WordPress is a very popular program that is used to create blogs. You’re probably reading this because you’re wondering if you want to give it a try, or you’ve already decided but don’t quite know exactly why or what to do next. To appreciate the special qualities of WordPress we need to gain some perspective on what makes up a website, preferably without getting to technical.
When you look at a website (like this one) you are actually only seeing half of the picture. You are looking at what is called Web-page which has a lot more then your eye can see. For example it contains information that tells it that if you click here it should open a new window and show you another Web-page which has some information about me. You don’t see all that information, but it’s there. If you hear some technical people talking about “HTML” – that’s the language in which web-pages are written. The reason you are not seeing HTML is because the web-browser application you are using to view this page hides all the information you don’t need to see and only shows you what makes sense to you.
Web-pages are sent to you from another computer. When you type in a web address (called a URL) such as “www.iamronen.com” into your web-browser you are actually telling it to go to a computer that’s connected to the internet, it can be anywhere in the world, and ask it to show you what is on it. That computer is called a web-server. It is called that because it’s job is to serve you web-pages! Makes sense. Somewhere out there is a Web-Server which has been told to answer when you ask for “www.iamronen.com”.
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is a technical term used to describe a “place” on the internet. Most “places” on the internet are Web-pages. Every web-page in the world has a unique identifier (pretty amazing if you think about it) – this is it’s URL.
URL’s are made of two parts. The first is usually the name of the web-server. The second part usually comes after the web-server name and points the web-server to the unique page within it. For example.
- “www.iamronen.com/category/yoga” will lead you to a page that contains a list of yoga-related web-pages.
- “www.iamronen.com/contact” will lead you to page that has a contact form you can use to send me a message.
When you reach a web-server it shows you one web-page, a first page – this first web-page is called the Home-page . Usually it has some information on it and links that you can click. Those links point to other web-pages. Sometimes links point to other web-pages on the same web- server, sometimes they point to web-pages on other web-servers. For example:
- this-link will take you to a web-page on this web-server that contains an article I wrote about WordPress.
- this-link will take you to the another server – one that has lot’s of web-pages about WordPress itself.
What is a Web-Site?
Now it’s pretty easy to answer that question – it’s a collection of web-pages that exist on a web-server. You probably already knew that instinctively, but now we have a few basic terms to communicate some more about websites and WordPress 🙂
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