Lesson 4. Dynamic Web Sites

You have reached a significant milestone in the revision of the Newland Tours site. You have upgraded to XHTML, stripped out inefficient presentation code, created a cascading style sheet for the entire site, built a template, and enhanced the site's accessibility. Glancing at the site in a browser, it may not seem like you've accomplished three lessons' worth of work. But you know what important things are going on behind the screen: You've laid the foundations for a standards-compliant, future-proof, maintainable site.

Beginning with this lesson, you'll cast aside (for the most part) traditional, static Web development, and move into database-driven, interactive, dynamic site development. Before you can start developing, though, you need to work through some prerequisites, of both a conceptual nature and a technical nature. By the end of this lesson, you'll have an idea of how dynamic sites work, and what they are created to do; you'll have Dreamweaver configured to work with dynamic data; and you'll have a simple pair of pages that use dynamic content. And you'll have created your first page with dynamic content.

Developing dynamic Web pages often means mixing and matching regular text with placeholder variables.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn foundational dynamic site concepts

• Choose a server model (ASP or ColdFusion)

• Redefine Newland Tours for dynamic Web site production

• Develop a simple dynamic application

APPROXIMATE TIME

This lesson takes approximately one hour to complete.

LESSON FILES

Starting Files:

Lesson04/Start/newland/about.htm

Lesson04/Start/newland/contact.htm

Lesson04/Start/newland/css/newland.css

Lesson04/Start/newland/generic_template.htm

Lesson04/Start/newland/index.htm

Lesson04/Start/newland/profiles.htm

Lesson04/Start/newland/tours.htm

Completed Files:

Lesson04/Complete/newland/about.asp

Lesson04/Complete/newland/contact.asp

Lesson04/Complete/newland/css/newland.css

Lesson04/Complete/newland/generic_template.asp

Lesson04/Complete/newland/index.asp

Lesson04/Complete/newland/profiles.asp

Lesson04/Complete/newland/test_form.asp

Lesson04/Complete/newland/test_form_processor.asp

Lesson04/Complete/newland/tours.asp