Sitemap

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

How do you think you'd access masses of data stored in a database?
You'll still need a more advanced search mechanism. Do you think
information magically presents itself from a database? Do you think it
would be easier to search for many words simultaneously within a
database? Why? At the moment you already have a database - it's just
that your "records" are stored in directories instead of tables, and
files instead of records.



I think nothing of it. I think you need to get a better understanding
of what a database is and why one should use one. The problem you have
at the moment is that your current method of searching what would seem a
poorly structured site is too simplistic. Whether you use a database or
not is irrelevant - you still have to search for the information
somehow.

Why don't you just go ahead and start storing your information in a
database? It won't be long before you're stuck with the same problem
that you have now, that is, your current search engine is rubbish.
Alternatively, build your 1,000 link site map. I can assure that such a
method will be worse for your visitors. You'll be better off if you
structure your site in such a way that pages can be grouped under
similar subjects.

Luigi, as always, you ask for help but do not take on board the advice
that has been given. If your site is of any importance to your
business, it's time you employed someone to build it for you. It's
quite clear that you have no understanding of what a database is, how it
works, or how it can benefit you. Until you can get yourself to the
point where you understand how it can or cannot help you, you should
leave them well alone.

I am sometimes under the impression that you are more looking for a job than
answering the questions I asked.!!!
You do not know the answers to my questions you do not need answer at all or
you can write that you do not have any opinion about something.
Or are you against other people learning what you have learnt before or
may-be (you never know) not learnt yet?
I am not looking for someone building my site for me but I want to learn to
make it better. I am also interested to learn the skills step by step.
This way I save money and I can also build a better site in the end.
Of course, there would be a lot of disadvantages with employing someone
building the website for me.
Here are some:
1) Of course, when I am asking for information or for an opinion as you want
to call it, I still feel I am entitled to decide what I want. Your opinion
is worth as many other people´s opinions and I do not ask only or those
answering in this NG for an opinion. In the end I make what I think it is
better for me. To hear what others have to say is a part of the process
where I collect information. And those answering my questions in the NG have
also different opinions of course. For example you can read what has been
said about putting all the pages on the sitemap or just some.

2) It is easier to build a website in many languages if you can understand
and write the contents in all of them yourself.
23 I am against building several less large websites instead of one bigger
for several reasons, the visitor is probably more impressed by a larger
website than by many little ones and find what he is looking for ( even if
that was not necessarily what he was looking at the beginning)
4) I suppose that one example where a database might help is where the users
write their own e-mailadress on the website to get newsletters and the
database saves the adresses.
Even if what I say would not be true, making mistakes is till a part of the
process of learning. I can still make much more things if I learn myself
something than if I let others do it. If I had done as you suggested, that
means let the website do by others I had learnt much less and I had probably
got worse results ( no offence meant!) obviously from my point of view. Just
to give another example, if I had let other people learn english for me I
had still needed their translation to answer all of your posts and the same
works with German, with Swedish and so on...
5) To let someone else make a professional website means also to have much
larger costs.
6) The site is already structured in a way that pages are structured under
similar subjects. You can notice that especially in Swedish because most
pages are in Swedish so far. Do you understand Swedish by the way?

- -
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)



http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/it/benvenuti.html
http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/it/ceramicasvedeseuno.html

 

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

Where did you get the engine from? Have you tried the free one from
www.atomz.com ?

No, I have not tried it yet and I got the one which I use now from Telia
which has become now Telia Sonera.


- -
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)



http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/valkommen.html
http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/svenskkeramikett.html

 

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

No. I'm thinking that perhaps you should split your site into several
smaller sites each dealing with one aspect of your various businesses.
They'd be a lot easier to optimise.

BB

I think that a larger site can be more interesting for users.
The site has already a structure. There is no sitemap which shows it but
there is a structure.
Some visitors might be confused though because there are many pages under
construction and because
they cannot understand the language the pages are written. A sitemap might
help.


- -
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)



http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/valkommen.html
http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/lagenheteriitalien.html

 

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

A decent search engine increases the usability of your site, it lets
users find what they came to the site for quicker and easier. A
limited search facility will often work against you - it will
frustrate the user or mislead them into thinking you don't have the
information or product they want. In other words a bad search engine
is worse than no search engine at all.

I have to correct what I said before. It seems as you can also look for more
than one word at the same time.
Most pages are in Swedish so far. But if you search for example "boende
Italien"
or "boende Sicilien" you can see that you get results. The search engine
which I have is not bad at all!
So, I already have a good search engine. If you find a better search engine,
you should please let me know what it can do more.
Do you think th

A site map can also make it easier for users to find what they are
looking for, especially if they are looking for something that is hard
to express in search terms.

