As Web designers we are often asked to utilise the actual data contained within a companies databases on their Internet development. There are generally two approaches to this you can either go for a fully dynamically driven database solution with database loaded onto the server. A user visits the site and the server constantly queries the database thus generating the Web pages on the fly from the result of these queries. The alternative is to take this data and to lay it out in as easy to read and navigate a way as possible thus generate static pages that are then uploaded to the server.

GDIdb Professional works along the lines of this second approach; it allows you to quickly and easily build static Web pages. Utilising the content contained within a conventional Access database, spreadsheet or text based comma separated variable file (CSV) and generating static Web pages based on the selection from the database.

To demonstrate this, lets imagine you have a database from a small employment agency containing a list of a few hundred jobs in various categories. GDIdb will take this database and generate static Web pages based upon these various categories. Searching for a job on such a site would then involve simply looking through this directory structure selecting such things like Jobs.. Web Design.. E-commerce to view vacancies, in much the same way the Yahoo or a similar directory works albeit without the search facility.

GDIdb is an extremely easy program to use, and don't let first impressions count. Upon first opening GDIdb Professional you might wonder exactly what you have bought for your dollars, well what you get is a program that is not only extremely easy to use but which also has some really powerful tools that are not at first apparent. In fact when you first open GDIdb Professional you'll wonder exactly what your supposed to do, however you'll have the option to load a few walk through examples. These examples will quickly give you some idea of what is possible, as well as teaching you how to use GDIdb Professional.

GDIdb Professional comes in three main parts; there's a great scripting wizard for the database queries. A basic HTML editing program, which will also allow you to modify the scripts generated with the script wizard should you so wish, the third part is a feature to actually publish the data to the Web.

Although GDIdb Professional is a relatively easy to use program, it will still take you a while to get the hang of the scripting language. Although anyone with basic programming or database skills should have no problems whatsoever getting to grips with it in a relatively short time.

The basic HTML editing tools will not win any awards, or produce a masterpiece of design; it does however allow you to produce reasonable quality pages quickly and easily. For those looking to produce slightly better quality pages, simply design the basic coding in your favourite editor and then simply cut and paste as desired.as your working with raw code you can even do a little coding by hand if you feel up to it.

All in all this is an excellent piece of software; it allows you to quickly and easily utilise a database as a source of content for the site, and although it only generates static HTML pages.by saving your scripts updating the site in the future is simply a matter of rerunning the script on the database containing the changed data and then simply uploading these newly generated pages to your server, all quite painless and extremely easy once the initial design has been completed.