Selection Dilemma—Static vs. Dynamic Web Development

Web Design | Web Development

Dynamic web development technologies are rocking on the web though the mobile web is suffering from the performance issues with dynamic websites. Nobody loves to select the static website against the advantages of the dynamic websites, but if amalgamate of the technologies takes place and deliver static web pages with dynamic effects, everybody tends to lure on it. Today we are living in a mobile era where accessing the Internet is ‘pretty’ easy and exploring the web through various kinds of websites are ‘trends’ in all generations. Tech-savvy people are talking about the responsive web designs, which are befitting in almost all computing devices’ screens. People love to interact with the web interfaces, which are updating dynamically and providing the latest updates of the required content in real-time, not save before a day or week, just before a few minutes or seconds. In such scenario, if a web developer asks the client that whether it should be static or dynamic your website it seems ‘absolutely’ silly question in 2015. However, in 2016 and onwards it might not be the case! Yes, it is true because:

• The mobile web users are tired of performance issues of the several websites or web portals offering dynamic content.
• Slow loading of the web pages
• Sluggish interactions
• Frequent need for optimization of the databases
• Content optimization issues for responsive or mobile-friendly web portal
• Code optimization hiccups
• The denial of JS or other scripts on the various mobile platforms

Such are detrimental issues that one has to face while keeping the dynamic websites for the mobile audience.

The Past of Websites & Dynamic Web Development

In the 1990s, we had HTML and CSS like code to create frontend of the website and host it without any bandwidth and other hosting issues, except the file size of the source code due to excessive graphics and images included in the web pages. Later on, Flesh like technologies has shown us the ways to create some interactive and dynamic web pages using the Action Scripts. Later on, browsers were improved. It had pushed the HTML and CSS to evolve along with it. With the growing usage of SQL-based RDBMS, web developers learned the separation of content and design by developing CMS. In the midst of the 2000 era, PHP, Python, ROR, ASP.NET, and alike dynamic server-side, as well as client-side coding technologies, have given the birth of fully functional dynamic websites and web applications, which are mostly presented on the desktops and laptops like big computing devices and screens. With the emergence of the dynamic website development technologies, web developers, webmasters, and website owners experienced the freedom from the:

• Frequent and regular editing of static website pages using the HTML and CSS
• Keeping the consistency between the web pages for design and layout while changing the required content
• Editing every single page for a minor change in header/footer/body
• Hiring developers in-house or freelance to update and maintain the website
• Maintain the relevancy and consistency in the content and design flow with tedious editing

With the advent of dynamic web development technologies, database management systems, and open source LAMP stack, the Dynamic Web Design became the buzzword in the late 2000 period.

How Dynamic Website Works

The Amazing things in the dynamic websites are the processes taking place on the server.

• A web server loads the code into a PHP interpreter in case of PHP powered dynamic website
• It establishes the connections to the databases or database management system
• The exchanges of queries taking place
• Based on the data in templates it attaches the text into the HTML document
• The document served in the customized ways

The Role of the Technologies in Dynamic Web Development

It all possible with the server-side technologies or languages such as ASP, JSP, ASP.NET (Framework), PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails (Framework). The supporting database management languages like MySQL, SQL, PG SQL, and now NoSQL database languages. Client-side technologies use the CGI (Common Gateway Interface) to create the dynamic web pages. It also bundles the server-side scripts like JavaScript and its variants like Angular JS, Node JS, Media Query in the case of mobile browsers, DHTML, and some PHP codes to act in the browsers of the client devices. Client-side technologies register the responses of the users like mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, taps, swipes, etc. like touch gestures and send HTTP request to the server to act upon it accordingly. Now, Ajax, CSS, and JavaScript like technologies are working in the combination of all server-side and client-side technologies to serve the content dynamically whether in a set pattern on the server or in response to the actions taken by the end-users. Thus, you may find automatic updates of new blocks/sections of the dynamic websites. Presentation of personalized content, forms, and ‘marketing offers’ are delivering in response to the user interactions with the dynamic website.

The Role of CMS Technologies in Dynamic Web Development

It also enables the presentations of the multimedia content like texts, images, audios, and videos with real-time updates. However, improvements in CMS technologies in PHP open source have grabbed a big landscape of dynamic web presence in recent years, and its march is continuing due to adaptations of RWD (Responsive Web Design) techniques. Today we have WordPress as number one CMS on the planet used to develop dynamic websites for a big chunk of industries. Joomla is ideal for medium to large size web portals while Drupal is unique for big organizations such as governments and educational institutions. The most astounding things of the CMS is its MVC paradigm that allows the separation of business logic (Code) from the presentation (Design) and let the developers as well as webmasters/admins to work on the both simultaneously. Most of the CMSs have simple and easy to use user interface that enables the non-tech users to place the content without any knowledge of coding at all while for the power users of tech experts HTML coding is available in the text editor format. With the powerful dashboard, developers and power users can edit the design aspect of the CMS powered websites, so customization is quite easy and more intuitive with the availability of themes and its customization options. Therefore, today dynamic websites with CMS capabilities are highly popular and enable businesses to serve the fresh content with real-time updates without hiring any web developer or a webmaster at all.

