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/
See Browser
When Microsoft entered the Browser marketplace, they did so in a big way. Although at present only 10% of the market by most estimates, MSIE has made a number of deals in the second-half of 1996 which are aimed at gaining marketshare.
First, of course, MSIE ships free with Windows 95, and is available free for download on a number of other systems. It doesn't have as many different versions as Netscape does, and probably never will, but it covers most of corporate America.
Second, Microsoft made deals with Compuserve and America Online to incorporate MSIE as part of their commercial services beginning in early 1997. This will give MSIE access to millions of consumer households.
The Browser Wars between Netscape and Microsoft are heating up, and both bring advantages and disadvantages. They support slightly different feature sets. Right now, Microsoft's biggest advantage is its integration with other Microsoft tools in a Windows 95 or Windows NT environment. (See ActiveX.) It's getting easier and easier to use, if you have a Windows system. Netscape has two advantage: first, it takes less disk space to run, and it runs somewhat faster according to benchmarks available at the Netscape site. Second, Netscape has made a serious committment to making their products available for Mac, Windows 3.1, Windows 95/Windows NT, and Unix, all pretty much at the same time. So when Netscape introduces a special feature, more people in the world can use it. Readers like Netscape because it's faster and takes up less room on their machines. Open Web authors like it because they can reach more readers. But many companies designing Intranet Websites like MSIE, because it integrates well with other Microsoft products and they are willing to make Windows systems available to all their readers. So far, Netscape is holding most of its marketshare, but the real struggle will come when Microsoft enters its "Explorer" phase, and anyone who purchases a Windows 95 system will have MSIE installed and waiting.
If you're used to Windows, you know that at the top of the screen there is often a menu bar--a list of choices for you to pick from. This menu usually stays available to you at the top of the screen, even as you go from place to place.
Until very recently, this was quite difficult to do on a Webpage. It's still true that most browsers don't offer this feature.
Beginning in 1996, though, Netscape began offering Frames. Frames are a way of dividing a browser window into two or more parts. This allows the reader to scroll through one part, like our glossary, while leaving another part--the equivalent of the menu bar--available at all times.
Although frames are used for a number of purposes, one of the most common is for a Navigation Bar, or Navbar. A Navbar is just a kind of "Table of Contents" of a site that stays available so the reader can move easily from place to place,
If your browser supports frames, you are seeing this document divided into four sections.
The top left corner is our logo and the link to the Jade River Designs welcome page. The upper right
section is the Navbar for this glossary: it has the letters
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
available so that you can always move to a new part of the glossary.
The lower left side is a different kind of Navbar: this is an actual index, showing our topics. You can also click on these.
Finally, the lower right side is our main document--the glossary itself.
What if your browser doesn't support frames?
Then you are seeing this glossary as
one full page, without a Navbar at the top. We still have a navigation aid: the same
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
appears at the top of the page. But it doesn't stay visible the
way a Navbar does.
However, and this is an important point, note that it doesn't matter whether visitors to The Marketing Manager's Plain English Internet Glossary have frames or not.
This Website is smart enough to figure out what you have, and give you the format that's best for you.
In fact, we do that with Javascript as well, although that's also invisible to you as
a reader. If your browser is using Javascript, you will see the first line in our navbar with
a * like this
*The Marketing Manager's Plain English Internet Glossary.
No Javascript, no *.
So you can see that it is possible to gracefully and invisibly handle readers with and without frames, and with and without Javascript. The design is a bit more complicated, and there's some work required behind the scenes, but from a marketing manager's point of view, these technologies can be blended into a site very effectively without turning away customers whose browsers do not support these features.
A small, simple Website, the online equivalent of a business envelope-sized paper brochure. This is essentially a description of a business, product, or service, with an e-mail link to allow customers to get more information. See our Print Brochure vs. Online Brochure Comparison Chart.
This term normally refers to those Web addresses that are available to anyone with Internet Access. For example, some America Online information is available only to America Online members. Some, like the information at www.aol.com, is available on the Open Web--anyone with Web access can visit.
If you're designing a Website for the Open Web, you need to be aware that your readers may come from different countries, may be using different kinds of computer systems, and may have different browsers. Your work is much harder than if you put up information that is only available to a pre-specified audience.
