Glossary of Web Terms
A
ad clicks: When a visitor uses an advertisement link to go to another website.
ad copy: The text used for an advertising campaign.
ad inventory: The number of ads a website or publication can sell in a given period.
ad views (or impressions): When a visitor pulls an advertisement’s image from the server, it is assumed they saw it and have the opportunity to visit the advertiser’s website by clicking on the link. One person looking at one ad.
access service provider: A company providing access to the internet through a variety of methods, possibly including dial-up, cable modem, wireless, and DSL.
ActiveX: A programming language supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer which works a lot like Java. ActiveX is more invasive than Java, and can transmit computer viruses. If you use Explorer, turn off ActiveX.
AIM: AOL Instant Messenger.
affiliate program: An advertising program offering a monetary incentive for webmasters to drive traffic to the advertiser’s website. This eliminates the necessity for the advertiser to find websites with related content to list their banners. It also increases the response rate by giving the “affiliate” websites a stake in the response rate. Affiliate programs are a great plan for the websites offering them, but the websites that participate often become underpaid sales representatives.
alt text: Text provided with an image as an alternative to viewing the actual image. It will appear before the image is fully loaded, if your visitor has their graphics turned off, and if your visitor positions their mouse on the image. Alt text is also important because search engine spiders often read it. The code for alt text is as follows: <img src=”your.gif” alt=”your text”>.
article bots: Computer programs that search for articles on your favorite subject. They’re the oldest bots. Find one of your own at BotSpot.
ASL (or a/s/l): Marketing abbreviation for the Age, Sex and Location of people an ad will be presented to. Many experienced advertisers and ad agencies will ask you for this demographic information about your website or newsletter.
authentication: Technique which allows access to certain webpages only by offering a username and password. This process shows that the person entering the pages is an authorized user.
autoresponder: A program which will respond to your email immediately with a pre-designed response. They’re great for confirmation messages, but be careful not to rely on them too heavily.
B
bandwidth: How many bits are transferred between the server and its visitors. The more (and bigger) graphics and downloadable files you offer on your website, the more bandwidth your site will take, increasing the time visitors must spend on your website, and the amount of resources your host must spend on you. Taking up too much bandwidth may drive visitors away or force your host to charge you more to support your website.
beacon pages: A webpage created to increase search engine rankings by increasing the number of “related” pages linking to your main website. They take advantage of search engines’ new emphasis on pages that have many links from related websites in determining relevance to a search term. They are Doorway Pages with a different address.
BCC: Blind carbon copy. This is a field in your email program that will send a copy of your message to a person without the primary recipient knowing. The email address of the BCC recipient will not appear on the resulting email, and any replies to the message will not be sent to them.
BRB: Chat or bulletin board abbreviation for “Be right back.”
browser: A program used to find and interpret HTML documents on the internet. The most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape, in that order.
BTW: Email and newsgroup abbreviation of “by the way.”
C
campaign: The advertising and promotion done during a given period of time.
catch-all: A program that allows any email sent to your domain to go to a particular email address. That allows any email sent to a misspelled or unused username will still get to a person who can deal with them.
CGI script: A program, often written in the PERL programming language, written to run on any computer. They add value to a website by doing any number of cute things. For example, a CGI script can send a visitor to a “thank you” page when they submit a form. They normally go in a separate folder from your HTML files.
click through rate: The percentage of users who click on a viewed advertisement. It shows how effective the ad is, when compared to the average rate of the media.
client: The browser used by a visitor to a website.
client errors: An error occurring due to a bad request by the visitor’s browser, such as typing in a page name that doesn’t exist. Client errors will show error numbers in the 400 range in your log analysis program.
.com: Suffix indicating a commercial domain.
comment tag: An HTML tag. <!– Your Comment Here –> It is invisible to your website visitors, but many search engine spiders index them. Use them to mark parts of your page for future revision, as another place to put your site description, and possibly another place to list keywords.
cookies: These aren’t the kind your Grandma used to make! Web cookies are files containing information about visitors to a website, like username, password, and what they want to buy. It is stored on the visitor’s computer, and sent back to the website that created it when the visitor comes back or gets to the order page. Cookies can also retrieve information like monitor resolution and platform to webmasters who intend to use this information to improve their website.
counter: A CGI script which counts the number of times your page is requested by visitors. Remember that a visitor which visits your page more than once will be counted every time.
