WEB DEVELOPMENT

Almost all intranets, extranets, and e-commerce sites are tied into a database or several databases on the back end. However, even if your business uses none of these, there still may be several reasons you may wish to integrate your website with a database.

Example One
Let's say you want your website to look different to people who have already been there at least once. A database could keep track of this by sending each visitor a cookie and your web server would react by showing the user a different page, along with a personalized "welcome back" message.

Example Two
Let's say your company wants to put a form online for your customers to fill out, which includes information such as their address, telephone number, primary business, etc. TrueStep could build a custom form that captures all of this information online and feeds it into an existing customer relationship management (CRM) database. You now may be saving yourself a lot of time and trouble or you may be providing yourself with new information on your customers that you previously did not have any way of capturing.

These examples represent two of the countless number of applications that could involve integrating a database with your website.

Is it better to use our existing database or create a new database?
TrueStep has experience in allowing websites to work with businesses' existing database(s), as well as with helping businesses choose a new database and select the best database design to work with their site. We find that it is usually much easier to start from scratch, but we also realize that sometimes this simply is not an option. In these cases, TrueStep would become familiar with your current infrastructure (if we were not already) and design applications that coexist harmoniously with the current setup.