How Websites Works — An Exploratory Explanation for the Non-Technical Person (Part 1)
Hello Guys,
Today we will take a look at how websites work. The questions I answer in this article are: what really happens when you type in that website’s address in a browser and hit enter? Why can you see that search bar at www.google.com? Where does it all come from? To understand the concepts explained in this article, you need no prerequisite knowledge about technology at all! Yes, you read that right, nothing.
Let us begin from the most basic of the concepts. Before you can visit a website, you need to know the website’s address. Two very popular website addresses are www.facebook.com and www.google.com. To use facebook, or google, you need to open a browser and type either of two website addresses into the browser’s address bar, and just like that you’re able to access the services they provide. This “website address” (www.google.com or www.facebook.com) is called a URL by technical people, we will see why shortly.
First Concept: Exploring the URL.
URL is an acronym formed from the words Uniform Resource Locator. The URL is informally called a web address. The name Uniform Resource Locator makes a lot of sense when you think of a website’s content as resources.
A typical example is our dear old Wikipedia. Wikipedia contains a lot of resources spanning education, history, entertainment, and whatnots. The Wikipedia article on Barack Obama, for example, can be accessed by clicking the web address; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama. This web address locates Barack Obama’s Wikipedia article on the internet and sends it to your browser! Do you see why the web address is called a Uniform Resource Locator now? (Hint: URLs are direct addresses to resources (web pages) on the internet).
You, hopefully, now understand that every webpage on the internet has a URL associated with it and that browsers need this URL to display the webpage to you. Great job if you’re here. I’m rooting for you.
Next up is what really happens when you type in the URL and hit enter?
Second Concept: Web Servers.
If you’ve spent some time around Software Developers (or any technical person for that matter), chances are you’ve heard them talking about, or mention web servers. Every now and then, an article crops up on the news about a companies’ web servers going down, or being attacked by hackers. If you’ve never really understood what a web server is, then I write this (with love) for you. *tear.
Let us back up a little to after you type in the URL into your address bar, and hit enter. At this point, your browser takes the URL that you’ve typed in and tries to find the Web Server that holds the resource you have requested for. So, can we say then, that a Web Server is “something” that holds websites? Correct. Can we also say that these web servers have addresses through which they can be accessed? Yes, we can. In fact, these web servers are not “something” at all, they are computers just like yours.
The difference, between these computers that are used as web servers and your laptop, is that instead of surfing the internet, listening to music, and making documents, they are used to store web pages, connected to the internet and given an address through which other computers on the internet can find the web pages stored on them!
A typical example is Wikipedia’s web server. It is a computer that holds thousands (possibly millions) of files for various Wikipedia articles.
If we bring what we know about URLs and Web Servers together now, the process really is this:
1. You enter the URL into your browser and hit enter,
2. Your browser searches the internet for the Web Server that owns that URL (address) and asks it for a web page.
3. The Web Server determines which of its web pages you want to see and hands it to your web browser.
4. Your Web Browser displays the web page to you.
It really is that simple, guys. In part two (2) of this article, I will explain how these web pages are made in the first place before they are put on a web server.
If you have any questions, you can (as always) shoot me an email at vnwonah (at) outlook.com. Cheers!