Fortunately, one of the advantages of the Web is that it is probably the easiest computer medium ever created as far as making information available to people with different computer systems. A good Web Designer will know how to design your site to reach your target audience, and whether you should be on the Open Web or in a limited access service.
PICS stands for Platform for Internet Content Selection. It's a standardized format for rating systems. Note that PICS is not a rating system itself. You could use PICS to rate how quickly sites download, or international languages (French, Spanish, German, etc.)--or, as most people think of them, for G/PG-13/R/X content ratings.
The PICS standard lets anyone define how their rating system works. With all the concern about children on the Web (and recent numbers indicate that 1 in 10 Internet users is a child accessing the system from school or home), many people have begun to provide lock-out systems which prevent children from seeing sites with adult content. Most of these systems rely on a PICS label.
Note, though, that since each rating service defines its own system, they can all be looking for different things. One might have separate codes for Violence and for Adult Language--another might combine these into a simpler rating like Not Suitable for Children.
From a marketing manager's point of view, this may mean that your site has to be separately rated by several services, especially if you're setting up a site for children. Since some Website designers are not aware that different services use different PICS labels, make sure that they have verified your site's labels with the specific services that you want to list with.. (The PICS label itself identifies which rating service will use it.)
Although technical information on PICS is available from the World Wide Web Consortium, for commercial site purposes we recommend that you simply contact the specific ratings services with which you wish to list your site.
See Rating Services for more information on the different rating services that are available.
Many people have attempted to apply rating systems to the Web. The most common reason is to identify sites with adult content that might not be suitable for children. There are many different services available. Almost all allow you to register your site for free. Once registered, your Website must include a rating indicator, using a PICS Label. The only thing you really need to know about the PICS format is that different rating services may use different labels. For example, one service might distinguish between Violence and Adult Language, while another simply uses a G/PG-13/R/X/ format.
Once you've registered your site and labeled it, how will the ratings be used? Some browsers, like Microsoft's Internet Explorer Version 3.*, include screening software which simply won't display a site that doesn't match the reader's desired preferences. Since MSIE uses the RSACi rating system for its built-in screener, this service is expected to become increasingly popular over the next year. For now, though, most people are installing separate software with names like SurfWatch, CyberNanny, CyberPatrol and so on. Again, the important thing to note here is that the label on each Website (if it's using the PICS software) will tell the software just who the rating organization is. That makes it possible to use the same "nanny" software with more than one rating service.
From a marketing manager's point of view, the rating services are helpful. You may want to add suitable for children labels to your sites not just if your market is children, but also if you're trying to reach teachers who may be using school systems to reach the Web, or parents who don't want to bother setting their system separately for the adults and the children in the family. If your site is G-rated, it won't hurt you to add rating service labels--and if your site contains material not suitable for children, you should definitely add them.This type of self-policing is one of the things that makes the Internet suitable for classroom use, and is a courtesy to parents as well.
To get in touch with the various rating services, see Yahoo's category on ratings at http://www.yahoo.com/
Technical Alert: On November 26, 1996, Microsoft acknowledged a problem with Content Advisor, the screening software built into its MSIE 3.0 browser, which will cause it to reject any site from a URL that includes a ~ (tilde) character. There is a fix, but your Site Designer will have to make a modification to the standards RASCi PICS label in your site's files. For more information, see the Microsoft advisory at their site.
Reach is commonly used in marketing to determine the degree of penetration into a target audience. It can be given as either a number of individuals or as a percentage. If it is a number of individuals, it means the number of people who are likely to be exposed at least once to an ad in a given period of time. Note that reach counts each household only once even if they will see the ad 5 times during the campaign.
If reach is given as a percentage, you also need to know how the target audience is defined. For example, if a television program has a "40% reach for women age 18-25," that means it reaches 40% of that target audience at least once during a given ad campaign.
However, in order to understand the percentage reach number, you also have to understand the definition of the target audience. Is it "women age 18-25 in the US"? "women age 18-25 who watch television"? "women age 18-25 who watch daytime television"? "women age 18-25 who watch daytime television on our network"?
