Originally Posted by chrishirst

That's true, BUT can you tell which is which?

All three sites in my signature have a mixture of static pages, scripted pages, pages built with includes and pages created from a database, some pages have a combination of the options.
Any one care to tell me which pages use which?

Ordinarily it's easy to spot when it's a .php page or something like that.

As for your sites, now there's a challenge! Here's my preliminary guesses...

http://www.modtalk.co.uk/ - I think this one is an .asp site of some kind? some kind of CMS certainly... I'm going for an .asp CMS then?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk/ ... there's got to be some .asp in there... some static, static index?

http://www.cram-system.com/ .... all .asp - got to be an .asp CMS.

I'm guessing you like using Active Server Pages?

Ordinarily it's easy to spot when it's a .php page or something like that.

Just because the pages have a .php extension does not mean they are Db driven.

As you can see you can only guess at how the pages are created by looking at the site because it's all HTML at that point

cram-system is entirely "static" pages, done with .asp extension because I wrote my own tracking and stats system and there is a line of script that writes to a database

modtalk is mainly powered by my own CMS with many pages in the "_site" section being static.

C and S is built with includes and scripts, no database in use for any content only the tracking code.

I use .asp extensions primarily on a Windows host and .php on a *nix host simply in case the client decides to add an extra level of complexity. Just something I learnt when I first started with web development.

The basic difference between the static & dynamic websites lies in the programming language. A static site uses HTML programming while a dynamic site uses more complex programming code like PHP or ASP. and if I talking about the most useful sites then the answer is "static" because these sites are easy or quick to develop and cheap to host.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Just because the pages have a .php extension does not mean they are Db driven.

Of course, but I'd still qualify them as dynamic, as there wouldn't be any point building a page in php unless some kind of calculation going on to generate the pages, be it from a database, or from a variable or something.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

As you can see you can only guess at how the pages are created by looking at the site because it's all HTML at that point

cram-system is entirely "static" pages, done with .asp extension because I wrote my own tracking and stats system and there is a line of script that writes to a database

modtalk is mainly powered by my own CMS with many pages in the "_site" section being static.

C and S is built with includes and scripts, no database in use for any content only the tracking code.

I use .asp extensions primarily on a Windows host and .php on a *nix host simply in case the client decides to add an extra level of complexity. Just something I learnt when I first started with web development.

Interesting stuff. I've never used active server pages before, I don't know, I just really don't like Microsoft stuff, I've always favoured *nix.

I'm totally with you on adding the .php extension. I've gotten into the habit of always building sites with things like navigation and footer as .php includes, makes it easier to update and as you say, add more functionality in the future.

just having a .php, .asp, .aspx, .py, .pl, .cfm, extension does NOT make them "dynamic". The source for that page could be entirely in HTML tags, a web server will not initialise the interpreter until it finds a code delimiter (<?php, <?, <%) and if there is no "code" the page will be served out "as is", in exactly the same manner as a page with a .htm(l) extension is.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

just having a .php, .asp, .aspx, .py, .pl, .cfm, extension does NOT make them "dynamic". The source for that page could be entirely in HTML tags, a web server will not initialise the interpreter until it finds a code delimiter (<?php, <?, <%) and if there is no "code" the page will be served out "as is", in exactly the same manner as a page with a .htm(l) extension is.

No of course I just assume that people would only do that if there is some kind of query going on behind the scenes... unless, like yourself, they're just planning for future expandability.

So if "dynamic" site are "difficult for SEO", why do somany "expert SEOs" suggest using Wordpress, Blogger, Hubpages, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc etc all "dynamic" sites!