What is a website and how does it work?

A website is collection of web pages containing different types of information such as music, video and or images (photos) and accessed on the internet. A website or simply a site as sometimes called, can have one or more pages linked by the special features typically known links/hyperlinks by which a user have to click on in order to jump or navigate from one page to another within the site. These web pages can be served on a single web server or more.

A website can link other pages from other websites to simplify navigation to other sites. Examples of websites are www.google.com, www.mwananchi.co.tz, www.about.com, www.yahoo.com, www.facebook.com, www.moe.go.tz, www.aol.com, etc.

Every site has its own web address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), that users have to type on the search box when they want to search for a specific site. If a user wants to search for a site without using a specific site’s URL, he/she must type the main keywords that will return the exact results expected.

In most cases a website is featured with the home page, that is among the site’s web pages serving as the table of contents (site’s content).

All websites differ in case of appearance and accessibility, for instance others have the navigation bar on the top of the pages while others have navigation options residing to any of the side bars.

Some sites require users’ personal details while others do not. Most of the sites that require users’ personal details are well encrypted for ensuring the user’s details are not accessed by unauthorized people. A user must subscribe in order to access the content of this kind of site. Most of these sites are forums or any of the websites where a user can create E-mail account or online profile. Examples of these websites are Facebook, Myspace, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, etc.

The web pages are built by using specialized languages whereby each language has its unique functionalities. The most common languages in the web are HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), Javascript, PHP and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

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