Each day when browsing the Internet, we visit a lot of websites, some more complex, others - just simple personal pages. The term "website" represents a summary of all the content you have put online - each file takes part in what the website represents. And the driving power behind the website, the pillars that hold it together, are the web pages.
The Web Page
Each web page (also known as webpage) represents various types of information presented to the visitor in an aesthetic and readable manner. Most of the web pages are available on the World Wide Web, which makes them widely accessible to the Internet public. Others may be also available online but only restricted to a certain private network, such as a corporate intranet. The information in all those web pages is located on remote web servers in the form of text, image, or script files. A smaller amount of web pages are intended for home or test use and are located on local computers, which do not need Internet connection to display them.
How do web pages work?
The information on a web page is displayed online with the help of a web browser, which connects with the server where the website's contents are hosted through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). For instance, if you look at the URL of the web page you are on at the moment, you could notice the prefix 'http://', which tells the browser what protocol to use to execute the particular URL request.
Each web page's contents are usually presented in HTML or XHTML format, which allows for the information to be easily structured and then quickly read by the client's web browser. With the help of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), designers can precisely control the web page's look and feel, as far as layout, typographic elements, color scheme and navigation are concerned. CSS instructions can be either embedded within the HTML web page (valid for that particular page) or can be included in a separate external file (valid for the whole site).
An example of How to Create a Simple Web Page
<html><head>
<title>Your title goes here</title>
<link href="/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body bgcolor="white" text="red">
<h1>My first Web page</h1>
This is my first web page!
</body>
</html>
Web Page content
There are multiple types of information that could be presented on web pages, which could be divided into two main groups - perceived information (visible to the website visitor) and hidden information (hidden from the visitor's eye).
Depending on the purpose and target audience of a website, its perceived information could be textual, non-textual and interactive.
The non-textual information includes static images (e.g. GIF, JPEG, PNG or TIFF), animated images (e.g. animated GIF, Flash, Shockwave, Java Applet), vector formats (e.g. Flash, SVG), audio file formats (MIDI, WAV, MP3, Java Applets), video files (WMV, RM , FLV, MPG, MOV). Interactive content on web pages could be displayed via DHTML, interactive illustrations, script orchestration or DHTML based buttons. For interaction between the content on separate pages developers use hyperlinks and forms.
The hidden information on web pages includes comments, metadata, charset details, CSS visual specifications, scripts (e.g. the interactivity focused JavaScript, Ajax).
Depending on the type of information, a web page could be qualified as being static and dynamic. Static web pages contain static text files that are displayed on the screen the way they are stored on the web server. Dynamic web pages, in turn, are retrieved by the browser in accordance with the interactivity instructions set for the particular web page.
Creating a Web Page
When faced with the task of creating a web page, there are several ways one can go on. There are a lot of web pages created by simply using HTML code. Such pages are simple and not very interactive, despite being fast to load and browse. A way to create a more advanced web page is by using a programming language (also known as scripting languages), such as PHP, Python or Perl. PHP-based websites are preferred by many web page designers, who rely on the ease of use of the PHP code.
Creating a website using a scripting language however is a hard task, since you must possess extensive knowledge on how to do it. This is why there are a lot of website builders, which sport a wizard-like approach to the creation of web pages, using several predefined templates. This way, you can easily create a whole website in just several hours with no knowledge of any scripting language. All of the Low-Cost NTC Hosting web hosting plans offer the Online website builder, in order to give our clients the tool they need to create their web page the way they want to.
Web Pages with NTC Hosting
NTC Hosting has been in the web hosting business long enough and during this time we have gained valuable experience on what a client needs in terms of plan features. This is why both our CMS hosting and regular hosting plans come with enough web space to host an almost unlimited number of complex, database - driven web pages.