CPA: Cost per action for banner ads. This is the best type of rate to pay for banner advertisements, and the worst type of rate to charge. Advertisers only pay for the visitors who click on their banner and then sign up, fill out a form, or purchase something on their website. This is most common for Affiliate Programs. My opinion is this type of payment arrangement is already an endangered species, and will soon become extinct.
CPC: Cost per click through for banner ads. The advertiser only pays when a visitor clicks on their banner (whether or not the visitor waits for their page to load before leaving). Look for this type of rate when you plan to place a banner on a website with related content.
CPM: Cost per thousand (impressions or subscribers). CPM is a marketing term you will see often when researching banner and magazine ad rates. It helps you determine how much you are spending per person viewing your ad, and the company by allowing them to charge more as their subscriber base or hit count increases without changing their posted ad rates. If you are planning to offer advertising, this is the way to do it.
cracker: A person who breaks into copyrighted software to illegally duplicate it or remote computers to destroy information.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. They let you assign the look of different elements of each webpage in your website. They’re an HTML 4.0 feature, so older browsers may not support them.
cyberspace: The Internet. The phrase was coined in 1984 by William Gibson in his book, Neuromancer.
D
DBMS: DataBase Management System.
demographics: The types of people looking at a given advertising medium. (For example: 25-30 year old males making £30,000-£80,000 per year, with blond hair and green eyes.)
dial-up service provider: An Internet Service Provider accessible through telephone lines by modem.
digest: An email message containing several postings to a mailing list. Lists often inundate members with postings, and digests help people with less time keep up.
directory: A list of websites, usually organized by category. Many directories are searchable, but they are different from search engines because they just list your home page. They don’t spider your site, so any hidden descriptions or keywords will not count toward the relevancy of your page in any given search.
discussion list: A group of people discussing a particular topic by email.
DNS: Domain Name Server. A program which automatically translates domain names into their correct IP addresses.
domain: An area on the internet assigned to a particular company. Each area is assigned its own numeric IP address and a text name. If one server has more than one, they are considered “virtual” domains.
domain name: The text name assigned to a website. A domain name example would be www.texaseldersolutions.com.
doorway pages: A webpage designed to rank well on a specific search engine for a specific keyword phrase. These pages usually rely on frequent repetition of the keyword phrase, and often try to “trick” search engines into ranking them well.
download: The transfer of information from the internet to your computer. The information could be a webpage, email, or a program. Downloading things can be dangerous, so be sure to use Protection before engaging in intercourse with other computers. (In other words, if you’re going to be on the internet, get a good virus protection program.)
DSL: Digital Subscriber Line. A method of connecting to the internet permanently via a high-bandwidth phone line. They’re faster than dial-up service, and you can be on the phone and the internet at the same time without purchasing an additional phone line. They’re also more expensive and temperamental than phone lines.
DSVD: Digital Simultaneous Voice and Data.
E
E-Commerce: The ability to sell goods and services over the internet. To enable your website to sell goods and services, you need a merchant account (to process credit cards), a secure server for your form, and (if you have more than one product) a shopping cart program to “remember” what your customers want to purchase. If you anticipate a large volume of purchases, you may need a separate company to provide real-time processing of your credit card transactions.
.edu: Suffix indicating an educational domain.
email: Electronic mail. A wonderful, free marketing tool and a great way to keep in touch with friends, family, business associates, and website visitors. If you don’t have an email address, what are you waiting for? Your internet service provider should give you one, your web host should give you one if you have your own domain, and you can get them for free on the world wide web or by using Juno.
email address: The first part of an email address is the username, which identifies the person you want to contact. The @ symbol is after the username, and before the host name. The host name identifies the computer or email service the person uses. A three letter suffix is added (separated with a dot) after the host name. The most common suffixes are: .com (commercial), .net (network), .org (non-profit organization), .edu (educational), .gov (government), and .mil (military). Any two letter suffixes after the three letter suffix identify a country: .us (United States), .uk (United Kingdom), .de (Germany), .ca (Canada), .se (Sweden), etc. The host name and country suffix are unnecessary if your information is the same. (If you use AT&T Worldcom and so does your best friend, you can address email to just her username, and if you live in the United States, you’ll never see a .us suffix.)
encryption: A program that scrambles and unscrambles data on a network, so personal information located there is unintelligible to unauthorized people. Even if a website’s form data is encrypted, if it is sent via email it becomes accessible to anyone. If you are setting up E-Commerce on your website, be sure to store your customers’ data on a secure server.
