Export to HTML files

Just a note for interest.
We ended up doing a full export via a batch publishing route to create *.html files for all viewprd and viewcat dynamic pages. Everytime we make a change to the product databases or there is a product review we need to force a manual update of the sister html file for the product and we have to live without some of the dynamic features - but on the plus side static pages load faster and human/SEO happy URLs.

I am happy to share this - in the hope that its is maybe of some use - as I have been very grateful to receive both support from Early Impact and other members.

Before I detail how to. The end result is a website where all category and product pages are static html. These are able to have human and search engine compatable names. Because the pages are static they load very quickly even when the server is loaded. Additionally the approach provides some publishing editorial control (this was not our objective) and works on shared hosting (if you do not have ability to configure IIS etc). The disadvantage is that you cannot choose to have dynamic customer session specific info on the page.(Therefore this is probably not suitable for BTO).

I am using a shared hosted environment and periodically the performance of the site particularly for pages with multiple database calls is a little slow. My circumstance is also a new site and wanting to anticipate how best to accelerate building page ranking with search engines.

I do not anticipate altering my product description, daily. My initial products will be around 1500. Lastly, I have about 300 category descriptions and many of these have significant "content" that I really want Google to know about.The viewcat_h.asp that I am using is heavily modified so that it has additional database calls (which further slows the page down).

There are only two key elements to this. The first is to create and maintain a table of the PC equivalent URL page name and the filename.html that you choose. The second is to use a batch utility to create html from the *.asp. It works and it is free.

We are using 1&1 as a host and they do not allow root access/configuration of IIS and this rules out many of the dynamic/pseudo static work around. We started reading about how certain on-line media sites control their copy by on-line batch processing to html and this lead us to initially evaluate ApGen ($199) which enables you to both publish static and mixed static/dynamic pages (by shelling ASP). This is probably what we will do longer term.

However, at the moment we choose to live with stripping all customer specific dynamic content from our category and product pages (this only consisted of customer name and cart contents) and looked at finding a solution to batch publish the pages of both viewprd and viewcat to create static html. There is a simple utility for this on line http://www.chami.com/free/url2file_wincon.html and here are two sample lines for both a product and category:

URL2File http://www.myhealthmyworld.com/viewPrd.asp?idProduct=3111 C:\htmldownload\Absolute_Nutrition_CBlock_90_Tablets.html

URL2File http://www.myhealthmyworld.com/viewCat_h.asp?idCategory=216 C:\htmldownload\Age-Related_Cognitive_Decline_and_Dementia.h tml

(From these URL you should be able to compare the actcual asp and resultant html. The html is directly in the site root e.g. product example and category example).
The script lines in the example above are formated within Excel after exporting tables from MSSQL (or figuring out the category or product numbers by another route). The key objective being to end up with easy_name.html file name that avoids illegal characters. We used the product or category titles after ensuringthey were all uniqueOnce you have done this for one item it is easily repeated and does not matter if you have 10 or 10,000 products or categories.

Next you export the URL2File script for each line (in the format example given above) to an editor and save as an executable batch file. The batch file is run on a workstation (in DOS) to create all the static html versions of the dynamic files at that date. After creation of the html to the workstation we then use ftp to upload the files to the webserver. Using FTP to upload the files is the slowest step for us but we just let it run for 1.5hours overnight or in the background. (If you had direct root acces to your webserver you could avoid this step and create the files directly in the server). The html that is created appears (for what we are doing) to be subsequently compatible to both IE and Firefox browsers.

If you study either these html pages (linked above) or look at any other on our site (www.myhealthmyworld.com) you will see that it is still practicle to link to more  elements such as user reviews or enabling customers to re-sort products within a category. However - the key is that the first time the user views the information it is static and quickly delivered.

IMO this gives a simple high performance solution to a number of objectives and still integrates well with the rest of PC shopping experience. The customer navigates through the category desc and product information and then adds products to dynamic PC ASP cart. This solution provides a way to mix static html and asp in a way that is seamless to the customer.

I did not invent it - but it works. I just hope my explaination was clear.