A website, also written as Web site, or simply site, is a set of related WebPages containing content, including text, video, music, audio, images, etc. 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.
Website builders are tools that allow the construction of websites without manual code editing. They fall into two categories: on-line proprietary tools provided by web hosting companies, typically intended for users to build their private site; and software which runs on a computer, creating pages off-line and which can then publish these pages on any host.
Later software was written to help design web pages and by 1998 Dreamweaver had been established as the industry leader; however some have criticized the quality of the code produced by such software as being overblown and reliant on tables. As the industry moved towards W3C standards, Dreamweaver and others were criticized for not being compliant. Compliance has improved over time, but many professionals still prefer to write optimized markup by hand.
A website contains webpage; a webpage is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). A webpage may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors.
WebPages 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 webpage 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 hyper linking 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.
Many web hosting companies and domain sellers offer website builder programs and templates in their packages. If you use the website builder provided by your web host, be sure to try out the many different templates offered so you can more effectively relay your web page’s image to your viewers.
