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How Websites Work
Hosting
A website is made up of one or more computer files for each web page. These files are stored on computers called hosts, that are directly connected to the internet. Generally hosts operate continuously and are constantly monitored for proper operation. Whenever someone wants to see one of your web pages, the request is sent to your host, which transmits the necessary files to the requestor. If your host is not operating, nobody can see your web pages.
Site Names
Host computers on the internet are identified by long strings of decimal digits which are decidedly unfriendly to remember. As such, part of the internet mechanisms allow names that people can remember, such as www.coke.com, or www.whitehouse.gov, or www.amazon.com.
There are special computers on the internet known as name servers, whose sole purpose is to provide the translation from these more user friendly names to the decimal identification of the corresponding host computer.
This translation mechanism has additional advantages. It allows a website to move from one computer to another, simply by changing the information tables in the name servers. Perhaps one computer is being overloaded, or physically replaced, or you found another hosting service that is cheaper or more reliable. The internet naming methods gives you the equivalent of one address for life.
Of course, there must be some method to make sure that the names that the assigned names are unique, and that changes are distributed to all the name servers together. This is the role of corporations called Internet Registrars, and they charge between ten and thirty-five dollars per year to maintain each unique name.
Role of the Browser
An internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, are applications that run on your computer. When you want to see a web page, they send the requests on the internet for the needed files, assemble and interpret the files received, and display the results.
There is a standards organization that specifies the control options within these page files, and how the results should be displayed. However, these standards are constantly evolving. No current browser supports the full standard. Further, individual browsers have introduced and implemented their own ideas, which are not in the international standard. If a browser encounters something unexpected, it is ignored.
Why Do Things Look Different on Other Computers/Browsers?
The computers that hook to the internet have many different capabilities - some computer displays can show four times as much information as others. Some really old computers could show only sixteen colors, in the early 90's 256 colors were the state-of-the-art, and now 24 million colors are common.
The web page files do not contain a page image, but a description the page content written in Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML). One very common HTML tag describes a block of text as a paragraph. When a browser encounters this, it displays this text left to right, then wraps to successive lines until the end of the paragraph is reached. Where any particular line ends depends on the user's screen size, settings and capabilities. The screen display of many other of the HTML tags are also similarly variable.
The HTML language was never intended to produce an exact page image. What is ultimately seen depends on the user's computer capabilities, software installed, browser version, and settings.