If you want to know what websites and how many are installed in magento you can get that information from getWebsites method of the Mage_Core_Model_App object.
$storeCodeAsKey = true;
$websitesCollection = Mage::app()->getWebsites(false,$storeCodeAsKey);
echo "<pre>";
print_r(count($websitesCollection) . "\n");
foreach ($websitesCollection as $website => $value)
{
print_r(($storeCodeAsKey ? "Store Code:":"Store Id:") . $website . "\n");
}
echo "</pre>";