What is a 'Dynamic Website?

Up until now, owning a Dynamic Website was simply out of reach for most small business owners. Only large Corporations with equally large IT budgets were able to afford the skill set required to develop and deploy a full featured dynamic business web site. The net result was that most small businesses ended up with static websites and static content that quickly reached its 'sell by' date.

Elements of a Dynamic Web Site

A Dynamic website has several elements that all work together to produce the web page you see in your browser. All of the information on the site is stored in a database. The information can be in several forms:

    Content Items– these are the articles on your website
    Components – more complex content such as forums
    Modules – smaller content that usually allow interactivity, like a poll/survey

All of this content is pulled from the database by the Content Management System and arranged/presented as determined by the site template. The template is simply a set of rules about presentation. For example, the template will determine how many columns to use, or what color to make titles. The template also determines the layout or positioning of the web page. The pages are now dynamic.

It is interesting to note that the web pages that are seen in the web browser don’t really exist until you follow a link to view them.

There are a number of powerful features provided by a dynamic website platform that are not usually available in static websites. In no particular order, some of the features include:

    Simple creation/revision of content using a text editor from main website or from the hidden Administrator site
    User registration and ability to restrict viewing of pages based on user level
    Controlling editing and publishing of content based on various admin user levels
    Ability to conduct Polls or Surveys
    Imbedded Contact forms
    Public site statistics
    Private detailed site traffic stats
    Dynamic home page that can show content from anywhere in site
    Random “newsflashes” that can be shown anywhere
    Random “images” that can be shown anywhere
    Content hierarchy split into sections and categories
    Simple static pages for smaller sites
    Built in site search functionality
    Ability for users to submit content
    Ability for users to submit links
    Customizable presentation of content, in tables or narrative (called a blog)
    Automatically shows author, creation and revision dates
    Email a friend, PDF and print format capability
    RSS feeds– Real Simple Syndication feeds
    Ability to show latest news/content
    Ability to show most read news/content
    Ability to show content related to current page
    Simple content rating system
    Show content or news feeds from other sites

As you can see by now from the list above, there are a tremendous amount of features inherent in a dynamic website platform. To have a conventional web designer create all of these for a static site would cost tens of thousands of dollars.  However, It doesn’t stop here.

Most of the web as we know it was built on ‘Open Source’ i.e. freely available technology. Applications like Linux, Apache, Php were all born of the international Open Source movement. There is a massive community of over 30,000 developers world-wide that have contributed over 2,500 modular plug and play, cross platform extensions.

Some of the more popular types include:

    User Forums
    Shopping Carts
    Electronic Catalogue
   Payment processing
    Email Newsletters
    Event Calendars
    Document Managers
    Image Galleries
    Banner Ad managers
    Complex Forms
    Language Translators
    Directories

Each of these types has several products available. Then to customize your site even more, there are some more unusual extensions available:

    Recipe managers
    Help/support desk management
    Fishing tournament tracking
    Google AdSense Placement
    Multiple Site management
    Sitemaps

By now you get the general idea!

In Summary

A Dynamic website is made up of content and a template. Content can be in the forms of content items, components or modules. The template acts as a filter or a lens. It is controlling all the presentation aspects of the web pages. It does not have any content, but can include logos.