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Websites: Defined

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What is a website?

Well basically, it’s a location on the World Wide Web. A place where individuals, businesses or other organizations can have a presence that is accessible by some or all of the Internet’s users. It typically has a home page, where users often enter the site, and subsequent directories and subpages. The file structure that makes up a website is really quite similar to that which you’re familiar with on your own PC, in that it is broken up into folders, each containing files (text, images, and other files) which is all pulled together via HTML in order to be presented in an appealing, logical way to web surfers.

A little more detail please.

Web pages today are typically compiled of three primary aspects: content, presentation, and markup/programming. The content encompasses the vast majority of the site’s textual information, as well non-presentational graphics, videos, sounds and other files like PDFs or Flash animations. In modern browsers, presentation is handled using CSS (which stands for Cascading Style Sheets), a method that allows websites visual aesthetics to more easily be created, maintained and updated as well as reducing the time it takes to download each page. CSS has become the industry standard and replaced older, more time consuming and inefficient ways of handling the layout and formatting of web pages. Markup/programming is all of the coding that is required to deliver the content and presentation to a user’s browser. Markup specifically refers to the HTML, XHTML or XML that makes up a basic web page. HTML held the position as reigning champion for the majority of the 90s and even well into this decade, but slowly XML, a format that emphasizes using standards to allow a broader range of devices to deliver web pages (such as PDAs and cell phones). XHTML is the marriage of the two technologies, and is generally considered the best practice for creating most web pages as of the writing of this article. Each technology, HTML, XHTML and XML, have different versions which are constantly evolving, which requires that web designers and developers constantly update their skillsets in order to provide websites that will have maximum longevity and depreciate gracefully over older browsers. Finally, programming typically refers to more intense levels of coding, such as PHP, ASP or ColdFusion, which allow web developers to offer more advanced services such as shopping carts, member logins, and many more of the most interesting things about the web.

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