What is a static website?

Static websites are the simplest and most straightforward type of websites to be found on the Web.

Static sites, as their name suggests, contain content that does not change dynamically when a visitor views with it (the site content may change between visits but that's because the webmaster has changed something on the pages, not because the content itself changes in response to user input or clever programming code).

These types of sites were very common in the early days of the web when many organisations used them simply as electronic billboards to advertise themselves and their products. It wasn't long, though, before people were looking for something a little more sophisticated and functional, and webmasters soon looked for techniques to make their sites more dynamic.

These days, static websites are really only useful for personal websites - the great thing about the Web is that anyone can create their own website using web space provided by their Internet Service Provider and a little knowledge of static HTML markup coding.

For organisations, though, this type of site is now of little benefit and any site wanting to exploit the huge benefits that the Web has to offer will need to take advantage of a number of the (not necessarily complex) dynamic technologies now availble to web developers.