All websites provide some sort of service to the people that visit them, even if that service is simply information about a product or topic. But no website is worth anything if people can't find it.
We can compare opening a new website to moving into a new place. Imagine moving into a new home, your friends and family won't know where to find you without an address. This is where IP Addresses come in.
In the previous lesson, we learned about hosting our website with a hosting provider. When you rent space on a server for your website, that space has a unique identifier called an Internet Protocol Address (IP Address).
One of Google's many IP Addresses is 172.217.7.238. You can test this out by going to http://172.217.7.238 in a browser. You should end up at google.com and see the Google home page. But if you're just like me, and everyone else, you don't want to have to remember a string of numbers and dots for every website that you want to visit, and so enter domain names.
A domain name is a unique and human readable name for your website and no two websites can have the same name. In the example above, "google.com" is the domain name of 172.217.7.238. So you must first see if your domain name is available for use.
Domains that have been registered to other websites are kept in a database called the Domain Name Registry.
Companies that manage these databases and registrations are called Domain Name Registrars. A domain name registrar will charge an annual fee for the use of domain names based on the type of domain and their unique # structure.
In the example of "google.com", "google" is the domain and ".com" is the extension. The combination of the two makes up the entire "domain name". There are several common extensions that are used in domain names, and these common extensions make up top-level domains (TLDs). .com, .org, .net, .biz, and .edu are all top-level domains.
Once you have selected and secured a domain name for your website, you'll want a way for people outside of friends and family to find it. After all, you can't tell everyone by word of mouth about your website, right? Search Engines are databases that keep track of websites and their content to help people find the content or services that they are looking for. Think of them as the internet's phonebook for websites and web applications.
Now that you have a spot for your website to live and an address and phonebook for people to find it, it is time to look at how websites are designed and constructed.
<-- Step 1: Renter, Buyer, or Landowner?
Step 2: Home Address