Building your own website is never an easy task and there could be a lot riding on the design and functionality, especially if it’s a commercial venture. If you’ve also got to sort out how to link your site to a database, for example when setting up an online store, things can start to get particularly tricky.

Whether you build websites for a living or want to create a new site with extended functionality, Symbiant’s Easygen is sure to be of interest. In essence, it speeds up the process of developing a database-driven website by creating the links between your site and the database, and generating all the necessary code.

Typical uses include creating an online shop and setting up a members-only area on a commercial website. You don’t need to know how to create the database, nor do you need to know how to write the code required to make it function with your site. Easygen does all the hard work for you.

It takes a bit of practice to use Easygen to its full potential, but Symbiant has gone to great lengths to ensure that the learning experience is as easy and straightforward as possible.

To help you get to grips with Easygen, a selection of animated tutorials, ranging from initial setup through to creating a full ecommerce website, can be downloaded from Easygen’s website.

To get the most out of Easygen’s program you should have some idea of what creating a website involves. If terms such as PHP, ASP and MySQL are completely foreign to you, then it’s a good idea to develop some degree of background knowledge.

The beauty of Easygen is that, while it helps to know what these languages are, you won’t need to know the details of how to program in them. Unlike products such as Microsoft Frontpage, Easygen will generate all the code for you, leaving you to concentrate on the design and function of your pages.

You can even swap between PHP and ASP after the site has been created, making it easy to migrate between Unix and Windows servers. The database can also be created as you go, requiring no programming skills whatsoever.