Finding it difficult to understand all the techno mumbo jumbo? We’ve put together a list of some of the more widely used terms below to help you out.
A
- Accessibility – Addresses the issue of creating websites that are accessible to all users, regardless of physical ability or the way in which they are using the internet.
- Adwords – Googles main advertising product. It offers pay-per-click (PPC)advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.
- Analytics – Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.
B
- Bandwidth – How much data a system is allowed to transfer over a given connection.
- Blog – The short form of term “Web Log”. Blogs are typically websites with regular entries (text, video or pictures) usually displayed is reverse chronological order.
C
- Cloud Computing – A style of computing which is becoming increasingly popular where IT-related capabilities are provided as a service, allowing users to access those services from anywhere with an Internet connection.
- CMS (Content Management System) – An application used to create, edit, manage and publish content.
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – A stylesheet language typically used in web design to define the presentation (colours, fonts, layout) of a webpage which has been written in a markup language like HTML.
D
- DNS (Domain Name System) – An internet system used to translate domain names (e.g. www.findingsimple.com) into IP addresses (e.g. 208.77.188.166).
- Domain Name (Internet) – Internet domain names are used to identify resources on the internet. They are typically used as part of a websites’ URL (eg. www.findingsimple.com) or as part of an email address after the ‘@’ symbol e.g. @findingsimple.com.
E
- eCommerce – Consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the internet.
- Email (Electronic Mail) – A method of writing, sending, receiving and saving messages over electronic communication systems (typically the internet).
- Email Marketing – A form of marketing which uses email as a means of communicating messages to an audience.
- eMarketing – The marketing of products or services over the internet.
H
- Hosting Service (Web) – A service which allows individuals and organisations to store and make their website accessible from the internet. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity.
- HTML (HypeText Markup Language) – The markup language for web pages. Allows the author of a web page to describe the structure of text within the document.
P
- PayPal – is a business which allows payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet.
- Podcast – A series of audio (or video digital-media files) which are distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds, to portable media players and personal computers.
- PHP – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessing. A computer scripting language which can be embedded into HTML and used to create dynamic web pages and content.
R
- RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – A family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format.
S
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – The process of improving rankings in search engine results.
- Sitemap – A textual or graphical representation of the structure of a website.
- SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) – A cryptographic protocol that is used to provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging and other data transfers.
T
- Traffic (Web) – The amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit.
U
- URL (Uniform Resource Locator) – Specifies where a specific resource is located and what protocol to use to retrieve it. We rely in URLs to access websites. For example http://www.findingsimple.com is a URL which tells your web browser where my website is located (e.g. www.findingsimple.com) and how to access it – using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (e.g. http://).
W
- Wiki - A page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites.
- WordPress – An open source web publishing platform, primarily used for the publishing of blogs.
**Note – definitions used on this page are primarily derived from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.