How does a website work?

My intention for this site is to help non-technical people to get their head round internet marketing. So it makes sense to start with something really basic – how does a website work?

If you’ve never built one, or had one built for you, you might feel quite bemused by websites. The truth is though, if you can use a computer and create and save files on it, you’re well on your way to understanding how a website works.

That’s because a website is nothing more than a series of files linked together. In reality, each page (even on a big complex, nice-looking website) is just a simple file, not much more complex than a Word document or an Excel sheet.

Granted, a web page has some differences, such as:

• A Word document is normally only viewed by you and selected others, whereas a web page is generally free for anyone to view over the internet
• A web page links to other pages using hypertext – better known simply as links – which you don’t normally do with Word documents. (In actual fact you can link Word and Excel documents this way, but you rarely see it done)
• Web pages typically follow a design template, so all pages on a site tend to look similar with standardised menus etc

These differences are minor though, so remember that a web page is in essence,  just a file, and don’t let any web experts try to let you believe otherwise.

So let’s think again about that Word document on your PC – what else would you do with it? Well, to create it properly you will have to give it a filename. Then, you save it somewhere – could be a drive on your computer, could be a CD or a USB drive.

With a website, you have to give that a file name too. The only difference is that because it’s shared publicly, you have to give it a unique name, to avoid people visiting the wrong site. That’s why domain names, which are basically just a filename for a website, have to be bought and reserved and only used once.

Whereas you might save a Word document to the hard drive of your computer, a website needs to be viewable by people all over the world. So, it has to go on a server. In layman’s terms a server is simply a computer that serves up the pages to people who go to your website. It’s not quite like your computer because it will always be switched on and can be accessed by anyone, which your computer can’t (strictly speaking you can turn your own computer in to a server to be accessed remotely by other computers, but it’s not really advisable, or necessary).

Buying some space on a server to host your website is really easy and affordable. Generally you will buy your domain at the same time from the same company. I use justhost for this, but there are loads of hosting companies out there.

So as you can hopefully now see, a website is not as far removed from a normal document on your PC, as you might have thought. And now you’ve probably got a reasonable understanding of the relationship between your website, the domain and the server and what each term means.

So, that’s the basics, but how do you get your website built, and put on to a server? There are various options here, so stay tuned for my next post where I will explain the basic options.

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Related posts:

1. How does a website work? (part 2)
2. Why you should treat your website visitors like teenagers
3. How QR Codes work and how you could use them in your marketing
4. How do you get website visitors?