Using advanced Web publishing tools

Many Web sites are built with "flat" HTML files. This technique requires Web publishers to code all the words, images, navigation and content onto each and every page. Initially, this doesn't present a problem because most sites begin as small operations, but as you incorporate more content, your site can quickly balloon to hundreds of pages. At this point, if you want to change your site's design, or even make a small tweak across all your pages, you'll need to manually access every page and make the alteration. Some of the more robust text and layout editors can find and replace text across a site, but to accomplish this you need to make sure you have all your files in one location -- and sometimes it's impossible to make a search specific enough to guarantee every file is changed.

To combat this problem, programmers and software companies came up with ways to dynamically generate Web content. With this process, you can centralize parts of your pages that rarely change -- such as your logo and copyright blurb -- then make these elements available to every page on your site from one location. With a dynamic system in place, changes made to one file will appear across your site.

There are three cost-effective ways to harness dynamic publishing: Content management systems, cascading style sheets and server-side includes.

Let's start with content management systems.