General Website Terms

So, you’ve now decided to go for a website and don’t really know where to start. You do some searches for web agencies in your browser and you start chatting to various companies. You start getting thrown a whole lot of questions you just don’t understand and, therefore, don’t know how to answer.

Here’s a list to help you answer those questions.

Domain Name

Very simply, this is your website address. You will always need to check if this is available before going ahead and committing to a name. Think carefully about this one as the name you choose will follow you around in your emails, on your business cards and when you network with other people.

How the domain name reads will play an important role for you as well – some domain names are great in theory but, when put into writing, they can read in various ways. For example, the domains listed below are better implemented with hyphens or possibly something else (try and read them without hyphens):

• www.experts-exchange.com
• www.therapist-finder.com
• www.ip-anywhere.com
• www.pen-island.net

Hosting

Hosting companies HOST your website and make sure that, when someone types in your domain name / website address, it shows up in their browser correctly.

Each domain name has an IP address allocated to it. The IP address is like your ID number – it’s something unique and “special”, and is allocated to your domain name at the hosting company you choose to use.

When you or a web agency builds your website, the end product needs to be uploaded to an IP address at the hosting company you have chosen. Once these files are uploaded to a dedicated location at the hosting company, you are able to browse your website on the World Wide Web (WWW).

When choosing your hosting company, I suggest you do the following:

Contact the hosting company and determine the most suitable hosting package for your requirement. Bear in mind that you WILL need to consult your website company to assist you in choosing the appropriate hosting package.

• Register or sign up with the hosting company.
• The hosting company will “do their thing” and you will be provided with information that includes FTP details.
• You would send the FTP information to your website company.
• The website company will use the FTP information to upload the files to your hosting company’s dedicated space for your website.
• Your website will then be able to be viewed via an internet browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc…

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

When a web agency receives the FTP information for a particular website, the FTP details allow them to connect to the hosting company’s server and, as the name suggests, transfer the files from their local server to the hosting company’s server. This then allows the files to become publicly accessible.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

A URL is the website address to either a website or a particular web page. So, www.momtrepreneur.co.za would be the website URL and www.momtrepreneur.co.za/about/ would be classified as the web page URL.

Web Page

People tend to get confused between the terms Website Page and Website. A Web Page refers to a single page on a website e.g. the ABOUT US page, the CONTACT US page, etc… There’s no limit to the length of a page, like there is in a book.

Website

The website is the combined list of pages on a particular domain. For example: Celebration.co.za, one of my babies, would be called the WEBSITE, but every listing screen or service partner portfolio page would be referred to as a Web Page.

World Wide Web

This is the same as the Internet – just another term for it.