There are basically two types of website, static and dynamic. Nowadays, you can buy software that will allow even the complete novice to design their own basic static website, it might not look very good (that's what you pay a web designer to do!) but just getting the page online should not be too difficult. However, it is important to note that over 90% of the most successful websites are now dynamic driven or planning to upgrade to dynamic very soon. This is why at WonderWebs we design all websites to be dynamic as standard.
On a static web page the same content will always be displayed each time it is viewed. To make changes the web designer would need to manually edit the page with a HTML editor and then re-publish the page.
On a dynamic web page the content can be customized or actualized for each individual viewing. The web page can continually update information as the page is displayed to the user. So, as a very basic example, a dynamic website could say "hello Steve, welcome back, you have been viewing the site for 5 minutes and 30 seconds" and when Steve refreshes the page, it could say "hello Steve, welcome back for the second time! You have been viewing the site for 5 minutes and 50 seconds". The web designer would not need to manually edit the page in order to show the changed response, it would be automatic.
Being able to 'remember' details about a visitor such as personal details, order details, viewing preferences (the visitor may have poor eyesight and needs the size of the writing to be larger) allows very complex applications to be developed. As long as information can be 'remembered' by the website, in theory, any type of website, game or application can be created, the only limit is that of your imagination. Any type of website that features a login screen to access an area of the website would be dynamic in nature, because when you login to the site, the system retrieves your details from the database, identified by the username and password details that were entered. You will be viewing a 'live' page customised just for you, that is the purpose of dynamic websites.
We design our dynamic websites in the Perl programming language, although we are happily to use PHP if the client prefers. PHP is the most widely used programming language to construct dynamic websites but it is somewhat limited both in terms of functionality and also performance when compared to Perl 5.10 (the latest version). Perl allows for extremely complex websites to be created which would simply not be possible using PHP. We integrate all of our dynamic websites to mySQL databases in order to 'remember' the users details. We find mySQL to be the perfect compromise, keeping the costs low for our clients and yet still not sacrificing query speed or server performance.
Two of the most popular websites would not be here today unless they were dynamically designed.
Both sites need to 'remember' their users in order to provide a service to them. They need to remember the users postal address, so that any items purchased can be sent to the correct address and removes the need for the user to continually re-enter their shipping information.
Both sites also show the user's balance and remember the transactions they have made, which are summarised on the account statement page. Amazon remember items that you have purchased in the past and will recommend other items that they feel you may be interested in. Amazon also feature a 'Wish List' where users can list products that they may wish to buy in the near future but cannot afford to do so at present.
So you see, if you want to remember details about the users that will access your website, you need a dynamic website.
