Welcome to the glossary area of ProMediaPublishing.com.  Here we have a collection of terms and phrases that are commonly used in the industries of web design, web development, seo, and many more.

Administration Area

This is a general term that is commonly used to describe a specific area of a content management system, blog, or application. The administration area allows administrators the ability to manage many areas of a public facing website or blog. Some basic features include adding content, deleting content, managing the navigation and look and feel.

Adobe Illustrator

A vector based software application that is used for creating graphics.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop has been the industry standard for many years when it comes to creating raster based images and graphics.

Affiliate

Affiliates bring customers to companies or people that have something to sell. The seller pays an affiliate a percentage per sale or customer.

Association Management Software

The term "Association Management Software" or (AMS) is also commonly referred to as "Association Management Systems." This is a type of software that is meant help clubs and organizations manage many aspects of their membership activities.

Blog

The term came from the marriage of two words... web and log. We combine the two words to get the word.. blog. Blog describes a type of website. The idea of a blog may have started with people publishing their personal content. As personal publishing grew in popularity, so did the term blog. Today, blogs can be simple or very sophisticated websites with huge amounts of readers.

Bot

What is a bot? The term bot is also referred to as "crawlers," "spiders," or "robots." It's short for "search engine robots." Bots are actions taken by search engines to visit and index a website. They automatically collect web pages, store those pages, and analyze all the content to create searchable indexes which we call search engines.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS as it is commonly referred to, is a language that is used in web programming to help define colors, fonts, spacing, and to help the overall layout and design of a page or website that is being dispalyed on the internet.

Cloud

The term cloud is used to describe a massive sized web hosting system. Servers are so powerful these days, that one machine can hold hundreds or thousands of virtual private servers and services. People can now rent or purchase small segments of a larger network to host their website or application. Phrases such as, "In the cloud" or "Cloud computing" are used to describe such a powerful computing system.

Content Management System (CMS)

A content management system (sometimes referred to as a CMS) is a piece of software or a service that gives users  the ability to add pages, images, text, and many other forms of digital assets.  There are hundreds, maybe thousands of content management systems available on the market. Here is one list of content management systems on

Custom Application

Is a term used to describe a web, server, or downloadable software application that is completely built new from the ground up.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A CRM is in reference to a software tool that is used to track and manage client relationships. Track and organize companies, organizations, individuals, and the interactions that happen over time.

Drupal

Start building your website or blog today using this open source, content management system. Open source, meaning the code is not owned by a single company or individual. People, companies, and organizations are free to download the application at anytime and to build a website using Drupal. Create your media empire using Drupal. This website is built using Drupal.

Export

The term export is commonly used when talking about moving data from one database to another. It can also be used in reference to other applications such as Microsoft Word, or Adobe Photoshop, where they have export functions to save a file in a format other than what they use by default. Here are a few examples of export, as it relates to what you may find when working on the internet. Example 1. You have a blog on a free service, but you decide to host your own blog using Wordpress.

File Transfer Protocol - FTP

This is a protocol used to send files from one computer to another computer. For example.. File Transfer Protocol or FTP is commonly used when building websites.

Filename Extension

You see these things all the time at the end of a file on your computer. For example, .txt, .html, .php, .dll, .jpg, .png, .js, and many many more. These are called filename extensions. They help your computer figure out what type of information is in the file itself. It also help the operating system choose a program to run the file with. Filename extensions are important pieces of information to keep things running smoothly on your system.

Free

As in.... without charge.  No money down.  Many popular applications available on the internet are free or commonly referred to as open source.  Drupal and Wordpress are two examples of free content management systems available to anyone.  You may ask yourself... How can these possibly be free? The reasons are many... but on the internet, giving something away for free is a marketing strategy used to build up the number of users of a particular system.

Gmail

Is an email service offered by Google

Google Analytics

A service that is offered by Google to track the users to a website, domain, or mobile application.

Google Webmaster Tools

A set of tools and services that are offered by Google. The tools provide insights into how webmasters can improve the performance and rankings of the domains they manage.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language, or HTML is a computer language used on the web. HTML provides a standard way to allow internet browsers to read information from millions of servers on the internet that are publishing content in HTML. HTML is a key component of creating websites and blogs on the internet.

LAMP

LAMP or LAMP stack, is a term that is commonly used to describe a group of technologies that are used to build websites. L is for Linux, which is the server operating system. A is for Apache, an open-source web server. M is for MySQL, an open-source database application. P stands for PHP, which is the programming language.

Landing Page

A general term that is used to describe a type of page on a website. A landing page can be an overview page or it can have specific offers and forms. For example, if a user receives and email with a great offer, they may click a link to that offer. The user "lands" or arrives at a web page that has the offer and a sign up form.

Marketing Automation

Is a term used to describe systems used to automate many manual functions of communicating with people on the internet. It is commonly referred to as "MAS". Still confused? Okay, let's look at an example. You visit a website and are offered a free e-book. You choose to download the book and in the process your email address is submitted to the website. At this point... you most likely you have just entered into a marketing automation system.

POST

The term Post can have many meanings and used in different ways... fence post, post office, post cereal. In this glossary, we are only concerned with post as it is used in technology. Post can refer to a blog post, or it can refer to a process to submit data to a server. For example... someone may ask, "Did you write that post?" In which case they would be referring to a blog post. Or, a web developer may ask.. "What fields did the form post?" There is a double meaning for post in the internet realm.

