I own a free wallpaper site called [login to view URL] that is currently all static html pages. I want to keep the directory & file structure to take advantage of current search engine traffic, but I want to be able to use headers and footers so I don't have to make changes to every single page whenever I change something. I'm trying to explore the costs and benefits of doing this in different ways. The two main ways I can think of doing this are
1) Putting all the relevant data (file names, wallpaper titles, etc.) in a database and then somehow rebuilding the pages using this information, either through a separate script that creates the same pages or on the fly with some cloaked php site (i.e. [login to view URL] actually loads a php page that looks up the wallpaper in the database – [the image file name is essentially the same as the html file name so this wouldn't be that difficult to do])
2) Create a header footer template and apply it to each page, leaving only the absolutely necessary html (such as the wallpaper image and title). The downside to this would be that I can't insert information such as wallpaper title and URL dynamically and there will be less flexibility with how I build each page. I might have to do this if the first is too expensive though.
There are 4,152 html files, most of which are individual wallpaper files (for an example, see [login to view URL]) and some others which are category files that list the different wallpapers(see [login to view URL]). All will need to be changed.
I know most of you will need more familiarity with the site to give me an accurate quote, but please give me a ballpark figure and post on my PMB about the costs associated with each option.
Hi, I am highly proficient in many areas of web development specialising in PHP/MySQL based web applications. Please see PMB for more details. Thanks, Taner