SEO is the process of optimizing your website for the purpose of getting free traffic form search engines. Search Engine Marketing is over and above SEO. SEM is the marketing process with a goal of getting more free traffic (SEO) or paid traffic. Through paid search advertising you essentially buy advertising space in the search engine results . So instead of trying to rank higher and get free traffic you pay to appear in front of the searches

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another
If you have found that you have multiple ways the same content on your website, this is where a 301 redirect will come to your rescue. Setting up a 301 redirect will correct these duplicate content, multiple access point issues and clear up confusion for the search engines.

An ALT tag is what shows in place of an asset (image) when it's not rendered by the browser or can't be seen by the user (and is instead read by a screen reader). They're important for SEO -- since combined with the ALT description, that tells the search engine what the image is (i.e. people in line).

• A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result, and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content.
• Title tags are a major factor in helping search engines understand what your page is about, and they are the first impression many people have of your page. Title tags are used in three key places: (1) search engine results pages (SERPs), (2) web browsers, and (3) social networks

• Piwik: it's a self-hosted solution and a safe method for getting around with strict cookie law.
• Parse.ly Dash: this product is focused on providing real-time data and traffic generation for large site.
• KISSMetrics: KISSMetrics is focused on conversions and e-commerce business.
• Clicky: It’s simple to use on a simple site, such as a blog site.
• Woopra: Both the real-time and the general analytics are more advanced than GA. It has the same steep learning curve as GA. The only drawback is the fairly high price for successful sites.

Automated Testing is a part of continuous integration (CI). Like it sounds, it's the process of testing code against an expected outcome using scripts. For example, a test might be to look at the robots.txt file and see that it says "Disallow: /" on a dev site. The test would fail if it came back "Disallow: " since the expected outcome is the opposite of that.

Depending on how the JS application is set up and where the error is thrown, a console error can stop the entire application from continuing or it can simply halt the current function from executing while the rest of the app can continue. Either way, a console error will cause the JS app to misbehave and that is something we definitely don't want.  A warning tells us there are flaws in the code, but doesn't stop the application from executing. At GoldenComm, an important step in our pre-launch process is making sure our dev site has no console errors. 

In most browsers, you will see console log, messaging, warnings and errors in different colors and/or icons.

A set of quality management systems standards for both consumers and organizations.

Emulators come in a variety of shapes and sizes -- but all do the same thing. They allow you to see the web by pretending to be a different browser and/or device than what you're currently using. Most of us use Chrome. Press F12 and click on the device icon to launch the Chrome emulator. Here you can see the web the "same" as if you were using a Nexus 5X or iPad Pro.

Other tools also exist, like BrowserStack, which are "better" emulators since they let you actually use the device you're trying to test rather than pretend to be one.

Debugging is a process of identifying and removing errors from software or hardware.

QA is Quality Assurance.  QC is Quality Control.  Both are part of Quality Management.

Quality Assurance focuses on preventing defects by using techniques, methods, and processes.  

Quality Control is to test or verify actual results by comparing it with the success criteria.

QA detects weakness
QC detects defects

QA is process oriented
QC is product oriented

QA is failure prevention system
QC is failure detection system

A software bug is an error, flaw, failure or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made in either a program's source code or its design, or in components and operating systems used by such programs. A few are caused by compilers producing incorrect code. A program that contains a large number of bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be buggy (defective).

User Acceptance Testing; phase in software development to have users test in real scenarios.

Concurrent testing determines the stability of software during normal activicity.  This might include multiple users doing the same thing at the same time (like search or checkout).

Stress Testing is checks the upper limits of your system by testing it under extreme loads. The testing examines how the system behaves under intense loads, and how it recovers when going back to normal usage, i.e are the KPIs like throughput and response time the same as before? In addition to load testing KPIs, stress testing also examines memory leaks, slowness, security issues and data corruption.

Three environments (dev, stage, production) are common. Larger companies will often have a QA environment between dev and stage.
 
Development site (Dev Site in short) is a place on your server where the entirety of your site is copied and replicated for development and testing. Technically speaking, it means that we login via FTP/Remote to your host and we create a subdomain in the root folder and completely copy the site over.
 
Staging site is an independent clone of your live production site that can be easily created to test plugins, themes, and custom code. You can also copy the staging site back to the live site at any time after making changes.
 
Production site (otherwise known as Live site) is the environment that users/clients directly interact with. Deploying to production is the most sensitive step; it may be done by deploying new code directly (overwriting old code, so only one copy is present at a time) or by deploying a configuration change.
 

Ad hoc testing is a commonly used term for software testing performed without planning and documentation, but can be applied to early scientific experimental studies. The tests are intended to be run only once, unless a defect is discovered.
 
Ad hoc testing is the least formal test method. Since ad-hoc testing is more of a “wild-child” testing technique that doesn’t have to be structured, the general recommendation is that it must be performed after the execution of the current test bucket is done. Another point of view is that this could be done when detailed testing cannot be performed due to less time.
 
Recommendations/examples when ad hoc testing is not necessary:
 
1. Avoid this testing when there is a test case for which a defect exists.
2. Avoid testing the beta version of the software. In such cases this testing should not be conducted.
3. Another scenario is when there is a very simple UI screen that is added. Traditional positive and negative testing should suffice here to bring out maximum defects.

Usability testing is a way of measuring a human-made product's ability to meet its intended purpose. It's a technique where a product is tested with actual users. This gives direct input on how real users will use the product. 

It's not to be confused with several other methods (like usability inspection) where experts evaluate the product without users. It's also not simply gathering opinions.

