Database Driven Website Design
Once you have designed an attractive Website, you need to get your products on there. One way of doing this is to add the products one at a time to the Web site's HTML pages, formatting each product individually. However, this approach can be very time-consuming.
Unfortunately things get worse if you need to change or remove a product - if you have pages displaying eight products at a time and you need to delete one, you'll have a gap where that product was. You then have to reformat the page, moving the other products to fill the gap. Also, if you decide the products would look better in a different order, you have to remove them all and format the pages again.
Website designers use databases for online shops and many other types of websites. Adding your products to a database means they can easily be displayed on the page that is using ASP or PHP and you can manipulate them however you want from day to day. You can use Dreamweaver to build your site you can utilise the built-in functionality to facilitate this - and to create a basic database-driven catalogue you won't need to do any hand coding at all!
There are many tutorials online that show you hwo to use Microsoft Access to create a database for an online store. Although it's technically a desktop database, Access can be successfully used on the Web to store data and provide a user-friendly interface to design and create your database.
Once the products are stored in the database, you can use Dreamweaver's Server Behaviors to add free extensions to get the data from the database to the page. You can learn from many websites listed on the search engines how to design a database, connect to it and use Dreamweaver to create a database-driven product catalogue.
The other alternative which is a little more complicated but more robust is to use a MySQLl database in conjunction with PHP. There are also many tutorials online which show you how to setup and MySQL database and program in PHP to get the desired results.
Whatever you use, a database driven website is the way to go. Search for tutorials on the web now and start learning how to be a database website designer.
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