You probably use the Internet virtually everyday and trall across many many websites but for some reason hardly any of the bigger sites never give away their secrets on what actually makes their site tick. Well in this first part of this discovery, I will talk to you about how my site is developed, by whom and whats involved in maintaining it.

The Beginners Online Workshop contains around 50 unique web pages designed to carry out a particular task. Most of the pages have been built using a technology called Active Server Pages from Microsoft. For people who are new to development, Active Server Pages are generally a mixture of HTML code and VB Script code. By using this mixture, I can gain more control over my sites than the traditional way.

VB Script is basically Visual Basic code which is a cut down version of the much larger language. It is very easy to learn, but I recommend that before you starting using VB Script, you first start looking at the HTML side. If you are comfortable with HTML, then there is no reason why you cannot move onto this new technology. Before you can implement this technology on your own website, there is a couple of important issues to solve.

1. Do you have NT Webhosting?

You cannot implement Active Server Page websites effectivly on any other operating system other than Windows NT. This is the first step you need to overcome.

There are many NT Hosting providers on the Internet however some a very expensive. It is well worth shopping around.

2. Make sure your NT Host has not left anything out!

Its important to consult you hosting provider to ensure that the Hosting they are providing does not contain any missing components. For example, you might want to check to ensure that CDONTS is present. If not, you cannot send any emails out from your webpages. If they do not let you use this technology, check to see if you can use any Third Party Components. If they do let you install some, you can use other Free components to send out emails. Just something worth asking.

So as you can see, The Beginners Online Workshop is hosted on a NT hosting platform and it is built with Active Server Page (ASP) technology. Learning to program in ASP should never be a problem and I recommend strongly a book from Wrox Publishing called Beginning Active Server Pages 2.0. Have a look in our Book section for more details.

So how does the workshop fit together? All the webpages are connected to a central database. This allows us to retrieve information when we require it. This is a very important factor because it saves us creating each page first which would obviously make maintaining this site a very cumbersome task. By holding all of the information into the database, it allows us to retrieve it stage by stage as we need it. Some obviously data sources could be either Microsoft Access (.MDB) of SQL Server 7. We use SQL but there is not problem implementing the site using Microsoft Access data backend.

So how do we maintain the site? This is all done by using the Web as a front end to our database. We have a special web form system which connects to each of our tables in a our database. We can add, update and remove data all from using the web. Nice and easy with the minimal ammount of fuss. For example, this article is held in the database. It allows me to make changes to it whenever I see fit. I dont have to open up the page in a Web Page editor and make the changes.

A demonstration of this technique is available when you signup to this site as an author. You will be able to add and update your articles which you have written. Why not give it a try.

Summary: To learn ASP, why not have a look around at some of the excellent Active Server Page websites. An example of one is called ASP 101, try it by Clicking Here.

In the next Part to this article, we shall be looking at how some of the exciting features work such as the mailing list and the administration section. Thanks for reading.