 So what is a dynamic Web site?
Simply, a Web site whose content depends upon who – or specifically which browser - is viewing it.
A dynamic Web site is built by a Web server program on a Web server, using information gathered from one or more other programs (usually a database). The other programs may run on the Web server, or on other computers to which the Web server has access.
As the content of the Web site depends upon requests sent from the viewer’s browser, one can say that the final assembly of the site actually occurs as the viewer looks at it.
The Web server program takes information from the database and places it into a template that may be common to all the pages on the Web site. This means that only the information in the database need be changed in order to update the content of the Web site. The information may be changed by people with no knowledge of the construction of Web sites – indeed by people who may never have seen the Web site.
Examples of dynamic sites include Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) and the BBC News pages (news.bbc.com).
To host a dynamic Web site, the Web server needs to run a language that allows the exchange of information between the Web server software and another program from which information is taken, such as a database.
The information from the database in then translated into HTML and published as part of the Web site: such a Web server language is known as a server-side scripting language.
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