When I first started designing and building websites as a profession they were mostly static sites. These basically consist of HTML pages coded manually or with an HTML editor and simply adding images and content. This is fine if you only have a small website of 20 pages however if it expands to 1000 pages it becomes very difficult to maintain. For example if you wish to add an image to 1000 pages you would have to add the image to each page separately. A way around this is to use templates or server-side includes (SSI) however a more efficient method is to create a database driven website.
Top 7 benefits of creating a database driven website
1. Separate design from content
If you intend to build a website consisting of thousands of pages use a content management system (CMS) such as Word Press or Joomla to separate content from design. They both use a MySQL database to store and manage content while using a template for the design. If you want to change the design it will immediately be reflected across all pages in the database. It makes your database driven website easy and inexpensive to maintain.
2. Store vast amounts of information
What if you want to build a contact database and store your contacts data online? This would be a nightmare to do manually however a database would make this relatively easy. It would enable you to store, sort, add, edit, delete, search contacts as well as print or download the table as a CSV file.
3. Manage relational data
The beauty of a relational database is that you can create multiple tables that relate with each other. For instance one table could store registration information while another table would store contact data. The database administrator could easily manage all contact data from a backend administration panel thus saving a ton of time.
4. Multiple users
Do you need more than one user to access the database? Using a MySQL database you can easily create multiple users who have access to the information stored in the database. You can limit the permissions each user has. For example one user is limited to accessing only one database table while another has access to multiple tables.
5. Run complex queries across relational data
If you want to find specific data about one of your contacts you can run a query that rapidly spits out the information thus saving you lots of time and frustration.
6. Generate database reports
If you’re maintaining a database for a company or organization they probably want you to generate reports of information in the database. The database can easily be set up to generate printed reports or download the information to an Excel or CSV file.
7. Reduced maintenance
If your database contains thousands of contacts, content, products or data it would be impossible to maintain manually. A database driven website enables you to easily maintain all the information in one place thus saving you time and money.
So why aren’t people creating database-driven websites when they should?
First of all you need to know the purpose of what your trying to accomplish and secondly understand how a database-driven site works. After that it takes some careful planning. For example if I want to create local city directory the main purpose would be for visitors to easily search topics based upon their topic or zip code.
Effective database design is not something that can be learned overnight. It takes time to understand your data and then convert that understanding into a usable database.
If you’ve been managing your data without using a database maybe now is the time to build one. It may not be the simplest of tasks but it will save you lots of time, money and frustration and give you the edge over your competitors.
Related articles
How to Build a Database Driven Web Site
How to Backup mySQL Database With phpMyAdmin
Moving WordPress to a New Server Step by Step
How to Use Excel to Import/Export Tables to/from a MySQL Database
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