Posted by payperclick.brandon@gmail.com on 12/05/06 14:30

Hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

I want to build a product web page using data in a spreadsheet. I
already have everything I want about each item in that spreadsheet i.e.
Product Name, Product Description, Link to image, Price etc.

I could easily build individual web pages, the problem is I have 7000
rows in the spreadsheet. It seems like it would be far easier to have a
single page that dynamically generates based upon the URL rather than
lots of unique pages. (not worried about spidering for search engines
etc.) Something like www.mysite.com/productid=9999 and then having the
web page do the equivalent of a vertical look up for the product with
id 9999 and populate some variables throughout the webpage with the
data associated with that product id.

The specific reason I want to do this is to be able to quickly change
all the web pages dynamically. Suppose I want to have a sale and lower
all my prices by 10% for a weekend. Changing 7000 pages then changing
them back would be a nightmare. Whereas changing the prices in Excel
and uploading that spreadsheet is a snap.

The actual website I am doing this with is not selling anything, so I
am not concerned with SSL or other e-commerce factors. Can this be done
using just Excel or do I need to use a database (something I know
almost nothing about)? Does this require a more advanced programming
language or can it be done in HTML? if not HTML which language is the
most user friendly to accomplish this.

Thanks for any insights.

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