Agnivo Roy

Do you own websites or planning to build some? Whether you’re a professional webmaster or a starter, you’d surely have learnt that static websites are now passe, dynamic script driven websites have now become the norm. Static websites are the ones where each and every page is to be designed and manually coded in HTML or equivalent standards.

Static websites are pain to manage and update as every page that needs to be edited has to be manually changed everytime. With dynamic sites powered by website scripts, things are now easy and fast…you can now concentrate and devote more time on adding content and managing your sites effectively instead of tweaking the individual pages.

Dynamic sites are based on the fact that one or more “scripts” (like software packages or executables on our PCs) are responsible for generating the full page content based upon the queries or requests made to it. You can store all your site data into a database or flat file and the scripts have the functions coded into them which take user input (forms, query strings or clicks), fetches relevant data from storage, processes them accordingly, encapsulates the content into a well-defined common template and output the resultant HTML code viewable by the browser.

Like normal programming languages on the PC, we have different web development and programming languages using which the web scripts are coded. Some common scripting languages are PHP, ASP, Perl and Coldfusion. Most professional scripts come with installer module and instruction readme so that anyone can install them on their website. Similarly most have a backend or administration panel to manage site content, settings etc. Scripts are available as out-of-the-box solutions for a wide variety of applications - forums, guest books, blogs, calendar, article management and publishing, CMS, portals; just to mention a few.

So, how much do these scripts cost? Trust me most scripts floating on the web are free scripts - either GNU/GPL or freeware. But most professional and extensive scripts are commercial software packages and may cost from tens to thousands of dollars. But that doesn’t mean free scripts are low on features, there are free scripts like SMF forum, phpLD which look really professional and feature rich. To choose the right script for building your websites, whether free or paid, use search engines and resources like script directory, web development forum & communities.