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Building a high-traffic Web site with static delivery using XML: dynamic and static sites: get the best of both worlds.

Article Excerpt
More and more companies are experiencing a need to effectively manage ever-changing content on high-traffic Web sites. These high-traffic sites receive as many as 1 million hits per day and require significant amounts of technical and financial support. The question of how to create a cost-effective, efficient system to support these sites has fueled a debate among IT professionals over the value of delivering them dynamically versus statically.

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Dynamic sites--sites that pull and assemble content stored in a repository--are easy to customize and capable of providing rapidly changing content. These sites provide the richest feature set for contributors and are easier and cheaper to build and manage. However, a high-traffic dynamic site requires hefty investments in software and hardware to support the high consumption requirements. And, as the site grows, so do the costs of additional equipment and staff to manage the site's burgeoning content and increasing traffic.

On the other hand, static sites--sites built and delivered with HTML code--are capable of handling more traffic with less hardware and software. Static sites are cheaper to deploy and generally have the highest guarantee for both the consumers' response time and overall availability. However, they tend to be much mare difficult to service behind the scenes. For example, because changes to content on static sites must be coded in HTML, Web masters, rather than nontechnical employees, must manage all updates, which can cause time-consuming, costly delays in providing fresh content to users.

So how can companies tap the best qualities of dynamic and static sites to efficiently manage a high-traffic Web site? Build the Web site dynamically but deliver it statically.

Dynamically Build a High-Traffic Web Site with XML

Companies using a Web content management (WCM) system to...