Building Your Own Website from the Ground Up

What is a Website?

• A website consists of one or more "pages" that may be accessed by a web browser.
• A web browser is a piece of software that runs on your local computer but shows content from a website hosted on a web server.
• A web server is a computer located at a particular address on the internet that is configured to respond to requests from web browsers and provide "pages" of content.
• An "IP address" is an "Internet Protocol address," a unique number that identifies a computer on a network; the whole internet is nothing but a set of uniquely identified computers that can send packets of information to each other by means of their IP addresses.
• A page is a handy metaphor for "everything we see on our computer screen in response to a request we made of a server through our browser." The metaphor must not be pressed too closely; the content displayed in a browser by a server can be much more subtle and dynamic than a piece of paper or a page in a book.

What is a Domain Name?

• A Domain Name is a human-readable alias for an IP address.

• URL
• DNS
• IP address
  • IPv4--static vs. dynamic
  • IPv6

"While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an IP address, and therefore has 232 (4,294,967,296) possible addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, for an address space of 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) addresses."

How do I design a web page?

Static

• HTML
• css

HTML editors:

• Dreamweaver
• Bluefish

Dynamic

Content management systems.

• Database
• Scripts (PHP, cgi, Perl, javascript)

ISPs

GoDaddy

Slicehost

Amazon Web Services