Ever wonder what the heck I am talking about when I use terms such domain name, hosting, DNS?
Here is a list of common website terms that you may hear me use when we are working together on your site.
Website terms and definitions
Domain Name – This is the internet address of your site. It is what people will type into the address bar of a browser in order to get to your website. Example: www.YourName.com
URL – The internet address to a website or to a specific page within a website or blog. Every web page has it’s own unique URL and will be the name that you give to a page.
www.yourname.com is a domain name, and a URL of your home page.
www.yourname.com/gallery is the URL of another page on your site.
Domain Registrar – This is a company where you purchase your domain name for an annual fee. The average cost of a domain name is around $10 to $20, any more than that then you are paying to much. (read my post on domain name scams)
Note that if you forget to renew your domain name your website will not appear on the web and can be sold to someone else.
Parked Domain Name – After purchasing your domain name it is considered parked at the registrar’s website until you redirect the name servers to your hosting site.
You can also register more than one domain name. Say you want YourName.com and YourName.ca, you will use one of these as the main domain of your website and park the other at the same hosting site. Then when someone types in either one of those domain names in the address bar of a browser they will land on your site.
DNS – Domain Name Servers – To point your domain name to your hosting account insert the name server addresses that are provided by your hosting company into an area called DNS (domain name servers) in the domain name account. This will connect your domain name to your website at the hosting servers.
If you have more than one domain name as mentioned under Parked Domain Names then you will have to point the secondary domain names as well.
Once the connection is made and resolves over the internet (usually with in a few hours but they will say up to 72 hours) your domain name will appear in the address bar and show off your new site.
Host, Hosting Account – This is a company that sells space on their servers so your website can go online. There many hosting companies out there and each have their own terms and costs.
Image Website Terms
.jpg or .jpeg – the preferred file format for most website images and images of your art. You would name your image and save it as a .jpg or .jpeg
Image Size – can refer to either the actual outside dimensions of an image in inches or pixels as well as the resolution.
Resolution – refers to the number of pixels, or dots, per inch in a digital image file. The fewer the pixels or dots, the lower the resolution and the smaller the file size. Resolutions of 300 dpi and higher are required for printing. Resolutions of 72 – 100 ppi are best for web sites.
DPI – dots per inch, typically used when talking about images for printing.
PPI – pixels per inch when talking about images for the web.
See also Resizing Images for the web
Developer Website Terms
Not that you have to worry about any of these items. They are the guts that run WordPress and what allows you to manage your website content with out having to know anything about how to use them. Just so you know.
PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor (the name is a recursive acronym) is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages such as those in WordPress.
MySQL – “My Sequel” is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing access to a database. We need one to run WordPress.
HTML – Hypertext Markup Language is the language that most websites use for defining their layout and structure.
CSS – Cascading Style Sheets are often used to define styles, such as colors, fonts and sizes, of elements on a blog or website. Changes made to a specific element on a stylesheet will apply to that element everywhere it appears on the site.
JavaScript – is a scripting language that allows applications hosted by other websites to work on yours. Many widgets and such that give you code to put on your website work via javascript.
CMS – Content Management System – are programs that run on your hosting server that allow you to manage your website content online with out having to know HTML, CSS or JavaScript. All Artbiz sites are created this way using WordPress.
