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.com: Suffix indicating a commercial domain.

Comment tag: An HTML tag. <!-- Your Comment Here --> It is invisible to your website visitors, but many search engine spiders index them. Use them to mark parts of your page for future revision, as another place to put your site description, and possibly another place to list keywords.

Cookies: Web cookies are files containing information about visitors to a website, like username, password, and what they want to buy. It is stored on the visitor's computer, and sent back to the website that created it when the visitor comes back or gets to the order page. Cookies can also retrieve information like monitor resolution and platform to webmasters who intend to use this information to improve their website.

Counter: A CGI script which counts the number of times your page is requested by visitors. Remember that a visitor which visits your page more than once will be counted every time.

CPA: Cost per action for banner ads. This is the best type of rate to pay for banner advertisements, and the worst type of rate to charge. Advertisers only pay for the visitors who click on their banner and then sign up, fill out a form, or purchase something on their website. This is most common for Affiliate Programs. My opinion is this type of payment arrangement is already an endangered species, and will soon become extinct.

CPC: Cost per click through for banner ads. The advertiser only pays when a visitor clicks on their banner (whether or not the visitor waits for their page to load before leaving). Look for this type of rate when you plan to place a banner on a website with related content.

CPM: Cost per thousand (impressions or subscribers). CPM is a marketing term you will see often when researching banner and magazine ad rates. It helps you determine how much you are spending per person viewing your ad, and the company by allowing them to charge more as their subscriber base or hit count increases without changing their posted ad rates. If you are planning to offer advertising, this is the way to do it.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. They let you assign the look of different elements of each webpage in your website. They are an HTML 4.0 feature, so older browsers may not support them.

D

Database: Data stored in a computer in such a way that a computer program can easily retrieve and manipulate the data.

Database System: A computer program (like MS Access, Oracle, and MySQL) for manipulating data in a database.

DB2: A database system from IBM. Mostly for Unix and Solaris platforms.

DBA (Data Base Administrator): The person (or the software) who administers a database. Typical tasks are: backup, maintenance and implementation.

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol): An Internet standard protocol that assigns new IP addresses to users as need.

DHTML (Dynamic HTML): A term commonly to describe HTML content that can change dynamically.