Searching and using the internet is second nature to most people. Each day, you consult different websites to seek information. However, do you ever stop to ask what a website is and how it works?
This post aims to enlighten you on how a website works in a simple manner to understand the concept.
The DNA of Your Website
Before we jump into the topic, imagine this first. Humans are very much like websites. You have eyes, legs, ears, and arms, while a website has buttons, videos, images, and texts. On the surface, it is quite simple, but if you look deeper, websites and humans are both controlled by code.
And for humans, it is your DNA. For websites, its HTML refers to Hypertext Markup Language. That code utilizes tags—directions wrapped in command prompts—telling your web browser how to show the web page.
In short, HTML is a language web browser understand, read, and convert to show information that is understandable to humans. Further, HTML files could be uploaded to a web browser, allowing any internet-connected computer or device with a web browser to find them.
The Style of Your Website
Many websites utilize cascading style sheets or CSS to guarantee comprehensive and proper style throughout their website. If you didn’t know, a CSS is an intuitive shortcut allowing web developers to make the necessary change to a single page and then systematically update the remaining website.
For instance, your organization likes to replace the colors of your website. CSS creates it so web developers can adjust the color palette on one page, and the other set of pages will follow suit. The awesome things do not just stop there, as CSS can also create numerous different website versions.
That helps when searching to make other style sheets for mobile devices, other operating systems, and more. CSS is the tool web developers utilize to create a uniform and streamlined changes to a website.
Content Management System
Would you like to schedule a meeting or an event to your website, make an announcement or enable multiple users to make edits simultaneously? You will not be using CSS or HTML to enable such capabilities.
As an alternative, you should use a web content management system or CMS, a software that handles and delivers numerous data types and keeps it all in uniform. That involves many common features of a website, such as calendars, wikis, forums, blogs, and many more.
The best part about using CMS is that you don’t need to add HTML code to make necessary changes to your website. It is already prepackaged software, and that means everything is designed with a WYSIWYG editor. That makes it possible for people not skilled in code to make relevant updates and changes. Awesome, right?
Server
There is one important thing you need to understand to learn how websites work. To that do, let’s go back to our metaphor of websites becoming like humans. You see, websites and humans both need a physical place to live. People live in apartments and houses, while websites live on servers.
You possibly pay a mortgage or rent on your place every month. Unless you have your server, you will need to rent a space for your website as well. For a monthly cost, web hosting providers rent out space on their servers so you can host your site.
So, the next time you type in a domain name, consider how your web browser is pulling data from a web host server, interpreting the HTML, and showing those crystal clear images on your screen.