I have a web page which allows the user to carry out various operations that in turn modify the database. Also, this web application needs to keep track of various fields in dat
Without going into too much detail, in general you might want to consider generating your HTML dynamically, using Javascript, in an Ajax-style manner. It's considerably more challenging to do right, but it's the right way to go from a user-experience perspective.
Check out the Yahoo user-interface library for guidance and assistance -- it does make things a good deal easier than trying to do everything by hand.