The traditional way of building static webpages is long gone. In the past years, we have developed new methods to improve our workflow and make our code as efficient as possible. In turn, these have led to the most efficient creation of dynamic websites using modern front-end technologies.
A static website (or webpage) is the conventional way of developing pages using only HTML and CSS (and possibly some JS to manipulate some content). When a visitor opens your website, the content is shown as it was originally saved on the server. Nothing changes to the user. Everyone that visits your site will be shown the same content as everyone else.
In contrast, dynamic websites fetch content generated from the server, and may serve different views depending on the information provided by the user, or the saved cookies data. The content is also dynamically provided as required by the actions or current activity of the user.
Websites are made up of a collection of webpages, connected together by links or call-to-action buttons. In most cases, all of the webpages throughout a single website will contain the same layout and components. Some of these can be the: header, footer, newsletter-form, side-bar, site-navigation and modal dialogs. A dynamic website is built to make use of functions (or methods) that contain all the main layouts and global components of a site. We then call these specific functions in each page accordingly. But what makes a dynamic website so efficient?
Let’s have a look into the main advantages of building dynamic websites.
MAINTAINING YOUR CODE
If all the pages in our website are made statically, each time we want to update a common layout throughout the whole website, we would need to iterate through each page and make the changes line-by-line, and page-by-page. This would make multiple corrections seem tedious and a waste of time. If you have ever written CSS without any use of preprocessors, you’ll know what it’s like to maintain the styling of numerous webpages. The same applies for HTML — your website structure — and the content. Making your website dynamic makes it easier for you to maintain your code and easily keep track of all your changes.
EASILY MANAGE YOUR WEBPAGES
Once you build a robust dynamic structure in your back-end, manipulating a page is as simple as passing a new argument. For example, if you have a navigation system, and you would want to either hide your current active page-link, or simply make it inactive, all you have to do is pass a class name (or a conditional argument), and apply it to the navigation before the server actually builds your page. This provides better control over each page, and whether it’s a navigation or a crash-course popup dialog, you can easily choose and control what you want to show for each individual page — in just a few steps.
IMPROVING YOUR WORKFLOW
Your workflow becomes more productive and efficient. Although it might take you a while to implement the basic structure of a dynamic layout, eventually creating a new page is as simple as copying an existing file, and updating the content inside it. Remember that a dynamic website is not only there to help us manage the layout of the page. One of the main advantages is the use of web components.
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