Website

From Saferpedia

A website is a collection of web pages, images, videos and other information with a domain name or a common IP address. A website is hosted on at least one server accessible trough a network like Internet or a local private network. Web pages may include elements from other sites with anchors and corresponding mark-ups.

Web pages are accessed and transported with Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which can address encryption methods (Secure HTTP, HTTPS) to supply security and privacy for the user.

Web pages usually can be accessed from a simple URL (Uniform Resource Locator) called start page. Some sites require a subscription to view the entire content or just for parts of the content. Examples of these sites: business sites, news sites, academic journals, games sites, etc.

History

World Wide Web was created in 1989 by the CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee. On April 30 1993, CERN announced that WWW is free for everybody to use. Before HTML and HTTP were introduced, to download files from servers were used other protocols like FTP and Gopher. These protocols offer a simple directories structure where the user can surf and choose files to download. Documents were presented as simple texts without any formatting.

General presentation

According to functions, web sites can be:

personal web sites;
commercial web sites;
governmental web sites;
Non-profit organization's sites.

A web site can be realized by a person, a company or an organization and is designed for a specific subject or purpose. Any web site may include a hyperlink to any other website. Web pages can be viewed or accessed generally by any device connected to Internet like: PC, laptops, PDAs, mobiles, etc.

A website is hosted on a computer called web server or HTTP server. The most used software for a web server are Apache and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

Static websites

A static website has pages stored on a server in the same format they are sent to the browser. Examples of static websites: the classic 5 pages site, the brochure websites, etc. These sites include information about the company like: products, services, about the company, etc.

This kind of a website usually display the same information to all visitors. Just like a brochure which you hand to your clients a static site will supply standard information consistent for a long period of time. The owner of the site can make periodic updates.

Dynamic website

A dynamic website is a site which is frequently and automatically changed or customized according to specific criteria. Dynamic websites can gave two kinds of dynamic activities: code and content.

Dynamic code

The code is build dynamically while writing it using an active programming language instead of the static, simple one (HTML). A web page dynamically generated will interrogate various types pf information from a data base and will put them together to present to the user a coherent web page.

Dynamic content

A website with dynamic content refers to how certain messages, texts, images and other information are displayed in the page. The content is variable according to specific criteria.

The main purpose of a dynamic website is the automation. A dynamic website may operate efficient, can be built more efficient and is easier to maintain, update and extend. It's simpler to build a template and a database than building hundreds and thousands of HTML static pages.

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