Website & Online Dictionary

You hear all sorts of terms and words wandering about the internet. Here is a basic dictionary to help you understand terms that you might see or need to understand. Just before each description I've listed the category I believe the term to fall into to help further separate the terms for your understanding. This dictionary is a work in progress so stay tuned as I continue to add more to it.

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

 

A

 

above the fold: | Marketing Term | Content visible on a webpage (or email pane) without scrolling. Content you see after you scroll down is referred to as below the fold. The expression originated from newspapers and what was seen "above the fold" of the paper -- considered prime real estate in online marketing.

ActiveX: | Technology | This is a technology that enables interactive content on websites. Created by Microsoft.

ASCII: | Basic Computers | American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is the world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111. You will see the ASCII option when working with FTP programs.

 

B

Bandwidth: | Internet/Website | A measure of data transfer that is found by the number of bits or bytes per unit of time. When a website is visited, data is transferred from the hosting server to the computer of the person visiting the site. Example: 3GB/Month means the transfer between computers of 320, 864, 256 bytes during the span of one month.

Banner Ad: |Marketing Term-Internet/Website | A banner ad is an advertisement graphic placed on a website that links page to another webpage or site, with the sole purpose of driving traffic to the link or providing branding. Banner ads can be static (one image) or animated (multiple screens in one image). Most typical size is 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. (See pixels)

Bit: | Basic Computers | The basic unit of measure in computers. (See Units of measure)

Below the Fold: | Marketing Term | What you see once you scroll down a website. (Also see Above the fold.)

Byte: | Basic Computers | One byte equals 8 bits. (See Units of Measure.)

 

C

CGI-Bin: | Internet/Website | The common folder on a website server that holds all cgi scripts.

CGI : | Internet/Website | The Common Gateway Interface: a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers such as HTTP or web servers. Unlike a plain HTML document which returns only static information, a CGI program, on the other hand, is executed in real-time, so that it can output dynamic information.

CGI Program: | Internet/Website | Any program that accepts and returns data that conforms to the CGI specification.

D

Dynamic content: | Internet/Website | Content that is executed in real-time on a website, that changes upon launch. (Also see static content)

DPI: | Design/ Images | Dots Per inch. How your printer measures output of an image. Example: a 1200 dpi printer uses 1200 dots of ink in every inch to make up the colors. The higher the dot count, the more detail shown in an image. Typical quality output of a desktop printer is at 150dpi. -------- The relationship between PPI and DPI is 2:1. Example: to print on a 150 dpi printer, you would send a 300ppi image.

 

H

HTML: | Internet/Website | HyperText Markup Language - the markup language for writing web pages. Extension names include .html or .htm .

HTTP: | Internet/Website | Hypertext Transfer Protocol Overview

 

M

MYSQL Databases: | Internet/Website | MySQL is a relational database management system. It's written in a language called C+ and C++. It is the most common open source database server used today. Most authors won't have need of this for basic sites. It will come into use if a blog is installed to your website.

P

Pixel: | Design/ Images | This term is actually short for "picture element." A pixel is a small dot and combined together, pixels are what make up the images you see on your computer screen. (Also see PPI or Resolution: Screen or Print) The less pixels in an image, the grainier the image will appear.

PPI: | Design/ Images | Pixels per inch. A measure of image resolution on your computer monitor that will affect the size and quality of your images. . Typical resolution for an image used on a website would be 72 pixels per inch (ppi). (also see DPI) ------ The relationship between PPI and DPI is 2:1. Example: to print on a 150 dpi printer, you would send a 300ppi image.

 

R

Resolution: Screen: | Design/Images | Resolution for screen is the size of the image created/formatted to fit your screen. Your monitor requires a lower resolution of pixels in order to display: 72 dpi

Resolution: Print | Design/Images | Resolution for printing an image.

 

S

Static Content: | Internet/Website | Content on a webpage that does not change by the server or other scripts. This includes basic text and images in the html markup. (For instance, this page is static content - it is only text and images.)

 

U

Units of measure: | Basic Computers | Data transfer is measured by bits and bytes. The Measurement conversions are:

Bit: One unit of measure
Byte: 8 Bits
Kilobyte: 1024 Bytes (One thousand twenty four bytes)
Megabyte: 1024 Kilobytes (or 1,048,576 bytes.)
Gigabyte: 1024 Megabytes (or 106,954,752 bytes.)

 

W

www: | Internet/Websites | World Wide Web - the connection of servers via