What is a Website?
A website generally consists of one or many documents, graphics and resources that are stored on a computer (server) in a geographical location. A web browser is a piece of software on a user’s device that is used to retrieve the documents and display them to the user in a correctly formatted manner.
The user will either search for a document using a search engine such as Google or they will type in a correctly formatted Domain Name into the web browser address bar in order to retrieve the correct website documents.
Websites such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others contain catalogue’s of Domain Names and a search function so that users can search for names, goods and services. The returned list will contain linked text that, once clicked, will display the relevant website..
Website Creation
Websites are generally created using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). There can also be Javascript coding for effects and languages used for backend database access such as Mysql, Asp and Perl. There is also Java, Python and many others to learn and choose from when designing a website.
A website can be created by hand coding or by the use of various different applications (apps). There are a multitude of apps that can assist in the creation of the website such as CMS systems (Content Management Systems) like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal. The functionality of these app driven websites can be greatly enhanced with prebuilt plugins (pre-programmed additions). Alternatively, the website can be hand coded using a number of different computer languages.
Hand coding the website will give a greater degree of control to the programmer but will usually take much longer to achieve the finished product and will require a greater level of skill and knowledge, than that required for the apps mentioned above. However, with the huge range of website design systems and app’s available there is no need to start from scratch and websites can now be designed very quickly. There is still the creation, editing and manipulation of graphics, audio and video files to contend with and some back-end coding will be required to achieve the required results.
Options at Tay IT
Here at Tay IT in Perth, Scotland we can hand code but prefer to use WordPress as our go to App for website creation and design.