Basic Websites
What Exactly Is A Website?
That may seem like a really silly question but did you know that a website is actually an Internet address or rather a location on a server (your website host) on which your web pages are located?
The hosting server allows access to your site for the dissemination of educational, organisational, personal, religious, etc. information, doing business by selling products or services, expressing opinions, perhaps interactively and a whole host of other uses to which you could put your website.
Generally there are two type of websites – informational and commercial. Every organisation imaginable has a website, from governments to terrorist groups to moms wanting to sell or buy baby clothes to news agencies to colleges, to families wanting to share the photos of their latest holiday – you name it and someone is doing it.
For most of us the point of a website is to either give or get information, in other words, we all want to communicate.
The Process of Designing A Website
In order to fulfil the primary aim of communicating, a website has to have a structure that fits its purpose. If it is only giving out information, the website may be a single page, although five pages is more likely once you add the privacy page, the contact us page and some of the other pages required by regulations or for the basic functioning of the site. An ecommerce website, on the other hand could have anywhere from 5 to thousands of pages depending on the number of products being sold. So the first step in the process is to decide what the purpose of your site will be – commerce or information.
The next step is to choose and obtain a domain name. A domain name is the address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of your website. Your domain is made up of your name, your company name, or any other identifier you want to use followed by .com, .co.uk, .net, .org or similar. The name will be registered with a Registrar (such as 123Reg. or Network Solutions and many, many more) and you pay for them to hold the registration usually for one or two years.
The third step in this process is finding someone to host your website. Hosting services provide a place to “house” your web pages and constant, high speed access to the World Wide Web. They often provide support and some even process the transactions initiated by their clients’ websites. Don’t buy the first one you see, do some research to find a reputable, reasonably priced service that will provide what you actually need. Expensive isn’t always best or even better than cheap.
The final step to getting onto the Internet is to design or have someone else design and produce a website that will meet your needs. Most hosting services provide a control panel (often referred to as the “back end” of your site) in which there is information such as emails, domains, scripts, program and statistics. The statistics will give you information about where visitors come from, how many visited the site, which search engine they used, which search term they used and so on.
There are many different programs available with which websites can be built but for a novice it can be very frustrating trying to build a website unless someone walks you through the terminology and how the structure is interlinked, etc. Some types of sites are easier than others to build but they all involve some computer coding and commerce sites can be quite complicated especially if payment is to be taken over the website as well.
For help to reduce the confusion, email info@redhotwebhosting.co.uk today.
Basic Websites - Red Hot Web Hosting