static vs. dynamic

need advice for website redesign project

[Skooter]

I'm the webmaster for www.example.com and other Example websites, which I inherited from the previous master. We are in the process of redesigning our website, and it has been suggested that we switch to a mostly dynamic site (probably using asp) to ease management tasks. Seems a bit scary to me. I'm worried mainly about how this will affect our search engine ranking and the speed with which pages load when people access our site. We DON'T sell products online, and the number of products our company sells is in the hundreds (not the thousands), but I need to manage 5 different sites (in different languages). Please advise!

[edited by: heini at 11:42 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2003]
[edit reason] Please don't use urls / thanks! [/edit]

[mattur]

It depends ;) The thing to watch out for is having long querystrings e.g. mypage?r=1&t=5&h=g which Google may not follow.

Speed may be an issue if your code is poorly written, but it is possible to write fast dynamic pages, where the extra processing overhead is unnoticeable.

You could go semi-static: generate the content offline from a database, then publish these to the website. That way you get the manageability of database-driven content without ending up with dodgy, hard to spider urls.

[Skooter]

Much obliged for the advice. I will try to set up a CMS that I can use to generate both static and dynamic pages from a database. It seems that my biggest problem is going to be convincing management that this is the way to go.