The website itself is a collection of electronic files that are ‘hosted’ on a web server and has the intention to enable interactive features and interfaces to the end user. Elements such as text and images can be placed on a web page using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), XHTML(Extensible HyperText Markup Language) and XML(Extensible Markup Language). There are however more complex requirements for animations and movies for example that use Flash, Quicktime, and Java run-time environment.

The website pages themselves fall into two different categories of ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’. A static page has content that does not alter unless adjusted by the web designer and is usually programmed in standard HTML. A dynamic page changes its content depending on elements such as time, the user and database modifications and use client side scripting languages such as Javascript, Jscript and Actionscript. These pages are more complex to build and use several different types of programming technology such as Coldfusion, ASP, JSP, Perl and PHP.