Publishing Lots of Web Pages without Dynamic Pages
Dynamic pages (really just one HTML page that is filled with information as per an immediate request from someone at your site) is the approach most widely used for
- web sites that require regular updates, or for
- web sites that are produced by personnel who may be heavy on images and words, but light on computer programming
These dynamic pages are supported by databases. Most of the publishing work is actually done on the database side through commands written in Structured Query Language (SQL). These commands are embedded within the scripts that are invoked through tags on the dynamic HTML page.
I don't like this approach for several reasons and have chosen to go a different way with Best Plain Web Pages. The reasons are as follows:
- Security: business customers typically use a database for other reasons. The same SQL calls can run on the customer database that is not facing the web, but may be accessible through a back door. Better not to have tags calling scripts with SQL calls.
- Long URLs: Since the pages are dynamically published, information from different tables and/or rows of the database may be required to publish the same one page. The page address is written to reflect the various actions taken to publish the page, resulting in a long page address. Long URLs are not friendly for Search Engines.
- So-called Short URL schemes don't work well: systems developers at the various Nuke Content Management Systems (CMSs) like PostNuke, have spent lots of time trying to modify the .htaccess file that the Apache WebServer uses to set up the browser for the page address with limited if any success. My experience has been that the number of Page Not Found errors (404 codes) goes up dramatically which, once again, negatively impacts on Search Engine rankings.
Best Plain Web Pages uses scripts that 1) do not run on the client site and 2) produce static HTML pages. I think this is a much better way to go. The scripts we use are written with Open Source components like VIM and Python. Any large-scale changes that we need to make on client sites are effected with VIM functions like argdo, or with tried and true simple programs including SED.
I'm happy to say that our primary client maintains very high Page Rankings for a site in a very competitive consumer market. Long live static HTML.
© Mike Blonder, 2006, All Rights Reserved