Setting Up a Website

Behind the scenes

At the most fundamental level, when you access a website, e.g. http://www.example.com/page.htm, your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) talks to a computer (web server) pointed to by www.example.com and asks for /page.htm. The web server then looks for that file, and sends it back to your web browser.

Howstuffworks covers this in more depth.
Types of sites

Broadly put, sites can be of two broad categories. Of course each category has its own leagues within.

* Static sites
Servers hosting these sites basically have all their content on disk and just return pages (generally HTML) when requested.
* Dynamic sites
Servers that host these sites generally do not have the web pages on disk in a form that is meant to be returned to the user. Making use of scripting languages, the web server reads a script (program) and generates the HTML on the fly.

As with any system technical or biological or otherwise, the lower the complexity, the less things can go wrong; and vice versa. On the other hand, greater functionality generally requires greater complexity.
The process

From a corporate point of view, the Queensland government got a nifty article here. And for the first step it asks the questions of purpose - why do you want to set up a website, and it’s purpose. One may be impatient and want to just get started, but without a vision, people perish 1. Knowing the purpose of the website will also help to answer a lot of the questions that follow.

The next step is usually choosing a domain name (those things that end in .com, etc.). I list this before choosing a web host because it takes more time (thinking) and has longer term effects. Changing your web host is much easier than changing your domain name (and all your promo material). A domain name is essentially your point of identity, and can be used for anything on the Internet (e.g. email, running an IRC server, etc). In one sentence, a domain name can be used to point to any (”real”) computer on the Internet. Think about it as a directory service. Check out this page for advise on choosing a domain name.

It should intuitively follow that the question of where that real computer is - the web server, aka web host (the computer hosting the website for you). Okay, where it resides isn’t really so much the important factor as knowing its IP address to put into the domain name service. There are various factors to look for in this - storage size, support for scripting languages, etc.

Note that some cheaper web hosts provide domain name and web hosting bundles but do not give you full control over your domain name. For that you’ll need to read the fine print. This may be fine for an average Joe but I strongly advise against this. It may be possible too that some companies may actually register the domain name under their own company. Of these companies, beware. Various other issues to beware at this stage can be found here.

Depending on your needs, and how much capital and operational costs (not just financially) you are planning to put into this, you can choose the static or dynamic route. Most commercial sites tend to go with the dynamic route as it facilitates the management of content through content management systems. The features of content management systems vary greatly from free ones to fully custom developed ones. They tend to be theme-able thus allowing you to change the face of the site without affecting the brawn behind it.

There are two issues from here to consider - the technical side of security, and the social side of spam. As with any non-trivial system created by humans, we can never ascertain that it is completely secure. However, most of these CMSes tend to be open source code developed by pools of developers who counter check each others’ code. So, if you keep your CMS up to date, you should generally be on the safe side. Of course the usual security measures are common sense too, such as the having of strong passwords.

The next step for most companies would be to make a website interactive. Having an interactive website provides lots of benefits such as the ability to gather user feedback, allow user interaction, etc, such as on forums. If you are considering using a major open source CMS such as Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla, I would say that the technical security side of things would be similar to the above mentioned. However, the next step with accepting users to transmit any data to the server is that of spam. This doesn’t just apply to email, but web forms, etc. can all create potential issues of being too much work to take care of.

I think that should be enough information (with links) to get started at investigating the possibility of setting up a company website. As with most real world things, the cost of maintaining a website usually outweighs the cost of starting a project. How do you refine a website from here? How well defined are your target markets? Can your users find the information that they want easily? Wikipedia provides an overview to this and various links to explore further.

I will be the first to claim that this document is incomplete. The question of setting up a website can not be answered in a page, nor is making of these decisions as straightforward as buying a pack of chips. There is no such thing as absolute security in systems created by man - we can only ascertain to a sufficiently high level that one has implemented sufficient security required for a particular system.

That in one page sums up my main thoughts on this topic. This is the first time I can recall writing a technical article, and would appreciate any feedback on my writing :-)

References:

1. Proverbs 29:18