Have you ever been sent a file by email attachment that you had no idea how to open? Don’t you wish that you had a better understanding of what is meant by file formats, types, and extensions? Do the terms applied in connection to the Internet (XML, W3C, anyone?) send you scrambling for a dictionary? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, please keep reading…

FILE TYPES

Bitmap
The standard graphics format for Windows® and OS/2 operating systems. Usually ends with the file extension .bmp.

Eps
EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript, which is a file format for capturing precise image and text information. Because of the mathematical basis for building the format, EPS files are the most reliable method for transferring and storing artwork. Many different types of programs can save to eps files. File names end with the extension .eps.

Gif
A low resolution, small in file size, bitmap image file that is used on the Web. File names end with the extension .gif

Jpeg
Stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. A graphics file format commonly used as a replacement for bitmap image files as it requires only a fraction of the space for storing the same information. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a choice between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10 to 1 compression with little perceivable loss in image quality. File names end with the extension .jpeg.

PDF
Stands for Portable Document Format and is a file format created by Adobe Systems, Inc. PDF uses the PostScript printer description language and allows documents to be viewed, edited and annotated across computer platforms regardless of the software the original document was written in. PDFs can be created at small file size for use on the Web and at a large file size for traditional printing. Acrobat Reader is the main software for opening and viewing PDF documents. File names end with the extension .pdf.

Pixel
The information stored for a single grid point in the image. The complete image is a rectangular array of pixels. It is also the smallest unit of display on a video monitor or computer screen. Photographic images used on computers are rendered in pixels.

Tiff
Stands for Tagged Image File Format. This is another bitmap file format that is commonly used for images. Tiff files can be compressed or uncompressed. Ends with the file extension .tif.

Vector
Vector graphics is the creation of digital images through a sequence of commands or mathematical statements. Instead of containing a bit in the file for each bit of a line drawing, a vector graphic file describes a series of points to be connected resulting in a much smaller file. Vector files are usually line drawings and produced using applications such as Adobe Illustrator.
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PRINTING TERMS

CMYK
Short for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black), often referred to as process colour or four colour, it is the most common form of colour printing.

DPS
Double page spread.

Landscape
Called landscape because most landscape paintings are wider than they are tall.

Portrait
Called portrait because most portrait paintings are narrower than they are tall.

Proofs
Proofs are preliminary versions of publications and take many forms dependent on stage in the production process, time and cost. They are created as part of the proofreading and copy editing and checking processes to ensure quality of content and production. They can be used for promotional and review purposes.

Resolution
A complicated concept, resolution is a measure of quality and used to judge text and images both printed and viewed on screen. In print, resolution is measured in dots per inch or dpi, with different printing methods using different resolutions, typically a magazine will be printed at 300dpi. On screen display resolution is the physical number of columns and rows of pixels creating the display (e.g., 1280_1024). The term resolution is also used as a pixel count in digital imaging viewed on screen, for example as 60 by 48px. Another convention is to specify resolution as the total number of pixels in an image, as number of megapixels, which can be calculated by multiplying pixel columns by pixel rows and dividing by one million.

Hi-res
300dpi (dots per inch)/ppi (pixels per inch), used for print.

Lo-res
In print, anything under 300dpi (dots per inch)/ppi (pixels per inch). When used in conjunction with web 72dpi (dots per inch)/ppi (pixels per inch).

SS
Same size. It is best practice to check a piece of work at SS before it is produced to ensure there are no surprises.

WEB TERMS

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup languages like HTML and XHTML. Its function is to separate style from content and allows multiple pages can be updated from changes to one document. It is more flexible than HTML but is limited by browser compatibility. CSS is also used for email broadcasting but must be rigorously tested first.

GUI
Graphical User Interface is a type of user interface which allows interaction with electronic devices like computers, MP3 Players, Portable Media Players, Gaming devices, household appliances and office equipment. A GUI uses icons, and visual indicators as opposed to text based interfaces, typed commands or text.

HTML
HyperText Markup Language, is the dominant markup language for Web pages. It describes the structure of text-based information in a document by denoting text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, etc. It allows that text to be supplemented with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of tags, surrounded by angle brackets.

HTTP
Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a communications protocol for the transfer of information on the Internet. It’s use for retrieving inter-linked text documents (hypertext) led to the establishment of the World Wide Web.

MMS
Multimedia Messaging Service is a mobile telephone standard for sending messages that include multimedia objects such as images, audio, video, rich text. Its most popular uses are sending photographs from camera-equipped handsets and delivering ringtones.

RGB
The name comes from the initials of the three additive primary colours, red, green, and blue which are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours. RGB colours are used in screen based devices such as computers and televisions.

RSS
Really Simple Syndication are a collection of feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blogs, news headlines, audio and video – in a standardized format. Feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically and benefit readers who want to subscribe to prompt updates from favourite websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an RSS reader.

XML
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is to help information systems share structured data, particularly via the Internet, and it is used both to encode documents and to serialise data. In the latter context, it is comparable with other text-based serialisation languages such as JSON and YAML.

It started as a simplified subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and is designed to be relatively human-legible. By adding semantic constraints, application languages can be implemented in XML. These include XHTML, RSS, MathML, GraphML, Scalable Vector Graphics, MusicXML, and thousands of others. Moreover, XML is sometimes used as the specification language for such application languages.

