| Up to this point, we've used various web pages in the Dorknozzle site as examples on how to work with basic page formatting techniques, tables, CSS, frames, forms and form objects, behaviors, layers, and more. Up until now, the process has been simple: We create a new page, add some images and text to the page, format it with tables or layers, and then save it for viewing in the browser. In a real world scenario, however, our workflow process would be inadequate and inefficient. Imagine having 500 pages in the Dorknozzle intranet site and trying to perform day-to-day web maintenance operations. The process might resemble the following scenario: Company Events: As a web developer, your job is to manually add and remove company events as they're announced. After the company event is on the main page, you must also create a dedicated page for that company event that includes pictures, directions, times, and perhaps a reservation system that, you guessed it, would be manually updated by you based on email reservations sent to you. HelpDesk: The HelpDesk functions as a repository for employee hardware, software, and general office maintenance problems. In a traditional scenario, you are responsible for fielding emails from employees with problems and then manually posting information to the website so that the IT department can view the problems and respond accordingly. Even worse, after the IT department responds and fixes the problem, they would send you an email so that you could manually remove the ticket from the site. Company Directory: As the web developer, your job is to continuously add, modify, and remove employees from the employee directory page. Given today's volatile marketplace, this in itself could become a daunting task! Employee Store: As the web developer, your job also involves manually adding, modifying, removing products from the company's employee store. But wait, there's more. You are also responsible for fielding emails from employees who are interested in a product, collecting cash, giving the employee the product, and then manually updating a spreadsheet of inventory information.
After reviewing this process, you've probably come to one conclusion: job security! As you can see, these tasks are enough to keep you busy all day, leaving little time for your talents and skills elsewhere on the website. Rather than taking a design or development role as it relates to the website, you might be stuck in maintenance mode, constantly adding, updating, and removing data from the website. This is where dynamic web pages and web applications come into play. Using a web application containing numerous dynamic web pages, you could easily streamline your workflow such that it begins to model the following workflow process: Company Events: Rather than manually adding, removing, and deleting company events, you simply tie the main page of the site to a database. A table within the database could contain the company events that are in turn fed to an HTML table within the main page. Even better, you can create a second page that allows Herbert in HR to add, update, and remove company events from the database using a simple web page. HelpDesk: Instead of fielding emails from employees who have problems, why not create a two-page HelpDesk system in which employees can create new HelpDesk tickets? These tickets can be stored in a table in the database. A second page, accessible by the IT staff, provides a list of employees with problems (fed in from the database). When the problem has been fixed, the IT staff member simply selects from a drop-down menu that changes the status of the HelpDesk ticket from Open to Closed. Company Directory: Rather than manually adding, modifying, and removing employees from the company directory, you can easily create functionality within the Admin page that allows you to centrally add, modify, and delete employees from a database table. This approach effectively eliminates the need for manually connecting to the site, opening the HTML page, making changes, and then re-uploading the site. Employee Store: By far the most complex part of the Dorknozzle site is the employee store. Manually trying to add, modify, and remove products as well as collect cash, distribute products, and update inventories can be an extremely time-consuming process. Instead, add the products to a database and display those products within a dynamic page. Add shopping cart functionality to the page that allows users to add and update a shopping cart on their own. When it comes time to check out, you can easily integrate payment system functionality such as PayPal to automate the process of collecting money from the employee. Admin: As the web developer/administrator, you'll want a centralized interface for adding, modifying, and deleting employees. Additionally, you'll want to centrally add, modify, and remove product information from your site. This is where the admin page comes in. By creating a digital dashboard of sorts, you can easily fulfill these tasks without ever having to connect to your site within Dreamweaver.
After reviewing this process, you're probably starting to wonder about that job security. The downside to using dynamic web pages and databases is that you're effectively taken out of some of the processes you've become accustomed to dealing with. The upside is that you can now focus on building more applications for your organization. Even better, you can now focus on designing and developing the fun stuff! And while the initial setup and development time is greater for our web application than for the equivalent static pages, the benefits down the line far outweigh the time it would take to develop the application. Keep in mind that Dreamweaver cuts your development time in half: Because you're working with an intuitive visual editor and not coding by hand, the effort to create the dynamic Dorknozzle web application in Dreamweaver will be fast. The next nine chapters of the book involve building dynamic pages for the Dorknozzle website. Unfortunately, because of page-count limitations, we will only cover working with the employee store. However, you can download complete versions of the other pages, as well as view video tutorials on building the ficticious Dorknozzle website, from http://www.dreamweaverunleashed.com. |
