What is a website

A website, web site or simply site, is a collection of related website pages or web pages containing images, videos or other digital material. A website is hosted on at least one web server and although usually accessible via the Internet can also be available on private local networks through an Internet address known as a Uniform Resource Locator or URL. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web.

A webpage is a document, typically written in plain text but with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.

Web pages are accessed and transported with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption (HTTP Secure, HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user of the webpage content. The user's web browser, translates the HTML and renders the page content accordingly.

Static websites

A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the format that is sent to a web browser.

Simple forms or marketing examples of websites, such as classic website, a five-page website or a brochure website are often static websites, because they present pre-defined, static information to the user. This may include information about a company and its products and services via text, photos, animations, audio/video and interactive menus and navigation.

This type of website usually displays the same information to all visitors. Similar to handing out a printed brochure to customers or clients, a static website will generally provide consistent, standard information for an extended period of time. Although the website owner may make updates periodically, it is a manual process to edit the text, photos and other content and may require basic website design skills and software.

Dynamic websites

Variable content is displayed dynamically by-way-of software systems like, ASP.NET, PHP and the like, usually by retrieving content stored in a database.

A website with dynamic content refers to how its text, images and other information are displayed on the web page, and more specifically how its content changes at any given moment. The web page content varies based on certain criteria, either pre-defined rules or variable user input. For example, a website with a database of news articles can use a pre-defined rule which tells it to display all news articles for today's date. This type of dynamic website will automatically show the most current news articles on any given date. Another example of dynamic content is when a retail website with a database of media products allows a user to input a search request for the keyword Beatles. In response, the content of the web page will spontaneously change the way it looked before, and will then display a list of Beatles products like CDs, DVDs and books.

The main purpose of a dynamic website is automation. A dynamic website can operate more effectively, be built more efficiently and is easier to maintain, update and expand. It is much simpler to build a template and a database than to build hundreds or thousands of individual, static HTML web pages.

HTML

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags, enclosed in angle brackets (like), within the web page content. HTML tags usually come in pairs like

and

, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example . The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, tags, comments, and other types of text-based content.

HTML tags can also be extended with attributes, usually name-value pairs, separated by "=" and written within the start tag of an element after the element's name. These attributes help browsers and software systems to identify and address these elements and offer additional properties to manage their appearance.

Browsers and search engines do not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page. Organizing the HTML tags in the correct hierachy help the seach engines optimise index the website's content correctly and accurately.