Building a Personal Website (Mini-Series Part 1)
What is a website?
People build websites to share their stories. It may be for presenting information about a business, buying and selling online, or voicing personal thoughts and opinions. Either way, a website allows you to share your information with the rest of the world. According to Internet Live Stats, there are over 1.8 billion websites in the world today.
So, what is a website really? A website is a set of related web pages located under a single domain name. There are two kinds of websites: static and dynamic.
Static Websites
Static websites are fixed and display the same content for every user. They are purely informational and the pages won’t change. The pages are typically pre-rendered, cached, and delivered via content delivery network (CDN). Static websites are best used for website portfolios, static brochures, blogs, and landing pages.
Static sites typically take little time and users don’t need to use complex software programs to build them. They are usually written in client-side languages such as HTML and CSS. Nowadays many static site generators are available which help you build these sites without even knowing the details of HTML/CSS.
Dynamic Websites
You’ve probably seen dynamic websites too. Airbnb is a perfect example. It’s interactive — a user can enter where and when they want to vacation and the display is based on the input of the user.
Dynamic websites provide users with an interactive experience and these sites require both client-side and server-side scripting languages such as Javascript and PHP. A dynamic website can be changed through the code that runs in the browser as a user interacts with the website. Dynamic sites are typically more versatile and are generated in real-time by request of the server.
Now that we know about Static vs Dynamic websites, let’s look at the lifecycle of developing these websites. The website process includes development, hosting, and presenting it to the world. At the end of this mini-series, you will learn how to create your own personal website which follows these principles. Go to Part 2 of the mini-series.
