What Is a Website made Of?
Before we can even think about starting a new website, we need to know what it is that we are trying to create. Websites fall into a few standard categories.
I don’t want to bother with the definition of what a website is. Everyone knows that a website is a number of pages organized and stored at a web address. This has been true for a long time ever since people began using the Internet.
However, there is a clear distinction among the few standard and very basic types of websites. They are static websites, dynamic websites and web applications.
Static Websites, Dynamic Websites and Web Applications
The grandfather of all website types is the static website. Such a website would usually be very basic in nature. It could contain several pages about certain subjects but nothing more. More importantly, each page would normally represented a single concept and be located at a single location such as my-page.html and another page could have a location such as about-me.html
There is absolutely nothing wrong with building a static website. The simplicity of such a website can be used to our advantage. The advantage of making a static website lies in how easy it is to manage one. The more simple the website is the less maintenance it will normally require. This is generally true for all sites.
A static website, furthermore, is. . . well, static. All pages are defined exactly by one file. When a visitor views the page, that is how that page will appear throughout the entire existence of the site. On the contrary, a dynamic website may display different information on the same page when visited by different visitors. And therefore, it would be considered dynamic, because the website code generates dynamic content based on various factors, for example, visitor’s location (which can be found by tracking the visitor’s IP address).
The context of what a website should be is sometimes defined by the changing nature of human behavior the prerequisite of which is some type of a new emerging technology. Throughout the history of the web, these trends determined the kind of websites that are generally accepted as being standard.
Static websites became dynamic. And dynamic websites then became Web Applications. A web application is an advanced version of a website. It usually uses servers and software programmed in more than one language. It also puts tremendous focus on the user interface (such as buttons, sliders, interactive web forms, etc) and general usability.
In the very beginning it was acceptable for a website to contain just 5 to 10 pages of text complimented by a few images. As new technologies began to emerge, such as the availability of Javascript in all standard browsers (Internet Explorer being the most popular browser back then), the nature of websites in general shifted toward being more dynamic. Today, many websites are complex web applications. But it doesn’t mean that all websites are difficult to make.
Even today, a static website can produce an extremely large amount of value for visitors. On the other hand, a poorly developed web application, no matter how complex and difficult it was to create, may never produce much value for anyone at all.
If you have never built a website before, it is highly recommended to start with just the static website first. You can find much information about the subject of creating websites right here, on Website Homework.
What is a Dynamic Website?Thanks for visiting websitehomework.com - an website containing html tutorials covering topics such as how to make websites from scratch, css, javascript and other website-related subjects.