| This is the Last Page |
| Templating sites is this way becomes especially useful
where you have an application consisting of content or functional pages
that need to be branded differently for different corporate sites. The
long hand way is to have different copies of all scripts and content pages
- this causes nightmares when you need to update the content or
functionality. If you built a set of functions to generate all pages, you
would have to generate HTML the hard way with response.write statements
which prevents rapid development in visual editors and doesn't handle your
mainly static content pages.
With templating as in this sample, the same single version of content and scripts can be displayed completely differently depending on where the user clicks in from. By passing them via an entry page, we can brand the site for them and maintain that branding as they move around the site. This is of course a simple demonstration. This principle could be easily adapted to run high and low spec versions of a site, optimize pages for small screens/webTV/handhelds and even present search engines with a more content rich HTML document for indexing purposes. But even if you just want a way to quickly rebrand your whole site by editing one file in Frontpage or Dreamweaver, this is still worth considering. |