
would require such a complexity.
The cardinal rule for small businesses is to keep your website as simple
as possible!
