COMPARING TWO WEBSITES

Comparing Two Websites



Comparing Two Websites

Introduction

The report be examining two competing news websites: The Polish Club and Ocean Somali. The features I shall take a look at will be usability, design and content features. It is important for websites to be designed well, leading to greater useability and with up-to-date content to attract a wider audience.

Discussion

There are two main classes of website construction, hand-coded or dynamic sites. Hand-coded (or hard-coded) sites are the older style, where pages are built by hand in a desktop application such as Dreamweaver, then uploaded to the website by FTP. These are termed 'static' or 'flat' sites because the pages exist physically, are static, and cannot change.

Dynamic sites run from a database, and the pages do not exist - they are created on-the-fly by software installed on the webserver. These applications take care of all the page layout and design issues automatically. They also supply advanced levels of functionality that are difficult and expensive to include in flat sites. All kinds of websites are of this type now, including CMS (content management systems), ecommerce, blogs, wikis, and forums. In fact many types of modern website could not exist if database-driven functionality did not exist.

All modern main website applications, and most large sites and those with complex functionality are of this type now. The advantages over the old hand-built type are so numerous and so clear that there are few sites now that benefit from the individual page coding form of treatment. Perhaps only very small, simple sites with a minuscule budget are now best hand-coded, and they can be used on free or cheap hosting that does not have databases. Highly complex sites with a completely individual functionality type that is rare or even unique might use hand coding; and of course these sites have large budgets.

A content management system or CMS is a website type where the pages do not exist physically but are built from a database and image folders on request. The pages can be edited  online by the website owner, and design issues are taken care of by templates that can be installed or uninstalled quickly. Adding features or even functions to the site is done with plugins, not custom development. In all, these sites are a big step forward in website management, and almost certainly the way 90% of enterprise websites will be run in future.

Website analysis

So, to compare websites, there are a number of factors to be examined. What you are interested in precisely will depend on your reasons for carrying out this analysis. Here we cover most of the common questions, and run through them in the order of the list given above.

Type of site 

This refers to the website function. Is it an ecommerce site or a brochure site? The first sells products directly via a checkout backend; the second has a display of the enterprise's business services, products and objectives. There are dozens of other types, ranging from blogs to ...