What Is a Website?
A website is a collection of web pages that are linked together and displayed on the Internet. Websites can serve many purposes, including providing information, operating an online storefront and offering social networking services. Websites are built using web programming languages, including hypertext markup language (HTML), cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. Users access websites by typing the website’s domain name into their browser’s address bar.
There are currently more than 4.66 billion people connected to the Internet. That means that if your business doesn’t have a website, you’re missing out on potential customers and clients.
Websites come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, from news sites and porn sites to social media and e-commerce websites. The common denominator is that all websites offer some kind of media content, whether it’s text, photos or videos. A site’s structure and navigation vary, but most follow a general pattern of a home page that links to inner explanatory pages.
Most websites are created to meet a specific purpose, such as selling products or providing information. Some websites use a combination of static and dynamic content to provide different kinds of information depending on the user’s request. Some websites require visitors to register or pay to access their content, such as newspaper and academic journal websites, gambling sites and message boards. Other sites, such as file-sharing websites, Web-based email and real-time stock market data sites, require only that users have a valid username and password to log in.
The first website was launched in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist at CERN. It was the first publicly accessible webpage, and it was designed to share scientific research results with other scientists around the world. The web has since grown into an essential part of the world’s economy and culture, allowing people to connect with each other and find almost any information they need.
A website consists of a domain name, URL and web server. The domain name is the unique address that identifies a website on the Internet. The web server is where all of the web site’s files are stored and served. The URL is the Universal Resource Locator, which contains all the information needed to locate a specific web page on a website.
When users type a website’s domain name into their browser, the computer that serves the website looks up the domain’s IP address in the database of the Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS is an Internet directory that matches domain names with their corresponding IP addresses.
There are several ways to create a website, from writing the code yourself to using an easy-to-use software program. You’ll need a device that can access the Internet, such as a laptop or smartphone, and a web browser like Chrome, Firefox or Safari. You’ll also need a hosting service, which provides the space on the Internet where your website will reside. Web hosting services also take care of other tasks, such as ensuring that your website is available whenever you want to view it.