Benefits of Dynamic Websites for the Businesses

• The ultimate benefit of the dynamic website is the excellent user experiences, as it serves the content in real-time, highly contextual, and absolutely personalized manners
• Content upload, editing, and deletion are easy, rapid, and less expensive due to high-end backend systems including CMS
• It offers complete control over the content and appearance in the hands of business as well as the developers to deliver tailor made web presence
• It offers ample scopes to do Internet marketing using the latest techniques including SEO, SMO, etc.
• Dynamic websites offer enough opportunities to create unique content with desired layouts and improve the conversion rate, hence the ROI at the end
• Integration of analytics is easy and monitoring the traffic in personalized ways using the advanced Google Analytics and some paid analytics services
• With solid user authentication, the dynamic website offers highly secure and diverse experiences by offering multiple roles to the different levels of users. Thus, you can reduce the burden over the handful of content publishers and leverage the expertise prevailing in the enterprise or organization for the dynamic web portal success

Dynamic websites keep the end-users updated with the latest and relevant information, so it engages the audience to be loyal customers/clients and boost the growth of the business further

Issues with Dynamic Web Development

Vulnerability Recent statistics on the dynamic websites indicate that more than 70% WordPress sites are vulnerable to known exploits, and more than 12 million Drupal websites have got a warning to update with emergency patches due to infection of malware. It ultimately raises the security issues for the dynamic websites, as the easy intrusion is possible due to the frequent server and client interactions. Developing and scaling of the dynamic websites are expensive endeavors for businesses as well as developers. Performance Today, we have to deal with Big Data and NoSQL like expensive databases that cost dearly in terms of resources as well as for the performance of the website. It is because, with each database query, the server receives request and interactions with code, template, and database taking place in forth and back manner that hinders the performance of the dynamic website against the static one. Moreover, the introduction of cloud technologies, mobile presentations, and increased usage of the Internet for the myriads of purposes on the dynamic web portals have made things intricate. Role of Cache System Of course, cache systems are gaining rapid advancements and HTML 5 like offline cache capabilities have increased the performance of the dynamic web pages. To exploit the cache advantages in fast loading and rapid servings of the dynamic content, we have plugins such as WP Super Cache and other proxy caches such as Nginx, Apache Traffic Server, and Varnish is available. Unfortunately, cache system only keeps the copies of the generalized/common content and still rely on the dynamic updates of the changing content with the other parameters such as user preferences, requests, emergency updates, notifications, new news, etc. that are not possible to keep in the cache. Therefore, highly optimized dynamic website proves slower against the static website in the loading as well as running. Moreover, cache invalidation issues are hard to manage with the dynamic websites. URL of the Dynamic Websites It has seen that the same URL is returning the different HTML in several incidents in the case of the dynamic web pages. It is due to several parameters influencing the delivery of the HTML in a dynamic site. For instance, login and logged out conditions display different content and layout. Changes in the comments, settings like tags, categories, etc. can lead to the changes in the lists of the content and links accordingly.

The Best Possible Solutions

Since performance is a big issue in the mobile era and no solution is visible on the horizon of dynamic website development technologies, we need to take a step back in the era of static website keeping the contexts and contacts with the modern technologies, particularly advanced browsers and the emergence of static website generators. To know more regarding static website generators, read our blog on the static website explosion. With static generators, you can reap off the benefits of a static web page for fast loading, simple cache contracts, and URL bound HTML. To bring the dynamic effects and solve the same purposes with static websites, we need to take help of modern tools including static website generators, template system, Markdown support, metadata organization tools, and so on. With the advent of browsers, we can move the dynamic code running on the server to the browser of the client devices. Since modern browsers are acting as a separate operating system of its own, the ecosystem of the browser-based add-ons enable static websites generators to deliver dynamic effects that you can achieve with any dynamic web development technology. For instance,

Features

• For comments
• Social media integration
• Real-time data updates
• Search feature
• Live chat
• Add entire store

Browser Plugins

• Add Disqus, Isso, or Facebook comments plugins
• JavaScript widgets of Facebook and Twitter
• Squirt of Firebase
• Swiftype
• Olark
• Snipcart

Moreover, if your mobile web app has Angular JS, Ember JS, or React like technologies in the built, you can deploy the entire static website on it and can serve the CDN with backend API shared in between the website UI and the mobile client for seamless performance and user experiences.

Conclusion:

We hope that you may have deep insights of the static website development and dynamic websites development with its pros and cons. The more important thing is the modern solutions in the form of static website generators and amalgamate of the latest browser as well as CDN technologies to deliver high-performance dynamic websites even with the static website technologies. Of course, this one is the new development. Therefore, all web development companies may not have required flairs in the creation of such dynamic websites or dynamic web development. However, Addon Solutions is a leading name in the outsourcing industry that enjoys the pool of such talented web developers to deliver websites with the modern features and functionality using dynamic web development technologies and tools. It all with the least investment of time and resources.