Welcome to the tutorials section of ElectronicNigeria.com. We've talked about some basic web environment terminologies to help you out with orders on Electronic Nigeria especially if you are a starter - don't worry, we all started from somewhere.
The Internet is an interconnection between several computers all around the world. The reason for interconnection basically is to share information among one another, so that one single computer will not need an endless amount of disk space to store all the information it needs.
About 500 million people use the internet today world wide, all these people are sharing information, buying, selling, giving, receiving etc. This has to be the largest single market anywhere in the world, because of this I have to redefine the Internet as ‘the largest single market’.
The Internet serves as a platform for various services, some we know about, and others well, we will have to know about them today. The services includes:
So simply put the Internet is a technology, a platform in which seven or more services run. We are used to two of the services, the World Wide Web and the Email services. But at the very end of this manual you would have learnt about file transfer protocol (ftp); this service is useful when uploading your website on the Internet after completing the design.
Because the Internet is multi-services each service has its own identity specification; identity is specified by what is called a standard ‘PROTOCOL’. The protocol for the World Wide Web is ‘HTTP’ meaning hypertext transfer protocol. You will notice that when you type in www. Anything .com the browser window will automatically change it to http//www. Anything .com, which is the address with its valid protocol. The browser has to do that to be able to assess information on that service (World Wide Web), without the protocol the service can’t be reached.
The World Wide Web is a collection of several millions of websites, stored in different computers all around the world, connected to the Internet. With its standard protocol as hypertext transfer protocol (http). The unit of the World Wide Web is a Website.
The World Wide Web is controlled by a body called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They make specifications, rules, and laws, register domain names and they handle all issues dealing with web standards.
A Website is a collection of WebPages stored up as a single entity in a special computer called a server. The unit of a Website is a web page (a single page on a website i.e. home page)
A server: This is a computer that has the capability of keeping files (WebPages) i.e. hosting for non stop 24/7 every month, every year. This is very important because the WebPages will need to be assessed by anybody on the Internet at anytime, so the computer has to be kept on always.
A browser: This is a program that runs on the computer currently at use i.e., the computer you are using to browse. A browser views WebPages and navigates the World Wide Web; example is the very popular Internet Explorer. Its work is to request for WebPages from the server and format the final result on the computer at use. The request is a standard protocol request as mentioned earlier i.e. http, along side the page address - http//www.ElectronicNigeria.com/. You instruct the browser to request for WebPages by typing the name of the website wanted on the address bar, at the top of the browser window. The browser displays the page by reading instructions for display contained in all WebPages. Most part of the instructions are written in hypertext makeup language (HTML) – don’t worry; you will understand what HTML is, later.
This is the act of putting up Websites on the Internet just like newspaper publishing, but the only difference is, with website publishing there is no paper involved.
There are 3 steps needed to publish a Website: