How, then, is the content to get from the provider onto the Web site? Not every company can afford to staff a full-time Webmaster, and most Webmasters have better things to do than copying Word files into HTML templates anyway.

Maintenance of a content-driven site can be a real pain, too. Many sites (perhaps yours?) feel locked into a dry, outdated design because rewriting those hundreds of HTML files to reflect a new design would take forever. Server-side includes (SSI's) can help alleviate the burden a little, but you still end up with hundreds of files that need to be maintained should you wish to make a fundamental change to your site.

The solution to these headaches is database-driven site design. By achieving complete separation between your site's design and the content you are looking to present, you can work with each without disturbing the other.

Instead of writing an HTML file for every page of your site, you only need to write a page for each kind of information you want to be able to present. Instead of endlessly pasting new content into your tired page layouts, create a simple content management system that allows the writers to post new content themselves without a lick of HTML!

For any webmaster, once you have created a page with graphics and content, the next logical step is to make it interactive using server-side scripts, which are pieces of code that can be included within the HTML script.

It's thought by many that this 'server-side scripting' is very difficult to learn, and this has come from the early languages like Perl, which are difficult to write and even more difficult to debug.

Over the past few years two new languages have emerged, PHP and ASP (server-side scripting languages that allows you to do a lot more than access a database easily) and they both interact well with Structured Query Language (SQL -- the standard language for interacting with relational databases). These are easy enough for even the novice webmaster to learn.

Why Would I Want A Database?
For many people, the main reason for learning a scripting language like PHP or ASP is because of the interaction with databases it can offer. It is actually surprising how useful a database can be when used with a website. There are a huge variety of things you can do when you interact the two, from displaying simple lists to running a complete website from a database. Some examples of being used together are:

Banner Rotation. On some sites like yahoo, where each banner is, a server-side script is called. This opens a database and picks a random banner from it to show the visitor. It can also count the number of times the banner has been viewed and could, with a few changes, track clicks too. To add, change or edit the banners all that needs to be done is change the database and the script will pick the correct banners for all the pages on the site.

Forums. Hundreds of forums (message boards) on the internet are run using PHP and MySQL. These are much more efficent than other systems that create a page for each message and offer a wide variety of options. All the pages in the forum can be updated by changing one script.

Databases. One quite obvious example is sites which get all their information from a database. All the different script categories can be accessed in one script by just changing the URL to access a different part of the database.

Websites. If you have a large website and you want to change the design it can take a very long time to update and upload all the pages. With PHP and MySQL your whole website could be just one or two PHP scripts. These would access a MySQL database to get the information for the pages. To update the website's design you would just have to change one page.