Benefits of Website Related Content

Aside from the long-term cost of ownership and site flexibility issues mentioned in the previous IAQ, there are other advantages to database driven sites that make the sites themselves much more functional than a static website.


Many sites have great content, but are virtually unusable because their search features don't allow users to find content quickly or accurately. Static HTML search mechanisms are slow and inaccurate because they don't allow users to search based on information details. For instance, someone may want to find an article on a certain subject by a certain author, not necessarily all the articles that contain that author's name. These types of queries would be impossible to facilitate with a static site. Databases, on the other hand, are built for searching. One of the primary benefits of a database driven approach to web development is the advanced searching that it enables. 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.


With a database driven approach, single page templates can potentially access all the information in the site database. This allows sites to leverage the same content across 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 past events from HTML pages and duplicating the information by hand anywhere else on the site where the information would be useful.

Using a database driven model, each individual event would be stored as a separate entry in the database. Calendars are then dynamically generated and displayed based on the current date and time. Additionally, the information is displayed in a variety of places on the site, without needing to duplicate the calendar data.

Another common example of this advantage is displaying news items on a home page. Database driven sites can dynamically display news items with links to the detail simply by checking off a "display on home page" check box within the content management screen for that piece of content. This makes content reuse extremely simple and maintenance free.