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LO1 Understand web architecture and components

Web architecture

Investigate each of the following concepts. What are they, what do they do and how do they work?

Internet service providers-

There are many companies that offer this service for many people around the world so they are able to use the ‘World Wide Web’ (WWW). Sky, BT are currently the leading the internet service providers, there are many deals around from many different companies, and they each offer something that the customer wants. These deals all vary depending on how much you will be using online services and how many devices you will be connecting up to the internet. For a family with smart phones and gaming consoles and a few laptops will need to have a deal with more data. At home we have an unlimited BT deal and there are no restrictions for the amount of data we use and will not get charged for going over the limit as we do not have one. The unlimited deals are the most expensive but with a lot of devices in the home using the internet the data allowance can be used up very quickly. The more data you have the more you will use the internet, and for people who only have one computer to check emails and small tasks like this will have a limit of data. There will be no point in people paying for a high data package if they will not be using it. A few people I know have their internet service like this and they get a certain amount of data (250mb) for each month however if they go over they will need to pay the charges agreed by the service provider and they will suggest that you have a deal with more data included. It is a very competitive service as you get all these big service providers that fight to get the most customers. Sky and BT compete all the time, they offer complete deals with internet and TV subscriptions. There are many types of services and it all depends on what you are looking for and what you need.

Web hosting services-

These are online sites that let you create pages for the internet such as blogs and portfolios many of these are fee and to get a more advanced version you will need to pay to use the service, this is how the site runs. Web hosting services fives you space online to do what you want; you can do many things like create a blog type portfolio. I have created one of these for Art and Photography () below are some screen shots of the blog and a brief look at how to add content and change the look of the site.

I am using this site to put up art and photography of my own and this web host lets me add many features such as a photo gallery, slide show and a link to social networks like ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’. You can also create blog posts very Easley and you can publish them and they will be live to anyone online in seconds and they can be edited at any time. This is the best web hosting service that I have used as it is the fastest but there are many about like ‘Jimdo’ the free version of ‘JimdoPro’ where you can have a more advanced site. In the free one you get less designs to use, less storage (500mb), password protect one section, PayPal (credit card only), widgets and RSS feeds. ‘JimdoPro’ (bestseller) costs £60 for a year and you can do all of the free things and a lot more such as; add a logo, no adverts on your site and PayPal (credit card, check and invoice). There is a ‘Jimdo Business’ that has even more features to use and is the most expensive at £180 for a year.

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Domain names and structures address or name of the webpage-

Every page online has a name such as ‘Google’ for example and it also has an address; in this case it is ‘’ or at ‘google.co.uk’ this is what we can type in the bar at the top of the web browser. As I have said anyone can create a free website but you can pay to create one, this is what a business would do so that it is professional and meets all their needs. They would need to have a domain name, without this name the URL would be made up of symbols and numbers and no one would ever remember like we do with simple domain names such as ‘’ and ‘’. You can get domain places from ‘Verisign’ (‘’) and they have connected more than 121.1Million ‘.com’ and ‘.net’ domains. It would be standard for a business to get a ‘.com’ domain as this is trusted my people worldwide, and with the ‘.com’ it makes it easier to find online. A ‘.net’ domain is not as known as the ‘.com’ but there are millions of names available so new businesses will get a lot better chance to have the name that they are looking for. There are many more to have but it all depends on what type of web page that you want. For example a train company may want the site .

Structure-



A URL has many parts to it that all mean something, above is an example of a URL. The ‘http://’ is the web protocol there is also now a ‘https’ that is more secure and this shows that the internet is always changing and bringing in new things for us to use all the time. The next part is ‘blog.’ Is the sub domain and the ‘ud.’ is the domain. And at the end you have ‘.com’ this is known as the top level domain or TLD, you can also get country domain names such as ‘.uk’ and ‘.us’; these are very useful to tell people find out the site location of the site very quickly.

Web design software-

There are so many products that enable you to create a web page I have used ‘Adobe dreamweaver CS5’ in the past to create a site with many pages, it had intractive features such as an order form. It was easy to make after learning a bit about how the program works and what features it has. I really liked using this as you could decide on how you wanted to make the site, you could do it all in coding and scripting; this can be very complex if you do not know about coding, the image on the below shows what coding looks like.

