Dynamic Sites

Better for Whom?

[glengara]

Prompted to ask this as it seems every recent site here is dynamic, even ones that really don't need to be.

To add to this, the query string problem is virtually unknown, so rarely resolved.

So are designers here simply making life easier for themselves, or am I missing something?

[NFFC]

Maybe in some cases it is to benifit the site owner, for example to allow them to add/edit/delete products on an e-commerce site.

[txbakers]

Dynamic sites are in fact much mor complicated for the designer and totally geared for the user.

For instance, my product is geared to music teachers. If the person is a choir teacher, they don't need to see pages related to band instruments, right? So through dynamic coding I hide the band related stuff and only show the choir stuff.

E-commerce is the same way. If I indicate a preference for blue things, the site designer would write code to only show me blue things.

Dynamic sites make the web more personal. The coding is a lot more complicated for dynamic sites.

[rogerd]

I wouldn't say that dynamic sites are totally for the user's benefit. Any web designer who has had to maintain an e-commerce site with frequent product or price changes knows what a pain editing static HTML can be.

Plus, once a site is database-driven, creating "special" pages that slice & dice the info in different ways is easy.

[mikemac29]

Yes it true that Dynamic sites are easier once you have the DB setup, but really isn't that easier for the user too. After all if it was too much work to personalize, you wouldn't do it. So the user is getting quite a bit out of it!

[Lisa]

txbakers,
I think dynamic sites are easier on the developer! I don't care about the user. They would see the same thing no matter what. But combining databases and scripts on the fly is much easier on my.

[txbakers]

They would see the same thing no matter what

Not really. If you set a Session variable or cookie based on type of user (gender for example), then use that to dynamically create content, a male would log on to the site and see male stuff and a female would see female stuff.

We're throwing around the word dynamic here to mean two different things. I use it to refer to content created on the fly based on user input.

Some people use dynamic to refer to using includes in their htm pages.

[Lisa]

Well there is no way to customize based on the user without dynamic content.

I thought we were talking about site design using dynamic scripting. And includes are a big part of that. Static vs Dynamic creation of that site.

Like the navigation area. News. Date driven feeding of new content. The only thing that is static is the actual content then that gets merged with all the dynamic stuff.

Having the site render on the fly is the way to go.

[brotherhood of LAN]

As I have recently went through the transition from static to dynamic (using includes and databaseS).... I would say the advantages are to everyone.

You can keep bandwidth down, reduce time taken to alter the site...and a degree of uniformality, where your navigation "include" can be recognised to be in the same place over time by the user.

"dynamic" seems pretty generic, even for me, im at the stage where im listening to the differences of PHP and ASP.

hmmm custom content depending on biodata. Sounds time consuming but interesting :)