Nomenclature

Summary of terms

Web Forwarding

You may have heard of terms "free", "masked" and "framed" web forwarding, please note however, that VERY often, you'll have to pay a lot extra to keep it professional.
Many sites (such as EasySpace, UK2 etc.) love to put all of your pages in a 'frame' thereby keeping their logo in full flashing colour at the top of the page, and pretending that you are a subsidiary of them or that you are somehow linked to them. It also gives them a great bit of advertising every single time someone visits your pages (which is why they do it).

But tell me, if you were going to get some headed paper made up in your company logo, would you want PRINTED BY ANOTHER PRINTER.COM. AND HERE IS OUR ADDRESS AND OUR TELEPHONE NUMBER ETC in a huge 2 inch banner across the top of each and every page of paper you send from your company?
Exactly, the same applies to web pages.
Oh but they'll offer to take it away for you if you pay an additional premium .. but this normally doubles the price of buying the name in the first place! (why not go elsewhere first?)

Please be warned, even if it states 'free web forwarding' doesn't mean they don't put a huge banner across the page!

Email Forwarding

I'm sure if you accessing this page from your home, you've probably got an email address with your current internet provider for free (such as sueandjohn@ourfavouritename.freeserve.co.uk)

Now if you're going to go to the trouble of buying a great domain such as www.ourdomain.info, wouldn't you also feel you have the rights to all the email addresses at that site i.e. frank@ourdomain.info, after all, that's what people would expect right?. This is again where it gets strange, many sellers (such as NetBenefit) will charge you another additional premium to forward your email on to you. And if you don't pay the additional charges, at best the email will be returned to the sender, at worst, it just disappears into the abyss, and the sender assumes you don't want their custom!

'Free email forwarding' is just that, all the email sent to your domain address should be forwarded to your chosen email address ('catch all' forwarding)
You may even be lucky enough to get different email names sent to different email address.

Marketing by Confusion

Isn't it great how many different tariffs you can get with mobile phones?
Isn't it great how for just an additional £9.99 a month you can get 2p off all you phone calls to a certain number?
Although the list price was £7000, the salesman said I could pay for it for just £50 a week over 6 years, and he'll give me a CD player worth £150 free!

It's the same with web domains, "domain names for just 2p a month, 16p a week, etc.." plus our hidden registration fee, admin fee, sign up with us fee, you must pay for 10 years up front now etc.. Take the time to work this out, you may be surprised as to what it really costs!

POP3 Account

Everyone's heard of 'hotmail' right?

With many email packages, you have to be on-line to read and send emails (such as yahoo, msn, hotmail, excite, demon, etc..) What a POP3 account allows you to do, is get all your emails sent to a 'remote server' (i.e. a secure computer somewhere, much like the one's already mentioned), but the great thing is, all you need to do is log on to the internet, and all your emails get automatically downloaded to your computer hard drive, meaning you can log straight back offline again, and not have to pay the large telephone bill.

There are a few companies out there who may already offer this service (such as postone, btclick etc.) and you may have got a free POP3 account when you brought your internet access. However, for those that didn't, you'll probably find it much better to do that now.

And don't think you have to be at home to read the emails, most POP3 accounts should allow you the option to access your emails from any computer, and keep them there until you download them at home!

Browser

Used to locate and display Web pages via a software application. The most popular ones are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Cookie

Message given to a web browser by a web server. The message is then stored by the browser in a text file called cookie.txt. Each time the browser requests a page from the server, this message is sent back. A cookie's main objective is to identify users and personalise their visit by customising web pages for them for example by welcoming them by name next time they visit the same site. A site using cookies will usually invite you to provide personal information such as your name, e-mail address and interests.

IP (Internet Protocol)

All networks connected to the internet speak IP, the technical standard which allows data to be transmitted between two devices. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is responsible for making sure messages get from one host to another and that the messages are understood.

IP address

If you are connected to the Internet you have one, for example it may look something like this 198.184.98.9

URL

The 'Uniform Resource Locator', or the address shown at top of your browser page, typical examples include http://parlour.info and http://www.energyexchange.info

Web Server

Delivers (serves up) web pages to your computer.