Learn the Language of the World Wide Web

 by: Sushanth Bastawade

If you are already on the web or thinking about it then you must know the terminology used on the web. Here is a Glossary of a few must know Web Terms.

Visitors:

The number of distinct people who visit your site.

Page Views:

The number of web pages that have been viewed by the visitors to your site. If a single page is viewed many times by a visitor, each view is treated as a new page view.

Hits:

When a visitor views a page that has 3 graphics or images on it, he / she will give you 4 hits. 1 for the HTML page and 3 for the graphics. As hits are meaningless, you must not express your site statistics in terms of Hit count.

Referrer URL:

It is the web site from which the visitor has arrived to your site. Assume that the xyzsite.com web site has a link to your site on all its pages. When a surfer clicks on your sites' link and arrives at your site, xyzsite.com becomes your Referrer URL. Thus a referrer url indicates the sites which are giving you traffic.

If surfers type the url of your site in their browsers to arrive at your site, it will be shown as a Direct Hit in the Referrer URL list.

Targeted Traffic:

It includes the surfers who visit your site because they want the product or service or information which is being offered by your site. Usually a Search Engine or Directory will produce Targeted Traffic to your site. Your aim should be to build Targeted Traffic to your site.

A link or banner without supporting content will produce untargeted traffic.

Page Creation Tools:

They let you work with a single HTML document at a time. Netscape Composer is a Page Creation Tool.

Site Creation Tools:

They let you work with several HTML documents at once. MS Front Page is a Site Creation Tool.

WYSIWYG HTML Editor:

This is short for " What You See Is What You Get ". It is pronounced as We-z-Wig. A WYSIWYG HTML Editor will create the HTML page for you. All tags are automatically inserted by the editor when you click buttons. You only need to type in the text of your document. A WYSIWYG Editor is very useful while working with tables as it displays the table structure i.e. rows and columns.

Netscape Composer ,which is part of the Netscape Communicator 4 & higher package, is a WYSIWYG HTML Editor.

HTML Validation:

It is a software program which you can install on your computer. It is used to determine if the HTML code in your web page has any errors on it. Validating your HTML code ensures that your web page will be displaced correctly by most browsers.

Direct Linking:

If your web host allows direct linking to servers then a file (.zip, .exe) from your web site can be downloaded from another web site by hyperlinking. However, most of the free web hosts like Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire etc. do not allow Direct Linking. Thus surfers will need to visit your web page to download any file.

Spider:

When you submit a web site to a Search Engine (SE), the SE will send out spiders (software program) to your site. These spiders will record information about your site and bring it back to the SE. The info brought by the spiders is added to the database of the SE. This process is known as indexing. After your site has been indexed it will be ranked and listed by the SE, so that the site shows up in the search results.

Yahoo doesn't use spiders. All info is added manually to the Yahoo database. Thus Yahoo is a directory and not a Search Engine.

Autoresponder:

It is a software that sends an automated reply or replies to emails sent to it. The reply or replies are pre written and saved on the web server by the web site owner. As the replies are automated, it saves time & effort for the web site owner. Autoresponders can be used for sending product details to customers, to handle subscription requests or to send follow up messages to prospective customers.