Static Web Pages Have a Place in Your Websites

Database-driven dynamic websites are appropriate if you need to present interactive or personalized content to individual visitors to your website, or you need a modern online ordering system. However, static websites also have their definite benefits:

• Any web host can serve your website.
• Your website performance is far better.
• You may easily manage your contents in text files or databases.
• Your database can be kept offline, which eliminates many security issues.
• Your HTML files can be viewed locally with a web browser, for example after download or from a USB drive.
• Scripting with Mergemill tags in templates is far easier than developing a database-driven web application.
• You may identify the most common browse paths and use Mergemill Pro to generate easy links on your web pages. This creates a better experience for your visitors. Doing this dynamically may cause a big performance impact on your website.

Many people may think that static websites are only good if you have no more than a dozen web pages to manage. This is because maintaining a website manually does require a lot of work, and therefore site content can get stagnant easily. But this does not have to be the rule. You can have the best of both worlds. The answer lies in automation. That is, you generate static web pages with a static website generator like Mergemill Pro, and integrate them in a site with database-driven dynamic web pages where they are called for.

Mergemill Pro can quickly generates static web pages that do not need to present content dynamically according to user responses. Here are the simple essential steps:

1. Use Adobe Dreamweaver to create sample output files. They will be the starting point of your templates.
2. Work through each template to insert Mergemill field tags, which serve as placeholders for the content to be provided by the data feeds. Insert other tags as well where necessary for special contents and actions.
3. Add a job definition in Mergemill Pro. Specify an associated template and push a button to parse it. For each new field found in the template, Mergemill Pro automatically adds a task to the job. You then specify the data feed and data column to be fetched for each field in its task settings, or specify that the values are to be dynamically generated.
4. Test run the job. Mergemill Pro copies all static content in your template to the output, and replaces each field tag with the appropriate data value from its specified source to generate the full output. You may easily specify in your job definition the options to upload all or just the changed output files to your webserver via FTP.

The workflow to generate web pages is similar to those generating other files, such as RSS documents. If your website is frequently updated, it could be important to provide RSS feeds on your site. You may use them to list company and product news, upcoming events and important days, or new contents added to your site.

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