What is Website?
Website
A collection of web pages is known as a website. The web pages may have a collection of text, images, audio, video, etc. We can also say that website is the collection of data and information about specific things present on the web. Few examples are facebook.com, amazon.com, wikipedia.org, etc. A website can only have a single domain name, for example, tutorialandexample.com.
All the websites are publicly accessible from the World Wide Web (www). Any website generally starts with its homepage. A website is managed by an individual, an organization, or a company.
Definition
The variety of the website is unlimited. A website can be a news forum, music, video sites, educational websites, e-commerce, social media, and many more. A website's page consists of many things like text, audio, video, images, etc. There is no such rule to dictate any website.
Any person can create their website and host it on any server. But a standard website follows all the patterns that make the website looks great and easily accessible by users. Generally, the website's homepage contains all the contents of the website and other links connected with the website. It helps users to access the contents of the website as per their requirements. An internal web page to which several other pages are linked in a coherent structure (such as a specific category of topics) is called a "parent page."
Each and every page of the website is a single HTML document. All the HTML documents of different pages are bind through a hyperlink or simply a link that can be grouped in a navigation bar for easy use.
A great website has navigation on each page of the website instead of just on the homepage. It allows the user to access the main structure of a website quickly.
Another important part of the website is the footer. Footer is present at the bottom of every page of the website. Footer contains some external links and some other external resources. This part of the website also contains a disclaimer, contact info, policies of the website, copyright, address of the company, etc.
A server is required to host a website. A web browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc., is required to access a website. We can access the website on mobile, laptop, and pc.
We need to enter the URL address of the website in any search engine to access any website.
Originally, websites were categorized by their top-level domains. Some of the examples are given below:
- .gov = Government Authorized Websites.
- .edu = Education related websites.
- .org = Non-profit organization’s Websites.
- .com = Commercial Websites.
- .info = Information Websites.
One of the most popular domains in modern days is the ".com" extension.
History of Websites
A British physicist at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, developed the first website in 1990. Three years later, on 30 April 1993, CERN makes sure that anyone from all over the world can access the World Wide Web (www) for free.
How a Website Works
Whenever we enter any URL address in the search bar, various thing happen:
- First of all, the URL we have entered gets resolved.
- A request is sent to the server of the website.
- After the request has been made, the server prepares the response.
- Finally, the information on the website will be displayed.
Whenever we enter any URL address like tutorialandexample.com, a request goes to the special kind of server on the internet called Domain Name Server ( DNS ). The role of the DNS is to convert the domain into IP addresses. These DNS stores tables of machine names and their IP addresses.
So when we enter the URL tutorialandexample.com, the first DNS converts the URL address into their corresponding IP addresses, which identifies the computers that serve the tutorialandexample.com Website. After this, the browser has made a request to the server with an IP address of the domain name. The browser collects together a group of information and that information to the IP address. The data is sent using the standard known as "Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP."
After the request has been made to the server, a server prepares the response and sends it to the browser again in the standard form known as "Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP." The browser will parse the server's information and checks the data and metadata enclosed in the response. Based on that, it decides what to do.
The browser goes through the HTML data returned by the server and builds a website based on that. We should know that HTML does not decide anything about the website, i.e., what it should contain contents, and how it should look. The only work of HTML is defining the structure and giving the information to the browser which content is a heading, which content is an image, which content is a paragraph, etc.
