Once upon a time, finding a company meant going through a 50 lb yellow tissue paper, zillion page, bible called Yellow Pages. Today we Google…. And where do we land but in a companies websites. Websites have been around for a little more then two decades. So there are people alive today who remember when thier was only a postage stamp to communicate with a company.
As with the wide-spread use of owning a car, the widespread use of having a website has created an avalanche of new vocabulary. The irony are the parallels car have to sites.
Take fore example the basics, your domain, your hosting and your FTP. These are the equivalents of your car, parking space and keys.
Your domain is the name of your site, or in my metaphor your car. As with a .com, .net or .us, you can have a huyndai, toyota or ford.
Your hosting is the space your domain will be in, like a parking spot. And if you had a hummer, you wouldn’t park it in an 8 foot ceiling garage. So a website with a social network, video submissions and forum should have a hosting plan with enough web space, bandwidth and php capabilities.
An FTP are your car keys. If you want your website homepage updated, you need to let the webmaster know your File Transfer Protocol (FTP). These virtual keys allow entrance into your website and consist of 3 key components:
1 Your hosting server
2 Your Id
3 Your password
If you don’t know what they are, it’s best you give the id and password you created with the hosting company to your webmaster, they’ll know how to drive from their.
A cars dashboard can be compared to a websites content management system (CMS) with all its control and gadgets. So if your site can blog, retweet, have 5 rss feeds and infrared lasers to gather data from you viewers mind, Your CMS should reflect those same control features.
But ironically enough, as when you buy a car and its value goes down the minute it leaves the salesman car lot. Your website will loose its latest technical edge the minute it goes LIVE. The speed at which new website features become a standard in the industry will have you updating your site constantly. So think of it like a tune up minus all the dirty oil but still that confusing gut feeling you get when talking to a mechanic..Happy virtual travels!