Whether you’re a budding blogger or a small business start-up, getting your online presence noticed is essential in your path to success. However, this road can be a bumpy one for those who see the internet as an alien anomaly rather than a friendly face. Crack your complicated computer conundrums and become a world-wide whizz with our no-nonsense guide to internet jargon.
Browser: This is the programme you will use to access the internet. Popular browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari.
HTML: Hyper Text Mark-up Language is a programming language that tells the computer how to display a web page. A browser reads the HTML and displays colours, text, pictures and pages accordingly.
IP address: Think of your IP address as a unique ID number, distinguishing your computer from every other computer in the world that is connected to the internet.
Domain name: A domain name is a unique name that is assigned to your IP address to make it easier to remember and access. For example – the IP address 72.21.211.176 translates to the domain name www.amazon.com.
Server: The server is a remote computer from which your stored files are transferred using an internet connection or network.
Download: Downloading a file copies that file from the server to the hard drive on your own computer. Uploading a file does the opposite by sending information from your own computer to a remote server so it can be accessed online by any computer.
Web host: Web hosting refers to the company that stores a website on its server. A web host is necessary to start a website. Just remember, if you’re going to have a party, you need somewhere to host it…
ISP: This is your Internet Service Provider – the company that provides your access to the internet. ISPs often offer other related services, such as web hosting.
Cookie: You may have been thinking that internet users were a greedy bunch with all this talk of cookies, but unfortunately electronic cookies are a lot less tasty than their biscuity name-sakes. They can still be pretty useful though, taking the form of little bites of information stored about a person who is browsing online. Cookies allow websites to remember user preferences and log-in information and are great for businesses that use targeted advertising.
URL: URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is broken down into three parts, telling you what Internet Application Protocol is being used.
Luckily, you don’t need to know that. What you do need to know is that your URL is the address of your website – such as http://mygreatwebpage.com – allowing people to find you online. All pages, sub-pages and files stored online will have their own unique URL – e.g. http://mygreatwebpage.com/page2.
Are you an online aficionado or a tech-phobe?
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- License: Creative Commons image source
Catherine Halsey writes for a digital marketing agency on a range of subjects. This article links back to http://business.bt.com/domains-and-hosting/web-hosting/