Content Management Tips and Tricks
| A Web site, like a city, can quickly grow to a huge sprawling mass that becomes impossible to manage. A "dynamic" system, one that generates Web pages from a database and templates on the fly, could solve your problems, but you just don't have the time to evaluate, choose, buy, implement, cajole and cuss. Plus, it may be that one of the minor drawbacks of the latest super-duper all-in-one site management suite just happens to prevent you from doing something that you need to do. What will you do? Stick your finger in the dike. In this article, we'll discuss some quick and easy ways to streamline your content management without taking the plunge into a truly dynamic site. In fact, the tedium of site maintenance can be greatly reduced with a couple of simple tools, without spending a penny on complex and cranky dynamic "solutions." |
A Web site of any size requires a certain amount of ongoing work to keep it up to date. Large sites, and content-heavy sites such as online magazines or news sites, use dynamic page-generation systems to automate much of the work of content management. Publishers of many small- and medium-size sites, however, may not wish to implement a dynamic system, for various reasons. If that describes your situation, tools and techniques that can partially automate the process can save you a lot of time and tedium. In this article I'll discuss a couple of such techniques that can streamline the grunt work, without opening a can of expensive dynamic worms.
A comprehensive guide to the various types of dynamic page-generation systems would be far beyond the scope of this article. However, for the sake of our discussion, we do need to understand some of the basic concepts of dynamic systems, and take a very brief look at what's out there.
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