Under the Gun: Meet Your Deadline, Part III

Under the Gun, Part 3

by Rebecca Rohan
Meet Your Deadline (instead of the executioner)
Jeff De Tray says "Re-use every possible piece of code. There are very few pages I create from scratch anymore. Nearly all new pages I create are based on an existing page. Even if all you can re-use is the header and footer, it's faster than starting from scratch."
An easy way to recycle code is to make templates of the pages that you've already designed. Susan M. Cooney, President of Interactive Online Services, Inc., which hosts the CD SourceLine and Internex Web sites, says "Use HTML templates whenever possible, and draft page design thumbnails before you start laying out the page in HTML." Cooney says this easily cuts the time for creating pages in half.
Christina Craft uses templates extensively at the 52,000 page Corel site. "Once we have converted our WordPerfect documents with Corel WEB.TRANSIT, we take the raw HTML code and drag and drop it into our template. Our template was designed more than six months ago. It has some very complicated HTML code but we rarely ever have to worry about it because we keep the same format for every document. We have comment tags that say  and end with  so it is easy for anyone in our company to publish their own web pages."
Bring Databases Online
A database interface can be an enormously efficient way to get more use out of existing information, according to Dave McDuff, a Web Publisher at Corel. "We have a huge knowledge base where we store technical support documents for our users. We also have 67,000 photos for sale online. This information was already available in a database and our Web developers created a Web interface for it. This means we don't have to individually HTML code each document. Instead, it is dynamically updated with our database." Of course they recommend Corel's WEB.DATA as the front-end of choice.
Troy Hayden Glick, Online Development Manager at Destination Florida (site is no longer active), uses the Oracle database with PL-SQL. "The database took about 4 months," says Glick, "and the joke here is that it will save us a year over the next six months." The database automates the management of the site, ensures consistency within the site, and makes searches more efficient, according to Glick. When it's time to update a piece of information, the system shows every instance of that information across the system, and Glick says there are infinite ways users can call up a piece of information. Page authors can add expiration dates to documents, and the system notifies them a week before the expiration date. Expired pages become inaccessible but aren't deleted. "You can have the computer bring up a Halloween story every October 1st and get rid of it every November 5th," says Glick. Nice.
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