The above snippet is the foundation of a database call, and one of the major workhorses of advanced websites. Databases are, in my opinion, among the most powerful tools in any web designer's arsenal, and a necessary component of each of the above sites. For as a highly technical profession, website design entails some rather respectable rates, and there's no way our religious jewelry site would want to pay for the hours upon hours we would have to spend hand-positioning every single product image, or the headset site would want to accept the cost of an individually-created page for every last item (with new pages having to be created for each new item sold). Good luck keeping the shipping company's records or the translator's current jobs in order without a database, and I'm sure that our sports handicapper and seeker of cheap airline tickets will want to have to wade through your html to position their new all- inclusive vacation packages or update their latest sports picks.

With a database, and a robust CMS or admin system to maintain it, though, you create a glamour of site edits. In fact, these systems aren't there to let people edit their sites - or at least, not the coding. Rather, they allow the addition of variables into the database, which the site is coded to retrieve and use. Each database has a series of tables, which have what can be best visualized as rows and columns, not unlike a spreadsheet document. Each row holds one entry, with a variable placed in each column. The power of databases lies in their ability to reference that data in a variety of ways, grabbing based on certain values, sorting by others, and then using the information retrieved in code or even in other database queries.

So our religious jewelry site, for example, might have a pair of tables. The first allows the creation of categories, which is called for in the site to produce links to each category's page (itself an illusion; there's only one page, and by passing a variable to it, it brings up the information attached to that variable in the database). Once we have the category, a call to a second table for the jewelry products gathers the information from each, such as the piece's name, price, and the location of its image file. With the variables gathered, a looping code allows us to display them all in an organized format without having to go an hand-place every piece, saving time during site construction and allowing for easy upkeep where all the client has to do to add new products is post the new variables to the database.

Wireless headsets is probably using the same two tables, but rather than trying to display several products at once, the categories lead to a product list, which themselves lead to a full page that grabs all the information from the products and displays it. A differing approach is necessary here, for where the jewelry site relied on small thumbnail images and short, probably one-line descriptions, the headset site has room to provide larger images and longer details about each product listed. In fact, as a web designer, you might choose to advise the jewelry site to use the same sort of style the headset site wants, providing larger images of the pieces. Naturally, the other option is to take the best of both worlds, with a set of thumbnails that click through to full detail pages (which, themselves, might even click to full-sized images).

While those two debate the relative merits of varying image sizes, we'll move on to our travel site, which has a whole list of affiliates to place. Now, as any SEO expert will tell you, text content is an important part of site design, so the admin system here is certainly going to need at least two tables. The first, not unlike the products table for the headsets site, has the page built around it. This is a table for articles, a blog, forum posts, or whatever other method of content generation the site owner favors. While the content can be highly useful to visitors, the affiliates remain of primary importance for monetary purposes. Of course, different companies offer different options to their affiliates; some provide animated, eye-catching banners tied to links with unique identifiers. Others might use Javascript code to track clicks. Still others might have a third-party handling their tracking, providing code snippets from them to their affiliates. Regardless, varying types of code, sizes of banners, and styles of linking means that no simple formula will suffice for adding new affiliates. Rather, by creating a table listing the affiliates, as well as some details and/or options for the nature of the links, you can have an easy way to add the proper codes and then call it based on whatever parameters you choose. From there, you just call for the proper types of code in the proper places on the site. One area across the top might call for 60x600 long banners, while a section on the right might use any 125x125 squares your have stored. If Captain Dirt Cheap Airline Tickets really wants you to get into advanced coding, you might also create your own tracking system that you can use to compare data with the affiliate sites, relying on forwarders.

This article is continued in "The Illusion of Website Design III".