What is a website and how does a website work?

A non-technical explanation

What Is A Website?

A website is a communication tool.
Its primary function is to enable individuals and organisations to share and exchange information over the internet.

A website may:

• Make information available in electronic format
• Gathers information electronically
• Provide services electronically

How Does A Website Work?

The Internet
The internet is a global communication system designed to network computers with other computers based in other locations, using telephone, satellite or wireless radio connections.

By joining computers to a network:

• it is possible to transfer data between them
• data transfer on the internet can take place in different ways, or protocols.

The most common protocols currently in use on the internet are: 

• E-Mail (or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, SMTP), enabling users to send and receive personal messages in electronic format.
  
• HTTP (Hyper Textual Transfer Protocol): designed to enable users to access and make use of hypertexts , a type of electronic document that can contain automatic references, or links , to other files or documents - making it easy for users to move from one document to another, or to trigger actions on remote computers.

The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (www, or simply "web") is a symbol used to describe the vast collection of hypertext documents available through the HTTP protocol around the world. This choice of terms is due to the fact that hypertext documents stored in different locations around the world can be linked together electronically, forming a logical structure similar to a spider's web that extends over the globe.

By following the links, or connections, contained in hypertexts, users can move from document to document relatively easily: this makes accessing complex sets of information quicker than with other internet-based methods, and is the reason why - since its implementation in the early Nineties - the web has rapidly become the most widely used information system on the internet.

Hypertext makes it possible to combine text, graphics, audio and video into a single document: the web is therefore a multimedia information source, capable of conveying rich and complex information at the click of a mouse.

Websites

A website is a collection of electronic documents linked together logically in order to provide consistent information. These documents are stored on a computer that is connected to the internet, and made available via the World Wide Web.

Using the HTTP protocol on which the www is based:

• It is possible to assign a unique identifier, or address, to every collection of documents,
• The address distinguishes a given set from other sets of documents available on the web,
• It makes it possible for users to precisely locate the computer in which it is stored, and access it.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

The address you type to access a website

This is the full unique address of a file, such as a webpage, on the internet.

An http://www.example.com/news/article.html example URL into 5 parts:

1. http - The protocol (scheme), in this case the HTTP protocol. Other common protocols (schemes) include HTTPS and FTP.
   
2. www - This is the subdomain. The use of www is common for website addresses, although its use is not technically necessary. Some websites do not require the www subdomain at all, others do, it depends on the domain name's setup. Other common subdomains include ftp and news, which provide other methods of connecting to the server.
   
3. example.com is the domain name (or host).
   
   The subdomain (see www above) and the domain name can be replaced by an IP address. For instance, www.example.com could be replaced with 192.168.10.10 (192.168.10.10 is a reserved IP address, only used for example).
   
4. news is the directory on the web server where the file is stored.
   
5. article.html is the file itself. In our example, the file is a HTML document.

Web Browser

A web browser is a program which enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music, games and other information typically located on a web page at a website on the World Wide Web.

Text and images on a Web page can contain (hyper)links to other Web pages at the same or different website.

Web browsers allow a user to quickly and easily access information provided on many Web pages at many websites by traversing these links.

Web browsers format HTML information for display, so the appearance of a Web page may differ between browsers.

• Microsoft - Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Netscape - Navigator
• Google - Chrome