Major project - I need some tips

Hello everyone,

Most of my websites are about 10 - 100 pages in total. I am collecting information, sources and media on a totaly new website I wish to design - a museum of sorts.

The major problem I know I shall be facing is the shear size of the site, I estimate around 500 pages upwards to start with.
How is it possible to organise such a site, keeping it updated though-out?

I was thinking of using PhP inclued, prehaps a CMS system - does anyone know of any good ones - which are ofcorse SE friendly (I do know of mod_rewrite but would like somthing a bit easyer)

Any and all tips and surgestions would be most welcome, I would really like to have this site working as its on a subject I very much enjoy (not like my other sites) But due to the size of the project its somewhat off-putting.

So... any large site owners please, what do you use?

Kind regards,

Daniel.

I am not sure if that would answer your question but i found on a large website
in the main page about 200 links inclosed in a noscript tag .. and they were indexed
by google ok ...


Hope it helps,
Gabriel

Hi,

I would suggest a CMS that that generate static HTML pages.
Use site maps, and a logical site menu.

I tend to go low tech on my sites... keeping things simple in as many ways possible.

I have sites that range from 5 pages up to over 50,000 pages and all of them are .html files on the server. I find it easy to manage these sites using server side includes for main navigation, announcements, adsense, special offers, and links to parts of the site that I am promoting at any given moment.

I also have optimization strategies that are implemented site-wide using ssi. Since the nature of my business is seasonal, I change keywords in the fall and spring with SSI to get extra duty out of many PR6 pages.

This took a little planning at first - and I have revamped a couple of times - but by carefully planning a folder structure I can use find/replace commands to quickly and easily modify title tags and other parts of a file that can not be touched by ssi.

I know that a lot of you are shaking your head, thinking that EGOL really needs something more powerful - but I'll bet that I can accomplish my goals just about as fast with my current methods as a person running a site using a database program - and I have full control over my filenames etc. Plus, you don't see me whining about google not indexing my dynamic pages - my largest site was completely indexed and in the google SERPs within two weeks.

Someday I'll invest in myself and get a database site up and running with mod_rewrite, etc. but I am happy with how this is working for now.

I use MySQL to store content, php scripts to generate html pages from the database.

Hi,

I like the low tech XHTML pages idea.

Our web site (www.sorvoja.no) is just simple static XHTML pages on the web server. No javascript, no pictures, no java, no complex tables or css. But there is some of programming behind the scene, the content is in mysql and the structure in templates and the pages are written by a java program offline. It makes it easier to make global changes to our pages and we could quickly create a HTML 2.0 web site, or output the data in a different way or format since they already are in a database. Without the database system we would have to parse and rewrite the page html source and that is difficult programming.

Does it need to be PHP?

I have a cms that allows you to create static web pages

I would avoid creating static pages like the plague unless you are willing to spend thousands of hours updating your content.

There is no advantage whatsoever to having static pages. To a search engine spider, dynamic pages which have been well constructed, appear static.

Please feel free to take a look at my site (link below), it is entirely dynamic, standards compliant (except for a slight error on some special characters (outside our control)..) and accessible to the highest level. The search engines index it easily.

It's proof that the dynamic concept does work. 500 pages these days isnt a great deal, we have over 60,000 pages. With a simple alteration we can change elements of the entire site.

As for mod_rewrite being complex, it isnt if you know how to use regular expressions properly. To a beginner they might seem like nonsense, but they really are not that complex at all.

I would encourage you to either a) read like crazy on a server side scripting language such as ColdFusion (see Kapuni.com), PHP or ASP, or b) Find a good web developer who will do the job for you.

If you so wish, I may even be able assist myself, with the aid of our development team. PM me if I can be of assistance.

Either way, I wish you the best of luck in your endeavour.

Dynamic pages will get indexed however, static pages will outrank them anyday. I would definitely find a content management system and output static pages on the fly.

Interesting statement. I have never heard this before. Can you please provide some source/backup/evidence for this statement that all things being equal, a dynamic page (i assume you mean a page with a url parameter) will perform better in SERPs than a static page.