Re: From static to dynamic

To answer your first question, some search engines, such as Google, will crawl URLs that contain GET variables. Others will not. There is a way around this by creating links such as index.php?/Men/Shirts/Blue/XLarge and using the $PATH_INFO variable to parse the URL and spit out the needed variables. As for your second question, I can think of no legitimate reason to use flat files rather than a database. If you switch hosts you can easily transfer the database as well as the scripts. Most hosts have MySQL and if they don't they just are not worth using. Hosts are a dime a dozen these days and you can easily find some that have MySQL. Steven Katz <steven@idma.com> wrote in message news:NDBBLNCHMLLMAEBPGDOHIEAGKBAA.steven@idma.com... > I have a site which consists of a few hundred catalog pages. The > items in the catalog are pictured 9 to a page with accompanying > descriptions. The homepage features an item-of-the-day, as well > as the past 3 featured items. The entire site is static and > regularly updated manually by me. I don't believe it'll take much > to fully automate the site, which is what I plan to do, or have > done, over the next week or so. Now for my questions: > > 1. The dynamically-generated pages must remain indexable by > search engines. That is, indexing robots must be able to crawl > the entire site by following the various links to all of the > catalog pages. Do the strings that are passed through the URL > appear to search engines as dynamic, and therefore get ignored? > > 2. It's important that the site remain easily portable from one > host to another. I have no plans to move it, but it would be nice > to know that it would be a simple matter of plunking it down > somewhere else if I needed to. Is there any advantage to using a > flat file over mysql in terms of portability? How significantly > would performance be affected, considering that it's not likely > there will ever be more than 1000 catalog items (rows)? > > I'd be interested in hearing how you'd put this together. > > Steven >