Design: CSS Websites

Dynamically driven content describes content that is stored elsewhere, such as a database, that is displayed on a website. This kind of system separates the content from the layout.

The biggest reason people use dynamically driven content is to reduce time and costs of website maintenance. If the content is dynamically driven, the website owner can easily update the content without knowledge of website design or programming. In other cases, the content can come from other sources, reducing the time it takes to create content from scratch (or pay someone to do so). Other benefits include faster page loads and more possibilities for the delivery of the content, such as RSS or delivery for user accessibility.

The methods used for creating dynamically driven content are usually in two categories. The first category is client side scripting, that responds to mouse or keyboard actions, such as DHTML, Javascript or Actionscript. The second method is server side scripting, which would respond to a form or browser type, such as PHP, Perl or ASP.NET.

The simplest way to create dynamically driven content, is to use RSS feeds, PHP and a MySQL database. This can be as easy as getting the feed address and then using the feed in the script to display it on the page. There are also inexpensive tools to take the feed information and create a separate page for each item in the feed. This is SEO friendly because pages will show up in the search engine for the keywords in the feed items.
Other tools take the RSS information, display the title and a few lines and link to the original item. This is not as SEO friendly, because only the titles and the few lines will show up in the search engines and you will not be leveraging the entire item.