Need HTML/Website design advice...?

Question

I want to design a page similar to this:

http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Business:Careers-Employment

I want to know how to have the source articles appear on the page without having a completely different page for each article.

My concern is that if I have 100 articles in 100 individual .html files and I need to update a link in the header or sidebar, I then have to edit all 100 pages. Can I have 1 article list page that, when an article is selected, the contents will populate in a master template page.

I'm pretty good at finding these answers on Google, but I'm not sure exactly what to search for. So I'm not necessarily looking for a tutorial, but rather some terms/phrases that I can search on that will help me find what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

I can think of few ways....

1) As mentioned by others, you sort of need a content management system (CMS). its a database that stores your main text or articles in this case. when user request it, it pulls the contents from the database and displays on screen. This could be difficult if you have no prior knowledge of programming for web. Commonly used are php or asp. However google a little and you can find some ready free scripts for CMS. But still you need to understand some coding in order to edit to suit your site. Else getting a professional software is the next step.

2) If you already knows HTML, web design or don't mind picking up, you can use the "include" functions. What happens is for those things like sidebars, headers, footers etc... are all created in separate html files. Then in the main html, you "include" this files into itself and position them where you want. Thus if you need to change address, just change the footer file and thats all. Google for the include function.

3) If you don't forsee your site to exceed say maybe 50 pages, then sometimes just go ahead to have 50 pages. Why? 'Cos the other 2 options need much more setup and learning time. So if for a small site, just go ahead to create each page. In the event to change, even changing 30 or 40 pages of address don't take up too much time, in my opinion. Of cos for large sites 100 and more pages, this will be a chore. So decide early.

Answer 2

A little confused. The URL home page has a list of source articles (like a table of contents) that are linked to the actual articles that are completely different pages.

But if you want to have consistant data like a template that can be updated as one even though they're located in 100 individual places as in your header or sidebar example read the tutorial on Server Side Includes (SSI) like the one at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html. I've included an excerpt so you can determine if that is what you want.

SSI (Server Side Includes) are directives that are placed in HTML pages, and evaluated on the server while the pages are being served. They let you add dynamically generated content to an existing HTML page, without having to serve the entire page via a CGI program, or other dynamic technology.

The decision of when to use SSI, and when to have your page entirely generated by some program, is usually a matter of how much of the page is static, and how much needs to be recalculated every time the page is served. SSI is a great way to add small pieces of information, such as the current time. But if a majority of your page is being generated at the time that it is served, you need to look for some other solution.

Answer 3

You really should use PHP or ASP to do this. HTML will be hard to make do what you want. The page you referred to uses active code and reads the articles from a database so the page is updated instantly when the database is updated.

Just do a search for Content Mangement Systems on Yahoo or Google. there are tons of programs that will do this automatically for you and save you coding 100 pages. The big plus is if you add another ariticle it will automatically appear.

Answer 4

You should have a dynamic website with a database. You can program it in something like coldfusion, asp, php. Or I've heard about something called joomla which I've heard is a prebuilt content management system.

If you need a domain or hosting you can get a good deal at http://www.doggydomains.com

Answer 5

800 x 600 would of been good in 1998. 1024 width is perfect, anything between 1000 - 1100 is ok. Look up the holy grail. It is a great layout. IE is it's own issue. Just test it in every browser as you make it.

Answer 6

Do a google search for RSS. A lot of times you can send feeds into your site, and RSS parsing software will allow you to autocreate the pages without having to do a lot of manual editing.


Hope this answered your question.

VincentW is the lead developer of:
http://www.PowerfulChurchWebsites.com

Answer 7

Hi, you need a site such as this http://www.profitmart.com/affiliateid.php?v4w6tr7c that allows you to change just the parts of the page that you need to - for example I have my own site like the one in your link and if I want to change the header, the change will take effect on all 247 pages without having to manually change each one.

Answer 8

3 choices, learn ASP and use database so when you edit article you can just edit the database. but you will need ASP web hosting and usually not free. 2nd choice learn php, same as ASP. 3rd choice would be easiest use frames of html, just edit the contant of the article pages.

Answer 9

I know that you may want your own website and everything, you want to code it yourself, but I stongly advice you to check out Moonfruit.com
It is the simplest coding/website maker out there. It's free with ads or there are different packages to chose from. You can make your own layout or simply use 1 of theirs. It's a great program :)