What is the Site for?

It’s not a secret that nowadays more and more companies are trying to expand into the Internet. The Internet provides any businessman with prospective ways of development, opportunities both to expand the existing markets and find new ones. It is in progress within 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all the year round, with neither lunch nor smoking breaks, nor sick-leaves.

The company can easily arrange all this by creating a personal site. You can create a site yourself or turn to web-site developers.
 

What makes a web-site?

Web-site (comes from two English words – “web” and “site”) or simply site is a complex of documents of a private person or a company which were integrated under the same address (domain or IP-address) in a computer network. The site is certain to be in the Internet. All the sites make World Wide Web. For the client to access the web-sites directly on the servers there was developed an HTTP protocol. Web-sites call the Internet differently – a representation of a person or company. When they say “a personal on-line page”, a web-site or a private page on one’s site is meant. Apart from web-sites one can access WAP-sites for mobile phones.

Initially, web-sites used to be a complex of stative documents. Nowadays, most of them are dynamic and interactive. For such sites specialists use the terms “web-application” – a ready-made bundled software to fulfill the web-site tasks. The web-application is a part of a web-site, but without data it can be regarded as a site only technically.

In most cases one domain in the Internet stands for one web-site. It is domains that sites can be identified by in the World Wide Web. Though other variants are possible: one site on several domains or several sites under one domain. Normally, several domains use outstanding sites (web-portals) to differentiate logically between different provided services (mail.google.com, news.google.com, maps.google.com). Some cases are not infrequent when separate domains are allocated for certain countries or languages. For example, google.ua and google.fr are logically a Google site in different languages, but technically they are different sites. Integration of several sites under the same domain is a characteristic of free hostings.

Hardware servers to host web-sites are web-servers. The hosting service is called web-hosting. Previously, each site was hosted by its personal server, due to the Internet development and technical improvement of servers on one computer hosting a great many sites (virtual hosting) became possible. Nowadays, servers used to host a single site are called dedicated.

The same site can be accessible at different addresses and is hosted by different servers. In this case the copy of the original site is called a mirror of the web-site. There also exists a concept of an off-line variant of the site – a site copy which can be viewed on any computer not connected to the net and without the usage of server software.
 

Site History.

The first world’s site info.cern.ch came into being in 1990. Its developer Tim Berners-Lea published the description of a new technology World Wide Web there, which was based on the data transfer protocol HTTP. There were also described the principles of server and browser installation and operation. The site became the first world’s on-line catalogue as later Tim Berners-Lea listed the links to other sites there.

Nowadays, Tim Berners-Lea is the founder and head of World Wide Web Consortium which deals with development and deployment of Internet standards.
 

Still, what is a site for?

First of all, the web-site is a company image, providing the key information both about the company and its business segment (services, production, retailing, construction etc.). The main trends of the modern businessexpressly indicate on an increasing role of the Internet in the profit of a company which developed and maintains its site.

Normally, the first acquaintance with a prospect provider/ customer takes place via the Internet, and if the company has no personal site, it can negatively impact the business.

The personal company web-site is also an unlimited informational field both for the company and visitors (catalogue of produce, informational lines, articles, reference information, forums to discuss various issues, newsletters etc.).

By increasing the number of the site visitors you increase the number of your prospects. Getting acquainted with the information of the company site, the visitor has the opportunity to calculate the price of a particular choice, choose the product which meets their needs, ask a question of their particular concern on the forum and receive a comprehensive answer by the company consultant – and all this is done without visiting the company office and drawing away the staff from their work. You cannot but agree that this way of doing business is much more convenient than continual search for clients and explaining to them why it is your company that can satisfy customer’s needs in the best way possible.

Simultaneously, for loyal customers, dealers, wholesale buyers etc. there can be realized the private part of the site (password entrance), where can be laid open the exclusive price policy, specified information about the product etc.

These functions are just a few of many, which the company can use to do the business and win new market segments.