Date First Published: 8th July 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Development
Difficulty: EasyDifficulty Level: 1/10
Learn more about what a website is in this article.
A website, also known as a site, is a collection of publicly accessible, related webpages held together under one domain name that have been published and maintained by an individual or organisation and hosted on a single web server. All public websites are part of the World Wide Web and are accessible by a web browser, such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
Do not confuse the terms 'website' and 'webpage'. A website is a collection of several webpages held together to form a site, whilst a webpage refers to a single page of a website. For example, this article is a webpage and Computerhelp4all is a website that consists of hundreds of webpages.
Ecommerce websites are designed to allow people to buy and sell products electronically on the internet. These accept online payment, such as MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal. Examples of ecommerce sites are:
Elearning websites allow people to learn things online. The definition of elearning is learning that takes place electronically on the internet, where people can learn at any time of day or geographical location. Online course sites and online degrees are examples of elearning. The content may be freely available or a paid subscription may be required to access the content.
Popular elearning websites include:
News websites deliver the news in a different format than on the radio or television. Instead, they deliver the latest news over the internet, where anyone can read what has recently happened in the world. Examples of news sites include:
An informational website regularly updated by an individual or small group that is published on the internet for anyone to read. Blogs are written in an informal style and often contain information about people's personal experiences, opinions, and lives. Anyone with internet access can create a blog. People often blog on sites, such as Wix, Medium, Blogger, and WordPress. Blog is short for 'weblog'. This website is an example of a blog.
A collaborative website edited by a community of users. Wikis can be edited by anyone at any time, allowing multiple people to share their knowledge of certain topics. Wiki sites have wiki software that runs on the web server, such as MediaWiki.
An example of a wiki is Wikipedia, the largest wiki on the internet that contains articles about almost everything. Fandom is another site that is divided into wikis. Because wikis can be edited by anyone at any time with almost no restrictions, they are prone to misinformation and vandalism.
A website that allows users to interact with other users online, such as friends, family, colleagues, and relatives. The purpose of social networking websites is to allow users to keep in touch with each other when they are far away. Users can customise their profile, send friend requests to people they know and alter other settings, such as the publicity of their profile.
Common social networking websites include:
A website that allows users to share electronic media, such as documents, photos, and videos. YouTube is the largest media-sharing website that allows users to upload and watch videos. Anyone in the world with internet access can watch the uploaded videos. Media sharing websites are often free for a limited amount of storage and for extra storage, a paid subscription is required.
Google Drive and Mega are media-sharing websites as users can share files publicly with other users.
A website that provides high-quality content that is designed to entertain visitors, such as films, music, games, and television shows. Most entertainment websites require monthly fees in order for the content to be accessed. Netflix is an example of an entertainment website.
A website designed to allow people to find and contact other single people and form a long-term relationship or a date online. Dating websites allow users to sign up by creating a profile and providing information about themselves, such as age, gender, location, and a photo of themselves. Most dating websites offer online messaging services and VoIP and have the features of social networking sites. Examples of online dating websites include:
A website designed to allow users to carry out searches by entering keywords and characters. It is used for finding specific websites on the World Wide Web. All the crawled websites are stored in a database and when a user performs a search, it compares those keywords and characters with websites crawled in the database.
Search engines constantly scan the internet, indexing new pages and can return results with thousands, or even millions of results with links pointing to the sites. Examples of search engine websites include:
Websites ran by non-profit organisations that do not have the aim of selling products or services to their visitors, but convince people to support them by making donations. Examples of non-profit websites include:
A website solely designed for displaying galleries. The galleries may contain photographs, illustrations, product images, and art. They may be commercial or non-commercial.
A type of entertainment website designed to allow users to play games online. Users may be able to interact with other players online through typed messages. These types of games are different from video games in the way that they always require an internet connection. Cool Math Games is an example of an online gaming website.
A website designed to allow users to review products, services, and companies. These sites use Web 2.0 to enable user-generated content as users can post their own reviews and give star ratings. Examples of review websites include:
A website that represents and covers religions, faiths, and traditions.
A website that contains information about a celebrity or a public figure. They can be official or fan-made. Examples of celebrity websites include:
The most popular type of website that businesses use to promote their services and products. Most businesses have a website so that they can represent their brand online. Ecommerce websites and non-profit websites are examples of business websites.
