What an Automated Web Site Can Do for Your Business

As your Internet business grows, your free time will dwindle. Site changes will become time consuming and stressful. Automate your site and you can use your time for better purposes.

Automating

Automating a web site can cut out tedious tasks such as updating HTML, FTPing pages and changing site designs. Advanced automated web sites can send follow-up emails, send out newsletters, manage sales, do invoicing, track users visits and more. There is practically no function that can’t be accomplished.

There are many different types of automated web sites. Typically, the platforms break down into two categories, prepackaged or made to order. Automated web sites can range in complexity from simply using server side includes to full database driven sites. Server side includes are little snippets of code that allow content from one file to show on many pages. A database driven site, on the other hand, pulls content from an online database.

Web site information stored in an online database can be quickly and seamlessly inserted into many different types of templates. This becomes a huge time saver when you need to make a universal change to a web site. Depending on the system, the change can be made as a snippet of code or input directly into the database. Once entered, the regenerated site will carry the changes throughout the pages. In contrast, a non-automated site would require you to make changes to each individual page, a time wasting task. Let’s look at any example.

Assume you have a database driven, automated site. After testing the site, you discover the font appears very small in certain common monitor settings. Making an executive decision, you decide to change it throughout the site. With a manual system, you must pull up each page file for the site and change the html. If your site has 100 pages, you better break out the coffee! If your site is automated, however, you can simply address the font change in the database ONE TIME and generate the changes on all the pages. We are talking about saving days of your time.

If you are creating a site, make sure you use an automated platform. Don’t waste days of your life making manual changes.