Frequently Asked Questions

A web page is a collection of text and pictures usually written in HTML that a web browser 'renders' into a visible document. Also part of a typical web page are links to other web pages and scripts that add functionality to the page e.g. when the page was last updated.

A Website is a collection of web pages usually arranged in a hierachical structure similar to a restaurant menu. The means of moving between the web pages is called the 'navigation system' or 'menu'.

A Web Server is a computer that has a number of websites on its hard drive (often thousands). When a web browser requests a page that is on its hard drive, it 'serves' it to the browser so that the browser can display it.

A domain name is an address on the Internet. In South Africa, it is usually '.co.za' for commercial websites; '.gov.za' for government websites and '.org.za' for not for profit organizations.

Hosting is the space that you rent on a web server for your website. It includes a certain amount of disc space on the server's hard drive, an amount of bandwidth (see below) and other functionality depending on the size of the hosting package that you buy,. This usually comprises a 'control panel' that allows you to manage and monitor your website and its activity (see below).

Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that your hosting package provides. Every time anyone visits your website, text, images and other things are passed from the web server that your website is hosted on to the visitor's computer. The traffic is measured in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB).

If you have a popular website, there will be lots of traffic. If you have a website that has a lot of large pictures, the bandwidth will be high so you try to keep the file size of the pictures on your website small without compromising their quality,

A Control Panel is a series of tools that you can call up on your browser that allow you to do certain thiings. These usually are:
Setting up emails
Seeing how much traffic there has been through your website
Seeing the amount of disk space your website is using
Seeing who has been to your website
Seeing the most and least popular pages on your website
Seeing where you visitors entered and left your website
Seeing which browser/operating system they use
Seeing when search engines visited your browser
Seeing what search terms visitors used to find your website
Managing your database if you use one
. . . and many other things depending on the control panel

HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language and it is the coding language that is used to assemble most web pages.

Cascading Style Aheets are a series of commands that permit a website designer to control how things like text and images are displayed on a web page. They can also control how a web page is laid out. The nice thing about CSS is that a single style sheet can control the appearance of every page on a website.

Search Engine Optimization is the series of modifications that are made to web page content and the code behind it to enable search engines to decide what it is the website is all about.

Google is by far the most popular search engine but how it rates (ranks) web pages is a closely guraded secret. However, it is known that it looks for a certain number of keywords and keyphrases that describe the web page, the amount of code vs. content on the web page, the structure of the HTML and the quality of the content. It also ranks web pages according to the number of sites that link to that website.

Basically, using a website to sell your products/services.

Usability is the ease of use of a web page - how easy or difficult it is to perform any task on a web page. These would include absorbing and finding information, readability - both of text size and amount of gobbledygook, navigating around the website, searching the website, arrangement of information on the website etc. It is gernally acknowledged that every dollar spent on usability studies yields $100.

A Content Management System (CMS) provides the owner of a website with a means of editing the website content himself. This is important where the site has to be kept very much up to date - newspapers, NGOs, schools etc.

Content Management Systems can either be free or cost $20,000. They can comprise an entire site structure or be simply a little bit of coding that permits editing.

If many products/services have to be displayed on a website, it is easier, rather than coding foe every one, to hold the details in a database so that when a visitors searches for a product, the database provides the details. Unfortunately, such web pages (called dynamic web pages) do not fare well in search engines.

Simply, the ability to take payments via credit card (usually) on your website. The site owner has to register with his bank as an online vendor and engage the services of a Payment Service Provider (PSP) to validate the credit cards.

A collection of data extracted from millions of websites that allow visitors to search by words and phrases to find what they want. The results are ranked by what the search engine hopes to be closest to what you are looking for. Google is an example.

Like an online Yellow Pages with information divided into categories - Yahoo is the best example.