Databases and the Internet

For Virtual Life, the internet is a vast collection of knowledge, much of which is highly disorganised or poorly presented, but often interesting and informative. We harness the inherent flexibility of the database to store, search and recall information for a broad and diverse range of

There are two distinct types of web site that you can put on the Internet, a static one and a dynamic one.

• A static site is cheaper in the short term. Youhave it designed, supply the text and have it publsihed and hosted. Then three months down the line, you have a change of staff, address, policy or product and you go back cap in hand to the site designer and pay for an update, then three months later, another change and another.

• A dynamic site, however, has all content entered, updated and maintained by you. The information is not just displayed, but manipulated and used by both the site manager and the site visitor. You pay a little more for the this flexibility, but then you are in control of the site. A good developer will build in teh site in such a way as to extend its functionality at a later date, if you so wish.

The lesson here is to make the site work for your company, not extra work for the designer.

Three years ago, less then 16% of websites had been indexed by any search engine and worst, the number of new sites was outstripping the major search engines indexing policies. Since then, we have seen the demise of many such engines and the rise of a new industry, the search engine marketeer. A few of these champions of search engine technology employ less then proper means to rank their own and their clients sites in the top echelons of search matches. However, there are overwhelmingly, many who legitimately achieve positions that are warranted by the content in their site.

Marketing databased sites to search engines has been a developers nightmare, until very recently. Search engine 'agents' or 'indexing bots' can not index the contents of a database, even if they could, what information goes into what categorey. Simply, they did not have a point of reference for the contents of the database. To overcome this the search engines would invoke the database page so the contents woudl be pulled into the respective page, however there are severe limits on this, else a server could be invoked into a recursive loop and stall a major company's or university's primary server.

Virtual Life has developed a series of procedures to overcome this handicap, with some excellent results. If you are considering a dynamic website with good search engine position in mind. We would like to talk to you as much as you might now want to talk to us.