Static or Dynamic website?
Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Posted by Jenn Lowther
Static sites use HTML which gives you browser directions on how to layout text copy and images for your website. This 1st generation web technology’s main drawbacks are:
- Difficult to update – usually need a web developer to update pages. This has an ongoing cost drawback.
- Doesn’t allow on the fly indexing of website pages – If you want a sitemap of your site it involves labor
- Content is married to design – if you want to update design it is more difficult than with dynamic websites
Dynamic websites use a database to store information, a programming language (PHP, ASP, CFML) to get information from the database and translate it to HTML so that your browser can read the page. For example, LETA’s dynamic pages were designed using PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). These dynamic page use PHP to gather information from LETA’s central database. Benefits of using dynamic pages are:
- Databases searchable – users can search database for keywords/phrases
- User controlled content management – you control the text and images on your website. This saves you time and money in the long run. LETA has designed a user-friendly content management system that lets members build their own web pages. This means that members can edit their content on the web pages that they create as often as they like.
- Menu systems update as pages are added and removed. Static sites menu system is static so if you add a new page you must update the entire site. With dynamic websites like LETA, the Member Home Pages and Member product sub-pages are dynamic.
Conclusions: Although there is a higher upfront cost, the lower ongoing cost and ability to update style without effecting content is useful to users. Some sites that are small may not need a dynamic website, but it is defiantly worth investigating especially if you have future site expansion in mind.
For more information on Dynamic Websites contact Invoke.
