You probably have been thinking about getting a website for your business or organization for quite some time. (If you haven't yet realized the importance of having a website, please read the article "You Need a Website".) But developing and implementing a website may have seemed too complicated or time consuming. Don't worry - Katopia Design can make the process simple and we'll take care of all the technical details.

So just how do websites work, anyhow?

The first step to having your own website is to figure out the content for your site and then layout a design. After that's complete, the coding process begins. "Coding" is when a web designer/developer takes your concept and makes it web-ready so that it can be viewed by a web browser (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox). HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a very common way to code websites as is PHP and ASP among others. These acronyms may look familiar because you commonly see them as the file extensions in web addresses.

Basically, every webpage is a file that is stored on a computer known as a server. This is not at all unlike a Word Document that is stored on your personal computer. Simple, right? Take a look at your web browser's address bar; it says, "http://katopia.com/howwebsiteswork.html". What that means is that the webpage you're currently viewing is an HTML file called "howwebsiteswork.html" and that file is being stored at "katopia.com" so that you can view it on the internet.

Okay, so you've developed your website and worked with a web designer to convert your design into web-ready files. Now what? Now you need to get it online for the world to see!

After you've completed your website so that it's coded into web-ready files, the next step is to actually get your site online! I just briefly mentioned that your website files need to get stored on a server. But just what is a server anyway?

A server is basically just a fancy word for a specific type of computer. There are a companies, called web hosts, who own servers and they rent out space on these servers so that you and I can store our website files there. Personally, I use and recommend LunarPages for an inexpensive and reliable web host. You pay them a small monthly fee and they give you a free domain name and space on their servers for your website files.

A "domain name" is the unique web address for your website. You are currently looking at a web page found on the domain katopia.com. Whatever a user clicks on or types in your domain name in their web browser, they are directed (through the magic of the internet) to your website.

In summary, to make a website first you have to create special files that can be viewed by a web browser. These files are then stored on a web host's server computers. You choose a domain name so that when someone goes to yourdomain.com, they will be directed to the files you created and they will see your website! I hope that this article helped to clear up the mystery of how your website will work.