Website
We all have been visiting websites every now and then. For a common man a website is simply a web address like http://www.opensourcecook.in etc which shows some content.
According to Wikipedia
A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server.
In this post I would like to break down the concept of a website with respect to a technical aspect. This will be helpful for web developer who plan to host or make websites.
How do you setup a business
Let us try to understand this with a simple example. Consider that a person want to run a business. To run a business you need to register a name for the business say "ABC Corp".
Now your business needs a actual physical location i.e. an office, so you buy, rent or lease some office space somewhere.
Then you associate your registered organization/business name with the office location.
Finally you actually furnish you office space will suitable content for you customers and clients.
Once this is done when people look up your business name or organization they follow the address and come to your location and do business with you.
The same concept is followed in a web site.
Website setup
Domain Registration
To host or setup a website the first thing you need to do is register a domain name which is suitable for your business, like I here have www.opensourcecook.in
Getting Web Space
Second thing you need is space on a web-server which will allow you to host your site. This can be done in multiple way, by setting up your own web-server, buying/renting web-space by hosting providers etc.
In any case you need a suitable web-space on some server.
Domain Pointing
Once you have got some web-space, the next step you need to do is to associate you domain to this web-space i.e. the server. Generally you should have a domain control panel which allows you to do the same.
In most case we usually register our domain and web-space from a single business usually referred as web hosting providers.
The domain pointing to to web-server is similar to the concept of advertising our business address actual location.
Technically at this point we have a web-site ready but it is similar to an empty office, at this point if any one visits our site or office the find no content or any thing useful here.
Setting up content
So to absolutely have a website we need to load it up with some webpage with suitable contents.
You now need to set up some static, dynamic web pages as per you requirement on the server.
Today you can setup you website to server content in multiple different way out of which one of the popular mechanisms is using a Web-CMS.
Discussion about the difference between static website vs dynamic website will be in another post.