As with all things, misunderstanding breeds mistrust and fear. Web development is generally couched in a large amount of technological jargon that is not easily understood. This has led to reluctance on the part of people who should be using the web or making better use of it. This is a simplified guide that puts things in perspective, and will hopefully make things easier for executives.

Think of the web as a city with inhabitants. Before the city can develop, land must be sold to the future inhabitants. Each parcel of land is a domain. Each domain has an address on the map of the city, called an URL. When you surf the web, your browser or e-mail software uses URLs to identify where to go and where to send mail. Your piece of land can have a sign on it, giving a name. This is the domain name.
The basic building block of a city is a roof and four walls with a door. In the world of the web, this is a web page. If you have more than one room, for instance in a house, an office or a shop, this is a website. If you were building a house, you would want to know how many rooms you need, what were their purposes, how large they would be and what would be in them. So on the web, you would need to consider the size of the domain, how many pages and for what they will be used.
If you have a number of houses in a neighbourhood, different offices in one block or different shops in a mall, where one person can visit to access this is a portal.
The location of your home or business is in a certain area. On the web, this is a server, a box with a bunch of memory in it. Your location is important. If you expect many visitors, you will want to be near a highway. On the web, the size of the highway is the bandwidth. You will also need to consider the speed on the highway and congestion, as you don’t want your visitors stuck in a traffic jam. The larger your site, the greater the need for large amounts of high speed bandwidth.
As far as your house, office or mall is concerned, you will want to think about how to build it. Unlike the furniture retail and building trades, most of the building blocks, rooms and items in the rooms can be downloaded free of charge under GNU, GPL, freeware and shareware licenses. In fact, you can even get free websites, ready built on free domains if need be.
Naturally, if you are a business, you will want to protect your premises with locks and selective access. This is security which normally takes the form of PIN access similar to key cards for individuals or groups. There are other forms of security such as firewalls which prevent people from coming in and changing things, removing things or accessing certain types of data.
Finally, if you move, you can put up a sign on your old website, known as a ‘redirect’, which automatically sends visitors to your new site and redirects mail to your new address. It’s as easy as that. All you need to decide is whether you want to learn to build or hire someone to build for you.