When the web took off people developed websites using plain HTML. This was the time when server side language support for PHP, JSP, ASP etc had not come on the scene. CGI/Perl was available but most people found difficult to code in it so that is the reason we don’t find a lot of dynamic websites in those days. E-commerce websites were created in HTML where each product page was coded and uploaded online with no shopping cart option. People clicked on Pay Now and went on to PayPal to make payments for their purchase. Any change in content would require complete pages to be downloaded and the specific content was changed and the page re-uploaded. Change was needed!
Change started when Apache introduced support for PHP, Python. Microsoft came up with its very own ASP which later became ASP.NET when the .NET framework was introduced. Sun cam up with support JSP and Servlets. Suddenly dynamic websites started to come up here and there. As these technologies matured open source packages such as WordPress, Joomla, Zen Cart, OsCommerce, Magento came to the fore. Fully dynamic e-commerce and CMS websites started to be developed with more features every passing day.
People now have a chance to migrate their static websites to a fully CMS solution like WordPress with minimal cost and they can start managing their website and content from day one. WordPress theme support allows you to create your website theme compliant as per WordPress standards. You can use any number of plugins from their repository to install and setup on your website to perform SEO, Email, E-commerce, etc.