The first issue of BellaOnline's MUSED Literary Review was published in Winter 2007. For the 15th year, we decided to make some behind the scenes improvements. One of these improvements is to switch MUSED from the present static website to a dynamic Wordpress site. But what is the difference?

At the present, MUSED is a static website, which means that each page on the website is a pre-made HTML file. These HTML files are stored in a folder on the BellaOnline server. When a reader clicks a link to a webpage, the browser displays the pre-made HTML file. As you would expect, the page displays very quickly in the browser. Speed is one benefit of static websites. So, this is a great option for small websites that don't have many webpages or don't need to change the content on their pages.

So why do we want to switch MUSED to a dynamic website? Now that we have 45 issues of MUSED, we simply have out grown the benefits of a static website. But just how does a dynamic website work anyway.

Although the content on each webpage is already written, it is not stored on a pre-built static HTML webpage. The content is stored in a database. When a reader clicks that same link as before, the content is pulled from the database and compiled in to a webpage. But how? That's where Wordpress or some other Content Management System (CMS) takes over. It is the CMS that compiles the database content in to a format that can be displayed on a website. Although it takes a second or two longer to display the webpage built from a database than a static webpage, the benefits of a dynamic website make up for the small loss in speed.

One of these benefits of a dynamic website is how much easier it is to manage very large websites with a lot of content. Most CMS display content on a webpage in a modular way. For each issue of MUSED, the database can store the issue number, publication date and categories for that issue. It will also store the title, author name and text for each article in the issue. With a CMS, we can generate a webpage for each article in the issue without too much work.

The CMS will display the issue number and publication date pulled from the database at the top of the page, along with the header banner image and the MUSED logo. This header will not change for each article in the issue. What will change is the title, author name and text of each article. When the reader clicks on that link to view an article, the CMS will find the requested data for that article and display it on a webpage. So instead of storing thousands of individual HTML webpages on the server, we only need to store the content in a database.

Besides using the CMS to display webpages on request, you also have more options for re-useable content. For example, you could place the same newsletter signup form on some or all pages of the site but you only need to store it once in the database.

Before we close this article, we need to discuss the hybrid website. As you have probably guessed, a hybrid website uses a CMS and database for most of the content on the site but also stores a few static HTML webpages on the server. These static webpages should not need to be updated frequently or at all.