Dynamic and static Web sites and pages

Static pages are pages in a Web site that you update manually.

Dynamic pages are templates that display information such as press releases, products for an online store, or news stories that are stored in online databases. The information is passed into the page template, and the completed page appears in a viewer's browser. Dynamic pages can also perform actions such as updating a database.

Here's an example that shows how dynamic and static pages handle the same task, and how creating a site with dynamic pages can save you time and effort both in design and maintenance.

A common task in a corporate Web site is to list press releases. Let's say the site begins with twenty press releases. In a static Web site, you create a page that lists all your press releases by title. You enter each press release title manually on the page as you design it, making each title a link that, when clicked, takes the viewer to another page that displays the full text of the press release. You create a separate page in your site for each press release and manually enter the text on each page for each press release. Now let's say your company sends out five new press releases. In a static site, you would manually add five new titles to the main page, create five new pages, one page for each new press release, place the full text of a press release on each page, and then link each title to the correct page. Maintaining a static site such as this is a time-consuming and error-prone process.

You can dramatically lessen the amount of work by employing dynamic content technology. In a dynamic site, you create two generic pages or templates: an index page listing the titles and a details page that displays the full text of a press release. Both templates draw on a press release database for their content. The index page displays press release titles from the database. When a viewer clicks a title, the second page template pulls in the full text of the relevant press release from the same database. Adding new press releases simply involves adding the press releases to the database. The process is automatic and efficient.