Confused with all the tech terms, jargon and mumbo-jumbo when it comes to Web Marketing?
Here's a simple analogy that can help you better understand what on earth all those "InterWeb" geeks are talking about...
Web Hosting: like an empty room on a server, you can fill the room with your images, video, content, links, lead captures, downloads, contact forms...
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Domain: your websites street address, so that people can find your site without having to remember a string of numbers
Email: a personalised address for the people who occupy or manage your room. Use software like Outlook, applemail or Gmail to send and receive using this address.
Webmail: The ability to enter your room and see your emails without using email software. It’s clunky but you can access it anywhere, anytime.
Shared Hosting: You have a room in a large apartment building (server) with many other rooms. This keeps costs low but could open you up to security issues - you never know who’s living next door! You can’t easily increase the size of your room or add extra rooms. If someone else has a room that is struggling with capacity, this will effect the quality of your rooms performance.
Virtual Private Hosting: You have an apartment building of your own and can add rooms (websites) as you wish, with a number of other people having apartment buildings next door to yours on the same block. If all the apartment buildings traffic grows too quickly, your apartment performance could still be affected. A good option if you have lots of visitors and they need to access lots of rooms.
Dedicated Private Hosting: Your own apartment building or buildings on your own block of land. You’ve heard of Millionaire row? This is it.
Storage: The amount of stuff you can store in your room, including all your content and emails. A small website might use something like 50-100MB (MB=Megabyte)
Bandwidth: The maximum speed at which people can enter and get stuff in and out of your room, usually measured by seconds i.e. 2KB = 2 Kilobytes per second, a small website might generate 1GB of data in a month (GB = Gigabyte)
Traffic: The number of people who go to your room. You can get analytical reporting on who found your room, where they came from, if they went inside your room and what they looked at, using a widget like Google analytics.
Theme: Decorating your room, colour scheme, typestyles, layout, and the way people find their was around the room.
CMS: (Content Management System), such as wordpress or Joomla, that enables you to add things to your room - pages, content, images, articles (blog posts), forms, and all those widgets and plug-ins without writing code like a geek.
Plug In: These are specific tools you use in your CMS to improve the functionality of your room i.e. make it easier to find your room, get around and to improve it, such as adding a media room, making the front door bigger, knocking down or building a wall to make it better to get around.
Widgets: A set of CMS tools that help improve the appearance of your website and make it more interactive for visitors, pictures on the walls that direct them to go to a certain area, social media buttons, calendars, clocks, news & weather...
Sales Funnel: Especially for service providers, this is a mechanism by which you attract prospects to give you their details (normally email address) and their permission for you to send stuff to them. Data capture/lead generation widgets can be plugged in to your room, to get prospects into your funnel and send automated emails, newsletters etc
C-Panel (Control Panel) The switchboard in your room. You manage the availability, security, updates, configuration etc using your control panel. If there is a problem viewing your site, or it is hacked or ‘burns down’ you need to access your c- panel to sort it out. Or get someone to do it for you..
Support: Someone looks after your room making sure the entire apartment building is online and can be found, ensuring everyone is safe, the rooms look great and people can access them. They also update widgets and plugins as they develop and give you reports so you know if your room is attracting visitors. Some levels of support also help you tidy up or add things to your room using your CMS system or writing code.
Backup: A system that makes a copy of the contents of your room and stores it in a safe place so that if your room (or apartment) burned down, you could retrieve the latest copy and reinstall it with another host.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Google is the biggest search engine, literally searching through millions of bits of data per second to list the most relevant websites based on the prospects search words. SEO makes sure you get found and listed amongst the top most relevant rooms the prospect might consider visiting. This is based on your rooms content, location, accessibility, simplicity (how quickly it loads) and popularity.
Want to keep this info handy? Download a PDF here.