Ethernet: The most common method of networking computers in a local area network, since it can be used with any kind of computer. It also provides fast connections and (if the network has a direct connection to the internet), can provide fast and constant connections to the internet. Most University of California campuses now offer Ethernet connections to their students in the dorms for free - all they need is an Ethernet card in their computer!
ezine: An electronic magazine, often sent via email and/or posted on a website. These “magazines” are usually short, and are often free. I strongly suggest signing up for free ezines in your field and starting one of your own as a marketing tool. Signing up for your competitor’s ezine helps you keep up to date with what they’re doing, and can give you ideas for your website.
F
FAQ: Internet abbreviation of “frequently asked questions.”
flame: To send an angry or malicious comment to a newsgroup, chat room, bulletin board, or via email. Doing so is considered bad, so if an online comment makes you angry, don’t send your response until you’ve cooled down a bit! Derived words include: flaming, flamer, and flame war (which is basically a nasty online argumentt).
forms: A set of HTML commands which allows the author to control information sent to them by visitors. Forms can make it easier for visitors to give feedback because the author does all the work. All the visitor has to do is answer the author’s questions. (Other times, forms aren’t any easier to fill out than an email screen, and the tiny input areas make it more frustrating.)
FTP: “File Transfer Protocol.” This computer language allows you to get files from and send files to any type of computer over the internet. Under most circumstances, your browser works very well for transferring files between computers, but when you have your own website, it’s helpful to have a specialized program to update it.
FYI: Internet abbreviation for “for your information.”
G
G: Email and newsgroup abbreviation for a grin.
gif: A type of graphic understood by all graphic browsers. They were introduced by Compuserve back when graphic browsers were young. Now, they are the most flexible graphic format, allowing transparent backgrounds and animation.
gopher: A menu-driven interface for the internet. This system is now obsolete; it was almost entirely replaced by the world wide web four years ago, when I first encountered it.
.gov: A suffix indicating a government domain.
GUI: Graphical User Interface. A program that uses icons rather than commands. Windows uses GUI; Unix and DOS use command-line interfaces.
H
hallway pages: Most search engines which scour the internet for new webpages to add to their database give better rankings to pages they “found” than pages that were submitted on the “Add URL” page. Hallway pages are basically a list of links to all the pages in a website that the designer wants indexed by search engines. By submitting the Hallway page, rather than the index page, the website is likely to be indexed faster, more completely, and get better rankings.
hidden input tags: Form tags which visitors will not see when visiting your site. Some search engines index them. For example: <input type=”hidden” name=”Description” value=”Your page description here.”>
hits: Hits are simply requests for files from visitors. Each HTML document and graphic file counts as a separate hit, so they aren’t an accurate representation of the number of different visitors to your site, but sometimes they’re all you’ve got.
home page: The main or entrance page to a website. The page visitors are sent to when they type in your URL without adding a specific page name. Home pages are usually named index.html, home.html, or default.html. (I recommend index.html, since all hosts support that name.)
host: Your internet service provider host is the computer you connect to for internet access. Your website host is the computer where your website files are located, which allows visitors access from the internet.
HTML: “HyperText Markup Language.” HTML is a simple programming language everyone uses to author their webpage. (Programs which claim to avoid the necessity of learning it translate your document into HTML.)
http: Hypertext transport protocol. The language used to move web pages across the world wide web.
hypertext: A term used to describe associative writing, as opposed to linear (narrative) writing. People follow links in the text to read it their way, rather than how the author wrote it. Web pages are hypertext, and so are many CD-ROMs and computerized help systems.