If you want to find a web designer or interested in the technical elements of a site, or just want to know who created it, then there are many things that you can do to locate the person behind a website. This blog will walk you through how to uncover where someone built their website, how to locate information about any website, and even how you could ascertain what platform a website was built on.
Understanding Website Design
Before presenting the procedures on how to get to know who owns a website, it is very much necessary to explain first what website design is. Website design involves the arrangement or composition, colors, and style of fonts of a website, all in all, its feel. And this is the right combination of creativity and technical know-how that a good designer must utilize to provide an enjoyable experience for users as well as a nice look.
There are numerous influences behind website design, such as who needs to view the website, what the purpose of the website actually is, and what is hot in design. Designers also utilize many other tools and platforms. These offer some clues about who designed such a website.
How to Find Out Where Someone Made Their Website?
If you want to know where a website was created, the best first step is probably to explore the site itself. Many websites have information about who designed the site in the footer or on an “About” page. This section can reveal facts about an agency or individual who built the site.
If you can’t find that information, here are some effective ways to discover where someone made their website:
- Source Code: Every site has its source code through which one might refer to get some information about the design of the site. Open the source code by simply right clicking in the page and selecting “View Page Source” or “Inspect”. You will find the comments or meta tags in the source code hinting towards the designers or the platform used.
- Use WHOIS Lookup: You can use a WHOIS lookup, in which you can find information about a domain name. It can include the contact details of the registrant and even hosting providers that sometimes results in discovering designers or even design agencies. Some free sources to use are websites like WHOIS.net or ICANN.
- Check Design Credits: On some websites you’ll find credits to designers or agencies responsible for building the site. Search for words such as “Designed by appearing” in the footer of your site. That will automatically get you more direct information regarding who built that particular site.
- Social media and LinkedIn: Most designers usually post their samples on social media or professional networks like LinkedIn. In case you feel a specific designer might have done the site, you might find them on that site by searching on the profiles.
Through all these means you can know where someone made their site and you might even find the designer and talk to them further on the same.
How to Find Details on Any Website?
There can be thousands of tools and techniques involved in finding detailed information on a website. Some of the effective methods used for gathering details include:
- Website Analyzers: Various online tools analyze websites for several aspects, such as traffic, SEO, and technology stack. Tools like BuiltWith or Wappalyzer may give a researcher invaluable information about which technologies are used in the construction of a site, including whether or not it uses a CMS platform like WordPress, an e-commerce component, or various frameworks.
- PageSpeed Insights by Google: Along with testing the performance of a website, the PageSpeed Insights by Google also gives information on the structure and technologies used on a particular site. It can give you hints about design elements as well as the type of frameworks or libraries used.
- Browser Extensions: There are many different browser extensions that analyze the technology used on a website. You can get an idea of the language used, which library and many other things about a website.
- Check the Privacy Policy: Many websites do not reveal the design or development credentials, but they mention this in their privacy policy or terms of service. You may not directly get the name of the designer, but the company that developed the site is sometimes indicated there.
- Find Online Portfolios: Designers often post their work online on portfolio sites. If you can find the name of the designer or the design firm, a search for his/her portfolio may bring up the website as one of his examples.
Using these tools, you can find all sorts of information about any website including who developed it and the technologies they used, as well as various design elements.
How Do You Know What Platform a Website Was Developed On?
To know the functionality and capability of a website, it is important to know which platform was used in building it. To replicate some features or simply to satisfy your curiosity, knowing the underlying technology behind a website will be helpful. Here are some ways to determine what a website was built on in straightforward methods.
- Checking the Source Code
The first is by opening the source code, one of the easiest ways to obtain information. To check which platform the creator used, you may right-click the page and click “View Page Source” or “Inspect”. Then look up specific tags or comments. For instance, you will easily notice the references of the word to WordPress, Joomla, or Shopify, thus indicating that it was developed using one of them. The direct method is often extremely illuminating concerning a website’s structure.
- Using Specialized Tools
The other method that is used involves specialized instruments. Here, you just type in the URL of the website. Within seconds, online tools such as BuiltWith and WhatCMS provide detailed information on your desired details about the technology stack, the platform, plugins, and even hosting provider. Here, it could save some of your valuable time as well as give an overview regarding the building of the website.
- Accessing the Login Page
If you can get to the login page, that in itself is kind of a pretty good tell of the platform, too. For example, most WordPress sites have a login URL that is at the end of /wp-admin. That’s such a distinctive URL that it really gives the impression that the site is on WordPress. On the other hand, don’t attempt to log in without knowing the credentials because that would sort of be unauthorized access.
- Checking for Themes and Plugins
Besides these above types of authentications, checking for themes and plugins can be further useful in revealing the website information, especially for the most popular CMS, like WordPress. If you see that the site is in WordPress, perhaps you might find some parts of the source code that look like references to specific themes or plugins. This is important not only for platform identification but also for showing how the website will be customized, reflecting parts of the design and functionalities of this website.
- Utilizing Browser Extensions
Lastly, but not at the very least, there are really good browser extensions. For instance, Wappalyzer in particular is really useful. It will notify you what platform the website runs on when you are analyzing the site by browsing through it, but it also discloses information about the CMS, languages for scripting, and even e-commerce solutions. You just need to click on the button, and you will understand much better the technologies that drive this website.
Importance of Website Design and Development
Identifying who designed a website and how it is built is useful for various purposes. If you’re hiring a designer, you can see a sample of their style and their expertise, which is present in previous work. It also lets you see the differences that various platforms make in terms of functionality, user experience, and aesthetic appeal of websites.
Knowing the technology behind their competitors’ sites actually educates a business on some valuable information towards its improvement. They will find features that might be able to improve user experience or drive more traffic to their site.
But for someone looking to create his own website, knowing where quality designers work and what kind of platforms they design for will be helpful. Such a person would then be able to streamline their own process and be sure that the final product suits their goals.
Conclusion
It’s all interesting and sometimes helpful to know who designed a site or its underlying technology. It makes discovering the author and exploring source code through lookups using WHOIS become so helpful in finding out from where a person has made his website and gives details about it.
Besides, the information on how one determines which platform a website uses can be very helpful to both companies and users by providing choices for their individual web design needs. Whether it is a small-scale entrepreneur or a budding business owner or even just a curious user of the internet, discovering and analyzing website information is a good skill to have in this digital world today.