Common Internet Terms

For those of you just beginning to see the adavantages of moving your business onto the World Wide Web, but having difficulty understanding what exactly internet technology is able to offer and what is required of you before taking the plunge, the following page is a brief description of some of the most common terms you are likely to run into during the early stages of an internet based project.

What is the World Wide Web?

Originally developed during the 1960s as a military networking configuration to stop total communications breakdown in the event of a nuclear attack the forerunner of what we know as the World Wide Web took nearly thirty years to develop into the system we would recognise.

The three decades resulted in the development of high speed data links and data transfer standards (known as protocols) which enabled more and more institutions to access the stored information, in fact the system became so popular the backbone connections were upgraded again during the late 80s.

It was not until the invention of hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee and CERN to provide efficient data access to the members of the international high-energy physics community that the internet as we know it would develop. In 1992 Internet Society is chartered and the World-Wide-Web officially release by CERN. During the mid nineties the internet saw no major changes to the physical network but huge increases in the number of public and private users.

Today the internet is available world wide through millions of connections and a multitude of devices providing billions of pages of information 24 hours a day 365 days of the year

What is an ISP?

Your Internet Service Provider is the company through which you connect to the internet. There are a large number of ISP's available in the UK and all have differing connection packages and prices to suit your needs.

What is a website?

A website or web presence as it is sometimes known is a cost-effective sales and marketing tool that can draw additional custom directly or act as an aid to strengthen an existing marketing campaign.

With the constant pressure on business to stay current with technology and the need to provide potential customers with as many means of communication as possible the internet has provided a method of worldwide coverage for your products or services, something costing potentially thousands only a decade ago.

A website can range in size from a few simple pages of relevant content to many hundreds of pages with detailed information, rich media content and extensive use of database driven information.

At Cnx Web Solutions we pride ourselves on being able to provide cost effective solutions for all of our clients. Our extensive knowledge and long term experience of the technologies involved and the advantages and disadvantages to using them means we can avoid many of the pitfalls less experienced web design agencies fall foul of.

What are hyperlinks?

The most essential ingredient of any webpage, hyperlinks connect together two pieces of content in the same document or between entirely different documents. Typically you will have to click on a hyperlink with the mouse to traverse the link between content, though this is not necessarily the case with all browsers and websites. Without the use of hyperlinking the internet would not have become as popular, or as useable as it is today. Websites are essentially a collection of separate documents connected together by some form of navigation almost exclusively made up by the use of hyperlinking.

What is a portal?

Also known as a gateway, portal websites are often used as a starting point to find other websites on the internet. Typical services available are directories of links to other sites, the ability to search for information, news and entertainment. Portals provide an excellent means of driving traffic to your website by providing lots of information that sees users return again and again.

What is E-Commerce

Electronic Commerce is an all encompassing term to mean the buying and selling of products or services over the internet. Here at Cnx Web Solutions we are able to provide a number of E-Commerce Solutions for your business from off-the-shelf packages to completely bespoke systems.

What is a domain name?

Your domain name is a unique name for your business on the internet or, more technically the actual web server on which your website resides. Before the user is transferred to the correct server and website, the domain name is converted by a DNS (Domain Name Server) into an IP (Internet Protocol) address. The IP is a numerical address consisting of four numerical values separated by periods (full-stops) .

What is downloading?

Technically this is the act of retrieving any form of information from the internet to view on your own device. More commonly used on the internet to indicate to a user a particular file that they may copy to their computer for later use. A number of our client's websites have areas in which files are placed to enable potential customers to see more in-depth information about products or services that can not be described effectively using standard web based technology.

What is uploading?

The inverse of a download, this involves the user physically copying or sending information onto or more accurately across the internet from their computer or device. Many of our clients take advantage of upload functionality through the use of one of our custom written interfaces or CMS products. In most cases the maximum speed at which you can upload (in Kilobits per second) is lower than your highest download speed though this is dependant on the type of internet connection you have access to and the terms and conditions that your ISP sets out.

What is a search engine?

In simple terms a search engine is a tool that enables you to locate information on the World-Wide-Web more easily, without the need to know exactly which website the information is stored on. Search engines work by sending out 'spiders' (also known as a 'crawler' or 'bot') that traverse the internet through the use of the interconnecting hyperlinks on web pages. As the search engine spider reaches a page it will store the URL, links and keywords within it, sending them back to a central location for entry into the search engines database of information .

What is a URL?

The Uniform Resource Locator is a standardised address for a particular resource (such as a web page, document or image) on the internet. The first part of the URL, before the colon specifies the protocol to be used (usually http) and the parts following the colon are interpreted depending on the specific protocol being used