PDF, Portable Document Format – This is a file format developed by Adobe Systems. It allows document designers to create a file that can be viewed consistently by anyone with the free Adobe Reader plug-in.
Plug-in – A plug-in is an application that adds capabilities to your browser. Some plug-ins allow you to view video or audio files (QuickTime, MediaPlayer, Real) while others allow you to view and interact with animations, games and presentations (Flash).
Popularity Ranking – Some search engines rank web sites in the order of how many other sites link to each page and how many links the site has to other sites. This determines in what order a listing appears on a search engine when certain keywords are entered.
Relevancy Ranking – This is another way search engines display results. This method uses fuzzy logic to combine several factors, including how often certain terms appear in documents, whether they occur together as a phrase and where they appear in the text.
Script – A script is a piece of programming that adds functionality to your website. It can be written in any number of languages, including CGI, JAVA and JavaScript. Forms and interactive links, which respond differently when you roll over them or click on them use scripts, as do photos that change on a page, or navigation features that change color.
Server, Web Server – This is any computer that hosts documents that are used by the World Wide Web. It is also called a host computer. To have a website, you need to have a server or host.
Site or Website – This is a collection of web pages. A website is a collection of files in a location that are accessible via the web. A typical website contains images, html-coded pages, scripts and other files such as photos, video, pdf documents and audio. Together these comprise a website.
SSL – Short for Secure Socket Layer, it is the protocol on the Internet that encrypts information. It is essential that a site have SSL to secure transactions for online purchasing.
Spiders – Computer robot programs, also referred to sometimes as “crawlers” or “knowbots”, are used by search engines to scan web pages and catalog their findings. This includes adding new pages, updating pages that have been changed and deleting links to old pages that no longer exist. Most large search engines have several robots working constantly. A single robot would take six months to survey the entire web each time, so listings would rapidly be out of date.
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) – This is a suite of protocols that define the Internet. To access the Internet you have to have a TCP/IP connection.
URL – This is the abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator. This is the unique address of a web document. When you type an address with an http:// or www. at the front, that is the site’s URL.
WWW – In the Web’s early days, it was known as the World Wide Web. The www. still refers to that moniker, though many sites these days can be accessed by their names and Top Level Domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.), i.e., pepsi.com, microsoft.com or ebay.com.
