Website
website, also written
Web site,
[1] web site, or simply
site,
[2] is a collection of related
web pages containing
images,
videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one
web server, accessible via a network such as the
Internet or a private
local area network through an Internet address known as a
Uniform Resource Locator. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the
World Wide Web.
A web page is a
document, typically written in
plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (
HTML,
XHTML). A web page may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable
markup anchors.
Web pages are accessed and transported with the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption (
HTTP Secure, HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user of the web page content. The user's application, often a
web browser, renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a
display terminal.
The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a simple Uniform Resource Locator (URL) called the
homepage. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although
hyperlinking between them conveys the reader's perceived
site structure and guides the reader's navigation of the site.
Some websites require a
subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, parts of
news websites,
academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites,
message boards, web-based
email,
social networking websites, websites providing real-time
stock market data, and websites providing various other services (e.g. websites offering storing and/or sharing of images, files and so forth).
Overview
Organized by function, a website may be
It could be the work of an individual, a business or other organization, and is typically dedicated to some particular topic or purpose. Any website can contain a hyperlink to any other website, so the distinction between individual sites, as perceived by the user, may sometimes be blurred.
Websites are written in, or dynamically converted to, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and are accessed using a
software interface classified as a
user agent. Web pages can be viewed or otherwise accessed from a range of
computer-based and Internet-enabled devices of various sizes, including desktop computers, laptops, PDAs and cell phones.
A website is
hosted on a computer system known as a
web server, also called an HTTP server, and these terms can also refer to the software that runs on these systems and that retrieves and delivers the web pages in response to requests from the website users.
Apache is the most commonly used web server software (according to
Netcraft statistics) and
Microsoft's
Internet Information Services (IIS) is also commonly used.
Static website
A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the format that is sent to a client web browser. It is primarily coded in Hypertext Markup Language, HTML.
Simple forms or marketing examples of websites, such as
classic website, a
five-page website or a
brochure website are often static websites, because they present pre-defined, static information to the user. This may include information about a company and its products and services via text, photos, animations, audio/video and interactive menus and navigation.
This type of website usually displays the same information to all visitors. Similar to handing out a printed brochure to customers or clients, a static website will generally provide consistent, standard information for an extended period of time. Although the website owner may make updates periodically, it is a manual process to edit the text, photos and other content and may require basic website design skills and software.
In summary, visitors are not able to control what information they receive via a static website, and must instead settle for whatever content the website owner has decided to offer at that time.
They are edited using four broad categories of software:
- Text editors, such as Notepad or TextEdit, where content and HTML markup are manipulated directly within the editor program
- WYSIWYG offline editors, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver (previously Macromedia Dreamweaver), with which the site is edited using a GUI interface and the final HTML markup is generated automatically by the editor software
- WYSIWYG online editors which create media rich online presentation like web pages, widgets, intro, blogs, and other documents.
- Template-based editors, such as RapidWeaver and iWeb, which allow users to quickly create and upload web pages to a web server without detailed HTML knowledge, as they pick a suitable template from a palette and add pictures and text to it in a desktop publishing fashion without direct manipulation of HTML code.
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