Companies and organizations have websites to display content including text, images, and data that introduce themselves to their users. Therefore, using a database to store this essential information is the most common approach for many websites. If your organization’s data is stored in a database, you may need to use a database management system like MySQL or PostgreSQL to perform tasks to present the data accurately on the website.

Types of content to display on websites

There are many types of content that an organization/company can display on their websites. The connection to a database that contains detailed information about these content is crucial to successfully conveying a product, message, or service to the users.

Constant change in website content

Many websites experience constant changes, whether that be the website content, user record, or product details, having a database can help facilitate the administration aspect of it. An example of this would be a blog website that publishes daily blogs by different authors. In this example, a database would be useful to store the blog content, images, and the different author information. Once the data is stored, the website that displays this content can then be updated accordingly by using scripting languages. This not only saves time and effort from designing the website page layouts but also the manual updates on the websites. Users can also utilize a searchable database to look through the content based on keywords, authors, or date published, this creates a more friendly user experience.

E-commerce websites

An organization/company that is e-commerce based would heavily depend on a database-driven website. The database can be used to store details about the different products being sold, this could include product descriptions, prices, and customer ratings/reviews. Using a searchable database, the users can easily look for the desired products, it could also queue up products with similar details. In addition, once there are new products being introduced, the database can be updated easily and displayed on the website in a fast manner automatically.

User Driven Content

For websites that run on user driven content such as Reddit, Quora, or StackOverflow. These websites need user traffic to interact by posting discussions online with differing topics of interests. These websites can use a database to store user discussions, reviews, and comments with articles. Not only can this type of method improve user interaction experiences but it can also drive more traffic to the website and gain more exposure. Therefore having a database that collects data from users is essential to an operating environment that is based on driving user traffic.

To link databases to websites, this process can involve connecting the database, the backend server to the frontend with a server side scripting language such as PHP to present data on websites.

1. Prepare your database user account details

Details about your database account will be necessary to set up the connection to the website. Ensure to have the credentials before establishing the connection.

2. Connect to your database

You might need to use one or more server side scripts to connect to your database. The process for making a connection is similar for most database systems and programming languages.

3. Query your data

Using SQL to retrieve specific data from databases with SQL queries that will be executable with server side scripts and languages.

4. Output your data

After getting the data from the database, you can begin to present the data to the website pages which are structured in HTML format.

5. Test your script and present the data

Make sure to test your script before presenting the data online to check if the script is completed. Edit and update your script when you encounter errors. After confirming the completeness and accuracy of the script, you can establish the connection between the database and the website to present the data to your users.

Embed a table on the website with Acho

Typically, connecting databases to websites requires database knowledge and coding skills. If you are seeking a way of presenting data from a database to your website without code, Acho offers the ability to do so.

First, Acho allows you to connect to any database with a few clicks. Once the connection is set up, you can retrieve and transform data without writing codes.

Second, Acho can host a server and generate a HTML code for your table, so you don’t need to deal with the complex communication between back-end and front-end. The only thing you need to do is to insert the code on your website. Moreover, data can be displayed in a pretty and interactive table. In addition to viewing data, your audience can explore the data via the search bars and download the entire table.

Here are the steps of how you can display your data on your website.

Connect to your databases

You can go to the Resource page and choose the type of the database you want to connect to. Currently, Acho supports both SQL databases (such as MySQL) and NoSQL databases (such as MongoDB). Once the connection is set up, you can import some of the tables to a new project.

Transform and clean your table

Sometimes, your database data may not be suitable to present on your website directly. For example, your date and time column may follow a UNIX timestamp, which is not readable for humans. To make your data ready to be displayed, you can use built-in features such as Filter, Formula, or Cleanse, to clean your data within a project.

Create a data app with Acho App Builder

If you want to present your data in a more customizable format and share it with lots of people, you can use Acho App Builder to build it. The App Builder allows you to customize filters and build a full-text search bar. Moreover, the content can be drilled in more detail by clicking any row.

Embed a data application to your website

If you have your own website, you can embed the searchable database on your webpage using an "iframe" tag. Here is a sample HTML code that you can use:

<div style="width: 100%; height: 500px; padding: 0; overflow: hidden">
    <iframe
      src="https://publish.acho.io/f6250e75-06dc-4336-97a2-f5b7eea851d6/home"
      style="
        width: 200%;
        height: 1000px;
        border: 0;
        -ms-transform: scale(0.5);
        -moz-transform: scale(0.5);
        -o-transform: scale(0.5);
        -webkit-transform: scale(0.5);
        transform: scale(0.5);
        -ms-transform-origin: 0 0;
        -moz-transform-origin: 0 0;
        -o-transform-origin: 0 0;
        -webkit-transform-origin: 0 0;
        transform-origin: 0 0;
      "
    ></iframe>
  </div>

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