B

Bandwidth: How many bits are transferred between the server and its visitors. The more (and bigger) graphics and downloadable files you offer on your website, the more bandwidth your site will take, increasing the time visitors must spend on your website, and the amount of resources your host must spend on you. Taking up too much bandwidth may drive visitors away or force your host to charge you more to support your website.

Beacon pages: A webpage created to increase search engine rankings by increasing the number of "related" pages linking to your main website. They take advantage of search engines' new emphasis on pages that have many links from related websites in determining relevance to a search term. They are Doorway Pages with a different address.

BCC: Blind carbon copy. This is a field in your email program that will send a copy of your message to a person without the primary recipient knowing. The email address of the BCC recipient will not appear on the resulting email, and any replies to the message will not be sent to them.

BRB: Chat or bulletin board abbreviation for "Be Right Back."

Browser: A program used to find and interpret HTML documents on the internet. The most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape, in that order.

BTW: Email and newsgroup abbreviation of "by the way."

C

Cache (In web terms): A web browser or web server feature which stores copies of web pages on a
computer's hard disk.

Campaign: The advertising and promotion done during a given period of time.

Catch-all: A program that allows any email sent to your domain to go to a particular email address. That allows any email sent to a misspelled or unused username will still get to a person who can deal with them.

CGI script: A program, often written in the PERL programming language, written to run on any computer. They add value to a website by doing any number of cute things. For example, a CGI script can send a visitor to a "thank you" page when they submit a form. They normally go in a separate folder from your HTML files.

Click Through Rate: The percentage of users who click on a viewed advertisement. It shows how effective the ad is, when compared to the average rate of the media.

Client: The browser used by a visitor to a website.

Client errors: An error occurring due to a bad request by the visitor's browser, such as typing in a page name that doesn't exist. Client errors will show error numbers in the 400 range in your log analysis program.

Client/Server (In web terms): The communication and separation of workload between a web client and a web server.

Communication Protocol: A standard (language and a set of rules) to allow computers to interact in a standard way. Examples are IP, FTP, and HTTP.