We know: you don't want to program for the Internet, you just want to learn
how it fits into your business. We believe you don't need a course in computers in order to decide
how the Web can work with your marketing strategy. We offer our Plain English
Internet Glossary as a public service.
For more information about our Webpage Design and Internet Consulting services, including our 100% satisfaction guarantee, see http://www.jaderiver.com/
If you are looking for the technical definitions of the bits, bytes, and protocols of the Internet, we recommend O'Reilly's Dictionary of PC Hardware and Communications Terms.
A Firewall is a security barrier set up between a company's internal systems and outside systems. Firewalls can be designed to keep hostile visitors out, as a way of protecting the company's internal information--or they can be designed to keep company employees in, usually as a means of discouraging people from playing games or visiting recreational sites on company time.
Firewalls don't usually affect commercial sites, except that some of your target markets can't visit you during business hours because their company firewalls won't let them have access to any but preapproved sites. If your business provides services to commercial clients, you may want to work with them to see if they can get permission to access you "through the firewall".
The other reason you want to know about firewalls has to do with customer support. If you get a call from a customer who says they can get to your site just fine from home, but can't reach it from the office or from school, the problem is often a firewall. Again, about the only thing they can do is talk to their local Network administrator and see how to get your site added to the list of sites that they can visit.
Flame is a nasty note, or hostile letter, either written to a public forum or sent privately. Flamers usually think they're justified, and are particularly fierce in attacking what they see as misuses of the Internet.
A Flame War is an exchange of this type of note between two people.
Marketing managers have to be most concerned about flames when a promoter, intentionally or unintentionally, posts something that is perceived as an advertisement to an area that is regarded as noncommercial. This will generate a lot of hostile response, and can be very damaging to a company's reputation.
Suppose you have a page that has some text and 10 tiny graphics. The way the Web works, the reader's system will have to ask your site for 11 things: the main page, plus the 10 graphics. From a marketing point of view, that's one hit. But some statistical packages will count that as 11 hits!. Even worse, some packages continue to count hits if the reader reloads the page, or goes to an information form and comes back. Readers who have images turned off (usually for speed reasons), or who are using nongraphical browsers like Lynx, may get counted only once, while a graphical browser like Netscape gets counted those same 11 times. Finally, some online services like America Online (AOL)"cache" your page on one of their machines. What that means is that the first AOL user who requests the page causes a copy of it to be written to an AOL machine. From then on, whenever other AOL users request the page, the AOL caching machine checks with your machine to see if the page has changed. If it hasn't, it hands its member a copy of its cached copy. This can result in significant speed improvements for the AOL members--but it means your statistical packages may not count those AOL readers among your hits for the day.
In addition, because of the hypertext nature of the Web, if your site has 5 pages, you have no idea in what order a reader will visit. Some may start at page 3, read 3 and 4, and then leave. Some will read 1,2,3,4,5. Many will read 1, 2, 1, 4, 1, 5 if your first page has the Table of Contents, or 'Navigation Bar' for your site. If you only count hits on page 1, you'll miss counting the readers from page 3. On the other hand, you might overestimate the number of readers because of those who keep going back and forth from page 1 to other pages.
This is sort of like trying to estimate the circulation for each separate page of a magazine, and then using that to estimate the total circulation for the issue!
In an effort to stop double and triple counting visitors who are jumping between pages on the same site, many statistical packages count each visit from a single Internet Service Provider only once each day. That takes care of the navigation counts, but, then, of course, you're back to a situation like the one with AOL's cache: you may be getting many visitors from the same ISP, and you won't know it.
Hits are important, because they're the same as the circulation of your site: how many readers did you get? But as you can see, you miss counting all the secondary readers. In addition, depending on how you count, you may be overestimating or underestimating your readership. Most marketing managers prefer to get hits counted on the basis of one per page, not one per graphic. A number deal with the navigational hits issue by reading the same numbers two different ways: once counted as one-per-ISP, and once counted individually. As far as AOL readership goes, you'll just have to estimate that.
Like any circulation estimates, Hits require interpretation and analysis on the part of the Marketing Manager.
