Business Library

This is the second in a series of articles relating to the need for programming knowledge within the small business. The first article Spare the Tedium! introduced the concept and gave a few simple examples of Microsoft Excel making complex/everyday business tasks a little easier.

This article extends the theme and looks at a real case study - Local Links itself.

Local Links was envisaged in 1996 as a Web site hosting service especially for the small business and homeworker. The intention was to have a selection of services, each of which provided a business with a presence on the World Wide Web. At the lowest level was a simple directory where the presence consisted of a 'card' entry - as in the window of a newsagent - whilst at the top level were custom-made sites hosted on our Web server. All levels were related under a Local Links banner to form an electronic High Street.

It quickly became apparent that such a format could be easily put together using simple HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language - the coding used to produce Web pages such as this one) editors - but this approach suffered from several drawbacks:

1. As the site grew, it became more and more difficult to ensure that the links between pages remained consistent.
2. To change the style of Local Links (which we have done several times) required each page to be edited manually in turn. Unless the change in style was small, this became an onerous undertaking!

The solution was to automate all the tedious aspects of producing the Local Links site:

• The style,
• The index,
• The site map, and
• The links between pages.

At the same time there were areas which didn't really need automating as they were relatively static, such as the Front Page, and this News page.

We therefore chose to base our design approach on:

1. A relational database in which to store the data - for example the directory articles themselves, and
2. A program which extracted information from the database and produced the required pages.

The database was used because it allowed us to store the articles and other information in individual tables (such as Client, Classification, Article etc) and automatically took care of the consistency between these relationships - so we couldn't have an article in a classification which didn't exist for example. This significantly reduced the complexity of the programming - which could treat the database information as correct.

All the program had to do was act as a front end to the database (to enable us to enter and remove information from it) and prepare the Local Links Web pages. For those interested in such things, the program was written using Borland Delphi and the database stored as Borland Paradox.

Hence, to add a new entry to one of our existing classifications merely required a new article to be inserted, the page reprocessed, and the index and map prepared - all at the touch of a button!

The way in which style is defined and changed is a little more complex, as the layout of Web pages can differ widely - and we did not wish to limit our design options. Therefore our program uses the concept of a template - which is a complete Local Links HTML page format without any data. Special codes (chosen by us) are inserted to indicate, for example, "the heading goes here", and "the title goes here" - which the program can readily identify and insert the appropriate information from the database. The result is Local Links as you see it today: All the pages share the same 'look and feel' and we can be confident that the links are consistent as they have been made using an automated process.

Regular visitors to the Local Links site will have seen many such changes in style since it first came online and developed from a simple design towards a more complex format - which we hope is still viewable by practically any recent Web browser (the software you are using to look at this page). Where we have used Microsoft Explorer-specific features, we have ensured that they are invisible to, and have no detrimental effects on, users of other browsers.

However, without investing in some programming (plus a little database) knowledge when we were starting up the Local Links Web service, we would have been very restricted in what we could change easily - and far less confident that the look of the pages was absolutely consistent and the links between them correct.

Conclusion

A little investment in programming skills and a database has given us:

• Flexibility,
• Consistency, and
• Efficiency.