Static website

A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the same form as the user will view them. It is primarily coded in HTML (Hyper-text Markup Language).

A static website is also called a classic website, a five-page website or a brochure website because it simply presents pre-defined information to the user. It may include information about a company and its products and services via text, photos, Flash animation, audio/video and interactive menus and navigation.

This type of website usually displays the same information to all visitors, thus the information is static. Similar to handing out a printed brochure to customers or clients, a static website will generally provide consistent, standard information for an extended period of time. Although the website owner may make updates periodically, it is a manual process to edit the text, photos and other content and may require basic website design skills and software.

In summary, visitors are not able to control what information they receive via a static website, and must instead settle for whatever content the website owner has decided to offer at that time.

They are edited using four broad categories of software:

• Text editors, such as Notepad or TextEdit, where the HTML is manipulated directly within the editor program
• WYSIWYG offline editors, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver (previously Macromedia Dreamweaver), where the site is edited using a GUI interface and the underlying HTML is generated automatically by the editor software
• WYSIWYG Online editors, where the any media rich online presentation like websites, widgets, intro, blogs etc. are created on a flash based platform
• Template-based editors, such as Rapidweaver and iWeb, which allow users to quickly create and upload websites to a web server without having to know anything about HTML, as they just pick a suitable template from a palette and add pictures and text to it in a DTP-like fashion without ever having to see any HTML code

Dynamic website

A website can be dynamic in one of two ways. The first is that the web page code is constructed dynamically, piece by piece. The second is that the web page content displayed varies based on certain criteria. The criteria may be pre-defined rules or may be based on variable user input.

The main purpose behind a dynamic website is that it is much simpler to maintain a few web pages plus a database than it is to build and update hundreds or thousands of individual web pages and links. In one way, a data-driven website is similar to a static site because the information that is presented on the site is still limited to what the website owner has allowed to be stored in the database (data entered by the owner and/or input by users and approved by the owner). The advantage is that there is usually a lot more information stored in a database and made available to users.

A dynamic website also describes its construction or how it is built, and more specifically refers to the code used to create a single web page. A dynamic web page is generated on the fly by piecing together certain blocks of code, procedures or routines. A dynamically-generated web page would call various bits of information from a database and put them together in a pre-defined format to present the reader with a coherent page. It interacts with users in a variety of ways including by reading cookies recognizing users' previous history, session variables, server side variables etc., or by using direct interaction (form elements, mouseovers, etc.). A site can display the current state of a dialogue between users, monitor a changing situation, or provide information in some way personalized to the requirements of the individual user.

Some countries, for example the U.K. and the U.S., have introduced legislation regarding web accessibility.