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Web Definitions
Affiliate programs - Affiliate programs allow Web sites who provide links to your site to receive payments or reciprocal advertising in exchange for promoting your Web site.
Audio/Video streaming - Audio/video streaming allows you to provide visitors to your site with a real-time sound or video experience.
Backbone - The network of connections and high-speed lines that forms the infrastructure of the Internet. An important consideration in choosing a Web site host is that host's proximity to the backbone. The less intermediate network distance between your provider and the backbone, the faster and more reliable your Web site will be.
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Bandwidth - The amount of data that can be sent through a network connection, measured in bits per second (bps).
Banner ad - Banner ads are one of the primary methods of advertising on the Internet. They are usually small graphics with a very brief advertising message.
Bulletin board - A computerized version of the bulletin boards found in stores and other public places, where people can leave messages and advertise things they want to buy or sell.
CGI scripts - Programs that run on a Web server, in response to input from a browser. CGI scripts link the server and a program running on the system; for example, CGI scripts are used with interactive forms.
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Chat room - A real-time electronic forum; a virtual room where visitors can meet others and share ideas on a particular subject. There are chat rooms on the Internet, BBSs, and other online services.
Common Gateway Interface (CGI) - A set of rules that describe how a Web server communicates with another piece of software on the same machine, and how the other piece of software talks to the Web server. Usually, a CGI program is a small routine that takes data from a Web server and does something with it, like putting the content of a form into an email message, or turning the data into a database query.
Crawl. See Spider
Domain name - The unique name that identifies an Internet site. For instance www.globalspex.com is the domain name for Globalspex.
Domain name registration - Most Web designers will offer to register your chosen domain name for you. Alternatively, you can choose to register your domain name directly through InterNIC. Regardless of the method you choose there is a standard charge of $70 for registration.
DHTML. A combination of HTML enhancements, style sheets and scripts that allow for animation, interactions and dynamic updating of Web pages. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer have implemented Dynamic HTML with proprietary methods, but are expected to implement the W3C's Dynamic Object Model (DOM) in future versions.
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E-commerce - Electronic commerce is the exchange of goods or services via the Internet.
Features - The features available for designing a Web site are numerous, from guestbooks, to audio/video streaming, to chat rooms and bulletin boards.
GIF. (Graphics Interchange Format) A bit mapped graphics file format. It supports 8-bit color (256 colors) and compresses the files well. This translates into faster load times GIFs include a color table that includes the most representative 256 colors used. For example, a picture of the forest would include mostly greens. This method provides excellent realism in an 8-bit image.
Guestbook - A guestbook allows visitors to your site to give you their contact information (e.g. name, email or postal address, telephone number, business). You may be able to use this information to send email or direct marketing newsletters or simply collect marketing information about your customers.
HTML. (HyperText Markup Language) The document format used on the World Wide Web. Web pages are built with HTML tags, or codes, embedded in the text. HTML defines the page layout, fonts and graphic elements as well as the hypertext links to other documents on the Web. Each link contains the URL, or address, of a Web page residing on the same server or any server worldwide, hence "World Wide" Web.
Hyperlink. A jump from text or from an image map to a page or other type of file on the World Wide Web. In World Wide Web pages, hyperlinks are the primary way to navigate between pages and among Websites.
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IP Address. (Internet Protocol Address) The standard way of identifying a computer that is connected to the Internet, much the way a telephone number identifies a telephone on a telephone network. The IP address is four numbers separated by periods, and each number is less than 256, for example, 192.200.44.69. Your system administrator or Internet service provider will assign your machine an IP address.
JavaScript. A popular scripting language that is widely supported in Web browsers and other Web tools. It is easier to use than Java, but not as powerful and deals mainly with the elements on the Web page. On the client, JavaScript is maintained as source code embedded into an HTML document. On the server, it is compiled into bytecode (intermediate language), similar to Java programs.
