Types of Websites
A website is a collection of web pages accessed via the Internet, and delivering information, entertainment or services. It consists of a central location with links (hyperlinks) between individual web pages, allowing users to move easily across the site. Websites reside on servers, physical or virtual machines that store the site files, and serve them to web browsers running on computers or mobile devices. Websites are created and managed by the people who operate them, and they come in a nearly endless variety of forms: educational sites, news sites, porn sites, social media sites, e-commerce sites, and many more.
The first website was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, in 1991. It was called the World Wide Web project and was launched at CERN, a European particle physics lab. Berners-Lee also invented the World Wide Web protocol and HTML, the language used to format webpages.
There are currently around 1.9 billion websites on the Internet, according to various estimates, with the majority of them hosted on commercial or business servers. The vast majority of these are publicly accessible, with only a small fraction requiring user registration or subscription. A website may contain static or dynamic content; static pages are pre-written and stored on the server as HTML, while dynamic pages are generated on demand using content in a database.
While a website can contain many types of files, it is most commonly comprised of textual and image-based documents that are combined into one HTML document. A website may also include a number of other recurring sections, such as navigation bars, footers and contact information pages.
A wiki is a website that uses the power of collaborative editing to create and maintain its content, making it very popular with both experts and novices alike. Unlike traditional websites, which only have a single editor with admin privileges, a wiki allows users to write, edit and publish to the site. Some wikis are freely available to all, while others are restricted to members of a particular community.
In contrast to a wiki, a blog is an informational website that consists of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries. The contents of a blog are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry appearing at the top of the page. Blogs are a very common way for businesses to market themselves and share industry knowledge with potential customers.
A redress is a tool used by consumers to request compensation from an online company or service provider for a breach of the Consumer Rights Act, or to raise awareness about a problem. The redress scheme is regulated by the UK Office of Fair Trading. Depending on the type of complaint, the OFT can choose to investigate the issue further or to simply take action against the offending party. In some cases, the OFT will recommend that a complaint is settled out of court. In other cases, the OFT will refer the matter to the Trading Standards Agency for prosecution.