Your basic Web page:
A Worldwide Web page is a single document that has a specific address on a Worldwide Web server. It can contain text, graphics, and hypertext links. This article is a web page, for example, because its address is unique.
We've gotten used to thinking of pages as printed documents. But a Web page is an amorphous beast. When you display most Web pages, you can scroll down the screen to reveal more text or graphics on the same page. Some say a page is an 8-1/2" x 11" area, but technically a single Web page can contain several screens' worth of text and graphic links. While a printed 8-1/2" x 11" page of text can contain perhaps 2000 characters (2K of data), a Web page can contain 32,000 or more characters of text along with graphics which themselves occupy 100K or more of space. Most pages don't contain this much text, because it's easier to organize and display on several linked pages than it is to put it all on one gigantic page. Some Web developers charge by the page for their services (a silly idea in my humble opinion, given the variety of designs and contents a particular "page" might contain).
In some cases, you'll use only one Web page for a brief introduction about yourself or your company. In others, you'll create a series of linked pages that provide more information in several categories.
Collections of pages:
When you get Web space from your ISP or online service as part of your user account privileges, your Web page or pages are located on the provider's server and appear as a directory at the provider's network or domain address. For example, my first web pages were located on the sedona.net server. My directory of pages had the address www.sedona.net/crubin, so people knew that I was using space on someone else's server. My directory grew to a couple of dozen pages, but while it had its own distinct presence, it couldn't be called a site because it existed as a directory on someone else's domain.
Many commercial online services and Internet presence providers now allow you to create and display web pages for $20-30 a month. Some of the better deals for Web space that I've seen with ISPs are The WELL in San Francisco (send e-mail to info@well.com) and The World in Boston (send e-mail to staff@world.std.com). It is rapidly becoming a given that your Internet account with an ISP will come with anywhere from 5 to 25 MB of space on a Web server.
Web sites:
A Worldwide Web site is a collection of Web pages that has its own domain address. For example, www.eat.com (the Ragu Spaghetti Sauce site) has its own domain address. The only pages stored at www.eat.com are related to information about Ragu or related topics. (Check this site out if you haven't already--it has a lot of personality and offers lots of regularly-updated areas to maintain customer involvement.)
To have your own Web site, you need to register a unique domain name with the InterNIC Information Center (e-mail info@is.internic.net). Many ISPs will help you register a name for $25 or $50. Once you have your own domain name, you can set up your own Web server, or find an ISP that offers "virtual server" service. With a virtual server, you have the same technical setup as you do with a collection of pages (you actually have a directory on the ISP's server), but to your customers it looks as if you have your owner server because the directory is accessed via your own private domain name. For example, we set up a virtual server with the domain name www.gmarketing.com even though the pages are actually stored on a directory at http://www.direct.net.
Having your own domain name makes your company look as big as all those major corporations that have their own domain names, even if it doesn't cost you nearly as much if you use a virtual server. One reasonable deal I've seen for virtual server pricing is with Internet Direct (www.direct.net). Internet Direct's GoSite plan costs about $189 a month, and it includes some technical assistance and templates that help you create the pages and design for your site. In fact, it's the same place that we host the Guerrilla Marketing web site.