Most Websites give their reach in terms of percentage of the total online population. However, some may identify the target audience as the total population of a country, the total that is online, the total that visits that particular Website in a week, etc. So when comparing reach figures, be sure that you're looking at the same target audience for each site. Also be aware that there is no definitive source for the total number of people online. There are many different estimates, and you'll need to know whether the discussion is based on IDG estimates, Jupiter estimates, Neilsen NetRating estimates, MediaMetrix estimates, etc.
Proprietary services like AOL can be somewhat more precise when discussing reach for their own membership, but still have to use estimates for traffic from the Open Web.
Again, reach should identify individuals (or households), not exposures, so if the same person sees a banner ad 3 times they are still counted only once for purposes of reach.
If you're familiar with printers, you know that printers with more "dots per inch", like 600 DPI printers, can show more detail in the same amount of space than printers with lower DPIs, like 300 dots per inch.
The same type of measurements hold true for computer screens, but there it's called Screen Resolution. Most home systems, most laptops, and many office systems (especially those costing less than $2,000) come with 14 inch monitors set to 640 x 480 resolution. That's 640 dots (or in this case, pixels) wide, and 480 dots high to make a full screen.
Those who spend all day working with fine detail often spend the extra money to get a 17 inch monitor and an 800 x 600 resolution screen--or even higher. At 800x600, you can get almost twice as much detail on the screen as you can at 640x480. In fact, you can get so many dots of detail all crammed together that it's very difficult to read on a 14" monitor, which is why you so often see people increase both the resolution and the screen size. They want more dots in order to get more detail on one screen--but they want that one screen to be bigger, so they can make out each dot more clearly.
As a marketing manager, you need to be aware of who your audience is, and what kind of systems they are likely to have. If their computers are more than 6 months old, or if they are using laptops, or if they spent less than $2,500 on their systems, they are quite likely to have 14 inch monitors which work best in 640 x 480 mode.
On the other hand, your Website designer and your technical people, who spend all day staring at fine detail on a computer screen, probably have at least 800x600, and may have even higher resolutions.
We're aware of several projects where the screens were almost completely designed before someone realized that these beautiful 800x600 designs were only going to be partially visible on the customers' systems. That meant going literally back to the drawing board, and additional time and expense.
Your designer may have a hard time believing that anyone "still" uses 640x480, but it remains the most common mode, and that's true in both commercial and consumer markets. Designing for that size will mean that everyone you want to reach will be able to see and understand your Website. Designing for 800x600 may mean that a significant portion have to use arrow keys to scroll sideways and try and figure out what your site says.
This is another target audience question, just like the use of Browser-specific features. Make sure you make it based on good business logic, not just the accidental match to one designer's workstation.
Search Engines are the automated card catalogues of the Web.
Completely automated, Search Engines keep huge files with short catalogue entries of literally millions of Websites. Then, when you want to find information on "Cable TV use in Dallas" or "Printer Cartridge Suppliers," the search engines do their best to make a list of all the catalogue entries that might be what you're looking for.
Unfortunately, no one has yet developed and implemented a "Dewey Decimal System" for the Web, so the results are anything but scientific.
Ask for Elvis and you'll get sites on Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello, and sites about singers who say, "I want to be as popular as Elvis." You'll even get sites with information about the children's movie Free Willy 2, because one of the characters was named Elvis.
Computers are literal: they don't understand what they read, they just match on it. So you can get lists of sites that have next to nothing to do with what you're really searching for. Still, the search engines are a lot better than nothing when it comes to searching for information on the Web, and most readers use them in some fashion.
For information on how you as a marketing manager can influence how your Website is catalogued by these search engines, see Keywords.
The most popular search engines are Webcrawler, Lycos, Excite, Altavista, and Hotbot.
Yahoo and Big Yellow are sometimes called search engines, but they're really just catalogue directories like the print yellow pages. What's different about Yahoo is that human beings decide where to list you, and it's more of a librarian's card catalogue than a keyword search.
One of the frustrating things for marketng managers is that the Web really isn't commercial.
Even Yahoo, for example, doesn't let you decide how and where your company will be listed.