In coding you need to put all things that go on to the the site, from text color and size to borders and tables. I like to work in designing mode (‘Graphical user interface GUI’ or ‘What you see is what you get WYSIWYG’) as you get to see what you are creating and any visual mistakes show up easy; you will need to know code very well to look for mistakes and it may take a while to find. In this mode the coding is done for you and you can change mode at any time. There is also a split view that combines both coding and designing. This is not the only product that does this there are many all varying in quality and features, and ‘Adobe dreamweaver CS5’ is known to be one of the better ones but you get what you pay for.

Components

Hardware and equipment you will need

Web servers-

This is the software that allows you to store internet content and pages to your hardware an example of this is ‘Apache’ that will let you save HTML pages, it is able to run PHP pages (this is what makes the HTML pages.

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‘DropBox’ lets you store files on their online servers and you can retrieve files anywhere as long as you sign in to your account. There are many sites that lets you do this suck as ‘SkyDrive’ for windows and ‘knowhow’ cloud storage. Your files will be put on a huge server so that you can use them when you want. I spoke about blog sites creators such as before and they give you space on their server to create a page much like I have created (). Often these small servers are all stored on a huge server run by another company where they have an immense amount of space for people to use.

Email servers-

Email servers store send and receive emails so they can be looked at as a virtual post office. ‘Icewarp’ is a good example of this, send and archive emails, have a desktop and web and also outlook use of the site and program, use of IM (Instant Messaging) and it also has filters to block spam and viruses. The price of this will vary depending on how many users that you want, for 15 people it would cost you £409 and for 5000 £12,559 and there are many other pricing ranges. This sort of product is very useful in a company and emails are sent all the time to other parts of the company (for example the finance department may send information to the human resources department). Also an email can be looked back on unlike a conversation that can be forgotten so easy in a busy environment.

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You can also get some that receive emails from one client and then the server will transfer them to another client these are often named modules, ‘Postmaster’ uses these and you can have one for £14.99 per a year. This is sort of the middle man that passes things on from the first client and gives it to the second.

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Proxy servers-

This is software that helps you connect to the internet and can keep you anonymous and not noticed. In school we have the use of the internet and there is a filtering system that blocks content that we should not see; such as . If you use a proxy server then you will be able to bypass the filtering and go on sites without the being noticed. In school this is a huge risk to what the students do online as they are not protected from any online dangers like chatting to people who you do not know and the school will have no way to protect the students if a proxy is used. Also when using these servers you are opening up the system to allow computer viruses in and cause many problems with the whole network.

Routers-

These can be seen as hardware that directs the traffic on the internet; say if you want to open a page then your device will connect up to the router and will then take you to the page that you want. A router is connected up to two or more data lines and the data can travel through more than one router to get to the place that it needs to be. You can find routers in many places from shops and in café’s, in a work place and at home. The most common type is the wireless router often these are supplied by the internet provider (such as BT and Sky) currently ‘BT’ has the new ‘Home Hub 4’ router and they state that this is their most reliable wireless connection, they also have smart set up that requires no CD and you can do it from any device from a phone to a computer, you can add any device to the network with just a click of a button, has an even faster processor than the last model (BT Home Hub 3), smart diagnostics that tells you if there are problems with the use of lights on the device and lastly has a thin and sleek design that will fit in most places. This is the newest router from ‘BT’ but they always improve on the last model and the next one is sure to be even better this shows that the internet is always changing and new products are needed to keep up with this change. Some people can’t get a wireless connection and they may need to have a wired one, this is a little box that you plug in the phone line and it gets the signal from there.

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Fiber optic is becoming more and more common in households it is a lot faster than wireless, ‘BT’ also offer this service and they say that it is superfast. Not all people can have this service and it does depend on where you live but the number of people that can have it is increasing. Broadband and fiber optic are very new and are a big jump in speed compared to the way we used use the internet.

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Browsers-

We use browsers to view web content and pages, they to receive and present information and data from the World Wide Web (WWW). Any web pages are identified by a URL (universal resource locator) we type these in to the browsers and they will show us the content that we want. Hyperlinks are very useful to navigate to resources that we need all over the internet and it is the browser lets us do this, you can get them on phones, tablets, computers and many more devices. There are a variety to choose from all offering different looks and tools but they all do the same thing; allow us to view online content. I am going to talk about some browsers below starting with ‘Google Chrome’.

