This is a basic note about building websites. For ease of reading, I have listed down key definitions as a table below. In order to launch a website, the 3 key components you would need are a) Domain Name, b) Hosting space, and c) Website builder (unless you want to build it from scratch using HTML or other code).
By the way, 101 is an allusion to an introductory course, often with no prerequisites. When I did my Engineering, typically the 101 courses were the first to clear within each specialisation that each of us had chosen 🙂 Eg: FM101 would have been Fluid Mechanics 101, I guess …
Website Basics
| # | Keyword | Description |
| 1 | Domain Name | The website name or URL that you want to buy / register. This only gives you the name. It doesn’t give Hosting (space). You can buy Domain Name and Hosting from different providers. Popular ones are Namecheap, BigRock, GoDaddy etc. GoDaddy is known for Domain name service. WordPress is known for their Website Builder. |
| 2 | Hosting | This is the space where all the pages and data of your website will reside. Hosting provider can be different from Domain name provider. Popular hosting providers are Bluehost, HostGator, DigitalOcean, AWS etc. A Control Panel is where you can manage the files on your hosting space. cPanel is a Linux based web hosting control panel. |
| 3 | Website Builder | This provides tools build the website using drag and drop interface, without coding. Wix is a website builder. GoCentral is the Website Builder of GoDaddy. WordPress is a very popular and free website builder. |
| 4 | Normally for a website named mysite.com, we want to have e-mails in the format mymail@mysite.com. Typically, this has to be bought at extra cost which depends on number of mail IDs (mailboxes) and space provided. | |
| 5 | TLD, SubDomain | Top Level Domain or TLD is the extension that we see .com, .org, .net, .in, etc.. The main middle portion is actually called SLD (second-level domain). And www part is actually a SubDomain. We can create SubDomains to have sub-sections of the website. |
| 6 | Redirects, Not found | In the internet world 301 and 302 are redirects. 301 is a temporary redirect, whereas 302 is permanent. I can redirect https://music.hobbycue.com to http://hobbycue.com/music. 404 is an error code to denote that a page was not found. We can customise our website to deliver a specific message if a page is not found. |
| 7 | WhoIs | WhoIs is an internet protocol to store and retrieve details about a domain name. Lookup website such as whois.com and whois.icann.org provide the domain owner name, phone and address. Domain name providers usually provide a service (for an additional fee) to keep these details hidden. |
| 8 | SEO | Search Engine Optimization – Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. are search engines. Each search engine has its own methodology of indexing and ranking pages from the web. The aim of SEO is to provide the right meta data in the website so that the ranking improves. Yoast is a very popular SEO tool for WordPresss./td> |
| 9 | HTML and CSS | Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets are two of the core technologies for building Web pages. HTML provides the structure of the page, and CSS the (visual and aural) layout, for a variety of devices. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is an international community that works on the web standards. |
| 10 | Responsive Design | Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach which makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes. A quick way to check this on a PC is to compress the browser width to the size of a tablet or mobile, and the contents should automatically re-align. |
| 11 | RSS | Really Simple Syndication – a web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. Users may deploy news aggregators that automatically check the RSS feed for new content (This passing of content is called web syndication). |
Let me know if I am missing anything here, and I’ll be happy to add. The next on this series that I plan to do is a “WordPresss Basics 101”.
One of my first blogs in here was lost-internet-treasures, which referred to a website hosting space called Tripod. I’m not sure if those days tripod had a website builder or not – hence I had to build the site using HTML. But building a website is so much more easier these days, with hardly any coding!
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