Making websites easier with dynamic content
Nobody likes repeating themselves. Nobody likes repeating themselves. Everyone likes it when a task is made ridiculously easy!
With dynamic content, a website becomes so much easier to manage. Both for us as designers and for our clients — small business owners.
Maybe I lost you at ‘dynamic content’. So, let’s start at the beginning…
What is dynamic content?
Dynamic content on a website are parts of a design that are loaded differently for different pages of users.
When you go to Facebook and log in you will see your own account. If it just loaded up the same one person’s account for everyone it would be quite useless. With dynamic content, it delivers exactly the right content for the specific person or page you’re on.
As we recently updated our website design we increased the amount of dynamic content we’re using on our web pages.
Let’s look at an example. All of the services (Web design, website optimisation & website maintenance) pages, plus the blog and ‘Work’ pages all use the same page header. When you move between our WordPress Web Design page to our Work page you’re not actually loading a different page header, but the page is loading different content.
To make life a lot easier for ourselves we’ve designed one page header and placed dynamic content into the design.
When you look at the above pages you’ll spot similarities. Can you spot the 5 areas of dynamic, changing content? The light blue header, dark blue large header, the text block, button text and the image of the woman are all different on the two pages. That’s because this content is set out differently for the two pages, but loaded into the same header depending on which page you’re visiting.
Above is the meta box content, designed with the JetEngine plugin, that’s set out for each page. The one page header just has to request that data from the page when it loads a new page.
Why is this important?
Does it actually make it easier for everyone?
It’s important because it makes life an awful lot easier for everyone. For us when we’re designing pages, not just for us but also for clients, it’s a lot quicker when we only have to design one header section.
It’s an awful lot easier for our clients because the time it takes to change their content is shortened significantly. We already use the Elementor page builder for all clients, which ensures they can easily change their website content. Now with dynamic content, they don’t even need to load the Elementor editor, but just open their WordPress dashboard and quickly make changes.
Not only is it easier for us and for our clients, but it’s also actually easier for the website visitors.
When a visitor loads our Web Design page their browser will need to request all files to load the page. That would include the HTML file, all CSS files and JavaScript files. In total it’s around 20 requests the browser needs to make every time it loads a web page.
However, our browsers store cache. They store a copy of files to make it easier to load a website next time. If the browser has already gone to the effort of loading and caching our Web Design page, then tries to load our Work page it will find there’s not much new that it needs to load. An awful lot of the files are the same. It’s just the content on the website that changes.
Having a website that’s built to be dynamic means its saving time for everyone!
So is it just for header sections?
Dynamic content can be applied throughout a website. One our home page alone we’ve got three different areas of dynamic content.
As an example, our portfolio and review sections are made up of dynamic content. You will see these sections repeated throughout our website. The portfolio section sends out a request for the most recent 3 web design projects we’ve added to our portfolio section. If we add a new portfolio example it will automatically add the new example to every webpage that has that portfolio dynamic content section.
It’s the same with our review section. It lists our most recent 6 reviews. Once we add a new review within our WordPress dashboard it will automatically add the review to every single web page that features our review section. That happens to be almost every page on our website.
All of these sections of dynamic content mean that we can easily, effortless add new content to our website without needing to load up and edit every single page within our website. Having a website built around dynamic content makes it so much easier to manage our website.
In summary
Have a look at our updated website today and check out some of our recent web design work for clients. Every website we built is designed within the Elementor page builder. Every website is also designed to feature as much dynamic content as possible.
We build websites to be as easy as possible for our clients to manage and maintain their website. You can fall in love again with your website when it’s been built by Tiny Blue Rocket and built to be ridiculously easy to maintain.