Chrome is available for a wide range of devices, it offers fast viewing from start up to the loading of web programs; it is very fast to search the internet as it is made by Google who has the most used search engine on the web. Google say that they have kept the look and the design very simple “… so you can focus on what you care about most.” This says that they want you to view web content in the best way you can and they say that chrome offers that. Chrome is secure and will do many things like block sites that could cause harm to your device and doing auto updates to insure that the version stays up to date. You can also use ‘incognito mode’ this lets you go on web pages and they will not show up in your history, there are many privacy settings that can be changed very easy. If you use ‘Chrome’ on more than one device you can still view all your bookmarks when you sign in to your Google account, personally I do not like this feature as I like to keep my phone sites and computer sites different as more apps can be used on phones.

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Safari is another browser created by ‘Apple’, there is a lot of competition between ‘Apple’ and ‘Google’ as they are both fighting to have the best browser available. To be honest many of the features between Chrome and Safari are quite similar, they both offer secure products. Safari has a smart search feed that will look at you history and bookmarks to find online content; this makes finding sites that you have been on before very easy. It has a sleek design that ‘Apple’ have developed to improve the way we see the internet, they have a page where all you bookmarks are set out with large screen shots to give you a look at the site. The ‘iCloud tab’ is a very useful feature as it allows you to view online content from one device and then go to a different device and continue from the site that you left; when I used Safari this was very handy to use my laptop and then jump to my iPod and pick up from where I was. Another well thought out part of Safari is the ‘offline reading list’ this lets you add sites to a list and will preload the sites, when offline you can read off these pages and even if the article is on more than one page Safari will save all the pages so you can read it all. Safari and Chrome are always updating and improving to give us the best product, this is vital as like I said the internet and the way it works is changing all the time and products like this need to keep up with this change.

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It is very hard to work out what browser is the best out of the both and it all depends on personal preference; for me I would say Chrome as I can get it on my phone and Safari won’t as it does not run on android. There are many other web browsers to be used and these are the ones that I have had the most experience with.

Email applications-

Emails are used all the time and we use the applications to send and receive mail, there are many of these applications and they come in two type’s also known as incoming servers; Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP). The IMAP server runs completely online and if you wish to view/send mail you will need to do this in your browser, IMAP receives mail from the email server and all mail is stored on this server. I use the Google email application ‘Gmail’ this is an IMAP server, I have created a bookmark on Chrome and when I click on the link I will go to the Gmail sign in page. You can also get email accounts from your internet service provider when you open a contract, Sky does this and they will let you create your own name and if it is available you can have it; ‘12345@’ is an example of this, this sort of email account is on the IMAP server.

The other type is the POP server, Microsoft Outlook and Windows Live Mail runs on POP and all the mail is downloaded from the server to an application/program and you view and send mail from there. When you get a new computer on windows they will ask you to create an outlook account or to sign in and it does make emails easer from a PC but I look at my emails more on my phone and ‘Gmail’ provide an app and a mobile web page that you can sign in to anywhere. You can open Windows Live Mail from your start menu or under programs, and when you open the program it will take you to your mail or ask you to sign in or create a new Windows Live ID. You can also view windows mail from your browser by going on to where you can sign in to your Microsoft Outlook/Windows Live Mail account. The screen shots below show the Windows live Mail program on the start menu and the program its self and the web page (I have also included a screen shot of the Gmail sign in ).

SMPT stands for ‘simple mail transfer protocol’ this is a protocol on moving and transferring mail on the internet. SMPT makes very simple codes to make it easy to communicate email messages between the servers; the code is simple so that other servers can read the code. SMPT is really good as it is simple and very reliable and reduces problems like the wrong email address.

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Internet Protocols

Also known as IP’s

These are rules that need to be followed so that the internet works the way that it should, this protocol was first developed in the 1970 and has changed over time depending on the things that we do on the internet. TCP stands for ‘Transmission Control Protocol’ and is referred to as ‘TCP/IP’ as ‘IP’ and ‘TCP’ are used together. TCP/IP’s are used on web browsers when connecting to the internet and when we send or transfer things such as emails. The main point in TCP’s is to move data from one place to another; we do this all the time by uploading photos to a social network and to send emails.

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Every computer and device such as phones and tablets needs an ‘IP’ address so that it can connect to the internet. Your internet service provider will give you an IP address that you put on to any device so that the internet can be used; they may give you a static IP address that will say the same or a one that will change every time that you log on these are known as dynamic IP addresses. There is a third called ISP that connects people on dial-up but most people have a broadband connection so the IP will mainly be used. You can Easley find out your devices IP address and if any device is on the same wireless internet it will be the same.

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