What is a website? A website is far more complex than a simple page of information. It's the bringing together of all the great challenges of design.
It requires Ease of use, because without it your visitors will quickly leave. Carefully crafted graphic design, layout and typography, much like a poster on a billboard, studies show an average person decides whether or not they will look at an advertisement in the first 1.3seconds. That's roughly one second to impress that viewer with a beautiful masterpiece of art, that is both eyecatching and thought provoking .
While being all this, the website must engage the user, and be interactive, responding to their input like a living creature, feeling playful.
And at the same time, never distract the user, the design, the layout, the interaction, the graphics must always while being present, never hide the content of the website or make navigation difficult. The structure of the website should be so simple, it would seem that it isn't even there.
If that all wasn't enough challenge, the website has the technical hurdle of being accessible to everyone. While this may seem simple on the surface, this means the coding of the website must be created with internation standards in mind, and yet work with all common software, (even though most don't follow standards)
The coding of the website must function perfectly across all web browsers, and across all operating systems, and even perform as expected on mobile phones and game consoles! Lest you be leaving out a large portion of your target audience.
Also for the vision impaired (blurry eyesight, or full blindness, colour blindness) or hearing impaired, or anyone with any form of disability must also be able to easily navigate the site.
Ofcourse there is many other technical issues involved too, such as compressing the website down to use as little bandwidth as possible, optimising picture quality while reducing file size. Managing of style sheets and templates, maintaining site structure. What technologies to use? Will the users have a particular plugin for using a technology or need to install it? Will the users have javascript or a web browser with decent CSS support?
And yet again, another whole mountain arises when you decide to make your website dynamic with database driven content, user accounts and security against hacking attacks.
All these challenges and more face anyone wishing to create a website, to fulfill all these requirements, and do it on time, and on budget.