Why you need to understand the website elements
Understanding the essential elements a website contains is how you know what your site has or should have.
This is important for all businesses and also for those who want to do website SEO or digital marketing for a business.
Your website is important for your business and its success.
Every business or company needs to have a website to go online and to do online marketing.
Your website is your online presence and you should know what all it should have.
You need a good website. What makes a website good is that it has all the elements it needs.
SEO brings online success for business as part of online marketing. And this can happen only when your website is complete.
How complete is your website technically is one part of auditing. When you hire a SEO consultant then it is here that he or she will start with.
And if you want to learn SEO step by step and are looking for best guides then you also should start here.
To become a consultant or expert you need to understand these elements first.
This is how you understand a website
The journey to find important parts and elements of website leads us to the answer on how to understand a website. This is exactly what we are going to do here, understand a website by knowing what does a website consists of which are its different parts, aspects, elements and features.
Every website is an independent entity with a unique identity and individuality. Just like a person or a business entity or organization. Also every website is a part of very very large network which is called world wide web or WWW. It is also called as web. This also, as believed, gave website its name. It was called web site or web presence and now website.
Let us find out what are the important parts of that every website has
The Elements which are the Important Parts of Website
We are going to discover the important parts of a website here. After this we will find out what does a website consist of.
For that we have to start with knowing what is a website which will help us find out what are the features or elements of a website. These elements will then lead us to knowing the important parts of a website and what does every website consists of.
A website is a sum of many important parts.
While talking about the importance of website for a business we defined a website as a web page or a set of web pages which are live and accessible under a single domain name.
This definition brings out key features of every website. These aspects of a website then bring to light the important parts which every website consists of.
To identify the features of website let look at the definition as a process.
To have a website we go through a step process.
We build web pages
We have to make it live (which means accessible on and a part of the Internet)
For that we need to have a domain & other things
Please note that a website becomes a website only when it is live.
From this we can say that every website has two key elements.
Building a website base with a set of web pages
Making it live & accessible
We will look at various parts and sub parts of website though these two elements.
Before going into the parts of a website we should tell you that there is a third element of every website which is the most important. You cannot have a website without it and this element only makes up a website.
It is the content. It is both an element & part of every website & every page. Content is the most important part of website.
When it comes to building a site then the most important parts of a website are its pages. You need to have a web page or a set of web pages.
All the parts of every website fall under these two key elements:
- Build and create web page
- Making the site live
List of important parts of website
Let us now understand the parts of every website
Web Pages
After the content which is the most important part and element of a website, web page are the second most important part. It is these web pages that make up a website. Remember we said in the beginning that website is the sum of parts. It is these pages that every website is made up of mainly.
- The Index or Home page
- Product pages
- Category pages
- About page
- Contact page
- Blogs
There are reasons why we need these, and even more pages, for every website. Every website is build and designed for some purpose. That purpose is to reach to its audience and provide them with the information. This information is served through content. It can be general information or about products or services. You cannot put all information and content on a single page or randomly one after the other.
For this we need different pages (these parts) which serve different purposes. Collectively these pages and parts create your website and fulfil your complete objective of having a website.
The Index or Home page
Index page is what we also call as the Home page. It your first or entry level page located at the root level of your hosting directory. This is the page that leads everyone to your website and is also called as the home page.
You cannot have a website without an index page which is always named as index.html or index.php.
When you open up a website, the main or first or the highest level page is Home page. It is also the index page. You access this page by simply the main URL i.e. http://www.mysite.com. The index page is like an introduction to the whole website or the business.
Product pages
The product pages or service pages are for the services or products of the company. Normally, we create or have separate pages for each of the products.
Category pages
Category pages show or list different categories of products or services. In case a company has many products which are both similar and different than you will have such category pages. These pages serve the purpose of guiding a user to relevant product pages.
About page
About page is for a business to tell the users about the company. What it does; how it started; what is their moto, beliefs, purpose; how they work, etc.
Contact page
Where a website provides all the detailed information about how to contact them. It has the address, phone numbers, email. If a company has different locations then they may put all their locations on the contact us page to let users know of their presence.
Blogs
Blogs are information, both formal and informal. They are like conversational type of content. A company website can have blogs or there are separate blog websites.
Now comes the stage where we give meaning to page with content. Here again, content forms the basis. But there are many types of content. All these types of content create another area which contains more parts of a website.
There are basically two types of content.
Text or written words
Images
Videos
Infographics
Charts
Then comes the stage of designing, developing or creating these pages. Here we create, build or design web pages. Here each page has three parts, which also become parts of that website.
The three parts of web page and website are:
Header section
Header section is the top most part of every web page. It is the first thing you see when you visit a website or web page. This section normally is the same across all the pages of a website.
The head section contains few other parts or is created with sub parts.
- Menu
Menu is the place on every page which provides links to all the important pages of website. It is usually placed on the very top in header area.
- Logo
Logo can be an image or text. It can also be the business name. It is unique for every website and represents the identity of the business behind the website.
Body section
Body section or area is where all the content is placed and published. This is the meat of a web page. All the information or content that is published including images, etc. are placed in the body section. Body area is the most important part of a website.
Footer section
Footer section is another important part of a website. Footer section is the section appearing on the bottom of the page. It also contains few important information for every website.
Among other things, footer section may contain the following important information about a website or business.
Links to other important pages like privacy policy, terms, etc.
Brief company description
Location details, addresses and contact details
When it comes to design and development, you need to use certain codes and techniques. These also form essential parts of website.
HTML: HTML means Hypertext Markup Language. It gives web pages the structure.
CSS: CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, is used for designing and where each section and its content will be placed and how will it show.
Now we reach the stage where we make our website live on the Internet. We need few things for this, and these are very essential parts of our website. We cannot have a website without these essential parts.
- Domain name
- Hosting
Domain
To create a website one needs a domain name. And to make your website live or to publish it on the Internet you need to host it on a server.
Every domain name consists of four sub parts.
This is an example domain name or URL to understand these sub parts:
http://www.mysite.com
- HTTP means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
- WWW means World Wide Web
- mysite is your actual domain name
- .com is called as Top-level Domain or TLD
Hosting
Hosting is a service and the only type of service which you need to make your website live on the Internet and on the web or the world wide web.
Hosting means your website files and pages are stored on a server from where they are published to make your website live and remain live and accessible on the Internet.
To take a hosting service you first need to have a domain. Hosting is assigned to a domain name.
When you purchase hosting services then you purchase space on servers. After purchasing, you need to insert names of those servers which are given to you in the nameservers section of your domain account. This is how your website goes live.
Now you can look at what does a website consists of which will cover what information should be on your website, and what a basic website should have.
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