The Webmaster’s Encyclopedia : Terms That You Always Wanted to Learn About and Were Afraid to Ask
Posted by Spyros Panagiotopoulos in General Website Creation Tips, tags: learn webmaster terms, webmaster encyclopedia, webmaster lexicon
The problem that many people face when they are newcomers to a certain area is terminology. There are many new terms that one needs to be aware of and these are most times learned by practise and as time progresses. The same problem applies to new webmasters that have only recently taken up the task of creating a website or blog.They come up with new terms all the time, making it difficult for them to understand some of the ideas involved.
Therefore, i decided to create a post describing as many of these terms as i can. This one will be like an encyclopedia. There will be words and phrases explained, that are typically used at webmastering. If you have any objection on what you read below, or you have to propose new phrases that you feel should be added, please do so with leaving a comment below. I’ll gladly add it to the post.
Webmaster Tools
FTP Client
An FTP Client is a tool used by webmasters in order to upload their websites to an internet server, which most times is a free or a paid host. It’s the essential tool that allows for easily updating your website files and also transferring them from your hard disk to the world wide web. If you happen to not have used an FTP client before, you should find the FileZilla FTP Client pretty useful.
MySQL Database
The vast majority of websites nowadays needs to store some information coming from its users. Whether it is their registration credentials, emails or even plain information, like articles or posts, a database is necessary to preserve it. In fact, a database is like a storage room holding all this needed data inside it and cooperating with your website to serve that information back when needed.
Nowadays, mySQL is the most widely used database management system in the world. Most websites tend to utilize it in order to store their data. There are of course other database management systems too, like oracle, but mySQL tends to be the standard for website databases.
Blog
As you most probably already know blogs were firstly created to be online diaries. They were used so that people could write down the things that they wanted to and present them online for others to read. However, nowadays blogs have gotten a lot more power. In fact, they are powerful websites where webmasters create various posts that are ordered chronologically with the newer ones coming on top. As you can see, website-creation-tips.com is a blog too.
Search Engine Optimization (a.k.a. SEO)
A term that you have probably heard a lot of before. This one simply involves all the practices that a webmaster takes so that their website is indexed by the search engines as soon as possible and at the best possible search engine results pages. Of course, there are many techniques that one needs to do in order to get the best possible results. If you need to know more about it, i would suggest that you read this post about search engine optimization. Moreover, if you have a wordpress blog, i would strongly suggest that you take some time to read this post and install these 6 great Wordpress SEO plugins.
Website Traffic
Website traffic is all about the amount of visits that a website gets. A website can get traffic in many ways, such as advertising or promoting with social media like Twitter.
Referring Website Traffic
Referring website traffic refers to traffic that you get from other websites or referring sources. For instance, when somebody included a link of your website to their one and visitors reach you via this link, you get referring traffic from that link. Additionally, for example, a link from a pdf file to your website is also considered referring traffic. On the other hand, if a visitor directly visits your website, maybe having bookmarked your website, this is not referring, but direct website traffic.
HTML – CSS – PHP, ASP
All these 3 are technologies that web programmers use in order to create websites or edit them. HTML is the most basic programming language that you need to know in order to create websites, and in fact, every webmaster needs to know some things about it. CSS is a great way to stylize your html code as you would like it to look like. If you are not using CSS to do so, you are really losing much. Finally, PHP or ASP are languages used in conjuction with HTML so that dynamic programming is served. HTML is by nature a static language, meaning that it cannot interact with the visitors of a website. However, ASP or PHP can get information from visitors, store it on databases and present them back after editing them or not. Therefore, whenever you see a website that users create accounts and log in, you know that a dynamic language like PHP or ASP is involved.
Javascript
Javascript is another technology used by web programmers that is not static in nature. Javascript is a technology that runs on the side of the visitor. This means that, for instance, a clock can be utilized in javascript but there is no way for the server to interact with the user directly. However, this technology is quite good for creating nice effects for the user, like rollover images or simple counters and websites tend to use it a lot for such simple tasks.
CPC / CPM Advertising
It is quite certain that you have encountered these terms if you are into website advertising, maybe just even using a CPC network like Google Adsense. CPC stands for Cost Per Click and related to advertising where you are paid for each click happening on the ads your website(s) serve. On the other hand, CPM advertising means Cost Per iMage impressions. These networks pay you a standard sum for a standard number of impressions, usually counted in one thousand. So a CPM of 1$ for a thousand image impressions means that you get a dollar out of every 1000 pageviews your website serves.
Website : Hits, Pageviews, Visits, Unique Visitors
Whenever you check your website statistics, you should be certain what each statistic really means. Website hits refer to EVERY hit made on your website. Whenever an image, webpage or even audio is asked from your website, this counts as a hit. Therefore, you will mostly see lots of hits whenever you check your statistics. Pageviews refer to the pages that were viewed on your website. Thus, if you refresh a webpage 5 times, your stats get 5 more pageviews. Notice that some statistics counters only count a pageview after some time has elapsed before the last one has happened. The number of visits refer to the actual persons that visit your website. Whenever a new visitor arrives to your website, this counts as a new visit. However, notice that a visit is counted for a period of like 10 minutes. Therefore, if they refresh a webpage, this is still one visit. Unique visitors is probably the most important visitors related statistic, because it shows you the number of visitors that arrived on your website using different computers and so you can get a more reliable piece of information regarding your website traffic this way.
Google Adsense
Google Adsense is probably the most famous CPC network in the world. Once you get lots of traffic for your website, you would really want to utilize this in order to earn some money. However, doing adsense is in fact an art by itself. If you are interested in it, you may really want to take a look at this pdf discussing techniques to use in order to double your adsense revenue today.
Website Marketing
Creating a website is great but you won’t really go that far if you do not promote it to other people. The techniques used in order to drive people to your website are what website marketing is about. It is very important that once you create good, unique and quality content, you promote it to people who are interested about it.
This post is going to be updated lots of times in the future and new terms are going to be added every week. If you feel that something should be added here, please do not hesitate to leave a comment below or even contact me to tell me about it.
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