At the dawn of the world wide web, static content was king. The expense of hosting—not to mention programming for—dynamic content put it out of reach for all but the largest companies. Even though maintaining static content was tedious and time-consuming, it was often the only viable option.

Fast forward a decade, and the picture’s completely different:

Static is dying. Maybe it’s already dead. From corporate sites to vanity pages, dynamic content has taken over. Countless—and cheap—hosting providers, coupled with slick-n-simple tools like WordPress and Drupal have all but eliminated the once daunting costs associated with dynamic content.

The change from static to dynamic has blurred the line between design and development. Expectations are changing, and as designers, we’ve needed to change to meet them—even when that has meant picking up some coding skills. Learning the languages behind the dynamic revolution—PHP, Python, Ruby, and so on—has been a challenge for us at Web 2.0 Design Studio. But we’ve found that once learned, they’ve provided flexibility that’s impossible to ignore. And when our clients’ projects increasingly involve everything from theming for WordPress to prototyping with Ruby on Rails, that flexibility is fast becoming essential.

Of course, learning these new languages and the best practices that accompany the development process hasn’t been the only challenge. In an upcoming post, we’ll take a look at how adapting to these changes has meant establishing clients’ development expectations up front.

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