What is a Website in simple words?

Simple analogy to understand “Website”

Think of the Internet as a virtual world with land lots and houses. As you surf the Internet, you will be guided to houses based on their addresses.

You need the following for a website:

Virtual Land Lot (Web Hosting)

Your virtual land lot would be the server that will host your website. As the server has to be running 24/7 to keep your website up, I would strongly suggest against hosting your own website and engage a Web Hosting service provider as they have servers optimized for hosting websites.

Virtual Address (Domain Name)

Your virtual address is known as your Domain Name. The domain name for this website is minusonedigital.com, hope this example suffice. You can buy a Domain Name from a registrar online. Domain Name registrars are accredited by the governing corporation that coordinates the Internet.

Subdomain Names can be created from your Domain Name. A subdomain name looks something like this – marketing.minusonedigital.com or photography.minusonedigital.com. These subdomain names derives from the main domain name. Their purpose is to separate and organize distinctive content for you.

Virtual House (Website)

Once you have a land and an address, all you need is a house. And your website is your house! Like your house, you can fill your website with whatever content you desire for whatever purpose. Your house can be a store (e-commerce website) or a school (info-rich website), etc.

Benefits of a Website

A good website helps you to achieve your objectives, such as generating more sales leads.

Like most things, a website is only as good as the amount of effort invested into it. Here’s several essential considerations to building a good website:

Having a clear objective

Be clear on what you want to achieve from your website. This helps you to communicate properly to the web developers on what needs to be done.
E.g. Website goal is to generate leads, so the web developer will insert lead generations forms across the website.

Good content

If you open this tab, and all you see is “Just make good content.”, you would move on immediately wouldn’t you?

The idea behind a good content is to provide value to your users, such as answering a question. Because of how search engine works today, good content is better known as content-in-demand. My advice is to create content that answers to other users than create content that you consider to be good, unless you are not keen on having many visitors to your website.

Ease of use

Make it easy for site visitors to find the information they seek. Ensure that desired information are obvious and details is an option. As you scroll down this page, you can observe that I hide the details in drop-down tabs and leave the layman information in plain sight.

I believe this falls under the umbrella of User Experience (UX). I am not a subject-matter expert for this topic but I would recommend others to read up on it.

Optimize for mobile

As mobile internet traffic is growing and owns the largest share of the internet traffic today, it is imperative for websites to be mobile optimized to do well.

It is easy to access the internet on mobile phones today thanks to the advancement in technology.

Search Engine Optimization

Very specialized work to get your website to appear for certain search queries and keyword. This is of utmost importance and a heavily sought after service by companies as it puts their business directly in front of their potential customers.

I have created another page dedicated to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for those who are interested.

Learn More

Website Components

The 2 major components of a website that you should know about are the Content Management System and Control Panel.

These 2 components gives the users control over everything that is part of the website.

As the website is hosted on the Web Hosting Platform, the Control Panel and Content Management System will be on the Web Hosting Platform as well.

Web designers will usually work with the Content Management System only, while a Webmaster overlooks every component of the website.

Why is Content Management System important?

A content management system (CMS) or web builder is an essential part of the website as it manages and puts together all the bits and pieces to create the website we know today. It allows you to create and modify the content on your website using a simple interface without the need for coding.

The CMS manages the following:

Media Content

All the images and videos you see on the website, and how they are displayed.

Webpages

A website is basically a collection of webpages. When a user visits your website, they are essentially browsing through your web pages. The content and aesthetic of your webpage is important to attract more visitors.

Page Builders

A page builder grants the ability to edit and arrange the content on your webpages. Most page builders provides a visual composer that allow users to see and edit their web page visually, while some requires the user to type in codes.

There are a lot of drag-and-drop visual page builders that removes the barriers to entry for beginners who desires a website.

Blog Posts

Blog posts or Posts are utilized for timely content whereas webpages are utilized for timeless (static) content.

New blog posts on a website is the equivalent to an update on social media. Personally, I recommend to use blog posts to write stories to appeal to the users’ emotions and let webpages engage the users on a logical level.

User Management

The CMS can be accessed by multiple users simultaneously. Admin user can create other user accounts with varied permissions to allow for collaboration or transactions.

This means that you can allow users to register an account through the website and you can access their contact information.
E.g. Customer sign up for an account to purchase a product online

Or create an account specifically for users to manage the website with you.

e-Commerce Modules

e-Commerce modules refers to the ability to “add to cart”, “check out”, and making payment through payment gateway.

Some CMS comes with in-built e-Commerce modules while most of the others can install these modules separately.

Plugins (or Modules or Extensions)

For the prominent CMS(s), there are many plugins that are created by 3rd party and these plugins are very important. The e-Commerce module is an example of a plugin that adds the e-Commerce functionalities to a website.

Most website utilizes plugins for amazing functionalities such as analytics and tracking, which is not part of any vanilla CMS.

With that said, it is important to know your plugins as some of these plugins are not free or they could be malware.

What is Control Panel?

A Control Panel is a web hosting control panel software. It provides a visual interface for users to simplify the process of hosting a web site.

The Control Panel unlike the CMS; is a more technical software and slight misuse will result in crashing the website. Therefore, the Control Panel is usually not accessed by many except the webmaster and also the reason why I choose to talk about Control Panel last.

Nonetheless, here is a summary of what the Control Panel manages:

Where you set up and manage your email accounts that uses your domain name. It looks something like this:

tommyshelby@domainname.com

This is good for businesses to establish their identity and apply mass control to the email accounts by applying spam filters, etc.

Files

A platform for you to manage the literal files on the web server. You can access all your files that is responsible for running the website – from .php format files to the images that are used on the website. Visiting the file manager for the first time can be overwhelming.

Databases

Databases are needed for dynamic content such as:

1. Timely content (blog posts, etc.)
2. Account management (e-Commerce user accounts, etc.)
3. Product listing (e-Commerce shop products, etc.)
4. Form submission (contact forms, etc.)

Metrics

Access to information such as number of visitors, website errors, bandwidth usage, amongst other technical statistics.

Security

Manage the security aspect for your web hosting platform. You can block IP addresses and manage the SSL/TLS certificates from here.

Software

Manage web applications that are installed. Usually only used to install the content management system such as WordPress or PrestaShop.

What is this website utilizing?

Web Hosting

This website is currently hosted on Bluehost.

Domain Name

I got the domain name minusonedigital.com from Bluehost as well.

Content Management System

The website is using WordPress CMS, which is an open-source CMS (free).

Have more questions on Websites?

Reach out to me to share your queries and thoughts!