In the past, in order to be able to design a website, you had to spend hours laying out tables and including images and graphics into a HTML Editor such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, that later became an Adobe Product.

While this was a painstakingly long process to achieve a presence on the World Wide Web, it meant that the pages author was familiar with the inner workings of each page. Designing, editing and slicing code to a HTML web designer came naturally as it was the only way to produce web pages.

These days, there is a multitude of readymade scripts and content management systems (CMS) available for users to edit and customise to their liking. Essentially this has made the process of publishing your webpage on the internet a much faster process. Here i will outline some advantages and disadvantages of both.

Simple HTML code pages, these seem to be a lot more search engine friendly. The indexing bots that crawl the internet looking for content and indexing it according to its relevance seem to still prefer simply designed HTMP pages as opposed to server side scripts. I have tested this across 2 of my websites that target the same niche and share the same domain names, with different endings. Once is a .com and the other a .net. Over a period of 6 months, I have used a directory script and a self designed directory layout in HTML. The web address that was housing the HTML pages, made it to the third position in Google within 4-6 weeks while the PHP script struggled to get up to position 13. Couldn’t even crack the first page on Google.  After a couple of months I have switched the sites again and as expected the HTML version outranked the PHP by a long mile.

HTML pages are much harder to implement changes on. This gets quite frustrating especially in a directory like website where you have hundreds of pages, each requiring separate changes to be applied. Scripts tend to be mainly template driven and much easier to implement the changes in.

Today’s scripts have become so advanced that they overcome the problem of not being search engine friendly by being able to submit its sitemaps to main search engines on a daily basis, ensuring a ping from the search engines bots. This allows the bots to see new content added to the site more regularly and allowing them to rank the pages accordingly.

If you are planning to launch a website, one thing to consider is the size that you plan the site to be. If it is a personal information site that has your standard 5 info pages and a contacts page, then you should use a predesigned simple HTM template. On the other hand if you are trying to build a multi level indexed website such as a directory you would be much better off to use a server side script that is much more powerful and contains many more featured that any HTML page can handle.