The Lincoln Indoor Bowls Club Web Site - Dynamic Pages

Examples of Dynamic Pages (pages using dynamic content) on this web site are:

• Diary.
• Indoor Leagues.
• Indoor Competitions.
• Noticeboard.

In each of these, the actual content is held in a set of databases on the web site server. The document that enables the display is a set of place holders that the server fills with database content when you inform it what is required. For example, in the Indoor Leagues display, the server waits until the Season, League and Division are selected then the Games, Tables or Teams button clicked. It (the server) then "digs out" the appropriate data from the appropriate database and "builds" the page to display.

There are many advantages but the 3 main ones are.

• It avoids large, slow to download web pages. For example, the league fixtures chart from the club handbook would take 20 minutes to download using a dial-up connection. Using dynamic content with the database and filters method that is massively reduced.
• Inputting the winter league teams, results and tables is a very big job (26 ish !! divisions). Building and replacing the documents after games would be a nightmare. With this method updates are done in a standard web browser and several people will can do them simultaneously - only the changes are updated. These changes are displayed immediately. A massive reduction in workload.
• Expensive storage space on the web server is reduced - one dynamic page with its matching database takes the place of a team sheet, games sheet and results table per each of 26 divisions.