David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

If you are designing a directory site such as my hotel room website, my breakdown cover site or my credit card site, it's much easier to either build in an admin interface or to use a simple script that can parse CSV / XML files.

Why?
 
Today I had an email from Hilton Hotels asking me to change all my banner links and deeplinks.

Given they have quite a few hotels, this could be a daunting task to someone who has hardcoded their website.

But I've built a script that takes a CSV file, and inserts it into the database, overwriting the previous data. This means all I had to do was one "search and replace" search, save the file to my server and run the script.

Hey presto, all sorted.

Such an approach could be used for directory based websites, voucher code websites, etc.

What I do is simply set up a CSV file for each new site I create rather than use an admin interface. It takes less time and it's more secure as I can delete the import script after use, rather than relying upon a password protected admin area.