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Data Solutions

Data Driven Websites and dynamic content

What is a data driven website?

A data driven website is one which has one or more pages and will display different content based upon different search criteria. Typically, we think of data driven websites as being a database driven website. Data is best left stored in a database because it permits validation of data and safer storage than simply a bunch of files.

What is the best example of a data driven website?

Okay - maybe possibly a little biased, but our web data platform and data droppable website tech is purely data driven and incredible in terms of its versatility. We seek to allow data to be dropped and pushed to the website, permitting significant flexibility in how data flows into the website and to users. Want to find out more, take a look at our Web Data Platform

What are the advantages of data driven websites?

They allow for the publication of a large amount of content through a small window. DDWs are particularly useful for larger organisations who wish to publish information from their; industry, articles, content, products, and services.

Companies who have existing databases and information sources can simply publishes information through their website with minimal ease. This reduces overs and speeds up publication of key business critical information which customers and suppliers where you wish to understand about your business.

What is a great example of a data driven website?

A brilliant example we can think of is CoinGecko. Many are aware of the new phenomenon of cryptocurrencies - maybe not that new. originally there was one cryptocurrency called bitcoin and now we find there are thousands of cryptocurrencies. By building a consistent model, CoinGecko can serve tens of thousands of websites if required. the advantages that users can view many cryptocurrencies in exactly the same format the same information that displaying different features such as; price, volume, attention, supply, mining model. This was achieved by simply having a data-driven website a single page where the url could be hacked. Of course, this doesn't mean the website can be hacked - simply that it is easier to use and more user-friendly.

To give a simple example of a hackable url, please let's consider a fictitious webpage url (link).

/somecryptowebsite/cryptorating/btc

/somecryptowebsite/cryptorating/eth

In this example we can have any number of new currencies, even remove currencies and the website and handle this simply by having the same information being displayed for the database or other external data source.

An example could be the following website address (URL).

inforhino.co.uk/article

This is a page which can display an almost infinite number of articles.

For example /article/best website development agencies/info rhino would point to an article category of best website development agencies and could feature a full page article about Info Rhino. There would be nothing stopping us adding more articles.

Hackable urls and data driven websites

Remember the url showing different cryptocurrencies? We can simply type a different cryptocurrency code and get a different page. This is friendly for users, who can avoid navigating a page to find one of the thousands of cryptocurrencies. A better and bigger potential is web crawlers (SEOs) may be able to navigate these urls. Whilst outside the scope of this article, publishing different information to a website which is data driven can dramatically increase the amount of information available to a web crawler.

Why data driven websites are so important?

  • The number of real pages is reduced, making websites easier to develop and maintain.
  • Content can be pushed to the website automatically and displayed within the website.
  • Many DDWs are connected to live databases. This allows the website to display information in real-time.
  • In many situations, users can type into the website address bar to simplify their user experience - known as hackable URLs.

User friendly websites versus modern single page website and Search Engine Optimisation

The many advantages of slicker user experiences by reducing page refreshes often act counter to improving search engine optimisation.

It is one reason why older style data driven websites are far more likely to get better website hit results than what are known as single page application websites.

Our interactive page on our company page https://inforhino.co.uk/company is unseen by search engines because it enhances user experience over SEO for single page content access.

Whereas our articles page is completely transparent to search engines because we focused on clean accessible URLs.

This is why Amazon still feels older, yet they clearly have substantial resources to build super slick user experiences - it would hurt their SEO ranking. Dynamic content that needs to be found by users must be easy for web-crawling technology to find.

Best examples of data driven websites

Examples of websites which produces dynamic content. The more popular ones are those where users keep coming back to to keep using them for finding out information and performing different functionality.

Email clients

  • Microsoft Outlook Live
  • Gmail
  • Yahoo mail

Free and paid subscriber financial and trading platforms

  • Yahoo finance
  • Coinbase
  • TradingView
  • Binance
  • Investopedia

Image Gallery Websites

  • Flickr
  • Pexels
  • Instagram
  • Facebook?

Shopping Cart Platforms

  • Facebook
  • Ebay
  • Booking.com
  • Amazon

Website Content Management Systems

  • Piranha CMS
  • Umbraco
  • WordPress
  • Joomla
  • Wix

What do all of these websites have in common?

They have a small number of pages compared to the amount of output they provide. Data driven websites provide the ability to upload an almost infinite amount of content but provide a small number of pages which users can access to access that content this reduces the amount of time spent developing the website and updating content. Almost all websites should use some form of content management system or data driven design approach to an album to deliver content and reduce amount of time spent maintaining and administering them.

What are the disadvantages of data driven websites?

The main disadvantage of data driven websites is that they require high-level expertise to develop and manage. This disadvantage can be somewhat mitigated by wrapping content management systems around them. This lowers the requirement for advanced skills in developing website technology. Many don't realise it is possible to create a website without any programming skills at all. The challenge is releasing new content and information without continually re-publishing the website. For this and other reasons we feel that data driven websites offer far more advantages than they do disadvantages.

Info Rhino's Web Data Platform, dynamic content, and Data Driven Websites

Our WDP is completely dynamic content oriented;

  • Our Articles capability.
  • Our Report Manager and report loader functionality .
  • Our Dynamic Dashboard page display reports intuitively.
  • Our Reports access page. Shows reports by type on a single page which can be accessed.
  • Our content plugin snippets which can accept data and save it to disk automatically.
  • Our Report Display page (maps and charts) with dynamic filters built in.
  • Our Call to Action functionality. You may notice our website has the classic three panel cards in different areas. These are maintained outside of the content management system (CMS), meaning these are data driven content in page.

Not all of these features are visible on our Info Rhino website, as we switched them off, but they are present on our findigl property platform.

Top Data Driven Website Development company

Our website is ahead of the competition because we focus on data ready capability. Content and data can be pushed to folders, without a need to;

  • Connect to different databases.
  • Maintain new data driven content inside a content management system.
  • Connect to external APIs - these are notorious for changing their endpoints and breaking.
  • Integrate third party components into our platform.

This makes our company, a top solutions provider in the data driven website space.

Conclusion on Data Driven Websites

We like to think of our Web Data Platform as being a significant player in improving how DDWs can open their content up to search engines and users. We don't see other website development agencies openly discussing these kinds of topics because whilst they may build data driven capabilities, they don't think in terms of openness of data like we do.

Finally, we are adding a fantastic new feature which will permit access and content retrieval from external APIs without needing to redeploy this website - watch this space.

Written with StackEdit.

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