For the past handful of years, I’ve been teaching courses about interactive design and the internet. I teach within art departments at universities, so we learn about the internet’s impact on art—and vice versa—and how technological advance often coincides with artistic development. In class, we make websites. To do this, we learn the elemental markup and code languages of the web—HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. However, sometimes after the semester is over, I receive perplexing emails from students asking,
“So how do I actually make a website?”
This sparked my own questioning.
“What is a website, anyway?”
It’s easy to forget. Today there are millions of ways to make a website, and the abundance is daunting. But at its core, a website is still the same as ever before:
A website is a file or bundle of files living on a server somewhere. A server is a computer that’s always connected to the internet, so that when someone types your URL in, the server will offer up your website. Usually you have to pay for a server. You also have to pay for a domain name, which is an understandable piece of language that points to an IP. An IP is a string of numbers that is an address to your server.