What Type of Site is Right? Step Two
This is step two in our Starting a New Website Checklist - check out that post if you happened upon this one and want to a handy link to all of the steps in order.
Once you’ve figured out the strategy and brief for your new website, it’s vital to plan on how you will develop it. Forget learning the difference between ASP and PHP for now - more importantly, you need to make key decisions that will affect everything from programming language, to web hosting to just how you will get the site started right now.
First, there’s three types of sites to consider: Static, dynamic and application
A static website is essentially a print brochure in HTML. You have basic information and it can include from 1 to hundreds of pages. But there’s no system for updating it other than editing each page by hand. If you’re building a site that you plan on updating less than every few months, or even just leaving alone for a year or more, a static website is the ideal choice. You build it once, and forget about it.
A dynamic website is one where you can alter the content via a backend content management system. Blogs, online magazines and other types of publications are examples of this. There’s no way anyone would go through the trouble to update a blog by hand. Instead, there are great open source scripts like Wordpress to make it as easy as filling out a form to update the site. Even if you are doing a brochure site but plan to update it often, building your own custom content management system can be worth it to avoid changes that are costly in time, money or both.
An application is likely something out of reach for a first time webmaster unless you’re a coding genius or have a lot of money to develop. But applications can be anything from a social network to a photo sharing community like Flickr. Applications take a tremendous amount of planning and development time, so for the purposes of this site I’m going to focus on static vs. dynamic.
Cost benefits:
You need to realistically calculate just how many changes you will make to your site. If you plan on making a lot, then recoding the entire site by hand every time you make one will be a repeated cost that will plague you throughout the lifetime of the site. However, a static site is cheaper than a dynamic one if you’re just paying the one time cost of setting it up and leaving it like that.
Conversely, setting up a dynamic site is more costly, but it’s a one time cost and you never have to pay for updates again.
Think about it in the same way you would weigh buying a snowblower. If it snows once a year, then shoveling the one time it does snow certainly won’t kill you. Neither will paying your neighbor’s teenaged son a few bucks to do it. If you live in the mountains and it snows every weekend, then you’re going to have a very sore back or an empty wallet pretty quickly. The large, one-time cost of the snowblower is worth it because it pays for itself over time.
If you’re decided on a static site, your work here is done and you can move onto the next step.
If you’re choosing a dynamic site, there are different things to consider:
• Creating a static site with a blog (the dynamic component) so you only update that one section. This is a great option for a website who wants to keep their visitors informed of updates but otherwise will keep the rest of the information on the site the same
• Creating a blog - This puts the content of the blog front and center on the site. Great if you’re, well, starting a blog, or really looking to have an open dialogue with your customers
• Using a CMS (Content Management System) A CMS gives you a backend where you can create numerous sections, pages, links, etc. by filling out a series of forms and using a dashboard. A CMS is much more complex to set up, but it’s really the difference between having a newspaper and a blog. Newspapers have multiple content sections and pages, while blogs tend to be all in one place. While some CMS systems are open source and free, setting them up can be a tedious endeavor.
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