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Hi,
I am new to interactive web-design, therefore I wonder if I can pick your brain? Please excuse me if I ask dumb questions, (although I’d be grateful if you aligned me on any incorrect assumptions I make in my questioning.)
Using Visual Studio (C#, ASP, and Server Express) I’m putting together a website to advertise and sell ‘widgets’. I therefore want widget adverts to be available for both addition and editing by the widget owner, and I want new records to be listed on a search engine as soon as possible after a widget page is added or amended. I’d also like prospective buyers to add comments to the widget records, and these comments should also be indexed. It is important for me to access the widget records for administration and editing purposes, as well as allowing the user to quickly search for specific widgets within a very large number of other widget records. Users may need to quickly identify particular widget records, and parse selected fields to a routine that performs a calculation using that widget’s data.
My current understanding is that such a widget site would be ‘crawled’ by a search engine after initial registration, and, during that crawling, new pages and modifications would be identified and indexed for increased public access. My understanding too is also that the more often the widget records are updated on a site, the more frequent the search engines will return to crawl for updates?
I think that XML might be useful for my objectives, but wonder if I also need a RDMS database to run in parallel (perhaps because XML is not good at rapid, random access indexing?). One of my assumptions is that XML is not good for handling large datasets that need to be indexed on search engines. Further, I have a hunch that XML is not the correct tool on its own for enabling fast access to a particular widget record. For example, I may need to validate whether widgets already exist when new ones are entered, and I may need to automatically cross-reference other widget tables when a new widget is added.
The technical solution I was thinking of implementing was to keep my widget data in a RDBMS and then synchronise and update HTML pages with changes and additions to the widget records, enabling the search engines to naturally index those HTML pages during crawler visits.
Question. Can anyone advise me on whether XML is suited for the purposes I have described, and, if so, advise me on how to go about ensuring that XML is used in a way that is friendly to search engines and effective in providing for the other direct access functions described above? I know that search engines have quite small page caches, and if XML is used to house widget data, then I think I’d have to chop the XML files up separately?
Hmmm…
Appreciate your comments (and patience.)
:p
Rachel. x
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