Instead, you submit a "listing request," giving the category where you THINK you should be listed. But Yahoo may put you in a different category. They also limit the number of categories you can be listed in. And while you may be able to buy banner space, there's no equivalent to a yellow pages display ad or a favored listing in the white pages.
You can't control how and why your site is listed, and you can't buy more space for sites you want to promote.
Most things on the Web, including almost all of the search engines and the directories, require the marketing manager to do the same kinds of promotion they would do via press releases.
You write the best you can, you slant it to be of special interest to that market, and you hope you get listed in the way you want to.
While this may change in the future, it's important to understand now. Your site designer cannot guarantee when you'll be listed in Webcrawler, and they can't guarantee that you'll be listed in Yahoo at all.
There are, of course, different design techniques and application formats that get better results, and your site designer should be familiar with them. (See Search Engines.) But just as with the press, keep trying, and keep trying new things, if you don't get listed quickly--but remember that "quickly" on the Web is commonly 4 to 6 weeks. This can seem especially frustrating in a medium where publication is instant, but it may help to think of it like yellow pages. It's up to you, or your designer, to understand the lead times that publicizing your site will require.
Adding this kind of security to your Website requires three things:
Some Website designers will tell you that secure servers aren't really necessary--that you don't get that much additional security from them. They have, though, become the defacto commercial standard for the Web, and you will lose many, many customers if you don't provide secure ordering. This is no longer a technical issue: it's a question of consumer confidence. Readers know that they are ordering through a secure secure because of visible cues on their screen--Netscape uses a blue key to show that they are connected to a secure server. Most people who purchase over the Web are accustomed to seeing these signs, and won't accept other assurances.
The cost of adding security to your Website is about $2,000: $1,500 for a secure server license, and about $500 to register the secret code that you will use with one of the major registration agencies, like Verisign.
Alternatively, you can rent space in a cybermall that provides secure shopping. Some marketing managers choose to put just their "online order department" in this type of mall, and keep all of their other unsecured pages on their own server. With hypertext, this is quite easy to do, and can solve the security problem very quickly if you add a store to an existing information or promotional site.
A Shopping Cart is a program or a series of programs that let visitors to your site make selections from more than one page before sending in that order. For example, suppose your Website sells auto parts. You might have one page for sparkplugs, another page for batteries, and another page for replacement gas caps. With a traditional Webpage, your customers would have to place each order before they left each page, so they would have to send in one order for the sparkplugs. Then go to the gas caps page and place a separate order for the gas caps. A shopping cart on the Web works just like a shopping cart in the real world--on each page, your customer can "put things into the shopping cart" but not have to actually pay for them yet. As they go from area to area of your online store, they can add more items or put items back. Finally, they get to "check-out" where they place their combined order.
Shopping cart programs were originally developed by individual programmers, and could be fairly expensive. By the summer of 1996, though, a number of companies offered tested, proven, reliable shopping cart systems, which included credit card verification, the ability to handle large numbers of customers without getting their orders mixed up, various shipping and handling options, etc. These "off the shelf" products cost anywhere from $250 to $5,000 depending on the complexity and number of items in the store, but are all much less expensive than having custom work done.
Make sure your Website designer looks into the possibility of using these prewritten modules if you need a shopping cart option. While everyone likes to have a custom version, as a marketing manager you can understand how disastrous it would be if you shipped items to a customer who said, "I never ordered that!" Shopping cart programs need to reliable and easy to use for the retailer. A well-tested program with a few less features may be a much better choice than building your own deluxe model from scratch.
Note: One term you may hear associated with shopping carts is cookie. A cookie is part of a special file used to store information from one Webpage to another. You don't really need to know anything about cookies as far as planning promotions go--they're a specific technique used to store information.
Spiders and Robots (or "bots") are simply automated programs that explore the Web, looking for information. The most common kinds of Spiders are the ones that collect Web addresses for the Search Engines to catalogue.
The only time that you as a marketing manager are likely to have to think about these Spiders is when you're trying to get your site listed in a search engine, or avoid having some test pages on your Website automatically catalogued by a search engine before you're ready.
If you do want to create a test area on your Website and you want to keep Spiders out until it's finished, you'll need to tell your Web Administrator so they can put up a special "keep out" sign for these automated programs.
