This is a short overview of what makes a website work.

In the simplest terms, a website is made up of files in a folder on a computer. It is group of web pages, images and other information. A website can be just a single webpage, or it can contain thousands of webpages. HTML files are the webpages. They instruct the browser what to display and how to display it.  

The computer at which the website resides is called a server. Web hosts such as Crafty Hosting provide space on a server to store and serve the website files to the people looking at your site.

When someone wants to look at a webpage, their computer needs to be able to find the location of the server to get the files to display. Servers have an IP address that identifies the server. IP addresses are a series of numbers though, and aren't very easy to remember or type. That's where domains come in. A domain name is essentially a name that gets associated with a certain IP address--your server.

So rather than someone typing out an IP address to find your website, they are able to type in the domain name. The domain then points to your server, which serves them the files of your website.

The HTML file is read by the person's browser, and the HTML coding tells the browser how to display all the text, images, colors and layouts. Tada! The website is displayed.

This is essentialy how all websites work. However, nowadays it is very common to have dynamic web techonolgies. Rather than having an HTML file that always displays the same information, script files in another code such as PHP generate the HTML pages. This allows the website to change its content based on new information. Shopping carts, blogs and forums all rely on dynamically generated content.

These scripts are written by programmers, but they can be installed and integrated into your website without any programming knowledge. Our Fantastico feature installs many of these programs with jsut a few clicks.

We hope this has been helpful in explaining how a website works!

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