Website

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Mozilla Firefox 1.0 front page screenshot.png A website (or Web site, according to Associated Press guidelines) is a collection of Web pages, typically common to a particular domain name or sub-domain on the World Wide Web on the Internet.

To date, there are nearly 80 million websites in the world with registered domains.

A web page is an HTML/XHTML document accessible generally via HTTP.

All publicly accessible websites are seen as constituting a mammoth "World Wide Web" of information.

The pages of a website will be accessed from a common root URL called the homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server. The URLs of the pages organise them into a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the reader perceives the overall structure and how the traffic flows between the different parts of the sites.

Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples of subscription sites include many Internet pornography sites, parts of many news sites, gaming sites, message boards, Web-based e-mail services and sites providing real-time stock market data.

1 Overview
2 Spelling
3 Types of websites
4 Mousetrapping
5 Prizes
6 See also
7 External links

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Overview

A website may be the work of an individual, a business or other organization and is typically dedicated to some particular topic or purpose. Any website can contain a hyperlink to any other website, so the distinction between individual sites, as perceived by the user, may sometimes be blurred.

Websites are written in, or dynamically converted to, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and are accessed using a software program called a web browser, also known as a HTTP client. Web pages can be viewed or otherwise accessed from a range of computer based and Internet enabled devices of various sizes, examples of which include desktop computers, laptop computers, PDAs and cell phones.

A website is hosted on a computer system known as a web server, also called an HTTP server, and these terms can also refer to the software that runs on these system and that retrieves and delivers the web pages in response to requests from the website users. Apache is the most commonly used web server software (according to Netcraft statistics) and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) is also commonly used.

A static website, is one that has content that is not expected to change frequently and is manually maintained by some person or persons using some type of editor software. There are two broad categories of editor software used for this purpose which are

Text editors such as Notepad, where the HTML is manipulated directly within the editor program
WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver, where the site is edited using a GUI interface and the underlying HTML is generated automatically by the editor software.

A dynamic website is one that may have frequently changing information. When the web server receives a request for a given page, the page is automatically generated by the software in direct response to the page request; thus opening up many possibilities including for example: a site can display the current state of a dialogue between users, monitor a changing situation, or provide information in some way personalised to the requirements of the individual user.

There are a large range of software systems, such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP) and the PHP programming language that are available to generate dynamic web systems and dynamic sites also often include content that is retrieved from one or more databases or by using XML-based technologies such as RSS.

Static content may also be dynamically generated periodically or if certain conditions for regeneration occur (cached) to avoid the performance loss of initiating the dynamic engine on a per-user or per-connection basis.

Plugins are available for browsers, which use them to show active content, such as Flash, Shockwave or applets written in Java. Dynamic HTML also provides for user interactivity and realtime element updating within Web pages (i.e., pages don't have to be loaded or reloaded to effect any changes), mainly using the DOM and JavaScript, support for which is built-in to most modern browsers.

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Spelling

As noted above, there are several different spellings for this term. Although "website" is commonly used, the Associated Press Stylebook, Reuters, Microsoft, academia, and dictionaries such as Oxford and Merriam-Webster use the two-word, capitalised spelling "Web site". This is because "Web" is not a general term but a shortened form of "World Wide Web". An alternative version of the two-word spelling is not capitalised. As with many newly created terms, it may take some time before a common spelling is finalised. (This controversy also applies to derivative terms such as "Web master"/"webmaster".)

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary and the Canadian Press Stylebook list "website" and "web page" as the preferred spellings.

The term is also occasionally misspelled as "web sight".

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Types of websites

There are many varieties of websites, each specialising in a particular type of content or use, and they may be arbitrarily classified in any number of ways. A few such classifications might include:

Archive site: used to preserve valuable electronic content threatened with extinction. Two examples are: Internet Archive, which since 1996 has preserved billions of old (and new) Web pages; and Google Groups, which in early 2005 was archiving over 845,000,000 messages posted to Usenet news/discussion groups.
Blog (or weblog) site: site used to log online readings or to post online diaries; may include discussion forums. Examples: blogger, Xanga.
Business site: used for promoting a business or service.
Commerce site or eCommerce site: for purchasing goods, such as Amazon.com.
Community site: a site where persons with similar interests communicate with each other, usually by chat or message boards, such as MySpace.
Database site: a site whose main use is the search and display of a specific database's content such as the Internet Movie Database or the Political graveyard.
Development site: a site whose purpose is to provide information and resources related to software development, Web design and the like.
Directory site: a site that contains varied contents which are divided into categories and subcategories, such as Yahoo! directory, Google directory and Open Directory Project.
Download site: strictly used for downloading electronic content, such as software, game demos or computer wallpaper.
Game site: a site that is itself a game or "playground" where many people come to play, such as MSN Games, Pogo.com and the MMORPGs Planetarion and Kings of Chaos.
Information site: contains content that is intended merely to inform visitors, but not necessarily for commercial purposes; such as: RateMyProfessors.com, Free Internet Lexicon and Encyclopedia. Most government, educational and non-profit institutions have an informational site.
News site: similar to an information site, but dedicated to dispensing news and commentary.
Pornography (porn) site: a site that shows pornographic images and videos.
Search engine site: a site that provides general information and is intended as a gateway or lookup for other sites. A pure example is Google, and the most widely known extended type is Yahoo!.
Shock site: includes images or other material that is intended to be offensive to most viewers. Examples: rotten.com, ratemypoo.com.
Vanity site (or "personal site"): run by an individual or a small group (such as a family) that contains information or any content that the individual wishes to include.
Web portal site: a website that provides a starting point, a gateway, or portal, to other resources on the Internet or an intranet.
Wiki site: a site which users collaboratively edit (such as Wikipedia).
Political site: A website on which people may voice political views. Example: New Confederacy.
Rating site: A site on which people can praise or disparage what is featured. Examples: ratemycar.com, ratemygun.com, ratemypet.com, hotornot.com.

Some sites may be included in one or more of these categories. For example, a business website may promote the business's products, but may also host informative documents, such as white papers. There are also numerous sub-categories to the ones listed above. For example, a porn site is a specific type of eCommerce site or business site (that is, it is trying to sell memberships for access to its site). A fan site may be a vanity site on which the administrator is paying homage to a celebrity.

Many business Websites have the appearance of brochures—that is, an advertisement that can be strolled around. Some websites act as vehicles for users to communicate with other people via webchat.

Websites are constrained by architectural limits (e.g. the computing power dedicated to the Website). Very large websites, such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google, employ many servers and load balancing equipment, such as Cisco Content Services Switches.

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Mousetrapping

Mousetrapping is a technique employed by some "aggressive" commercial websites which prevents the user from browsing away from certain pages on the site. This can be embarrassing in, say, a business context if the site is pornographic in nature.

Exiting from the browser is the simplest way to escape from this.

Typically, this form of trapping is employed by the use of Javascript code (or Dynamic HTML) that detects a user's attempt to either close the browser window or leave the Website to view another site. These attempts may easily fail if the user disabled javascript on their Web browser; however, disabling Javascript may also impact how well certain pages on the current site or other Websites load. Tools such as pop-up blockers can help in preventing this annoyance but by no means will solve the problem entirely. [1]

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