What is a Website?
First, it was men on horse back and the pigeons, then came the postal service, then came the private couriers, then came the telephones and so on. Over the generations, the comunication channels have changed and over years, internet has changed the way we communicate. Today, it takes a fraction of a second for an email to reach from one part of the earth to the other part. Thanks to the internet, we could know what is happening in other parts of the world within the minutes or even seconds.
Technically, a website is a collection of electronic documents written in a definite syntax shared over the internet using a defined communication protocol. The definite syntax is called HTML or HyperText Markup Language and the defined protocol is called HTTP or HyperText Transfer Protocol.
In layman terms, a website is a means of sharing information through a set web pages viewed in a web browser. This information could be static (which means that all the visitors of the web page would see the same page independant of where they are viewing it from, what date they are viewing it from, etc.) or dynamic (where the content of the web page could change based on several factors including but not limited to the geography of the user, the date and time the web page is being viewed, the user who is logged on to view, etc.). A typical example of a static web page is this page where the visitor is displayed same information while the BBC News website would be a very good example of a dynamic web page where the news articles change on an hourly basis.
Websites are a great media to reach larger audience and to provide information on demand. Today, a website is not just limited to providing the information. There are a wide range of websites covering many topics. A purpose of a website could be anything. A website could be about news, about games, about travel, about history, about geography, about products, about product reviews, about product comparisons web diaries or even about About itself. According to Wikipedia, there are nearly 80 million websites in the world. Think of any topic in this world, you would find a website on that topic.
Who can have a website?
Well, the answer is simple - anybody. There is no restriction on who can have or own a website as long as the content on the website is legal. What does this mean? Legal content means that the content on the website is not an infringement of copyright and is not prohibited or banned by the Government of India. Even technically, its easy. Thanks to all the new blogging tools, starting a website does not take much technical knowledge if a person is already well versed with the working of the computer and the internet. However, for a person who is new to the computer itself, it might be a slightly tough task to set up an own website. If the necessity is not to self create a website, there are many web designers readily available today who would agree to create a website and maintain it for you at a small price. The advantages of internet come in very handy at such a time. That is, the web designer need not be in the same city as you are, they can be anywhere in India (or even world) and you could get the work done without having to see their artistic face even once.
What is required for a website?
The bare minimum requirements for a website are a computer to contain the web pages and an address by which one could access. A website need not be on the internet, it could be on a local stand-alone computer with a HTTP server running locally. However, more practical websites use a Domain Name as an address and the computer used to contain and distribute the web pages is called a Hosting Server. We would deal with Domain Names and Hosting in more detail in separate articles, for now, a website requires a Domain Name and a Hosting service.
How much does a website cost?
The answer to this depends entirely on you. What is your requirement and what are your expectations with the website. A simple personal website could be free (like a blog at Google blogspot) or it could cost several thousand Rupees a month for a full fledged high functionality corporate e-commerce site. The components involved in the cost of a website are : Domain Name, Hosting Service and the cost of maintaining the website itself (if you outsource the website maintenance). In a separate article, I have put forth the arguments and justifications for a free website vis-a-vis a paid website. Hope you find the information useful.
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