站 zhàn = 立 (lì) + 占 (zhàn). It is a pictophonetic character (形声字). The left side, 立, is the semantic component: it pictures a person standing with feet apart on the ground, the line beneath the figure marking the earth they press into. The right side, 占 zhàn, is the phonetic component, supplying the sound. So the structure reads at a glance: a standing thing that sounds like 占.

The radical 立 is the whole logic of the character. On its own 立 already means to stand, to set up, to establish. Adding the phonetic 占 carved out a separate, more concrete word: to plant the body upright and hold that spot. Where 立 leans abstract (to found a state, to set up a rule), 站 stays physical: a body on its two feet, motionless.

From the standing body the meaning extends outward by a simple logic of stopping in place:

1. To stand. The literal posture: 站立 zhànlì (to stand erect), 站起来 zhàn qǐlái (to stand up), 站岗 zhàngǎng (to stand guard).
2. To halt, to stop moving. A vehicle or traveler that has come to a standstill: 站住 zhànzhù (halt! stop!), and the verb behind every transit stop.
3. A station, a stop. The fixed point where you halt: 车站 chēzhàn (bus or train station), 加油站 jiāyóuzhàn (petrol station), 终点站 zhōngdiǎnzhàn (terminus).
4. A post, a site. By the twentieth century, any service point: 广播站 guǎngbōzhàn (broadcast station), and in the internet age 网站 wǎngzhàn (website), the place on the network where you stop and stay.

Japanese borrowed the character for its postal-relay sense, though modern Japanese writes the train station as 駅 (eki); Korean keeps 站 (cham) for relay stations of the old courier roads. The thread across all of them is one body, planted, not going anywhere.

The newest life of 站 came with the internet. A website is a 网站 wǎngzhàn, literally a "net station," the place on the 网 (wǎng, net) where you stop and stay a while. The metaphor is exact: just as a 车站 is a fixed point on a transit line where travelers halt, a 网站 is a fixed point on the network where users land. The same logic gives 网站 a relative, 站长 zhànzhǎng, the "station chief," meaning a website's administrator or webmaster. An old word for a courier relay post slid cleanly into the language of servers and domains.

Picture a lone sentry planted on a stone platform at the edge of a railway. His feet are set apart, pressed into the ground, and he does not move: that is the left half of the character, 立, the standing figure with the earth-line beneath his boots. Trains slide in and slide out; he stays. He is the stop.

Now read the whole glyph as the scene around him. The right half, 占 zhàn, only lends its sound, but you can hear it in the word the sentry guards: 车站, the station, the one fixed point on a moving line. Every sense of 站 is this same picture at a different scale. A body that stands (站立). A guard who holds his post (站岗). A platform where travelers halt (站台). And on the network, a 网站, the still place where you stop scrolling and stay. Wherever motion comes to rest on its feet, that is 站.