In an earlier article, we focussed on the advantages and disadvantages of a dynamic or static website. This article will go into more depth about what you could achieve with a dynamic website. Here at EDi we get a lot of requests to build dynamic sites, but what exactly is a dynamic website? Simply put, this is a website that has a database behind it which can send and receive and store data between the web page and the database. What this means effectively is that any data that you would like to store, be it your products, your members, your content or anything else can be built up and retrieved at will. If this is done correctly it can make for a useful website, not just for your customers, but also for you. So what kind of things could you do? Here are a couple of examples:

• Content management system – you have a lot of information about your company such as news, events or products that you’d like to be able to share with the world and update yourself without having to pay for updates – this is a classic way to use a dynamic website.
• E- commerce site – could you sell your products through your website? This may be cheaper and easier than you think to use a dynamic website to update your products and take orders dynamically.
• Members database – allow people to sign up through your website and manage that information securely online using your administration interface.
• Deliver information to a wider audience – information stored in a database has more potential for delivering in an accessible format or using RSS (see our earlier article on RSS).
• Dynamic Extranet – use your website to share information, discuss and provide documents in a secure area of your website that only your staff can access.
• Bin the paper or the Excel spreadsheet – if you currently have an outdated paper based way of capturing and storing information or store things in an offline database or spreadsheet – it may be worth considering streamlining and updating this process to make it easier for staff and customers to access this information.

If you’d like to find out more about how a dynamic website could benefit your company, EDi would be happy to talk to you about it.