What is a website?

A web site is a group of individual web pages which are hosted online together, usually under the same domain name (web address).*

Sometimes, if someone has a small business, they might just want one web page about themselves online, because all they've got to say fits on 1 page. So they have a web page. But you can also call this a website, because it's their whole presence – it just happens to only be 1 page long.

Meanwhile some people need an "about us" page and a "portfolio" page etc. and then those are extra web pages that make up their website.

Any individual page of a website is a web page. So http://www.a-website.com/about-us is a web page on a website, and http://www.a-website.com/services is another web page of that same website.

If you're telling someone – a web developer if you've got your own website, or just a friend you're sharing information with – about something you've seen on a website, then it's helpful to tell them the actual address of the web page you're talking about, rather than just the website name. Eg. if you've seen a nice wardrobe on IKEA, then rather than tell someone "visit ikea.co.uk" you should tell them "visit http://www.ikea.co.uk/bedroom-furniture/wardrobes/wardrobe-102″.

This is called the URL which stands for Uniform Resource Locator – a complicated term at first but when you think about it, that's exactly what you're trying to do – help someone locate a particular resource by giving them the exact address. It's like giving someone a post code they can put in their Sat Nav rather than just telling them the name of the town.

(*OK so you can argue that Facebook is lots of websites because it's so vast it's hosted on lots of different servers under different content delivery network domain names, but we're keeping it simple for this page!)