What are websites?
Websites are collections of web pages, which are Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) document, accessed from a web address. Each web address is unique to a web page and its contents. A web page can contain any type of information and in many formats possibly: text, color, graphics, animation and sound.
Why People visit Websites?
Websites can serve two primary reasons:
- The world wide web (WWW) is an information center. You get a detailed information with regards to the choice of web address entered in your browser. You can invariably enter your choice on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo or Yandex.Students seek colleges to apply, while food lovers seek new joint to enjoy a wonderful meal. In all this, it simply enumerates that Information is Key.
- To complete a task; visitors may want to buy the latest phone, download a software program, or participate in an online discussion about a favorite hobby.
Note: You are creating the site for your visitors, not a private information archive. Organize your topics properly, share with passion and express notably to make sense to your visitors. A website is a communication channel, it is only successful if your information gets to the intended user.
Website Components
A Website component includes the various parts that makes a web site complete. Web pages are broken down into components for development. This allows various persons to work on the website as a whole. Web pages align with interactive scripts. These are Javascripts, PHP, Ajax, CSS and Asp.net. They hold these pages together, setting a rhythm of transition from one to the other. Here are some components as mentioned above:
- Home: Your registered domain displays this content as its first page. Your website is tagged with the first page view all around the world wide web. This correlates with the first impression we should give about the intent of the website. Home page not set right, is filled with broken links and visitors gets out fast. Create a captivating home page that tells and redirects properly to needed pages on the information you intend to share.
- Menu: Visitors spend a lot of time on websites with very elaborate navigation menu. Every click responds fast, and leads to a much more interesting page than the former.
- Logo: Every website is identified with its unique logo. This is good practice for companies with long history of service provision and goods distribution over the internet.
- Contact: Visitors should be able to contact you from anywhere in the world and why not put a webpage specific for that purpose. The contact us page can have a full location address, with google maps, email address, phone number, fax, telex and possibly post office mail address. Today we have been able to integrate web forms to instantly alert us of the request via the contact form fields.
- About: The about us page is a way of telling about your company or person on a single web page. People like to know if you are true, sincere and after their interest if you are writing about self. You should let your visitors see the required basic information about your company. A story of your origin and mission will be the best way to go.
- Gallery: An image gallery seems to be a grand thing. If aligned well withing the web page, you might have a very catchy page where visitors will like to scroll until the end.
- Footer: Traditionally, websites have always allowed their footer information to house the copyright infringement information, terms of service (TOS) and privacy policies. Today, many information is found within the footer: newsletter subscription, Logo, sub menus and many more.
- Sidebar: These can exist either on the right or left of your web page. It helps hold smaller information housed in blocks we call widgets. Ranging from company profile, latest news, contact forms, newsletter subscription and possibly adverts.
- Articles: Articles are renamed as needed in various websites; for some they call a blog article, others call it news articles. They change dynamically while other pages remain static. Today, article publishing has become a known thing. It could be fun or work.
- Social Share: The vast majority of the world like to hang on social medias; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more. Placing an Icon for share on your website structure can help get your information to a vast majority of people in one click.
- Monetization: One great benefit to monetizing your website is the statistics you will be made aware of that is denying your website the opportunity to make more than its potential. You will be forced to put your house in good order for your revenue to flow meekly.
- Media:Web pages displays images and videos. These slows down your website when loaded directly from your web host. Smart web developer share these media from popular media sharing sites like you tube, Dropbox and many others. This is done with a technique we call embedding.
Basic Versions/Forms of Website
- E-Commerce
The internet allows merchants to reach world-wide customers. Even product reviews are much more a huge trend to contend with. Newer products are available over the internet via eCommerce Platforms. The ability to process credit-card transactions over the internet was a huge push of encouragement in this direction. More companies are getting involved with eCommerce, this encourages more people to pay what it takes to get their deliveries to their door step.
- Blogging
Blogs were very popular back then cause they allowed the very intelligent ones to express their thoughts on the world wide web. Today every person can blog just about anything that pops into their head. Visitors on a web page must be seeking information for what he/she needs. They could either be independent blogs like a single News article or a part of your website. Content management systems (CMS) has helped us beat the challenges of old. Anyone can be a blogger overnight no restriction to age. If you are not blogging about your passion, what else can you really do online for fun. Some major website created free blogging platforms for the common man which comes all pre-installed. Google offers Blogger, WordPress offers a free version as well.
- Search Engine
The major gurus of the web page archives are those who are able to write up a website that does this function appropriately. Search engine websites are not a small starter web aspirations cause they include alot of rquirement set to cut off competitions from the smaller industries. These web pages are search ny means of a spider bot program, which reads the HTML platform for needed information which include:
- Permission granted for the bot to search your website.
- The website complete details to be made known to the Engine.
- The correlation of every single data in relation to the search phrase.
- Error checking and error reporting while still runnng a live website.
Amongst the World Wide Web, they found with a simple search and a couple clicks, your information. Dont make it harder to get the required information you revealed to the bot who made this available to the search engine. The google spider bot keeps statistics of how people behave on your website thereby if visitors spend more time on your website, you get a good rank.
- Social Media
Social media had existed for a long time on the internet and has not been much a popular platform until a unique one hit the market in 2005. Facebook rvolutionized the social media world and changed the way of doing social media with their version 2.0 approach. Twitter followed immediately. The effect on account holders was massive. The act of a share, makes it worth the time and effortlessness.
- File Sharing
More pages, documents, e-books, music files, and even movie clips are downloaded from websites. Many have the potential to manage larger documents and easily provide this to their online visitors. This is the purpose for these kinds of websites. One issue with these websites are law suits. They involve copyright infringements. E books, Music and video files fits right in this category.
- Chatroom
There are a number of ways to allow people interact online. The Chatroom was one of the oldest form of human conversation directly on the internet. It has now been transitioned into the social media platforms. Yahoo used to be a leading chatroom managers and they received a heavy load of visitors online. This allowed us to choose yahoo mail over other mails. Today we have whatsapp on our mobile doing the same thig on the go. You basic facebook platform allows you a chat option with your friends and that makes it much more a complex interactive system. If Facebook decides to offer free email address in the future with every account created for contemporary use, i believe that the likes of gmail and yahoo mail will go extinct like the Hotmail and AOL of old. Many apps are built to keep the chat alive. This is the closest we have to human interaction on the internet over long distances.
- Other Forms/Versions of Websites
Websites are modeled for various functions in unique ways. A simple home router has a basic website platform that allows adjustments of the router functionality to help optimize the service provision. Some website serves as ad rota-tors for publishers like myself and many others. I suggest you search the internet for more functions of the website. Learn how they are used for personal and corporate benefits.