When designing a business website, you cannot just think about the aesthetics. You have to consider the performance too. As it often happens, web designers and business owners know how they want their online portal to look but are not too sure about the back-end mechanisms that would help the website to perform as best as it can.
At the very first phase, when you are just conceptualizing the website, you might feel overwhelmed, unsure, and indecisive due to the sheer amount of available options. It is difficult to decide what will work for your website and what will not. The technological innovations and upgrades taking place every other day are difficult to keep track of, and many times, they are too expensive to incorporate. At that point, what is essential to focus on is the utility of the website both from the perspective of the website owner and the end users.
Questions like how scalable the website is, how effectively it integrates all the design elements, how user-friendly it is and many more would need to be answered. Teams or professionals in charge of the design and development must understand that it is their job to sift through all that confusion and concentrate on the fact that every element of the website is connected to data or the database, and efficiently managing this database can improve the overall performance of the site. Thus, it is advisable to go for a database driven website.
What is a database driven website?
It can be simply described as a website which contains all its content in a single database. A database-driven site usually consists of dynamic web pages, but it can also be made of static web pages too. To understand the mechanisms of this type of website, you should first get clarity on precisely what dynamic and static sites mean.
Dynamic: A dynamic webpage keeps its content, both textual and visual, separate from its design or template. Upon creating a connection between the two, the display of the site reflects a layout that is filled with content from the database that it is connected. The content is displayed on the website in real time, which means if the content changes on the database, it also reflects on the site. The database is where you store the segregated visual and textual content.
Static: This type of site stores all instances, otherwise known as visual and textual content, JavaScript, and style sheet in its HTML. Static pages can be displayed evenly on a local website if the instances are present there. So, for example, your site has thirty pages, then all the 30 pages need to have separate HTML coded with the very same stylesheet so that they have the same design and provide the same design functions and experience. However, if you decide ever to redesign the website, each of the pages would need to be edited in the same way. So, sites that have hundreds of pages or those that update their content frequently would find the static website to be too difficult to manage.
What is database management and why is it noteworthy in web design?
According to the experts at remotedba.com, most of the businesses nowadays use a database management system or a DBMS. Experts opine that modern companies with their massive data load cannot hope to survive and thrive without using a robust DBMS. Database management is the technique of separating different types of data from business logic in application software without interrupting the function of the application's code in any way. These systems are useful as they provide businesses with efficient and seamless means of handling multiple types of data.
The process is relatively simple and secure too. When you enter data into the system, multiple users can access it at the same time. These users may use different passwords to gain access and simultaneously they may be using the data differently. One DBMS can hold multiple databases simultaneously and sometimes people may interact with a website's database without realizing it. For example, while logging into a web portal, the web server retrieves the relevant login information from the website's database.
Since dynamic websites enable visitors to interact with the content that is displayed on the web page, and the users' information is stored in the database, it is crucial to integrate the same with the web design. It will render the website easily navigable and faster.
What are the main benefits of database driven website?
- It can be updated in real time whenever required with negligible downtime.
- You do not need to have extensive expertise in HTML to manage this user-friendly website.
- It can be integrated with corporate systems like HRMS and CRM.
- It allows visitors to search for specific information and filter the results as per request.
- Dynamic pages are created automatically as more information is added to the database.
Here, it is essential to understand that database-driven websites are a bit more expensive than other sites. From design to launch to maintenance, you need to factor in several points when estimating the price for this type of websites. Besides the usual costs of designing and development, the main factors for the high rate include database management costs, cost of custom database designs, database connectivity costs, back-end administration, initial database population, backups and more. Note that with increasing amount of data in the future, there will be the need for upgrades to expand the capacity of the database. The website will only be able to perform optimally if the database is capable enough.
It would not be wrong to say that your database-driven website will itself pay for these investments. In fact, improved ROI is one of the main benefits of this type of websites. Real-time updating of content, ease of use, user-friendly interface, high scalability and considerable reduction of risk of errors make it one of the most preferred frameworks for website designing.