Knowledge Base

What is a Web Site?

In literal terms a Web Site is the collection of files that make up the pages of that site. The files are held on one or more computers running a special program called a Web Server. It is the Web Server program that serves up web pages to your Browser when you look at a web site. Although the Web Server is actually a program, we usually refer to a Web Server as the computer running it since its role is normally dedicated solely to this task.

Web Browsers and Web Servers rely for their simplicity on a key method of communication over the Internet called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (commonly referred to as HTTP). It sounds complicated but is just a fancy name for a set of rules that govern how they communicate with one another. It is also why the names of web sites always appear as something beginning with HTTP:// when you enter them into your browser address line. It is this protocol that allows us to click our way from one page to another in a web site, or to jump from one web site to another via a link.

What is a search engine optimisation?

How do we rate Search Engine’s? We personally decide which of them works best for us. That means a number of things; the first being that design and layout of the search engines web page is relatively easy to use.
The second and most important, though, is the quality of the results it gives us. For instance, if we enter the keywords “ford dealers uk” we really want to get a list of web sites back that have information relating to Ford Dealers in the United Kingdom. If the first site in the list gives us exactly what we want we would rate that search engine higher than one that didn't’. In other words, we would say the quality of the results were better because they told us exactly what we wanted to know.

That is the goal of every Search Engine company, to give exactly the information you want. But how do the Engine’s establish which site had the most useful information for you? Well, in the beginning it might have been a simple enough task of looking for web pages that had those keywords in them. Unfortunately, as the web started taking off, and web site designers realised search engines were the main means people would use to find they sites they designed, they would get crafty and add words to their site that weren’t entirely relevant to the content in the aim of getting visitors to their site on false pretexts in the hope they might buy something there anyway.

This resulted in an intellectual battle between the web site designers/marketers and the search engine companies where the latter would develop more and more sophisticated programs for sifting through the information on web pages and determining their true content, and the former would strive harder to exploit any remaining loopholes that could find to get their sites to appear in response to as many keywords as possible.

For honest web designers, interested only in getting information to their targeted audience, this now means they have to use sophisticated knowledge based tools to help them design their pages in such a way that they will get a high ranking for the keywords they expect people to use to find them. This is the job of the search engine optimisation specialist. It is a skilled and laborious job, but carries an enormous potential for the success of a companies web based marketing strategy.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A website built around a content management system (CMS) is a system that can be used to organise the creation of documents and other content. A CMS is frequently used for managing websites and web content, though in many cases, content management systems require special client software for editing and constructing articles. The market for content management systems remains fragmented, with many open-source and proprietary solutions available.

At SiteWeavers we specialise in solutions based around the Mambo CMS system