The days of the Web as nothing more than a giant brochure are largely past... today Web sites must communicate both ways. Your customers or members need to be able to let you know what they think. They expect to be able to view and make changes to their accounts through your site, search for the information they want, and place orders.
The Permaculture Collaborative had a complex record-keeping scheme in mind: they wanted to track event attendance by the individual person, but membership by the household. What's more, they wanted any member of a household to be able to "upgrade" their membership at any time to add people to the household. My solution was a custom form with a two-part registration process affecting multiple database tables. Payments are processed by PayPal and recorded in the database as soon as they are processed.
World Population Balance had an excellent set of pages depicting how different countries' per-capita energy consumption compared to the USA's. But every time new statistics became available, they had to update all their graphs and all the numbers and images on several dozen pages! My solution was to put the numbers into a database table and generate the graphs, images, and statistics on demand. When you click a country from the list at left, you get a detail page like the one at right comparing the country to the USA. All the images and statistics are generated on the fly. This change not only made the site easier to update with new information, it also made it more fun to use!
My sites are written in PHP code, with occasional Javascripts. I have written proprietary code for a startup business, but I prefer when possible to work on open-source projects, since we're all in this together!
