The Lincoln Indoor Bowls Club Web Site - Dynamic Pages

This website uses a fully editable content management system (CMS) with dynamic pages - dynamic in the sense that much of the content is held centrally within a database and the pages are built "on the fly" whenever they are required. This enables club personnel to edit, add and delete content whenever necessary ensuring that information is kept up-to-date with the minimum of fuss and effort.

Examples of dynamic pages 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 an unacceptably long period of time to download but using dynamic content with the database and filters method only the essential information is displayed making the page much more responsive.
• 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.