Design Conscious web design

There are two distinct types of website’s, the first is referred to as ‘Static’, the second is ‘Dynamic’.

STATIC
Static doesn’t mean still, it means the content is all included in the HTML pages, if you want to change the content you have to open the page in a HTML program and edit the text, just as you would with a Word document for example.

This type of package needs less computing power to drive it and generally doesn’t require any special languages or code to make it function and therefore the hosting costs are cheaper.

Advantages:

• Cheaper hosting
• Website is more portable between hosting providers

Disadvantages:

• If the content you wish to change is in multiple pages, you have to edit them all
• More pages are required to serve all your products – if you have 100 products you may need 100 pages
• Generally not searchable (without scripts installed)

DYNAMIC
A Dynamic website calls all its content from a database. The pages are written with scripts that requests the information ‘on the fly’ and populates the page with the appropriate content. To change the content, you edit the records in the database.

Advantages:

• Changing one record changes that specific information throughout the whole site
• Less pages are required, same page just different content every time.
• Content in the database can be displayed in many different ways
• Searchable

Disadvantages:

• Hosting is more expensive
• Needs specialised languages and scripts
• Even though there are less pages, each page is much more complicated and therefore time consuming to construct and test.

Decide from the beginning what type of site you need, a static site can be very effective but unwieldy if you have lots of products to promote, but a dynamic site can prove expensive for a first time site.

Contact us to discuss the options.

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