An explanation of static and dynamic content.
So many of our projects are all about content. And sometimes we have a lot of it. Back in the Stone Age, we'd have to configure all of this content by hand. That's what we mean by "static content." It stays just as we created it.
We'd get this perfectly-designed blog page exactly how we'd like it, and what do we do? We duplicate. And then we go in and change the content on our duplicated page. We just created another blog post.
But then what happens when we want to change part of our design? We want to add something new on each page? Well, that's fine. We just go back and change it on the other page, too. Except that's not how it works. Because this project has 400 blog post pages.
We've all been here. That's static content. We have to do everything by hand.
With dynamic content, the concept changes entirely. Dynamic content — whether it's a name or a color or a photo or a number or an email address — any content. It can be added or imported whenever to a database. And your design? No matter how perfect it is or how detailed you make it or how many pages you have? You just create it once. And you can pull anything from that database. So everything gets built out automatically. No more going back and updating everything one-by-one.
This works for anything you can imagine, because you can customize the database to have any kind of content you want. And you can get super granular with controlling and organizing your content. And with that, you can do blogs, and restaurant menus, and development projects, and team member pages, news sites, and fake news sites.
But that's the main difference. Static content: entering and tweaking things one-by-one. And dynamic content: you can reference your custom database. You get to control everything, but the content is built out automatically using your design.
Working with dynamic content can seem intimidating at first, if you're not familiar with database concepts. But this short introduction will change the way you think about building projects and managing content.
In this lesson:
Static content describes normal elements that are created one by one, and we can use classes to style multiple elements at once.
It’s not very practical, though, if you're looking to create a blog, or a design portfolio. Same thing with restaurant menus, news sites, or any other type of site with content that's constantly changing.
In these, and so many other cases, using static content would require the manual duplication and modification of obscene amounts of content.
Dynamic content allows you to add, update, and import content whenever. And every part of your design linked to that data is built out and updated automatically. Just as importantly, you have extremely granular control over creating and tweaking design elements that use this content.
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