Converting to database-driven site

what technology is best for adsense?

[WildGoose]

My site has been around for 9 years, and I've had adsense on it for 2 weeks. It looks at this point like AdSense will at least pay for my hosting costs, which is great as far as I'm concerned. I do plan on making a lot of improvements however.

My site is currently structured in such a way that information is organized in lists in an alphabetical scheme. It's all made up of static page files. However, for the type of info I'm offering, it would make more sense to have a database-driven website. It would be easier to maintain, thereby allowing me to add a new key feature that will attract new traffic that would otherwise be time-prohibitive to maintain. As an added bonus, changes associated with the database conversion will roughly double the number of pages in my site (from ~100 to ~200), and there will be substantial text content in those new pages. SO, it seems to me like this will be a great move for AdSense revenues. (More exposures, more & better content, more clicks.)

THE PROBLEM: I've never done a database-driven web site before. I don't know which technology I should use. I have some very basic self-taught experience with SQL, but that's about it. Nonetheless, I can learn anything. Google.com says to stay away from methods with a "?" in the URL. Is that all I have to worry about?

Can anybody offer any PERLs of wisdom? (Ha. Ugh.)

[EricGiguere]

You can use whatever you want, yes, as long as you keep the URLs clean. Too many people expose implementation details about a website via the URL. Even Amazon does it. Why should the user see an ugly URL like:

[somecompany.com...]

instead of

[somecompany.com...]

Pet peeve of mine!

Eric

[roldar]

Be careful before you run out and change your whole web site around. If you change your content and move parts to their own pages (you said you'd be doubling the page count) you might suffer in the SERPs.

Also, do not under any circumstances change the addresses of your existing pages if they have any PR at all. You will likely lose that PR and your ranks for several months, if not forever.

If you're using apache you can use mod_rewrite to make your database-driven pages look static.

[jenkers]

I did something similar a couple of years ago - move a 5 year old (then) site with static pages to a database driven one. Scripting language is pretty much irrelevant - although PHP is much more common.

I used ASP to write static html files from a mysql db with the same name/location they'd always had so as not to lose rank. When I change something in the database which affects a particular page then that page is automatically rewritten.

Roldar's tip about not changing your urls is super important.

[WildGoose]

Hmmm. Methinks I'm going to have to buy a book or three.