Whether you are thinking of getting a website developed or already have one, you will come across certain tech-terms while discussing things with your web developer. If you are having language barriers with your web developer, take a look at the 5 terms you should know to talk geek to us.

Domain Name Registration

Once you are ready to get your website developed, one of the main things you will need is a domain name. A domain name is a name that tells the world what your website is. For example google.com is a domain name that takes a visitor to the main Google website. Same as remhai.com, it is also a domain name that takes you to the REMHAI main website. These domain names must be registered with a registrar by paying an annual fee. In the old days, there were limited top level domain extensions such as .com, .net, .org. Now, there are a variety of domain extensions. There are country specific domains (like .et for Ethiopia or .uk for United Kingdom), industry specific ones (like .shop), and more.

The key to registering a domain is to make it memorable and similar, if not the same, to the business name.

Website Hosting

Once you have your domain name registered, it’s time to find a host for your website. Website hosting is basically renting server space on the internet for your website to live on. Once your developer finalizes the website design, all those files must be put on a server that is connected to the internet so that your website is accessible to the world. This server space is typically rented on a per month or per year basis. When picking a website host, the key is to pick one that is up at least 99.999 percent of the time and has a good customer service. This will allow your website to be available almost all the time and you can also easily solve issues that might arise. After finding a good hosting company, the next thing to consider is the amount of space and bandwidth you get. Let us take a look at those in the next point.

Server Space and Bandwidth

If you have a website that will have a lot of content (images, videos, music, and text), it is important to have lots of space on your server. The more content you have, the bigger the space needed. This is the same as what you would see in a personal computer. If you have lots of family pictures for example, you want your PC to have enough space for it. Where it gets slightly different is with bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data you are allowed to transfer between different visitors of your site. It is typically measured on per month basis. For example, if you have a website with a video that is the size of 100mb and you’re expecting 1000 people to visit your website and watch the entire video once, you will need 100mb times 1000 minimum bandwidth per month.

In reality, when estimating how much bandwidth you need, you would probably get a lot more than the minimum bandwidth you need. This way, if your video or website becomes popular for some reason and 5000 people visit it, you still have enough to be live. Most hosts will automatically stop sending your website data once you reach your limit.

Content Management System (CMS)

CMS is exactly what it sounds like. It is a tool that allows you to manage your website content easily. A typical CMS will allow you to add pages to your site, edit existing pages, and change some aspects of the website easily. There are a variety of CMS available online today. CMS such as WordPress and Joomla are the popular free versions while you can also have another like Microsoft’s SharePoint as a paid alternative. Typically, you can design and run almost any type of website with WordPress. It is actually the top CMS by marketshare so you will have a lot of resources for it.

Dynamic or Static

Lastly, the term dynamic or static gets thrown out a lot with web development discussions. In the developed world, it is rare to have a client request or a developer suggest a static website. A static website is something that is developed with the intention of it being mostly permanent. It would typically be developed in HTML (it’s a web development “language” if you will. We can get into that in another post.) and would allow very few options to edit and update easily.

On the flip side, dynamic websites are ones that are developed with a few things in mind. It is developed to be easily updated with a help of a CMS. It is developed to be interactive with a visitor so that almost every visitor can have a unique page. A great example for this is the Facebook wall. It is a very dynamic page that is fairly unique for every user.

Coming back to you as the client, there are very few exceptions to having a static website developed. If your developer makes a website design for you, they might as well use a CMS like WordPress and give you the ability to be flexible in the future. That way, when you are ready, you can easily add additional pages, enable users to see custom content based on a criteria (maybe additional languages based on location), and much more.

Conclusion

Barrier no more! Review these terms and be on par with your developer. Even though these 5 are a drop in the ocean that is tech-terms, it should be good enough to have you up and running in no time.

Let us know what other tech jargon confuses you and we will do a second posting.

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