To set up and maintain a web site with less than 10 pages is quite easy today. It is somewhat more difficult to keep the coherence in a site that contains thousands of web pages, especially when you try to make them all keep the same 'look and feel' and you add some useful functions like multilingualism, horizontal and vertical browsing tools contextual help...
When we developed our first web sites, we looked into different areas from SGML to Object Oriented databases to find a convenient tool and we eventually decided to develop one of our own. It was designed to allow our editorial team to use out of the box wysiwyg HTML word-processing tools. But we wanted them only to have to deal with the information and not the presentation of this information.
One of the main characteristics of our tool is that the "dressing"
of the page is not added when the page is requested (as is done on dynamic web
sites). So it allows search engines to index our web site better and to manage
the same number of request with a less powerful hardware solution than with
a database.
Another characteristic is that the dressing templates are described in an object
oriented way : each HTML object can use another one to describe itself and each
object can be redefined for different parts of the web site.