Authoring Dynamic, Data-Driven Web Sites: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX

Anyone who has maintained a website soon encounters familiar problems: timely updating of information; avoiding duplicate entry of data; ensuring site-wide consistency. Such difficulties can be overcome, and the overall usability of a site improved, by separating content from layout—by housing content in a relational database, then retrieving that content on dynamic web pages.

Until recently, the complexity of constructing a dynamic, data-driven website has made it impractical for scholars who do not have, or have access to, extensive programming expertise. Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, however, opens data-driven website development to non-programmers. Dreamweaver automates the connection between database and web server, and offers a what you see is what you get interface for authoring dynamic pages. Dreamweaver reliably generates the necessary code for web-based retrieval and manipulation of information contained in relational databases.

For my own research, I am constructing a database of foreign artifacts imported into mainland Greece during the Dark Age (ca. 1150-750 BC). I am also creating a web site that will retrieve and manipulate information in this database according to criteria specified by the user. Updating site content will require no changes to the web pages themselves, only modification of the information in the database, which can be accomplished from any computer with internet access. This project is currently in its early phases, but as the body of data grows, maintenance of the website will not become more onerous, demonstrating the scalability of data-driven websites.

It should be kept in mind, however, that construction of data-driven websites remains more complicated than construction of conventional sites. Costs are typically higher, for example, and initial setup more taxing. Nevertheless, Dreamweaver opens the development of dynamic, data-driven websites to a much larger contingent of scholars, many of whom would benefit from the ease of maintenance and flexibility such websites provide.