A website is a collection of web pages and other media or file such as images, videos, flash, etc...

A web page is a single document (computer file) which is viewed using Internet Browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc... It contains content, information, media such as images, just like a normal page of a book. However, a web page is very versatile as compared to a page in a book. A web page can display moving images, which is commonly known as videos, sounds, flash files, such as flash games and much more. A web page also allows interaction between the reader and the page through these media. A web page may also contain forms, contact forms especially, where the reader fills it up, if he wanted to contact the owner of the website, and with a click of the submit button, gets his message into the email database!

A database is just a collection of information, normally huge amount of them, that is very organised, usually recorded as a table form, and it is usually stored on servers.

Just think of them as dedicated machines that serves data, resources and many more. They are responsible for storage of files and your website has to be on a server so that it can be accessed by the World Wide Web.

             Server  <------------> Website Visitors
             /     \               (from their Internet Service Providers)
            /       \
           /         \
     Database <---> Website

Do you see the triangle? Well this is the link. Just incase you might not know, Internet Service Providers are organisations that provides their customers with access to the Internet. You have one, if not you wouldn't even be here. Alright, lets get back. Servers are responsible for both database and website. As website visitors request for a certain web page, the server would then reply back with the web page. There are certain types of web pages such as PHP which requires the server to render the script so the server will process these web pages, and links up to acquire information from database if required, and return the processed web page to the viewer.

Web pages are not solely comprised of visible content and media(images). They contain programming languages, artificial language used on computers, which are not visible to the viewers. These programming languages, HTML being the most common, instructs how a web page would look like and also places media (images) in it. For instance, placing images, defines how big an image is, what is the font size of the web page, colour, etc... The reason why web visitors do not see these languages is because the browser has already rendered these. In other words, the browser has already interpreted how the website look like, according to the programming language, and displayed the final product. In order to see these programming languages, you have to open the web page file on plain text editors or web developing software. This is because plain text editors and web developing software(script editing mode) do not render the language, thus leaving the content of the file as it is.

In the last segment, I mentioned that certain types of web pages requires the server to process it. These web pages are being rendered first on the server then passed on to the viewer's browser which gets rendered once again to show the final product. Rendering on the server is much more advance in a sense that the server has greater abilities such as obtaining information from database and incorporating it into the web page. There is no way you can obtain the pre-rendered web page which has been processed by the server, unless you login to obtained the unprocessed file.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, an artificial language, also known as computer language, which you are required to know in order to build web pages. Whereas PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, an artificial language too, it is recommended for the much more advanced web developers. If you have not started or just started web developing, it is not recommended for you to learn PHP yet.

This is year 2008 and technology has advanced a big lot. More and more people are having internet access right from the comfort of their home. The internet is like huge library of books. A library with websites that contain videos, games, etc... The internet is so huge, that I doubt we can finish reading all the websites in a lifetime. My point is, it is very good to access huge amount of information from just one machine - the computer. If you own a business and do not have a website, you are at a disadvantage. This is because your business isn't going to be famous, more like, no one really knows about it. By having a website, you are actually contributing your own 'book' to the internet. Google search and other similar search engines are like the computers in the library where it will help you find relevant books that you are looking for. Just submit your website to these search engines and when people search for a certain keyword, they will be able to access your website and get to know more about it. People like to do research before spending their money on products! Let me illustrate:

$ = How pricey the same products are between the companies.
Company A           Company B             Company C
$$$$$$$$$$          $$$$$$$               $$$$$
Well-known website  New website created   No website
             \             |               /
        99%   \        20% |          10% /
               \           |             /
              Customer doing research on
              product he is wanting to buy
              /                \
        89%  /               1% \
            /                    \
Company D                     Company E
$$$$$$$$$                     $$$$$$$
Rather established website    No website


Well-known        : Referred to by friends, rather established too.
Rather established: Top 3 searches in search engines for product keyword.
New website       : Just created, middle to bottom few searches for product key-word.
No website        : Totally no website! Either customer walks by the shop by chance or quite well-known for the price.

The percentage displayed is just an illustration of what the chances are of knowing of the existence of the company.

Say for example, the customer gets to see Companies A, B and D websites. He would probably go for Company B because of its lowest cost. However, he does not know of Company C so both Company C and him looses out. I think you get my point.

I hope this has help you get more familiar with what websites are and if you intend to, you can proceed on to learn HTML from my other article.