So, if resources permit include both a good search engine and a site
map.

A database is another matter entirely. To the end user whether a site
uses a database or not should make no difference at all. They see web
pages, whether those web pages are static HTML or generated from data
stored in a database should not be their concern.

Well, you need a database if you want to let the user leave his
e-mailadress, in case he wants to get a newsletter, don´t you?
You need some place where this adress can be stored.

That's a perfectly true statement, but what does it have to do with
your site? All the above quote is saying is that databases are widely
used.

See above

What advantages do you think a database would offer your site?

See above as an example.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <[email protected]> <http://steve.pugh.net/>

- -
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)



http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/valkommen.html
http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/lagenheteriitalien.html

 

[Hywel Jenkins]

I am sometimes under the impression that you are more looking for a job than
answering the questions I asked.!!!

Not at all. I've seen you site and there would be far too much involved
for it to be worth my effort.

You do not know the answers to my questions you do not need answer at all or
you can write that you do not have any opinion about something.

I answered your questions - read my reply again. As I said, you don't
listen to what you're told. If you don't want to be told, or receive
other peoples' opinions, don't ask. Better still, ask in CIWAH -
they'll love you (in both the emotional and physical meaning of the
word.)

Or are you against other people learning what you have learnt before or
may-be (you never know) not learnt yet?

No. I think people should be encouraged to learn how to do things
themselves. Notice that I said, "Do you want to investigate them so
that you can extend your skills? If you do, just have a go at them."

I am not looking for someone building my site for me but I want to learn to
make it better. I am also interested to learn the skills step by step.

Then listen to what people tell you. IIRC it took three months before
you listened when people told you to resize your images in a graphics'

This way I save money and I can also build a better site in the end.

Two very good reasons. I appreciate that one-man operations can't
necessarily put large sums of money into their web sites.

Of course, there would be a lot of disadvantages with employing someone
building the website for me.
Here are some:
1) Of course, when I am asking for information or for an opinion as you want
to call it, I still feel I am entitled to decide what I want. Your opinion
is worth as many other people´s opinions and I do not ask only or those
answering in this NG for an opinion. In the end I make what I think it is
better for me. To hear what others have to say is a part of the process
where I collect information. And those answering my questions in the NG have
also different opinions of course. For example you can read what has been
said about putting all the pages on the sitemap or just some.

Good for you, though to me you don't appear to be listening to what
people here are saying. Of course you have to do what's right for your
site and your visitors, but do you think you've done that so far?

2) It is easier to build a website in many languages if you can understand
and write the contents in all of them yourself.

Only if you can handle the development process. For example, if you
provided me with all the text for a site in English, Swedish, Italian,
French, Welsh, etc, I could build the site for you - no problem. The
language of the content is irrelevant to the development process.

23 I am against building several less large websites instead of one bigger
for several reasons, the visitor is probably more impressed by a larger
website than by many little ones and find what he is looking for ( even if
that was not necessarily what he was looking at the beginning)

Who told you to build several smaller sites?

4) I suppose that one example where a database might help is where the users
write their own e-mailadress on the website to get newsletters and the
database saves the adresses.

Yes, though you'll still need some server-side processing to run against
that database in order to generate the newsletter.

Even if what I say would not be true, making mistakes is till a part of the
process of learning.

Agreed. Though why not learn from other peoples' mistakes? For
example, I crashed on my last skiing holiday, resulting in severe
rotator cuff tendonitis and a few hundred pounds of medical bills to fix
it when I got home. 8 months on and it's still not fixed. Do you think
other people should set out to achieve the same injury just to see what
it's like?

I can still make much more things if I learn myself
something than if I let others do it. If I had done as you suggested, that
means let the website do by others I had learnt much less and I had probably
got worse results ( no offence meant!) obviously from my point of view. Just
to give another example, if I had let other people learn english for me I
had still needed their translation to answer all of your posts and the same
works with German, with Swedish and so on...

Yes, though would your time be better invested in the day-to-day aspects
of your business?

5) To let someone else make a professional website means also to have much
larger costs.
Undoubtedy.


6) The site is already structured in a way that pages are structured under
similar subjects. You can notice that especially in Swedish because most
pages are in Swedish so far.

Then use those subjects for your sitemap. Simple.

Do you understand Swedish by the way?

