HOUSTON BUSINESS REVIEW

COST-EFFECTIVE IT: WEB DEVELOPMENT
By Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show Commentator Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, provides weekly information on our show about information technology issues. Mr. Sonnier can be reached at 281.445.4800 x 250 or via email.

This week I will discuss web development and tools, next week we will look at a specific example, like Macromedia's Dreamweaver.

What is Web Development?

A businessperson wanting to improve his business by using web technologies needs to understand web development. It is difficult because web development has evolved very fast in a short period of time. Thus, web development can be the development of several different types of web solutions for a business. The most common ones are:

• Static website
• Dynamic website
• Portal website
• Web application

Static Website

The static website is the online brochure of your business. Often, it is developed in conjunction with your printed brochure as part of an overall marketing image, and it can provide a great delivery vehicle for electronic versions of your printed marketing materials using Adobe PDF files. These PDF files allow your prospect to print an exact copy of your marketing information or just view it online. The website pages are can be highly graphical or simple as desired.

These websites have a great advantage over printed materials in that they can be updated quickly and made available to customers without printing or mailing cost. To develop a static website you use tools like Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX. As a bonus for my Houston Business Review readers, I am including a Dreamweaver product review with this article.

Dynamic Website

A dynamic website differs from a static site in two dimensions:

• Motion or multimedia
• Database driven

A static website becomes dynamic by adding elements of motion, sound, animation, or video. The simplest element to add is animated images that can provide motion at a low cost. The most complex dynamic website is developed using movies and databases. Movies are often done in Flash, another Macromedia technology. Ikea has an example of a multimedia website using Flash.

In the database-driven website many of the pages perhaps all are generate in response to input from the user. A simple example is the search website Google. Google's website is very simple and mostly dynamic. The user enters his search and Google builds a web page of results from its massive online database.

Thus, a dynamic website can be multimedia, database driven or both. To create such a website you use a suite of tools like Macromedia Suite MX and database tools.

Portal Website

A portal website is a dynamic website that is a gateway to many sources of information like Yahoo!. These websites are sometimes called the "web desktop," as the goal of the portal website is to become the one stop for all the information or applications that a user needs. Many businesses implement portal websites internally where the portal pulls together information from all the various information systems of the company. These are very complex and much harder than the dynamic website requiring special software and custom programming to integrate all the data sources together.

Web Application

A web application is simply a database driven, dynamic website that allows the user to perform some business process.

Next week I will discuss the heart of interactive websites: web forms.