Website — everyone has more or less an interest in the thing. So today I will discuss in detail what a website is and how it works. If we have to say what a website is, the easy answer is: the system by which you are reading this article right now is a website.
But knowing it the easy way is a problem of its own. You cannot explain it to someone like that. Let me put it a little more formally. A website is in fact made up of a domain and web hosting together.
Breaking the word website apart we get, web = world wide web (www) site = a place / a particular location
So from this a neat definition can be built. A website is a particular place or location on the internet. The internet world is very large, and a small place within it is Facebook, Google, Twitter, Ulkaa and so on. These, then, can be called websites.
Right — before learning about websites, let's learn about the web browser. A web browser is a kind of application software by which we can visit any website. The browser's job is to send the data given by the user to a particular location on a particular web server, and to show the response it gets back as output. This job is not remotely easy. To understand it you have to understand networking. Let today's discussion of it stay brief 😛
As I was saying, this is how web browsers go on serving us. The names of a few of the most popular web browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera and so on. So far we have learned some basic facts and concepts about the outside of a website. Now let's learn about what is inside — by which I mean what a website works on top of.
A website essentially stands and works on two things: 1. The domain name 2. The hosting server
I will discuss these in detail another day (insha'Allah). Today let me just give the basics. So, as I was saying. A domain is a name. Like these: facebook.com, stechbd.net — these names are the domains. And everything you see when you enter a website is essentially a file kept on some web server. When we type a web address into our web browser, for instance google.com then, from the domain name server, according to google.com's IP it finds out which computer it is on. It then shows the files kept there. The blue and white login page we see when we go to Facebook is essentially a file. In Facebook's case this file is written in PHP . PHP is essentially a Linux-based programming language. That is, Facebook's server is Linux based.
Anyway, the file has now been shown. How do we see it in the browser? When the browser sends the server a request to show a particular file, the server sends that file (subject to permissions) to the browser as a response. It does not send the PHP code directly, though. It converts that into a kind of markup language called HTML and then sends it. For if it did send the PHP code, we too could copy all of Facebook's code and build an identical site 😛
It is not the case, though, that it can only be done with PHP. A website can also be run on a Windows server if you like. In that case a language called ASP is normally used. I say normally because PHP can be used on a Windows server too. At present, though, PHP is the most popular, the most powerful and gives the best performance. And a Linux server is cheaper 😜. So poor people like me use Linux servers 😝. That is why its popularity is greater too. Besides this, another important language is JavaScript which is essentially a browser-side language.
Anyway, the browser now shows the HTML) web page according to the response it received. Passing through a great many complex processes like this, the web page appears in front of us within a moment. The largest part in all of this was played by the inventor of HTML, ‘Tim Berners-Lee‘. It is through the novel technology he built that the web world has advanced as it has.
Many of you may be at peace by now, having learned about websites. In truth, though, one more topic needs discussing: web design and development. Hearing the word design you have surely guessed that it is used essentially for arranging a website. Yes, your guess is right. What will the website look like? What will go where on the page? In what way? All of this is decided in web design. Web development, meanwhile, is done with web programming languages. Its job is to set what content the site will show and when, what will be shown to which user, and so on. So that is some discussion of web design and development. Now I have to draw a line. Other website-related topics will be discussed in detail later, insha'Allah.
If you have website-related questions, the comment box is there. I will try to answer as far as I can 😀
