What Is the Web Made Of?

The Web consists of:

Your personal computer or mobile device

Web browser software to access the Web

A connection to an Internet service provider (ISP)

Servers that host the electronic files

Routers and switches to direct the flow of data

A short overview of "the web" or "the Internet" as some people call it.
For the more technically oriented: "the Internet" is the interconnected network of devices
(computers, mobile phones, tablets, routers, modems etc.), while "the Web" is the subset of "the
Internet" that is usually reachable via the protocols http or https and is generally seen in a
"browser".
On your computer, mobile phone or tablet you have a software application called a "web
browser". (Major web browsers are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera,
and Microsoft Internet Explorer).

You type a web address (also called a "URL") in the address-bar: something like
www.google.com or perlmaven.com/perl-tutorial, or even just an IP address like 127.0.0.1. If you
have not supplied the protocol, the browser will automatically add it, and change the address to
http://www.google.com or http://perlmaven.com/perl-tutorial . Then it does some background
work translating the address to the IP number of the server, that we don't discuss here, and
send a request to fetch the appropriate page from the right computer somewhere, possibly on
the other side of the world.
The computer on the other side, runs a software program called a web server. (Major flavors are
the open source Apacheand nginx servers, and the proprietary Microsoft IIS.)
These web servers can be configured to map each request to a specific file on the file-system to
be served as it-is. This would create a static web site. A site that cannot take any input from you,
the user.
On the other hand the web server can be configured to run a program when the user requests a
page. That program can be written in many different programming languages and there are a
number of different ways to call them.
Page width

This is the first decision to make when designing a website. You have two choices - a fixed
width or a fluid layout. In simple terms, fixed-width sites will look the same on every screen,
irrespective of how wide it is, while fluid sites will expand to fill the screen.
Of the most popular websites in the world, most of their page sizes are fixed width. Here are
some examples of fixed width sites, along with the web page size:

Facebook - 980 pixels

YouTube - 961 pixels

Yahoo! - 973 pixels

MSN - 980 pixels

Twitter - 919 pixels (partly fluid)

LinkedIn - 980 pixels

Bing - 970 pixels (partly fluid)

Baidu - 900 pixels

QQ - 974 pixels

The average size of these web pages is around 960 pixels, which is what you would expect as
the most screen resolutions are 1024x768 or larger. W3Schools data from January 2011 found
that around 1.1% of users had a screen smaller than this, a number which will continue to
decrease.
That most sites use a fixed-width layout isn't really surprising; as design becomes more and
more important, designers want to make sure that their sites look the same on every computer.
The only truly fluid designs in the top ten, Google and Wikipedia, are heavy on content and light
on design.
Most of our clients opt for a fixed-width layout, with an average web page size of around 950
pixels wide, although we are of course happy to produce layouts to fit any screen. Contact
us today to discuss your website.

Page height

Clients often tell us "I want the site to fit on one page with no scrolling". Our response is that
without scrolling, the amount of content on a page will be seriously limited.
A website will display a different amount of content depending on the visitor's screen
resolution.The typical browser on the most common screen resolution will show around 600
pixels of your web page, after which the visitor will have to scroll. The area above this imaginary
line is called above the fold from newspaper design, and is enough to show the first five search
results from Google, or the top three rows of stories on the BBC News website. Some newer
laptops like netbooks will be even smaller than this.
Our designs always take the fold into account, especially on the home page.
Page alignment

If the average web page size is 960 pixels and the average screen width is 1024 pixels, the
average visitor isn't really going to notice if a page is aligned with the left side of the screen or in
the centre. It's telling that you have to scroll down a long way in Alexa's list of most popular

websites in the world to find a site that is left-aligned. The BBC News website made headlines
of its own in 2009 when they redesigned the site to be centre aligned and fit a 1024x768 screen
size.
The main reason to centre-align your page is that it looks better on larger screens. On a 1600
pixel widescreen monitor, a left-aligned web page with a size of 960 pixels has a lot of white
space on the right, but the space is a lot less obvious when centre-aligned. Unless your site has
special requirements, we would always recommend a centre-aligned design.