How To Website

If you're considering owning a website, you might want to learn more about how a website works. I've been making websites since 2006, so let me give you an overview so you can know what you're talking about and what your web developers are talking about.

Hosting

The web host provides the hardware where you can build or upload your website. You could run a website on your own computer, known as self-hosting, but there are drawbacks: You need to keep everything secure, ensure 99.9% uptime, and you may need a special router and/or internet service for best results.

There are free hosting providers, but some cheap hosting offers more capabilities and ease-of-use. For small and simple websites, hosting shouldn't be costly, unless maybe if you're contacting support every day or running cpu-intensive server-side scripts.

DNS

DNS allows you to have a name instead of a number as an address for people to access the website. You can get a free subdomain with some hosts, or get a free subdomain with a DNS provider such as freedns.afraid.org. Search engines and web browsers may not like the free subdomain option as much due to users putting malware and phishing sites on some other subdomains under the same domain.

The DNS makes the name point to the number. If the numeric address changes, the DNS will need to be updated. A website name can be made to point to any server or web host. DNS can sometimes take hours to "propagate" or take effect on the web.

If you get your domain through your host, you probably don't even need to think about DNS.

Domain Name

A cheap domain name may cost $10 or $12 per year. Some domains have been purchased by people as an investment because they expect them to be profitable, and these may cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy. You can save a lot of money by being flexible or creative with your domain names to try to find an unused domain. If you visit the domain and see someone asking for offers, it probably won't be cheap, but if it doesn't load anything, it's probably available. The place where you buy domains can easily tell you if a domain is available, i.e. cheap.

File Transfers

A web developer might work on a website via a local copy on his or her own computer, which he or she must then upload to the hosting server. To do this, FTP, SFTP, or a web interface may be used. Working on a local copy provides a backup of the website automatically. You have the online copy and the local copy, so if something happens to one, you probably still have the other.

Coding

A most basic web page just uses HTML. To change the appearance, we use CSS. To do stuff on the client/user side, we use JavaScript. To do stuff on the server side, we typically use PHP, but there are a few other popular options for server-side scripting. The PHP only needs to work on the server, but it's important that the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work right on as many web browsers as possible, especially the modern browsers. It's good to support browsers that are 20 years old, but that's not as important as supporting modern browsers. There are validators to help ensure that HTML and CSS conform to the accepted standards. To check JavaScript, we normally start with the web console available in most browsers, which shows errors and other potential problems. The major search engines provide tools and automated feedback to help improve the usability, crawlability, and hopefully the ranking, of websites.

Editors

Many text editors allow saving your document as HTML. The code generated is often a mess and usually not optimized for the web, but it can be used. Specialized HTML editors like CoffeeCup or DreamWeaver probably allow you to create better pages. When doing actual coding, you may use a text editor, but you must save as raw text like UTF-8, not any encoded or rich text format such as doc or html, even if the file has an .html or .htm extension, because those fornats add extra code to change the appearance of text. You want to edit the actual bytes when coding, so save as UTF-8, but when using an editor to do the coding, save as HTML.

CMS

A CMS like WordPress or Joomla can also elimimate or reduce the need for coding. These and other scripts are available via Softaculous in the control panel of some hosts, or you can upload scripts manually.

Web Server

A web server can refer to the machine or the software that runs on it to make a website available on a LAN or WAN. Any internet-capable computer can be used as a server.

.htaccess

This is an optional Apache config file that controls some security and other features, including access to files, redirects, 404 or other custom error pages, blocking IPs, and more.

robots.txt

This is an optional file placed in the web root folder to kindly ask robots to please be nice by obeying rules such as a time limit between requests, not crawling certain directories, and even blocking of some bots. May contain the address of a sitemap.xml file.

sitemap.xml

This optional file can help crawlers find pages or prioritize the crawling of certain pages on your website.

favicon.ico

This is an optional file in your web root that gives your website a custom favicon. I should probably talk about apple touch icons eventually.

SEO

SEO aims to help your website appear in search results and move up to the top of the results. Some SEO gives SEO a bad name, called black-hat SEO, which seeks to trick search engines into ranking the page higher and could result in penalization or removal from results. However, white-hat SEO is good and honest and aims to help the search engines work better so the crawlers can better "understand" or process the content appropriately.

And More

As I think of it.