Nope, though I can speak JavaScript, Perl, PHP, VB, C, a bit of Java,
COBOL, Pascal, and I've dabbled with Python. I can also "Sing a
Rainbow" in Welsh.

Luigi, I admire your determination - regardless of how my replies to you
come across, I really do. I can see that your site has come along
greatly since you first posted here (December last year I think). I
also think you should just have a go with building a database. If you
find it difficult I'm sure you can work things out. If not you can
always ask here. You could even start building new parts of your site
with database-driven content - you don't have to switch it all over.
For example, http://bluesheep.com/ gets some stuff from a MySQL
database, some from plain text files, some from XML, and some from
straight HTML documents.

Just go over to http://www.mysql.com/ and http://www.php.net/ and get
the two bits of software that will get you started. If you don't have a
server running on your computer get http://httpd.apache.org/. You may
already have IIS running, which will be reasonably suitable and easier
to set up that Apache.

 

[Steve Pugh]

Well, you need a database if you want to let the user leave his
e-mailadress, in case he wants to get a newsletter, don´t you?
You need some place where this adress can be stored.

Someplace doesn't need to be a database on your web server.
It could just be a text file on your desktop machine. Yes a database
makes administering many things easier. But the user really shouldn't
need to know whether you're administering the mailing list via a
database or via some other method.

See above

See what?
The statement you quoted boils down to "There are a lot of databases
in the world"
I asked "What does that fact have to do with your site?"
You said "I would need a database to administer a newsletter."

Seems to be a bit of a non sequiter.

See above as an example.

But why do you think that adding newsletter functionality is at all
comparable to improving your navigation or search facilities? You're
not comparing like with like.

I'm just trying to understand what you are really asking about.
Is your real question something along the lines of "what should be the
next thing I do to improve my site?"?

Steve

 

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

Someplace doesn't need to be a database on your web server.
It could just be a text file on your desktop machine. Yes a database
makes administering many things easier. But the user really shouldn't
need to know whether you're administering the mailing list via a
database or via some other method.

As you wrote a database makes administering many things easier.
If I asked users for example not only if they want to receive a newsletter
but even
many other questions and I want to store and categorize their answers, a
database might be useful, I suppose.
What do you think?

The
disadvantage may be that it takes a take to learn to build one but on the
other hand it may be good to have learnt the skills to be able to use them
afterwards. No, the user does not need know how I administer the maillist.

See what?
The statement you quoted boils down to "There are a lot of databases
in the world"

They also wrote "In today's world you just can't escape the database."

I asked "What does that fact have to do with your site?"
You said "I would need a database to administer a newsletter."
But why do you think that adding newsletter functionality is at all
comparable to improving your navigation or search facilities? You're
not comparing like with like.

Although my site already has a structure, maybe that a database would help
to have control over it if its files should be over 10.000, what might
happen
in future.
While building the website, the navigation tools need be extended too and to
do that one needs have a constant controll over the structure.
As much as it regards the search engines, the one I have works, I think. If
you think it does not, just tell me why. Of course, it can only find the
pages which I want let users search.

I'm just trying to understand what you are really asking about.
Is your real question something along the lines of "what should be the
next thing I do to improve my site?"?

Steve

The original question was about how to make a sitemap, I think
But of course it is always good to improve and learn to improve the website
also in other aspects.
So, it can also be a good question to ask the one which you suggested"what
should be the
next thing I do to improve my site?"





- -
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)



http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/it/benvenuti.html
http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/lagenheteriitalien.html

 

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

As you wrote a database makes administering many things easier.
If I asked users for example not only if they want to receive a newsletter
but even
many other questions and I want to store and categorize their answers, a
database might be useful, I suppose.
What do you think?

The
disadvantage may be that it takes a take to learn to build one but on the
other hand it may be good to have learnt the skills to be able to use them
afterwards. No, the user does not need know how I administer the maillist.

I meant "takes a while"


- -
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)



http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/it/benvenuti.html
http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/lagenheteriitalien.html

 

[Joel Shepherd]

Although my site already has a structure, maybe that a database
would help to have control over it if its files should be over
10.000, what might happen in future.

If you come to that eventuality, it's likely a database would be more
useful for storing content than for controlling structure. Well, let
me take that back: it might be helpful for both, but it requires planning.

I haven't looked at your site in a while, but I recall it being
listings of properties for sale or rent. Presumably, you'd get to 10K
pages with about as many property listings.

If you want to apply a database to this situation -- and it's probably
a good thing to think about -- then one good place to start is by
looking at the listings and determining the common elements. There are
probably things like a picture (maybe several) of the property, a
title or headline, a description, an address, contact listings for
further information, price information, date available, and so on.

