What Sort of Site

A Static Site

The most popular form of website. Most sites you come across will be in this format. It can range from a single page site to one made up of many tens even hundreds of pages. It is called a static site purely because once made, the actual content of the site changes infrequently.

A simple ‘brochure’ site can consist of a single page containing information, address, telephone number and few pictures and often a contact form.

The Home page of this site could be a brochure site - it gives you an outline of what we do, has contact details and a contact form. Obviously, we expanded this site with more pages to go into further details of your choices. It is unlikely that the information on this site will change more than once or twice a year.

Just because a site is called static, it doesn’t lack anything, they can still contain photo galleries, visual effects, and sound or video.

A Dynamic Site (CMS)

A dynamic site or Content Managed Site (CMS) is usually one where the content can be changed, deleted or added to as often as you like. A good example of this is www.permaculture-wales.org.uk. This site has new content added approximately three times a week. All the alterations are made simply by the site owner logging in and using an in built editor (like MS Word). The only time we become involved is if there are any technical changes that the owners require.

All the content of the site is stored in a database and is automatically displayed when a visitor clicks on a menu or a link within the site. The design (look and feel) of the site can be changed easily, without affecting any of the content. Although there are many different types of CMS available, we use Joomla because we know it is a well developed, stable and secure web site platform.

A Joomla site can have one or more people who are authorised to change content. New people can be added and old ones deleted very quickly and easily by the site administrator.

An E-commerce Site

An E-commerce site can be static or dynamic. A dynamic site uses an online database to store details of all the products for sale and is usually used where products or prices change throughout any period of time. Because of the database used with a dynamic site, customer names, addresses and email details can be kept in the database together with details of their previous purchases. This makes it ideal for mail-shots, promotions and coupon marketing.

A static E-commerce site is better suited where products aren’t changed very often.

Both types of site contain a shopping cart where the customer can see and edit the items they have selected before they go to the final payment gateway.

PayPal is probably one of the best known online payment gateways. It is reliable and secure, and because it is so well know it’s also trusted. A customer on your site does NOT need a PayPal account to make a payment through PayPal. Other online payment methods are available and most can be integrated quite easily into your E-commerce site.

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Website Checklist