Web Applications & E-Commerce Websites

Brochure website (Static Websites)

A brochure website is quite often an online extension of your sales collateral; outlining the who, what & where of your business. It is how most organizations start out on the web. For some, a simple online brochure that rarely changes is enough. However, most small businesses at least require the option to add and edit their own news articles. In these situations, a simple tool like Perch is ideal. This allows the maximum of creativity, with the added option of making some elements of the page editable. Our own website is built on Perch.

Most of the website briefs or requests for proposals that we receive spec a full content management system (CMS). In reality, most organizations don’t actually use the full capabilities of the CMS, only ever updating their news and staff pages. So, as mentioned earlier, be sure that you have the resources available before you start down the ‘full CMS’ path.

Dynamic website

A website, or individual web page, can be static or dynamic. A static website contains information that does not change. It remains the same, or static, for every viewer of the site. A dynamic website contains information that changes, depending on the viewer, the time of the day, the time zone, the viewer’s native language, and other factors. For example, the Computer Hope main page is a dynamic website that automatically changes daily.

A dynamic website can contain client-side scripting or server-side scripting to generate the changing content, or a combination of both scripting types. These sites also include HTML programming for the basic structure. The client-side or server-side scripting takes care of the guts of the site.