don’t let the jargon get you down

To help those who get frustrated with the jargon of the Web and the IT industry, we have listed some of the common technical terms.

Internet
Network connecting millions of computers and other devices to provide worldwide communication for businesses and homes.

World Wide Web (WWW)
A subset of the Internet in which graphics, text, sound and animation combine to form a rich communications medium.

Broadband
A high-capacity, two-way link between an end user and access network suppliers which can support full-motion, interactive video applications.

ISP
Internet Service Provider, providing broadband or dial-up access, hosting and email to the Internet.

Hosting
The process whereby your Website files are stored on a ‘server’ computer that is permanently connected to the Internet.

Domain Name
The name by which your Website is found; it is also the central part of the URL (see below) specific to you. e.g.. cravenplan-uk.com.

URL
Uniform Resource Locator; the unique address with which your web pages can be found on the Internet. e.g.. www.cravenplan.co.uk// or for some browsers the whole code is https://www.cravenplan.co.uk//

Navigation
Usually buttons, graphics or text links on a page which when clicked move you to another page or place on a page.

HTML
Hyper Text Mark-up Language; the programming language with which the web page is written. First proposed by an Englishman, Tim Berners Lee in 1990.

Javascript
A programming language which, when embedded into web pages, helps to create special effects, interactive games, security passwords etc.

Search Engine
A software program that trawls through the web and indexes pages much like the Yellow Pages. Users can find the pages they want by accessing the search engine.

Keyword
A word important to your Website subject matter which the search engines can use to identify, and therefore index, the topic of your Website.

Bandwidth
The amount of information and data travelling down a communications channel within a given time period (also known as Data Transfer).

Hard Disk Space
Space on the device within a computer that stores data, files etc. Measured in Mb (megabytes) (approx one million characters) or Gb (gigabytes) (approx one billion characters).

Browser
Software that allows you to view pages on the Internet. e.g. Internet Explorer (IE), Opera and Firefox.

FTP
File Transfer Protocol, the standard of transferring data over the Internet.

Pay per Click
PPC, the best known example of which is Adwords in Google, is the sponsored links advertising which appears on the right of the screen on many searches and in the coloured section at the top of the list on some.

Maintenance
Monitoring of Search Engine rankings and updating of Website on a regular basis.