A type of website that is run by local governments. The aim of these websites is to inform the public about government business and services. Gov.UK is an example of a UK information website.
These websites provide users with web-based email accounts and allow them to send and receive mail through a website rather than a software program or app. They are accessed by web browsers. Examples of mail websites are:
A website that is a clone of another website. The files on the web server have been copied to another web server so that the webpages are available from more than one place. Mirror websites have their own URL. They may be used when one site receives too much traffic and becomes overloaded.
A website that stores previous versions of webpages for anyone to view. An example of an archive site is the Internet Archive.
A website that allows customers to access information about their bank accounts and perform financial transactions over the internet.
This type of website is created with malicious intent, such as spreading viruses and malware and phishing for credentials.
Phishing websites attempt to impersonate trusted companies to steal sensitive information. For example, a phishing website might mimic a login page for an ecommerce site to steal login details.
Fake news websites are another type of malicious website that attempt to deceive users.
Most websites are made up of these parts:
Also known as 'home', the homepage is the main page of the website that users see when they first visit the website or type the URL into their browser. The file 'index.html' is the default filename for the homepage. The homepage usually consists of:
The footer is located at the bottom of each webpage and often contains:
Footers are an important feature of a website as they help visitors navigate options at the bottom of each webpage. Footers act as a collection of elements that users go to when they are searching for a specific page.
The navigation bar, also known as a navbar appears at the top of each webpage. The navbar allows visitors to quickly find important pages of a website and acts as an organised list of links. Without a top navbar, users would have a difficult time finding the page they want to and would often have to click 'back' a few times. The navigation bar often contains:
In order to ensure that the website is compatible with mobile devices, most top navbars are a 'hamburger menu'. On mobile devices, the top navbar collapses and when visitors click on the three-line icon, a dropdown menu appears with the navigation links.
Top navbars can also be 'sticky'. This means that they remain visible on the webpage and stay in exactly the same position when the user scrolls down and do not require users to scroll up to see the top navbar.
Navbars can be vertical and appear on the left or right side of the webpage. These often contain links to related pages of the website.
The content is the text, audio, or visual content that is published on a website. This is the most important part of a website as without any content, a website would be useless. Creating engaging and eye-catching content is the key to getting a website higher in the search engines to attract visitors.
All websites require the following:
Since the number of people using portable devices, such as smartphones and tablets has increased over a period of time, it is important that websites are compatible with smartphones and tablets. A responsive design automatically resizes the webpage to the size of the device. This ensures that the content of the webpage will not look untidy or scrunched up on smaller devices, such as tablets and mobile phones.
An accessible design ensures that a website is useable by all visitors, including those with disabilities and visual impairments. Carefully considering the fonts and colours and ensuring that there is a sufficient amount of contrast ensures that a website is accessible. Also, all images should include an 'alt' tag that will display if the image fails to load and is capable of being read by screen readers.
Encryption is the use of complex algorithms to scramble sent information into random characters and symbols so that it cannot be read by any unauthorised users if intercepted. Websites that have login pages or require users to enter sensitive information should use HTTPS, the secure version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
It is used for communicating over the World Wide Web and uses SSL/TLS to encrypt data, convert plaintext to ciphertext, and then decrypt the message when the recipient receives it. This ensures that no unauthorised parties can read the transmitted information.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a very important factor for a website as optimising a website for search engines, such as Google and Bing will make it appear higher in the search results, meaning that it will be found easier and it will increase the number of visitors.
Relevant descriptions, keywords, and page titles by the use of meta tags are helpful for optimising a website for search engines, such as Bing and Google. In addition, SEO-optimised pages should contain no plagiarised content, no vague error pages, and no overly short or long titles.
When publishing a website online, there are some legal considerations that need to be considered. Examples include data protection and copyright laws. GDPR is a regulation in the EU that controls how businesses store and use personal data. The Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act is a law that provides protection for people's work and prevents it from being distributed without their permission.
All websites need to be compatible with common browsers, such as Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. This is because if a website was incompatible with a user's web browser, it would make the website unusable to some. Each browser interprets website code in a slightly different way, so it might appear differently on another web browser.