Note that many of these elements are "complex", in that they may be
made of several sub-elements. There may be several contacts listed
with a single property. The description may partly be a list of
attributes: number of rooms, square footage (area, sorry ;-),
appliances, and so on.

A carefully designed database can be "flexible": you could have more
than one picture associated with a property, a variable number of
attributes in the description, you could even "share" data between
listings for the same property in different languages.

It's also possible to represent categories, or a hierarchy, in a
database, and you could, for example, use a database to automate the
creation of pages that visitors would use to browse through your listing.

But, A) You need to plan very carefully ahead of time, and B) You need
to have some ability in database design, and understand how to develop
a schema that accomodates the kind of data you want to manage.

A database for e-mail addresses might be a good place to start. It
should be simple -- one table probably -- but would give you a bit of
experience in creating a database, dealing with data integrity (how do
you prevent the same address from being added twice?), managing
indexes, and so on.

A second step, if you have a categorization scheme already worked out,
would be to implement that scheme in a database, and write code to
generate the actual navigational pages from it. That'd require more
complex tables, and also force you to think about relationships
between records, which one place where a well-designed database helps.

The final step would be creating a database schema for the property
listings themselves, migrating the data you have into the database,
and writing code to generate the listing pages themselves.

It's certainly "do-able", but your success will be proportional to
your ability to learn database design. I'd spend some time reading and
doing throw-away projects first, before making something I'd ask my
website's visitors to use.

 

[Luigi Donatello Asero]

If you come to that eventuality, it's likely a database would be more
useful for storing content than for controlling structure. Well, let
me take that back: it might be helpful for both, but it requires planning.

I haven't looked at your site in a while, but I recall it being
listings of properties for sale or rent. Presumably, you'd get to 10K
pages with about as many property listings.

If you want to apply a database to this situation -- and it's probably
a good thing to think about -- then one good place to start is by
looking at the listings and determining the common elements. There are
probably things like a picture (maybe several) of the property, a
title or headline, a description, an address, contact listings for
further information, price information, date available, and so on.

Note that many of these elements are "complex", in that they may be
made of several sub-elements. There may be several contacts listed
with a single property. The description may partly be a list of
attributes: number of rooms, square footage (area, sorry ;-),
appliances, and so on.

A carefully designed database can be "flexible": you could have more
than one picture associated with a property, a variable number of
attributes in the description, you could even "share" data between
listings for the same property in different languages.

It's also possible to represent categories, or a hierarchy, in a
database, and you could, for example, use a database to automate the
creation of pages that visitors would use to browse through your listing.

But, A) You need to plan very carefully ahead of time, and B) You need
to have some ability in database design, and understand how to develop
a schema that accomodates the kind of data you want to manage.

A database for e-mail addresses might be a good place to start. It
should be simple -- one table probably -- but would give you a bit of
experience in creating a database, dealing with data integrity (how do
you prevent the same address from being added twice?), managing
indexes, and so on.

A second step, if you have a categorization scheme already worked out,
would be to implement that scheme in a database, and write code to
generate the actual navigational pages from it. That'd require more
complex tables, and also force you to think about relationships
between records, which one place where a well-designed database helps.

The final step would be creating a database schema for the property
listings themselves, migrating the data you have into the database,
and writing code to generate the listing pages themselves.

It's certainly "do-able", but your success will be proportional to
your ability to learn database design. I'd spend some time reading and
doing throw-away projects first, before making something I'd ask my
website's visitors to use.

Thank you very much for the answer.
The examples were good. I also agree with you that it is better to
begin with an easier item, for example with e-mailadresses.
I have read something about different computer languages in Swedish
as Java and Perl for example several times for a long time and I found it
interesting.
But I read mostly books. Are there any sites among the many on the Internet
which you especially recommend about
database design, Java, Perl and Cgi.?
The sites can be in one of the following languages:
English, German, Italian, Swedish, French, Spanish, Norvegian, Danish but
preferably one of the first 4.
My knowledge in other languages like Estonian, Finnish and Russian is
unfortunately
not sufficient yet for such subjects ( but I am learning Estonian and
Finnish just now anyway, Ma õpin eesti keelt
)
And by the way, I am adding new things on my website, for example,
e-commerce with Italian and Swedish ceramics.
I have begun to introduce them in Swedish and in Italian.

- -
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)



http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/it/benvenuti.html
http://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/sv/lagenheteriitalien.html