type of website: Static website and dynamic website?

[guitarman]

Let me share my knowledge on different type of website available to develop.

When we develop a website, we would either choose to create a purely static site or purely dynamic site or quasi static - quasi dynamic website, depending on the needs and availability of our web server. This guide is for someone who is new to web development or someone who have developed some "static" site before and would like to know why we need a dynamic site?


Static website
Static website is a website that used HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to create. Every content or page is stored in a single .html file and is published as it is. Usually a website which has its file extention in .html or .htm is a static website but it is not always the case. Most likely you could create a static page with any HTML authoring tool such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage. Below shows you some of the scenarios where static website is better than dynamic website

1- The page does not require “frequent” update such as about us, contact us page.
2- The page is meant to be informative only not interactive i.e. does not require any comment or feedback.
3- If we need our site to be search engine friendly, create a static page would be the best choice.

Dynamic website
Dynamic website, like the name implied, is created on the fly. Each page is created on the fly getting the content from the one of the powerful Relational Database Managment System (RDBMS) such as MySQL, MS SQL and Oracle. Usually, dynamic website page has an extension different from .html, but not always! Although the powerful web authoring tool is available nowadays to develop dynamic website, chances are you will need to learn and master one of the serverside language such as PHP, Java or .NET platform. These server side programming languages need to interact with RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System) in order to retrieve useful content to be displayed and hence knowledge of RDBMS and SQL is a must. Follow is a list to describe a scenario when you most likely need a dynamic website.

1- The page requires “frequent” update such as news site e-commerce site i.e. cnn news site, amazon selling site.
2- The page requires interaction between users such as chat,feedback form and forums.
3- When we need a website to provide a similar application to a desktop application, we definitely need a dynamic website; for example: mortgage website.

Although dynamic website is mostly search engine “unfriendly”, we could create a search engine friendly page by various method such as caching or mod rewrite also known as URL rewrite (only available for Apache Web Server).

We have seen the difference between the static website and dynamic website. You are welcome to discuss further about your needs to see if you will need a dynamic website or static website.

Cheers

[ad-vuth]

There is another type of website which is active website.

This active website is mainly for continuous update without making any further requests to server. Meaning, the creater must know how to write programming code so that it can incorprate this code into his or her site. And the server will send this application to the client. And client must be able to run the application.

Real life example: imagine you are a stock buyer and seller. You need to keep track of the stock price info. however, the stock price changes every second. Thus in this case active website is very useful since the client can continuously update the information with minimum delay.

cheerz,

[guitarman]

Eh, I didn't thought of that but after reading your comment about stock market, it really is true about real time updating.

You have heard of "AJAX"? It also a mechanism to create a real time kind of application. AJAX helps improve the latency between the server and client PC. One noticeable applicationo f AJAX is Google Map.

[ad-vuth]

I did not hear of Ajax before. And i also don't know how to build an active website since i dont' know any scripting language.