There are many different types of coding for making dynamic websites. I chose PHP as my programming language. It can be used with MySql, most hosting companies support php and give access to mysql, and there's a lot of information online to help you learn to use PHP & MySql:

• PHP.net - the official site for PHP development
• w3schools.com - the largest web development website, includes tutorials for all web coding types, and standards for web development.
• Tizag.com - I love this site - includes easy to follow tutorials for PHP and MYSQL - great for beginners! This site now has photoshop tutorials as well!
• MYSQLTutorial.org - includes tutorials to help you understand how MYSQL databases work.

Ease of maintenance - dynamically built websites have many advantages. One of the best advantages is ease of maintenance. For a site that uses PHP and MySql, adding or updating products for your website can be as easy as entering the data for the artwork or product into Mysql!

Here are two great ways to use PHP to make dynamic galleries:

• With a MySql Database - When I first started my website, I built every product page by hand as a static page. If I wanted to change the look of my product pages or the information for my artworks, I had to change all of those pages by hand! Templates can make static pages easier to handle, but static pages just cannot compare to dynamically built pages.

  For a MySql database, I created a table for each medium that I work in. I added columns in each table for the name of the artwork, price, shipping, description, etc. So the "Sculpture" gallery page searches through MySql and picks from the artworks database the "sculpture" table; all of the information is gathered through a PHP query and placed on the webpage exactly as I want it - (see an example from my website - all of the gallery information on this page is dynamically built through PHP & MYSQL). As I add more artworks into the appropriate tables in my MySql database, those artworks automatically generate in the appropriate galleries!

  Tip - put your price and shipping fees in a separate database. That way if your prices or fees change (or if you run a sale) you only have to edit the information in one database! Example:

  In artworks database, the "shipping" column for a specific drawing would have a number that represents the ID for your shipping costs (i.e. - artworks "shipping" column would contain the number 15, and in the shipping database the ID of 15 would have a shipping cost of $6).

• With Text Files - While databases are great, and they make adding products as easy as logging into PHP MyAdmin, they can be slower to load than text files, and updating them can be time consuming if you have a lot of things to add or change. I switched to text files for a while, in which I used small files to tell my gallery which artworks to include based on user input. Each gallery uses the include command to include the appropriate file - i.e.:
  
  if ($medium == "sculpture") { include ('textFiles/sculpture.php') }
  
  Each file lists all of the artworks and the attributes for each artwork, including the location of images (i.e. "../images/sculpture/thumb.jpg"). This process uses Sessions, associative arrays, and is coding intensive, so knowledge of PHP is mandatory before attempting this route.

Vist the Web Design Programs page for more information about good programs for building a website.

Search engines are now able to index sites with dynamic content - some people shy away from dynamic content because they have heard that dynamic pages cannot be indexed by search engines. Pages with urls that contained phrases such as '&id=' used to be hard for google and other search engines to index; but a major update in 2006 fixed that, so now google (and other search engines) can index these pages. That makes url structuring for your dynamic site much easier, as webmasters need not rewrite their dynamic links structure for this parameter. While search engines are now capable of indexing these pages, try to keep the number of parameters to a minimum - referring back to my own site, a previously constructed url such as this:

http://www.equusstudio.com/Type/Humans.php?ButtonThumb.x=66&ButtonThumb.y=51&ButtonThumb=13

was listed in the google index.