Glossary

Glossary

The unique name that identifies an Internet site. For example: http://www.effectiveweb.com/ . It is not necessary to have your own domain name to have a website. It is used by companies to allow their Internet Website Address to be easily remembered by web surfers (customers). They are generally recommended for any firm that will benefit from the ease of access and added prestige that your own domain name offers.

E-Commerce:

(Electronic Commerce) -- Transacting business electronically, usually by e-mail or FAX through a website.

E-Mail:

(Electronic Mail) -- Messages, usually text, but can include pictures and hyperlinks, sent from one person to another via computer. E-mail can also be sent automatically to a large number of addresses (Mailing List).

Host:

Any computer directly connected to a network that acts as a repository for services (e.g. e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, ftp or World Wide Web) available for other computers on the network. See also Server.

Hyperlink or Link:

Generally refers to any highlighted words or phrases in a hypertext document that allow you to "jump" to another section of the same document or to another document on the World Wide Web.

Hypertext:

A way of presenting information in which text, sounds, images, and actions are linked together in a way that allows you to jump around between them in whatever order you choose. Hypertext usually refers to any text available on the World Wide Web that contains links to other documents.

Domain Name Registration:

The Internet Network Information Center (InterNIC) charges an annual fee to keep the assigned domain name within the Internet master domain name tables. If you so choose, Effective Web Design registers your site with InterNIC for the domain name of your choice. If the name is still available, you may lease it. Currently, the rate for your own domain name is $35/year. The price per year goes down if you preregister for future years.

META-tags

Code put into the HTML document that does not show on the document. It is used to speak to the spiders from search engines to let them know what key words are important to you, and what descriptions you want to give to your pages when someone looks up your site on a search engine.

Network

Two or more computers connected to each other so they can share resources. The Internet is a "network of networks," whereby anyone from an individual at a home with a PC to a large corporate multi-department system can freely and easily exchange information.

Search Engines

A search engine is a type of software that creates indexes of databases or Internet sites based on the titles of files, key words, or the full text of files. The search engine has an interface that allows you to type what you're looking for into a blank field. It then gives you a list of the results of the search. When you use a search engine on the Web, the results are presented to you in hypertext, which means you can click on any item in the list to get the actual file. If the file you select doesn't have what you're looking for, you can use the Back button on your browser to return to the list of search results and try something else.

The other nice feature about search engines on the web is that if you have a website or page of your own, you can register it. When you submit key information about your page or site, it gets added to the index. This is a very good (but often overlooked) way to get people to visit your site.

Search Engine 'Spider'

Search Engines often have an automated program that searches each site that is submitted to it, looking at it's content. It searches for words and rates and categorizes the site for it's search engine. It is called a 'Spider' as it crawls through the Web.

Search Engine Protocol

Each Search Engine has it's way of organizing the websites that are in it's database. The trick is to have your site turn up in the top 25 listed in a subject so that it will get seen and visited. The number of times a keyword is used (not too much, however, or it is considered spamming) is part of the equation, as well as many other things. Each search engine has it's own set of rules and priorities.

Server

A computer that handles requests for data, electronic mail, file transfers, and other network services from other computers (i.e. clients). See host.

Secure Server:

SSL

(Secure Sockets Layer) -- A protocol designed by Netscape Communications to enable encrypted, authenticated communications across the Internet.

SSL used mostly (but not exclusively) in communications between web browsers and web servers. URL’s that begin with “https” indicate that an SSL connection will be used.

SSL provides 3 important things: Privacy, Authentication, and Message Integrity.

In an SSL connection each side of the connection must have a Security Certificate, which each side’s software sends to the other. Each side then encrypts what it sends using information from both its own and the other side’s Certificate, ensuring that only the intended recipient can de-crypt it, and that the other side can be sure the data came from the place it claims to have come from, and that the message has not been tampered with.

T1 Line

A high-speed digital connection capable of transmitting data at a rate of approximately 1.5 million bits per second. A T1 line is typically used by small and medium-sized companies with heavy network traffic. It is large enough to send and receive very large text files, graphics, sounds, and databases instantaneously, and is the fastest speed commonly used to connect networks to the Internet. Sometimes referred to as a leased line, a T1 is basically too large and too expensive for individual home use.

T3 Line

A super high-speed connection capable of transmitting data at a rate of 45 million bits per second. This represents a bandwidth equal to about 672 regular voice-grade telephone lines, which is wide enough to transmit full-motion real-time video, and very large databases over a busy network. A T3 line is typically installed as a major networking artery for large corporations and universities with high volume network traffic. For example, the backbones of the major Internet service providers are comprised of T3 lines.

UPS Generator Backup

Uninterrupted Power Supply Generator Backup

Website Hosting

Storing a Website on a Computer (Server). Maintaining and monitoring it so that it is always connected and accessible to the Internet.

World Wide Web

The exact definition for the World Wide Web (popularly known as the Web) varies, depending on whom you ask. Three common descriptions are:

A collection of resources (Gopher, FTP, http, telnet, Usenet, WAIS and others) which can be accessed via a web browser.
A collection of hypertext files available on web servers.
A set of specifications (protocols) that allows the transmission of web pages over the Internet.

You can think of the Web as a worldwide collection of text and multimedia files and other network services interconnected via a system of hypertext documents. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) was created in 1990, at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, as a means for sharing scientific data internationally, instantly, and inexpensively. With hypertext a word or phrase can contain a link to other text. To achieve this they developed a programming language called HTML, that allows you to easily link you to other pages or network services on the Web.

If you encounter a page with a word that is highlighted in some way (usually in a different color and underlined), you can click on that word and "go to" the page or resource to which connects. Of course, you are not actually "going" anywhere when you do this, but rather, you are summoning the file or resource that the link points to. This non-linear, non-hierarchical method of accessing information was a breakthrough in information sharing and quickly became the major source of traffic on the Internet.

The basic elements of the World Wide Web are:

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) - the set of standards used by computers to communicate and share files with each other.
URL's (Uniform Resource Locator) - the "address" of a resource (file or directory) on the Web.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - the programming "taggs" added to text documents taht turn them into hypertext documents.

*Because so many of these technical terms are new to most people, we have linked these words to their definitions, so that you can understand what in the World Wide Web we're talking about. We hope it has been of some help. If we are not clear, please feel free to ask questions.

CONTACT US

WHY HAVE A WEBSITE?

EDITABLE PAGE

SAMPLES

GLOSSARY

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

WEBSITE MARKETING

Glossary