When you’re considering creating a website, or updating an old one, it’s important to understand a few things about what types of websites exist, how they work, and what they can do. Some websites act simply as online brochures, displaying information laid out like a printed brochure, and updatable by your web designer. Others do all sorts of things interactively, such as ebay or Amazon.com. Here we’ll look at what the differences are between these types of websites, and hopefully with more insight you’ll be better able to choose an approach that works for your business or organization.

Static websites, the most basic variety

When the Internet was first devised, this type of website was the only type. HTML, which stands for “Hypertext Markup Language,” was devised as an ingenious way to literally “mark up” text in a simple, plain text file.

Why mark up text? Imagine a newspaper office in the old days: a reporter types up a story, double-spaced on a sheet of paper. She hands that story, once it’s finished, to a layout person, who then writes on it with a red pen to indicate which lines of plain typed text are paragraphs, which ones are first-level headlines, second-level headlines, which text is italic, bold, and so on.

That layout person has just marked up the paper to divide the plain typed text into structural elements that bring meaning to the reader beyond the stream of text characters. The text is now organized into meaningful chunks that are easier for us to read and understand at a glance.

The original devisers of the Internet decided that they needed to make the pages of a website as universally readable as possible, on all computers. The most basic type of file that almost any computer can handle is a simple text file, so they decided to use text files to hold the content of web pages. However, since it’s impossible to mark a digital text file up with a red pen, they devised a different way of marking up text — the simple set of tags that comprises HTML.

The most basic type of website consists of text files on a server that employ HTML and other related files (stylesheets, images, and so forth) to make the web pages look a certain way, and that’s it.

A web server serves your website’s files

What is this server you keep reading about? It’s a computer. More to the point, it’s a computer connected directly to the backbone of the Internet (ideally), which is running software that enables it to serve web pages. Most businesses hire website hosting services to provide server space to house their website files. When you hire a hosting service, you’re actually renting a bit of space on a hard drive on that hosting service provider’s computer.

When you have a static, basic website, the whole thing consists of text files, image files and possibly Flash or other media files that live on a server somewhere. When someone types your doman name into their browser, their browser downloads those files into its memory, or cache, and the browser interprets the HTML and displays the web page, hopefully as its designer intended it.

A web server can also run applications

All websites employ a certain amount of interactivity, at least by providing links to other files on the Internet. This level of interactivity is built into HTML, and is, in fact, the reason for the “hyper” in “hypertext.” Static, simple websites also can contain JavaScript, which is a simple programming language that your browser can interpret and run. The types of things you can do with JavaScript include simple animations and other surface-level interactivity.

But you might want more interactivity built into your site. You might want to offer sign-up forms, to sell products on your website, or to offer an interactive image gallery. You might even want to allow your website to interact with you via a content management system to allow you to keep it up to date. These types of interactivity require more than simple HTML and JavaScript can offer. To run a more robust application on your website, your web developer will need to use a programming language such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, .ASP, .NET, or ColdFusion.

With this type of website, when someone points their browser at your server, the server actually runs a program, very quickly, and generates HTML based on the output of the program. This is called a “dynamic” website, and these days this sort of website is growing more ubiquitous every day.

Creating this sort of website is almost always more expensive and time-consuming than creating a static website, but it can be well worth the investment, and it doesn’t need to cost as much as you might think.

No need to reinvent the wheel

Most of the interactive things you might want your website to do have been done before, and most even have pre-written software available, either for sale or as open source software, that your web developer could use on your website. These pre-fab programs still usually require some programming skill to customize them and make them work on your site, but at least you don’t have to hire programmers to reinvent the wheel.

Some examples of excellent software for sale that your web designer can implement on your website are:

• Expression Engine for fully featured content management systems
• 1ShoppingCart for online sales
• ConstantContact for email marketing

Some examples of excellent open source programs that your web designer can implement on your website are:

• WordPress for blogs
• Drupal for complex content management systems
• Gallery for image galleries
• phpList for email newsletters
• PhpBB for online forums
• Zencart for large online stores

If you need a novel program that does not exist anywhere, plan on spending thousands of dollars and possibly years in development, since programming is a serious endeavor. If that’s the case, you’re probably not simply a business in need of a website to serve as a tool to boost your business. If you’re creating a novel interactive program on the web, your business probably is the website, and you’ll need to approach the creation of that website in a different way than other businesses.

Part of the process of creating a website is discussing with your web designer what you want your website to do. Hopefully now you have a more informed understanding of what’s possible and what’s involved, so you’ll be better able to choose what you need.