A Beginner's Guide To Websites.

What is involved in setting up a website?

Firstly, you need a domain name. A domain name translates a number that identifies where the website is stored into a name that people can remember. A website may be stored on a computer that is identified as 283.389.222.289, but a visitor couldn’t possibly remember that, so the business leases a domain name – they may choose something like goldwidgets.com if they just happen to sell gold widgets. So then, 283.389.222.289 = goldwidgets.com and when someone types in goldwidgets.com , their computer says ‘Ahh… you mean 283.389.222.289’ and takes them to the correct website.

There are a range of domain ‘extensions’ to choose from, but the most popular in Australia is .com.au. This means that the website is a commercial website (.com) in Australia (.au). The website owner may not want to state they are in Australia, so he or she may just choose a domain ending in .com which is very popular in the United States.

Once a business has a domain name, they need a design. A design could be as simple as the colour of the text and the background, or as complex as animated images, logos and themes that visitors associate with that business or industry. Design is generally undertaken by a graphic designer or website designer.

Once you have a design that you are happy with, you can then have your pages made up. This involves the business supplying the designer with either specific or general information, and the designer organizing this information into web pages.

Generally speaking, you pay for each page that is created, whereas the design costs are usually calculated by time or a flat rate.

After the pages have been created and any additional components are added (lets keep it simple and not talk about that just yet), then a website needs to be stored somewhere, otherwise no one can access it. It is NOT a good idea to try and store a website on your computer, as you need for other people to access it. This is not secure, and besides, it takes a large amount of resources (such as computer power and telephone lines) to allow many people access to your website at the same time. So, most businesses have hosting for their websites. These are computers located in secure facilities that have many websites on them. Their connections are fast and they can store much more information than a standard home computer. They are also managed, so the business owner doesn’t need to fix any problems that may occur. The computer that stores the information has an identification number that helps other computers find the website. This is called an IP address. We covered this earlier.

Once the hosting has been set up, and the website uploaded (this is usually done by the designer), then you need to ‘point the domain name to the IP address’. There is a registry of different IP addresses and their corresponding domain names. It is necessary to make changes to the domain name’s registration details so that the registry knows where the information is being held for that particular domain’s website. It is actually more complicated than that, but let’s keep it simple.

After all this has been done, your website is online! Other people around the world can see your website! BUT, can they find it without knowing the web address (domain name) ? Luckily, there are ways to make this happen without sending the entire population of the world a business card or brochure.

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