Maybe there are people who think pure HTML and CSS site is out of date. Although it IS an “old-fashion” technology for people to build pure html websites using tools like Microsoft Publisher and Adobe Dreamweaver, etc, html websites are still showcasing its advantages, which more and more CMS are noticing and trying to integrate.
If there are no complicated functions that would need database, html pages are easier to code, faster to load, and more SEO friendly.
In a single html web page, you can almost achieve whatever you want in term of layout and styling, with the help of CSS and graphics. Some simple Javascript or PHP can be more than enough to achieve animations and forms. In this way, it is very easy to make sure all your page codes are clean and necessary. There will be a lot of codes that the particular page doesn’t need.
This is also good for SEO purposes as all your contents are there, straight forwards for search engines to crawl and update. All the urls are clean and simple, and usually making sense in regard to its contents.
For example: you can have a url like: australiawebdesigner.com.au/web-design/pure-html-pages.html. This is telling the visitor, and search engines, that this page is very likely to have contents in regards to website design using plain html codes.
Moreover, html files are downloaded straight away from the server to the client’t browser, while the page is requested. This will save the time for the server to gather all the data upon each request. In the case of CMS, the request is sent to the server, usually in the form of a url. And then the php or asp or other programs will need to read the request and decide what data should be sent back to the client’s PC. After the programs understand what data is requested, they will need to go through the database to gather all the data (in most cases, data are not store in only a place in the database), and then organize the data in a manner that was set, and then send the data to the client’s PC, using HTML codes.
The whole process takes time, CPU power, bandwidth of the server… Thus when you visit a site built with CMS, it is usually slower to load up than one that is built with pure html. When a lot of people are visiting the same site, it is more likely for the server to stop responding as more CPU and RAM and bandwidth are used.
However, we can’t pretend that we don’t CMS’s advantages. Actually, CMS is killing HTML page builders in this decade.
A CMS allows people who may know nothing about html or css codes to update the website. As long as you can use Microsoft Word, you can use a CMS to update your site.
A CMS can save hours and hours of the website builder to make a change of the site. For example, you want to update your copyright info in your footer. If you are using HTML pages and you have 100 plus pages in your website. You may want to cry (although there are some ways around, they are easy for you to make mistakes). With a CMS site, however, this is not the case at all! You change one place, and all the pages are updated.
Noadays, CMSs are getting more and more sophisticated as they can be easily integrated with shopping carts, email newsletters, different templates, memberships etc etc… In this way, it will save the website master hundreds of hours per year to maintain the site.
Why CMS is getting increasingly popular?
Our bandwidth is improving (thanks to all the people’s hard work and the least wisdom of nowadays governments) so that the loading time of a CMS website is reduced dramatically.
Our servers is grading crazily (I believe everyone is having the same feeling about our PCs). So the servers can handle hundreds of times more requests.
People are getting lazy, in a good way. Of course people want to save time and effort when doing anything, while of course expecting better result. CMS is helping people this way.
CMS is improving: SEO friendly urls and tags are making it so simple to do SEO with CMS in the websites.
In conclusion, if you are a super code-liker and you are building a simple website with a couple of pages only and doesn’t need regular updating, HTML + CSS would be a greater option than CMS for sure. However, if you need a website, and want to update it as often as you want, eg. a blog, then a CMS is for sure your option.