Dynamic vs. Static Pages

I had a great question today from a potential client. David asked, "What is the difference between static and dynamic pages?" That was a perfect question to follow my last post about why Google doesn't always like to crawl dynamic pages.

Static pages are created in HTML by a web developer/designer. According to Wikipedia: "A static Web page is a Web page that always comprises the same information in response to all download requests from all users." It doesn't change.

Dynamic pages, however, are interactive pages. Wikipedia states: "Content (text, images, form fields, etc.) on a web page can change, in response to different contexts or conditions. There are two ways to create this kind of interactivity" In other words, the viewer gets what they need from these pages. Ask and you shall receive, but its not created until you ask for it. In other words, these pages don't really exist. They are built from a database or with Flash or XML or so many other languages.

A good rule of thumb is to use static pages and dynamic pages together in your site. Static pages should be your core pages like your home page, about us, a page about your services, etc. Dynamic pages are for your shopping cart, an interactive calendar, a location lookup, etc.

Here are a couple links to Wikipedia to help explain this concept a little better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_Web_page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page

 

Thanks for asking that great question David! Keep those questions coming...

Comments

[Bob39]

Are you saying that dynamic pages are only good for shopping carts and calendars? If a site had say 100 pages of content and the content needed to be updated regularly, whould you recommend static or dynamic?

[Desiree Scales]

What I wrote was:

"A good rule of thumb is to use static pages and dynamic pages together in your site. Static pages should be your core pages like your home page, about us, a page about your services, etc. Dynamic pages are for your shopping cart, an interactive calendar, a location lookup, etc."

Etcetera means that there are more occasions that would need dynamic pages than what I listed. Of course a site that has 100 pages would need to have some dynamic pages.

But, first of all, why would have more than 100 pages? That seems like an awful lot of content unless your site is a directory or a business module that holds company documents. You didn't give me a good example so I'm just guessing at what you might be talking about.

Second, I would hope you would make the core pages like the index (home) page, about us, services and some of your other pages static for the search engine crawlers to properly crawl. Again, a mix of static and dynamic pages is always best.

Actually, the more static pages you have, the better your shot at targeting more than one keyword phrase. More about that soon...