XML is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is a fee-free open standard. The recommendation specifies both the lexical grammar and the requirements for parsing.

XHTML
The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.

While HTML is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed, true XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using standard XML tools, unlike HTML, which requires a relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser. XHTML can be thought of as the intersection of HTML and XML in many respects, since it is a reformulation of HTML in XML.

W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of February 2008, the W3C had 434 members.

W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web. It was founded and is headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. According to Tim O’Reilly:
“ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realised the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.

www
The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, and released in 1992. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web.

MARKETING TERMS

B2B - Business to Business
Business to business describes the business transactions involved in bringing a product or service to market, e.g. the sourcing of resources that allow a car to be built.

B2C - Business to Consumer
Business-to-consumer (B2C, sometimes also called Business-to-Customer) describes activities of businesses serving end consumers with products and/or services.

An example of a B2C transaction would be a person buying a pair of shoes from a retailer. The transactions that led to the shoes being available for purchase, that is the purchase of the leather, laces, rubber, etc. as well as the sale of the shoe from the shoemaker to the retailer would be considered (B2B) transactions.

CPC - Cost Per Click
The cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through. The terms pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-click (CPC) are sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes as distinct terms. When used as distinct terms, PPC indicates payment based on click-throughs, while CPC indicates measurement of cost on a per-click basis for contracts not based on click-throughs.

For example, consider a campaign where payment is based on impressions, not clicks. Impressions are sold for $10 CPM with a click-through rate (CTR) of 2%.
1000 impressions x 2% CTR = 20 click-throughs
$10 CPM / 20 click-throughs = $.50 per click

CTR - Click-Through Rate
The average number of click-throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage. It is important to distinguish what a click-through rate does and does not measure. The CTR measures what percentage of people clicked on the ad to arrive at the destination site; it does not include the people who failed to click, yet arrived at the site later as a result of seeing the ad.

As such, the CTR may be seen as a measure of the immediate response to an ad, but not the overall response to an ad. The exception involves ads that display no identifiable information about the destination site; in these cases the click rate equals the overall rate.

Merely getting visitors to a site had value when Web site traffic was generally accepted as a measure of success. The trend towards profitability, along with better tracking tools, has resulted in less interest in click-through rates and more interest in conversion rates.

A high click-through rate does not assure a good conversion rate, and the two rates may even share an inverse relationship. An advertisement geared towards curiosity clicks will result in fewer sales, percentage-wise, than an advertisement geared towards qualified clicks.

PPC - Pay Per Click
Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying click-throughs. In a PPC agreement, the advertiser only pays for qualifying clicks to the destination site based on a prearranged per-click rate. Popular PPC advertising options include per-click advertising networks, search engines, and affiliate programs.

Paying per click is sometimes seen by some as a middle ground between paying per impression and paying per action. When paying per impression, the advertiser assumes the risk of low-quality traffic generated by the publisher. When getting paid for actions, the publisher assumes the risk of low-converting offers by the advertiser. In the PPC model, the publisher does not have to worry about the sales conversion rate of the target site, and the advertiser does not have to worry about how many impressions it takes to attract the specified number of clicks.

PR - PageRank™
PageRank is Google’s ranking software that calculates the relevance of a webpage to the search keywords entered. The software analyses both the number of incoming links and the ‘quality’ of the referring webpage to generate a relative measurement between 0 (low-relevance) and 10 (high-relevance). (The ‘quality’ of the referring webpage is an abstract measure of how authoritative it is on the subject matter.)

PV - Page View
Used in site statistics as a measure of pages viewed rather than server hits. Many server hits may be made to access a single page, causing many separate log file entries. Analysis software can determine that these server hits were generated when a visitor viewed a single page, and group them together to provide this more useful method of counting visitors. See also ‘Hit’ and ‘Unique Visitor’.

ROI - Return on Investment
A measure of a corporation’s profitability, equal to a fiscal year’s income divided by common stock and preferred stock equity plus long-term debt. ROI measures how effectively the firm uses its capital to generate profit; the higher the ROI, the better.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing
SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a website within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your website. SEM includes things such as search engine optimisation, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your website.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
Short for search engine optimisation, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

SEP - Search Engine Positioning
Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

SERP - Search Engine Results Page
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): A page of results generated by search engines based on weighted elements in each engine’s algorithm. Each page typically consists of 10 URLs, with no more than 2 URLs per domain.

TECHNICAL

CMS
In the context of a website a CMS is a collection of tools designed to allow the creation, modification organisation and removal of information from a website. It is common for a CMS to require users to have no knowledge of HTML in order to create new web pages.

CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organised and efficient manner. In many cases, an enterprise builds a database about its customers. This database describes relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, and customer services can access information; match customer needs with product plans and offerings; remind customers of service requirements; know what other products a customer had purchased; etc.

DBMS
Database Management System. A complex system of programs and utilities used to define, maintain, and manage access to large collections of online data.

DC - Data Centre
Data centre, sometimes spelled datacenter (American spelling) is a centralised repository, either physical or virtual, for the storage, management, and dissemination of data and information organised around a particular body of knowledge or pertaining to a particular business.