Static is the New Dynamic
Are you serious?
Yes. Absolutely yes. Static content is the lightest, easiest, and fastest content on the web. There was a time, when I was all about the latest and greatest in CMS technology. I have spent many a hours trudging through the bowels of Joomla, Drupal, and Mambo. Slashing the foliage of MovableType, Mephisto, Typo, and Wordpress with my machete. All because I needed the most flexible, extendible, hackable, and mashable solution to manifest my off-the-cuff projects.
Why use plain ol’ static pages?
The first reason, is that static pages “just work”. Yeah, you can make typos, mismatch markup, and break links, but even with the most abstracted CMS these issues still exist. With static pages, there is no “moving parts” so to speak.
Automation
Static content doesn’t mean you have to write out every single piece of HTML by hand. In fact, there is excellent software that you can run locally to build shared layouts, generate blog entries, and leverage dynamic templating. You run a build command and the software pumps out static pages ready to upload. You can even automate the upload/syncing process.
It’s cheap!
You can sign up for the least expensive hosting package, and that will work just fine for a very long time. It’s cheap in terms of resources too, web servers (software) are usually very light weight. Storage and bandwidth will be the only variables you have to worry about. Storage is not a problem, scaling storage is easy and relatively inexpensive. Running out of bandwidth means you are transferring a lot of data, which is usually a good problem (people are visiting your site). Maintenance is minimal, you still need to call your web guy to make edits and updates, but problems will usually be simple fixes.
SEO
Static content is ideal for SEO, the search engines see everything just as it is, plain ol’ static HTML. Search engine spiders were built with static pages in mind. The spiders can quickly and easily parse through all of your pages without a hangup. In terms of SEO, nothing beats static content.
When static pages won’t cut it
Web Applications
There are plenty of situations when static pages won’t cut it. In terms of web applications you are out of luck. Even the most simple applications use some sort of dynamic technology to exist. Every form you see uses a dynamic technology to process the information. That isn’t to say that you must say goodbye to static pages. Applications can still have a large amount of static content.
What about blog?
Blogs can be pulled off with static pages, and I am still intrigued by the idea. With a static blog, you don’t get the administrative dashboard, you don’t get plugins, and you only kind of get comments. Why am I using this database driven blog software to run this site instead of generating static content locally and syncing it up? One of the few reasons that I am, in fact, using a dynamic blog engine is because of comments. There are ways to have comments without using a database, but it wasn’t compelling enough to me. I also like the web interface that lets me publish from any computer with internet access.
Conclusion
Static pages are great because they are quick and easy to create. They are ideal for sites that showcase a company or product. Some clients might ask if they will be able to edit a page, and you will tell them no. The truth in this situation is that aside from just plain body copy, a client won’t really know how to change anything else even inside a CMS. I would prefer to save the upfront hours I would spend setting up a CMS and spend them on these minor updates and changes. Static pages stay completely usable even if you do decide that you need a little more infrastructure, you just pop them in as pages in your new CMS.