Premium

Premium is another way of saying Paid. Instead of something being free, there is a price to use the service or to download a product. For example, many Wordpress themes are free or premium. Operating systems could be another example. The Linux operating system is free, or you can choose a paid system like Microsoft. As a customer on the internet, you have many options to use free or premium services when trying to achieve a specific result on the internet.

Registrar

When speaking about the internet, the term "registrar" refers to an organization that offers services to register and keep track of domain names. Basically, if you register a domain name.. you will use the services of a registrar at some point in the process.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a method of strategically publishing content. The idea of SEO is to publish content so that people will find your web presence on the internet. An SEO strategy can require many different disciplines to be effective. There are technical requirements, marketing skills, social media strategies, and a whole host of other pieces that are needed when building a SEO strategy.

Sendmail

An open source mail delivery system that ships with many versions of Linux. In simple terms... it delivers and receives email. Sendmail is very powerful and handy to anyone running their own server. Chances are... if you are on shared hosting, you will probably not have to deal with sendmail. If you are running a VPS or dedicated web server, using and configuring sendmail may be an issue.

SMTP

SMTP or (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the protocol used when delivering email.

Social Media Strategy

This is a term you may hear in a variety of contexts. Basically, Social Media Strategy refers to how an individual, company, or organization uses a variety of publishing services on the internet to communicate with their target audience. For example, an individual may use Twitter to follow their friends and family. A company may use Twitter to engage with a huge audience and to drive traffic from their Twitter account, back to their website, and into a lead nurturing campaign. Two different uses for the same service.

SSH

Stands for secure shell. You may ask yourself... what the heck is a secure shell? Basically, it lets you connect to another unix based computer. The great thing about SSH, is the encryption. Older technologies such as Ftp or Telnet send information in plaintext, so your password can be intercepted by a third party. Not a good idea. SSH is a line of defense against hackers. If you are using linux based web hosting, then ssh is highly recommended for many of your connection and file transfer needs.

SubDomain

You are already familiar with how subdomains work, but the terminology may be new. Technically speaking, subdomains are part of the Domain Name System that is used to identify resources on the internet. For example, let's use Tumblr.com. If we add another name to the front, like this.. promediapublishing.tumblr.com, we have created a subdomain off the main domain. Very commonly you may see www.yahoo.com. The www part is actually a subdomain that allows website administrators the ability to direct traffic to different servers on a network.

Theme

In internet language... the term theme refers to the look and feel of a website. It's a mixture of graphics, colors, fonts, and the page layout that give a website a unique look. For example, if you think of a car... the body styling, the shape, and the colors are the "theme." The frame and engine of the car are separate, they are not part of the theme.

Traffic

You hear or read this term from time to time in reference to a blog or website. The term "traffic" is a general term to describe the amount of people that visit your site.

Twitter

A short messaging service or "SMS". Twitter allows people to connect with each other by "following" each other. Messages are sent primarily in text format with a limit of 140 characters. Twitter is a big part of any current social media strategy for internet communications.

URL

URL is short for Uniform Resource Locator. If someone asks to see your website, they may say, "Hey, what's the URL?" They are asking how get to your website. Another term is "address." Instead of

Web Server

A web server is a computer that is connected to the internet and provides website content for viewing. When anyone on the internet visits a website, they are actually requesting information from a web server. Web servers are a necessary component for publishing a website or blog.

Website

This is a general term which is used to describe a collection of text, images, and multimedia content found and organized in one place. There are millions of websites published on the internet.

Wiki

Is a term used to describe a type of website that promotes the collaboration of information between a large or small groups of people. Ward Cunningham is the creator of the first wiki, which first went live in 1995.

WinSCP

Is a freeware program that provides a graphical user interface for FTP, SFTP, and SCP file transfer functions. If you need to transfer files from one computer to another, this program is an excellent resource. It has received a five start rating from CNET.
More information about WinSCP can be found at the WinSCP website.

Wordpress

A very popular free, open source content management system. Wordpress started its life as software for blogging, but has changed over the years to incorporate features of a content management system. Wordpress enables people and organizations to get up and running fast on the internet with a website. The application itself is free and can be downloaded from Wordpress.org.

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is short for, What You See Is What You Get. This term usually applies to text editors found in many applications today. With a WYSIWYG editor, a person should not have to know any HTML code to produce a web page which has text formatting. For example, HTML authors use tags to bold text. A person using a WYSIWYG editor just highlights the text and applies the bold attribute. The editor adds the HTML code behind the scenes.

Zip

Zip files are compressed files. Its usually a group of files that are gathered together and smashed down to make the overall file size smaller. They are commonly referred to as "zipped files." When zipped files are encountered, they need to be un-zipped, or de-compressed with a zip program. Windows users should be able to use 7-zip to un-zip files. Mac users may use stuff-it.

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Hello and welcome to ProMediaPublishing.com!  This is a place where we discuss the ins and outs of building online marketing assets.  We share tools, resources, and tips and tricks to help move your project forward and to help grow your business.  Thanks for stopping by and fee free to contact us if there are any questions.