What is a website?

What is a website?

Daniel Wright | 19/10/2010

It sounds like a ridiculously simple question and yet I find myself regularly surprised by the number of times someone will not understand the potential of the web to address their business needs. If that really is true, then I think there’s definitely some value in revisiting what exactly a website is.

Wikipedia has a rather neat definition of the term website:

A website (also spelled Web site) is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator(URL), often consisting of only the domain name, or the IP address, and the root path ('/') in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network.

See the hook in that first sentence is really in the use of the term “digital assets”. A digital asset is basically anything you can put on a computer. If it can be put on the computer, then it can be put on a website.

More than this though, websites can (and should) be functional. Not only can they store data and display it when you browse the internet like it’s a giant electronic magazine, websites are capable of managing very complex functionality and simplifying the integration of business processes with technology.

We build a great deal of complicated websites that integrate with stock management systems, medical databases, payment gateways, mobile services and much more. This is now our stock in trade. More than ever before, the web is now about what you can do, not just what you can display.

tags: Web Design ,  Web Development ,  Common Sense