If you have heard about how powerful a database driven web site can be but don’t quite understand it, you aren’t alone. A database driven web site is powerful because it makes it easy to generate fresh content with very little effort. This is particularly useful for people who are too busy to generate new content for their website on their own. Many people easily create new content for their web site with the combination of PHP and MySQL, but this requires learning how to use them. However, if you have FrontPage 2002 hosting, you can generate a database driven web site by using it along with any database, including Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle. You can even use MySQL, the free enterprise class database that comes with many cheap web hosting packages.
Let’s talk about why you would use FrontPage 2002 hosting to create a database driven web site first. The challenge that many web developers have with keeping their web sites fresh looking is getting updated content. But why is new content important? New content keeps repeat visitors to your site interested because something different is going on that they didn’t see last time. No one wants to go to a website and see the same content every time. That is why people surf so much. Generating new content also keeps viewers on your site longer. The longer they are on your site, the more likely they are to buy something. Also, the search engines like new content. If your site has consistently new content, you are going to get a higher ranking, which means that you will get more traffic.
If you are a small business owner, however, there is no way for you to write new content all of the time. You will be surprised at how fast time goes by before it is time to write new content for your site and then realize that there is no way to keep up with it. A professional writer costs too much money to use all of the time, and anyway, if you pay them, you still have to take the time to code the content yourself. There has to be a better way to get fresh content and add it to your site, and with FrontPage 2002 hosting, there is. You can add content to your database, create a template with FrontPage, and connect the database to the page where you want it to produce a dynamic web page. The best part about this is that it is really easy to do.
To make use of a database full of information to be displayed on your FrontPage 2002 hosting site, all you have to do is connect it to the information you want it to display. A database connection is simply a function that lets your web page connect with your data base through server side scripting. If you don’t’ have FrontPage, you could use PHP and MySQL, but this is so much easier. This is because FrontPage will let you set up a template that will change the content by contacting the database and automatically create a new page of content without any additional coding.
The first thing to do is to create a database in Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, or Excel. This can contain content, customer messages, or anything else that you want to put in the pages of your website. Then create the template where you want to display the information. The great thing about having a template in FrontPage is that you can change the content of the page by importing new content from the database without having to recode the page itself. Even if you do buy new content or hire a writer, there isn’t any need to recode the content. All you have to do is connect the page to the new content in the database and it will be generated on the server side when someone views the page.
To import the content, all you have to do is go to choose file on the tool bar and open the ‘Import’ dialogue box. Browse for the file you want to import and when FrontPage asks you if you want to create a connection for it, hit yes. That’s all there is to it. This is a great way to always keep your web pages looking new, especially if you can find inexpensive content that you can use. There is a little more to it than what we’ve described here, but the great thing about FrontPage 2002 hosting is that almost every task that you want to perform has a wizard or a tutorial that goes with it. Also, if you make a mistake it is easy to find the problem and correct it.