A website with a fast response time will ensure a better user experience. Website speed is the first impression that a website makes on visitors. A slow website will have a negative impact on SEO and will encourage visitors to leave the website.
Websites are created using a range of markup and programming languages. These include:
The basic and most widely used markup language on the World Wide Web. This achieves font, colour, graphics, and hyperlinks on the World Wide Web. HTML consists of hundreds of different elements and tags, all of which instruct the web browser on how to display content.
A stylesheet language used to define how HTML elements are displayed in a web browser. They can be used to adjust the layout, text size, font colour, background colour, and more. Without CSS, it would be much more difficult to create an eye-catching website that engages visitors and websites would be much harder to navigate.
A scripting language used to create interactive effects within web browsers. JavaScript can perform calculations, update and change HTML and CSS, display notifications in a web browser, and more. Almost all websites use JavaScript on the client side to control the behaviour of websites.
A server-side scripting language that is embedded in HTML pages. PHP is often used to create dynamic content, interact with databases, and perform calculations. Because PHP is a server-side scripting language, it is run at the web server before it is delivered to the end-user. This means that PHP code cannot be viewed in a web browser.
An open-source runtime used to run JavaScript code outside a browser. Node.js is often used to build backend services, also known as APIs. It is ideal for building highly scalable, data-intensive, and real-time apps.
An open-source JavaScript library used to simplify JavaScript programming.
An open-source programming language used to build desktop applications, data processing services, and automation tools. It can be used in web development.
In order for created websites to be publicly available on the internet for anyone to visit, they are hosted on a web server. Hosting services are provided by hosting providers, usually for a monthly fee, although most will provide basic features with limited bandwidth and other server resources for free.
As stated above, the use of mobile devices to browse the internet is becoming much more common. Responsive websites are much better for SEO and attract a wider range of visitors.
Even a small spelling mistake, grammatical error, or syntax error can give visitors a bad impression as it will suggest that the webmaster is unprofessional. Before posting an article, read it through to ensure that it makes sense. You can use a grammar checker, such as Grammarly to eliminate as many spelling and grammatical errors as possible.
Professional webmasters write website code and markup language from scratch. Creating a website using a WordPress or Wix template will give you limited design options as they do not allow you to edit the HTML of the template. By writing your own code, you will have full control over how your website looks and functions.
In addition, if you wanted to learn the markup and programming languages of the web and used platforms or templates to create a website, you would not be learning anything. All that you would be learning is how to use that platform.
A small inconsistency within a website can make a webmaster look unprofessional. When creating a website, always ensure that the footer, top navbar, side elements, colours, and fonts are exactly the same on every page and remain consistent.
A simple design will make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. When a design is too complex, it will make it much more difficult for visitors to use a website and understand how it works.
As stated above, each browser interprets website code in a slightly different way, so it might appear differently on another web browser. Always test your website in different browsers to ensure that it works properly.
Pages and sections of a website should be organised with a hierarchy so that visitors can find what they are looking for. This will prevent the website from looking cluttered.
For accessibility, website colours should not be too extreme (e.g. too bright) and they should have enough contrast. Stick to a few colours for the design of a website rather than using almost every colour on the colour wheel.
Popups that require users to click to continue reading an article are the most common annoyance factors on a website. Instead of creating a newsletter form popup, asking if users want to subscribe, you could place the newsletter form on the side of the footer.
Purchasing a custom domain name, such as 'example.com' makes a website much easier to find since all users have to do to visit the website is type the domain name into their web browser. Unless it is a temporary website, avoid using free subdomain names, such as 'mysite.wordpress.com' as these look long and unprofessional.
Both spellings have been used. However, the spelling 'web site' is now a rare and old-fashioned variant of the word 'website' and most people view it as a miswritten form. In old webpages that were written in the early days of the World Wide Web, you may sometimes see it spelt 'web site' or 'Web site'. 'Website' is now the standard spelling used in all English-speaking countries and it is all one word.
The first website, called info.cern.ch contained the first webpages with a description of the World Wide Web. It was first introduced to the public on 6th August 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee briefly summarised the World Wide Web project, but it wasn't available to everyone until 23rd August 1991.
On 30th April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be freely useable to anyone, contributing to the growth of the Web.
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