JPEG. (Joint Photographic Experts Group) Primarily used for still photographs. Pronounced "jay-peg." An ISO/ITU standard for compressing still images that is popular due to its high compression capability. Using discrete cosine transform, it provides lossy compression (you lose some data from the original image) with ratios up to 100:1 and higher. Again, this translates into faster load times.
Meta Tags. An HTML tag that identifies the contents of a Web page. Using a format, Meta tags contain such things as a general description of the page, keywords for search engines and copyright information.
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Microsoft NT. The brand name for Microsoft's server operating platform. See also, Unix.
Opt-in. To purposefully accept some situation or condition ahead of time. An opt-in program implies that you can cancel, or "opt-out," when you no longer want the service, which makes it quite different than spam.
Plug-In. A single document in a World Wide Website written using the HTML language.
Rich Text Format (RTF) - A standard for specifying the formatting of documents. Some documents formatting languages using RTF include Hypertext Markup Language.
Resolution. The degree of sharpness of a displayed or printed character or image. On screen, resolution is expressed as a matrix of dots. For example, the VGA resolution of 640x480 means 640 dots (pixels) across each of the 480 lines. Sometimes the number of colors are added to the spec; for example, 640x480x16 or 640x480x256. The same resolution looks sharper on a small screen than a larger one.
Rights-Managed Stock - Images are purchased for a specific, clearly defined use and the price is determined by the scope of that use.
See our list of stock photography web sites.
Royalty-free Stock - single images, photographs, illustrations, movie clips, with price based on file size, or as disc collections containing 104 images on each disc. Once purchased, the images may be used as many times as you'd like, in as many ways as you'd like (with certain restrictions).
See our list of stock photography web sites.
Security functions - Securing areas of your Web site can allow visitors to your site to submit credit card payments online or access sensitive information (e.g. account information).
Search Engines. Software that searches for data based on some criteria. Although search engines have been around for decades, they have been brought to the forefront since the World Wide Web exploded onto the scene.
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Shopping cart - Shopping carts serve two functions: to manage your Web-based inventory and to help you design a browser interface for displaying your product or service line.
SMS - Short Message Service: available on digital GSM networks allowing text messages of up to 160 characters to be sent and received via the network operator's message center to your mobile phone, or from the Internet, using a so-called "SMS gateway" website. If the phone is powered off or out of range, messages are stored in the network and are delivered at the next opportunity.
Spam. Spam is e-mail that is not requested. Also known as "unsolicited commercial e-mail" (UCE), "unsolicited bulk e-mail" (UBE) and "gray mail," the term is both a noun (the e-mail message) and a verb (to send it). Spam is used to advertise products or to broadcast some political or social commentary. Source: TechWeb.com
Spiders. Also known as an "ant," "robot" ("bot") and "intelligent agent," a crawler is a program that searches for information on the World Wide Web. It is used to locate new documents and new sites by following hypertext links from server to server and indexing information based on search criteria.
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Web Browser. The program that serves as your front end to the World Wide Web on the Internet. In order to view a site, you type its address (URL) into the browser's Location field; for example, www.computerlanguage.com, and the home page of that site is downloaded to you. The home page is an index to other pages on that site that you can jump to by clicking a "click here" message or an icon. Links on that site may take you to other related sites.
Web Page. A single document in a World Wide Website written using the HTML language.
XML. (EXtensible Markup Language) An open standard for describing data from the W3C. It uses a similar tag structure as HTML; however, whereas HTML defines how elements are displayed, XML defines what those elements contain. HTML uses predefined tags, but XML allows tags to be defined by the developer of the page. Thus, virtually any data items, such as product, sales rep and amount due, can be identified, allowing Web pages to function like database records. It is expected to become the dominant format for electronic data interchange.
Unix - The name of a group of server operating platforms from Sun, RedHat, HP, and others. See also, Microsoft NT.
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URL - Uniform Resource Locator (formerly Universal Resource Locator). An Internet address which tells a browser where to find an Internet resource. For example, the URL for GlobalSpex is http://www.globalspex.com/.
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