[thelist] Re: Concept of Website

Eveline Vanhemel eveline_vanhemel at pi.be
Sat Jun 30 04:12:58 CDT 2001


Hi Richard,

I think I catch your drift, but I am not sure. Let me add something what I
also was thinking. At the moment the site is not yet online (in fact it is,
but not yet visible to the big audience, and beside the question here). I
think the idea of a dynamic website will be the only solution in the long
run, especially as it goes multi-language. So, the only point is, what will
I do? Stay a partly static website for the moment and see what comes out or
just do it right now and hope it was worth the effort? Let me put it
otherwise, if I was sure that this project would have the full support of
the owners, I wouldn't hesitate one second, but since money is a big issue
for them, I am hesitating. It still remains a big dilemma for me because I
work on this site every day and this site is yelling: "put me in a database,
please!!".

Another issue is that they desperately want that search box, but they do not
like any third-party development into the site. So I really need to come up
with a solution for that.

I don't know, but the other solutions I can think of for creation of a
search box will also require some programming (I was thinking of the
Dictionnary object, any other ideas?) and with the heavy text load of the
site, also quite some work.

Do you understand my dilemma now?

Eveline
eveline_vanhemel at pi.be

Richard wrote:

Hi,
As fellow webworker from Belgium I had to reply to this, I think we're the
only ones :o)

One thing I'd like to point out is, to avoid the mistakes I made, I started
out with a temporary site to see how things went, too.
The URL was temporary , and I used a redirect to point to it.
The server was slow but that didn't matter for the little traffic there was.
As things started to grow, I added a second server, to spread the load.

The result of this is that anybody's bookmarks, and the search engine
results don't actually contain the real url, but one of the mirror
addresses.
And then I did some site reshuffling, only later I found out that this
caused a lot of dead links on pages linking to mine, so I had to add those
files back in, which has made the whole thing a real mess, with very
fragmented search engine results.

I think the moral of the story, is to get your URL hosted, not redirected,
to choose a server that can expand with your needs, and think carefully
about the layout of the directory-structure of the site, so you don't have
to change these fundamentals once you go multi-language, or whatever.

Cheers,
Richard Bennett

mail at richardinfo.com
www.richardinfo.com

Richard Bennett
Independent Software Consultant
Leemputstraat 41
2600 Berchem, Belgium
Phone: + 32(0)475 71 91 84






More information about the thelist mailing list