Website how-to question

[JeffD78]

Okay, say you have a website for your business, with a listing of your inventory and information about the products you sell. Is there a way to run the thing out of a database, so that you can change information or add information to said database and have it either automatically or with minimal effort update on the website itself? Preferably the data for the listing part would be either in Excel or Access. The output, however, would have to be viewable by anyone (i.e. someone without Excel or Access). Is it possible to do something like this without spending a fortune?

[U-96]

I think you will need to look up stuff on something like Microsoft Internet Information Server - I believe this comes packaged with WinNT4 Server.
This allows dynamic linking between an Access back-end and a web interface.
This is what you are usually dealing with when you see .asp (Active Server Pages) addresses on the Net

If you don't have the need for dynamic changes, Access has built in features to save reports and queries as HTML. You then upload this just like a regular page.

I also think there are a lot of hosts who specialise in providing solutions for businesses like yours - and also securely process orders. Maybe this will save you some effort if cost isn't too much of a consideration.

U-96

[JeffD78]

Thanks. You gave me a good place to start, but what I'd really like to do is find a way to do it myself. The company I'm doing it for is planning on getting a DSL and serving their own website from a computer at their site. I've been fiddling with Access 2000 and you can make web pages that are essentially forms, but they don't quite work the way we want.

~EDIT:
The website in question is at http://www.cagles.com They want it so they can just update the back end and automatically do the front end, if possible.

[This message has been edited by JeffD78 (edited 05-19-2000).]