Intelligent web design
Terminology
Bandwidth
This refers to the amount of data that can be transferred (throughput) for example if you have a web site that has an allocated bandwidth of 500MB and your web sites home page is 50KB twenty hits would use 1MB of your allocated bandwidth. Your web sites hosting package will usually have a restriction on the bandwidth the more you pay the more bandwidth you will be allocated per month. If your web site has flash movies or a lot of high resolution images the amount of bandwidth used will increase each time the pages is viewed.
This stands for File Transfer Protocol and it is a means of transferring your web pages from your local computer to the server, it then becomes accessible from the www. Many web design packages now have an FTP program built you will need a user name and password to access the server which will be sent to you once you have registered with a hosting company.
POP3 email
This stands for Post Office Protocol which deliverers your Email to your local computer through an mail program like MS Outlook or Thunderbird (free). Depending on your selected hosting package you may have 5 or more pop accounts this allows you to have five Email address's i.e. tom@yourdomain.co.uk. Your hosting company will send you the details on how to configure your pop Email you will need the pop and smtp settings together with your user name and password.
SMTP
This stands for Simple Transfer Protocol most email is send using SMTP if you are able to receive Email but cannot send it will probably be your SMTP settings that are incorrectly configured.
Web Stats
Many web hosting packages provide you with a basic stat report allowing you to see how much bandwidth has been used and the amount of monthly hits your web site is reaching. There are many free web site stat programs you can use such as Google analytics or Statcounter these will allow you to see what keywords are being used to find your web site, What location they are coming from and how many sites are linking to yours.
CGI
Common Gateway Interface - CGI programs are executable programs usually written in Perl or Python though you can use just about any programming language. These programs are usually stored in the cgi-bin directory of your web server and allow you to add all kinds of sophisticated functionality to your web site such as web site Email forms. Although you can write your own scripts you can find a plethora or ready compiled cgi scripts.
PHP
This is another powerful server-side scripting language and can be used when creating dynamic and interactive web sites. PHP is widely-used and free it offers an alternative to Microsoft's ASP. PHP is perfectly suited for Web development and can be embedded directly into the HTML code.The PHP syntax is very similar to Perl and C. PHP is often used together with Apache (web server).
.htaccess
More web hosting packages are now configuring their web servers so you can now create an .htaccess file which can override certain default server configurations. If your web hosting package is being hosted on a Linux server running Apache web server you can use .htaccess to have some control on how your web pages are served for example you can specify which directories can be accessed and by who.