A beginner-friendly guide to choosing the right type of website for what you want to build.
Resources mentioned in this lesson:
A short tour of static versus dynamic websites. There are a huge number of resources online for this, going as deep or as shallow as you like, so we walk through the ones worth your time as we go rather than leaving you to find them.
A static website contains fixed content that doesn't change: text, images, the things that sit there and stay put. The CodeYam prompt library is a good example: it's all text, none of it changes, and it is very clearly a static site.
Because the content is fixed it loads fast. There is no database and no easy way for users to meddle with the site, so it tends to be more secure, especially for something simple like a marketing landing page. It is also easy to build; plenty of no-code and low-code drag-and-drop tools handle it well, because a static site is a solved problem rather than something custom.
You can usually launch a simple static site for nothing using a hosting service, which is somewhere to push the site so it is viewable on the internet. GitHub Pages will host a simple static site free, so getting one live is genuinely easy.
A dynamic website is inherently more complex. Reach for one when you want personalization, content that changes as people use it, or a web application with a user login, where actions store data in a database and what someone did last time changes what they see next. More interactive, more personalized, and more valuable when that is what you actually need.
Simple versus slightly more complex. Static is very simple and fixed. Dynamic is more complex but allows greater personalization, more flexibility and more features. Which one is right depends entirely on what you are building.
Every resource mentioned here is linked on this page, in the CodeYam Academy. If anything is still unclear, ask. That is what the questions are for.