A website, also written Web site, web site, or simply site, is a group of Web pages and related text, databases, graphics, audio, and video files that are served up by a Web server to present information.

A web page is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). A web page may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors.

The World Wide Web (WWW) was created in 1990 by CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to use for anyone. Before the introduction of HTML and HTTP, other protocols such as File Transfer Protocol and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server. These protocols offer a simple directory structure which the user navigates and chooses files to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files without formatting, or were encoded in word processor formats.

A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the format that is sent to a client web browser. It is primarily coded in Hypertext Markup Language, HTML.

Simple forms or marketing examples of websites, such as classic website, a five-page website or a brochure website are often static websites, because they present pre-defined, static information to the user. This may include information about a company and its products and services via text, photos, animations, audio/video and interactive menus and navigation.

A dynamic website is one that changes or customizes itself frequently and automatically, based on certain criteria.

Dynamic websites can have two types of dynamic activity: Code and Content. Dynamic code is invisible or behind the scenes and dynamic content is visible or fully displayed.

Offers a variety of Internet services Examples of services:

News Sports Search engine/directory Web publishing Reference tools Maps Shopping Email

Examples of portals: AltaVista, AOL, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, Yahoo!

Contains newsworthy material Contain stories and articles related to

some of the following: Life, money, current events, weather

Examples: WSB-tv NBC.com

Promotes or sells a product Many examples

Offers exciting, challenging avenues for formal and informal teaching and learning

Online training for a new skill Online courses Online college classes Examples

UGA Phoenix University

Interactive and engaging Offer music, video, games, sports, chats,

sweepstakes

Describes a cause, opinion, or idea Presents views of a group of people or

organizations

Short for webblog Time-stamped articles or posts, in a diary

type format Vblog – a blog that contains video Blogosphere – worldwide collection of

blogs Vlogosphere – all vblogs worldwide Reflect interest, opinions and

personalities of the author

Encourages members in the group to share interest, ideas, stories, photos, music, and videos with other users

Popular examples: Facebook MySpace (12 million visitors a day)

Media Sharing Web site – different Allows members to share photos, music, and

videos ShutterFly, Flickr – popular sites GoogleVideo and YouTube are example for

video sharing sites

Private individual or family created People publish personal web pages for a

variety of reasons: Job hunting Share personal experiences Family histories

Most websites could fit in this type of website to some extent many of them are not necessarily for commercial purposes

A website that indexes material on the internet or an intranet (and lately on traditional media such as books and newspapers)and provides links to information as a response to a query.

Used to preserve valuable electronic content threatened with extinction. Two examples are: Internet Archive and Google Groups