Glossary

This glossary contains a list of commonly used terms when disscussing web design:

Cache - In browsers, "cache" is used to identify a space where web pages you have visited are stored in your computer. A copy of documents you retrieve is stored in cache. When you use GO, BACK, or any other means to revisit a document, the browser first checks to see if it is in cache and will retrieve it from there because it is much faster than retrieving it from the server.

CMS - Content Management Systems (CMS) are websites that have an additional administration area allowing you the owner to make changes to your content, images and even layout.

Cookies - Is a message from a WEB SERVER computer, sent to and stored by your browser on your computer. When your computer consults the originating server computer, the cookie is sent back to the server, allowing it to respond to you according to the cookie's contents. The main use for cookies is to provide customized Web pages according to a profile of your interests. When you log onto a "customize" type of invitation on a Web page and fill in your name and other information, this may result in a cookie on your computer which that Web page will access to appear to "know" you and provide what you want. If you fill out these forms, you may also receive e-mail and other solicitation independent of cookies.

CRM - CRM is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information.

Database - A database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system so that a computer program or person can consult it to answer queries.

Domain Name - The address or URL of a particular Web site, it is the text name corresponding to the numeric IP address of a computer on the Internet. For example: www.netlingo.com is the domain name for the numeric IP address "66.201.69.207." There is an organization called InterNIC that registers domain names for a fee, to keep people from registering the same name. To register a domain name, you can contact a company (such as Network Solutions, Inc.) or you can ask your ISP or hosting company to register names for you.

Download - To copy something from a primary source to a more peripheral one, as in saving something found on the Web (currently located on its server) to diskette or to a file on your local hard drive.

Drop Shipping - Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to wholesalers, who then ship the goods directly to the customer . The retailers make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price.

Driver - A computer program that interacts with a particular device or software. A driver is a file that contains the information a program needs to operate a peripheral (such as a scanner or mouse). An extremely handy use of the Internet is to download a driver directly from the manufacturer's Web site. In personal computing, a driver is often packaged as a dynamic link library (DLL) file.

e-Commerce - e-Commerce consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.

FTP - File Transfer Protocol. Ability to transfer rapidly entire files from one computer to another, intact for viewing or other purposes.

HTML - Hypertext Markup Language. A standardized language of computer code, imbedded in "source" documents behind all Web documents, containing the textual content, images, links to other documents (and possibly other applications such as sound or motion), and formatting instructions for display on the screen. When you view a Web page, you are looking at the product of this code working behind the scenes in conjunction with your browser.

IP Address - (Internet Protocol number or address). A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 165.113.245.2
Every machine that is on the Internet has a unique IP address. If a machine does not have an IP number, it is not really on the Internet. Most machines also have one or more Domain Names that are easier for people to remember.

JAVA - A network-oriented programming language invented by Sun Microsystems that is specifically designed for writing programs that can be safely downloaded to your computer through the Internet and immediately run without fear of viruses or other harm to our computer or files. Using small Java programs (called "Applets"), Web pages can include functions such as animations, calculators, and other fancy tricks. We can expect to see a huge variety of features added to the Web using Java, since you can write a Java program to do almost anything a regular computer program can do, and then include that Java program in a Web page.

Link - The URL imbedded in another document, so that if you click on the highlighted text or button referring to the link, you retrieve the outside URL. If you search the field "link:", you retrieve on text in these imbedded URLs which you do not see in the documents.

Plug In - An application built into a browser or added to a browser to enable it to interact with a special file type (such as a movie, sound file, Word document, etc.)

PHP - PHP is a programming language designed for building dynamic web pages.

RSS - Short for "Really Simple Synication" (a.k.a. Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary), refers ti a group of XML based web-content distribution and republication (Web syndication) formats primarily used by news sites and weblogs (blogs). Any website can issue an RSS feed. By subscribing to an RSS feed, you are alerted to new additions to the feed since you last read it. In order to read RSS feeds, you must use a "feed reader," which formats the XML code into an easily readable format (feed readers are to XML and RSS feeds as web browsers are to HTML and web pages.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site.

Server/Web Server - A computer running that software, assigned an IP address, and connected to the Internet so that it can provide documents via the World Wide Web. Also called HOST computer. Web servers are the closest equivalent to what in the print world is called the "publisher" of a print document. An important difference is that most print publishers carefully edit the content and quality of their publications in an effort to market them and future publications. This convention is not required in the Web world, where anyone can be a publisher; careful evaluation of Web pages is therefore mandatory. Also called a "Host."

TCP/IP - (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) -- This is the suite of protocols that defines the Internet. Originally designed for the UNIX operating system, TCP/IP software is now available for every major kind of computer operating system. To be truly on the Internet, your computer must have TCP/IP software.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator. The unique address of any Web document. May be keyed in a browser's OPEN or LOCATION / GO TO box to retrieve a document.

Web Application - Web application or webapp is an application that is accessed via web over a network such as the Internet or an intranet.

Web Hosting - Web Hosting essentially means to store your website on a server. In order for a website to be online, it needs to be "hosted" on a server, so people can physically access it.

XHTML - A variant of HTML. Stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is a hybrid between HTML and XML that is more universally acceptable in Web pages and search engines than XML.