A/B, multivariate, and bucket testing are all types of usability testing. 

The W3C is an industry consortium which seeks to promote standards for the evolution ofthe Web and interoperability between WWW products by producing specifications andreference software. Although W3C is funded by industrial members, it is vendor-neutral,and its products are freely available to all.

The Consortium is international; jointly hosted by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in theUnited States and in Europe by INRIA who provide both local support and performing coredevelopment. The W3C was initially established in collaboration with CERN, where the Web originated,and with support from DARPA and the European Commission."

Why this is important to Goldencomm.

W3C sets up standards for web development. Those standards are important since they define set of rules for building out web pages. HTML language is not compiled - which means it runs on user computer (to be specific user browser). Each browser can interpret the code a bit different (we all know why browser testing is important). Standards help with this issue, right now most major browsers are 100% compliant (or close to 100%). So knowing W3C rules and standards should help with quicker / better development.

Additionally, some people believe that SERPs will rank your site lower if its not 100% compliant - this is very commonly missinterpreted. Google will not penalise you for not being W3C compliant, but if you are not there is good chance google bot will not be able to understand all of the content on the page. So while you are not penalised by Google for non compliance, but Google simply won't understand your site.

In software development, obsolete or deprecated features means that features, functions or methods are planned to be removed entirely sometime in the future. As best practice, you should work to remove their use from your code. If you provide external API, if you want to remove a feature, it's good practice to deprecate or mark as obsolete for 2-3 revisions before actually removing them. That way, you provide 3rd parties who rely on your web service ample time to make necessary adjustments to their code.

The following are the e-commerce platforms that Goldencomm is developing on:

aspdotnetstorefront.com (.NET)
nopCommerce (.Net)
Magento (Php)
Shopify (SaaS)

Other common platforms that we don’t actively develop on:

WooCommerce (PHP)
Bigcommerce (SaaS)
Volusion (SaaS)
Presta Shop (PHP)

** SaaS - Software as a Service - type of framework that is offered as a end-to-end subscription service. Usually includes hosting and out of the box customisations, however users and developers can’t modify the engine (code) of the framework. Extending such platform is only possible (and is limited to) usage of dedicated API

Product attributes are additional characteristics of a product that further describe it. So three common ones would be size, color and sku.

Price has been named as the most important factor affecting the online purchasing decision by the 60% of all online shoppers worldwide. This number is even higher in emerging eCommerce markets.

More than 90% of online shoppers invest time online to hunt the best deals and offers for the product they are planning to purchase. More than 10 mins per purchase on average.

So its very important to choose pricing strategy correctly based on the product / demand / availability and also marketing plans

For e-commerce most important is dynamic pricing (also called Demand pricing) here are most common pricing strategies:

• Price skimming - is a pricing strategy in which a marketer sets a relatively high price for a product or service at first, then lowers the price over time.
• Price discrimination - is a pricing strategy where similar goods are marketed at different prices in different markets.
• Yield management - is a variable pricing strategy, based on understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize revenue or profits from a fixed, time-limited resource (you might hear Jason using term Scare City)
• Price point - is pricing strategy based on assumption on demand curve downward-sloping (high demand high price at the beginning)
• Penetration pricing - is a pricing strategy where the price of a product is initially set low to rapidly reach a wide fraction of the market and initiate word of mouth. This is one of the strategies that are heavily aimed at marketing effort
• Value-based price - is a pricing strategy which sets prices primarily, but not exclusively, according to the perceived or estimated value of a product or service to the customer rather than according to the cost of the product

A search query that includes a company's name or variation thereof. Looking for "magento orange county" will give you search results with our PPC ads and organic results pointing to aucomm.com. But if you look up "GoldenComm" or "AuComm"... you guessed it. We come up right away, with no PPC ads.

Well... easy! Vertical search is when you're looking for for a specific set of results. That being said, horizontal search (or general search) is when you get mixed results from different topics and segments. Say you're looking for the word "stars", you will end up with results such as articles about celebrities as well as images of astronomical maps of stars. If you were to cut that down to something like "stars in our galaxy" and clicked the images tab of the google search options bar, you will get just that images of only stars in space, no videos, no articles, just pretty pictures. 

Branded search is even easier, its a search query that includes a company's name or variation thereof. Looking for "magento orange county" will give you search results with our PPC ads and organic results pointing to aucomm.com. But if you look up "GoldenComm" or "AuComm"... you guessed it. We come up right away, with no PPC ads. 

To recap (TLDR): 
vertical search = specific results and segment like images of stars. 
branded search = using the name of the company you're looking for 
general search = pretty much everything else.

Robot.txt file contains instructions for web robots about the website.  It may contain rules explicitly excluding one or more robots from accessing the website or specific folder or pages.  This file is publicly available and anyone can see what the webserver does not want robots to use.  Some robots ignore this text file, especially malware, harvesters, spammers, and security vulnerabilities scan robots.

SERP = Search Engine Results Page. Examples = Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com...

This relates to everything we know about SEO and SEM!

Question/Discussion for WOTD Chatter:
For a client who might be concerned about their ranking on the SERP, what kind of traffic are they usually referring to? What do you think they might be looking for and/or what services could GC offer?

Variable product is a product that comes in pre-defined variants. An example would be someone buying running shoes, a store can carry different sizes and colors, however each color - size is physical product (variant) that is available for sale. Its important to notice that Variants usually represent physical item so will have clearly defined quantity.
 
Configurable products are products that are either made to order, or are made from selection of other products and "assembled" before sale. Think of this as laptop that you buy and you can choose your hard drive size, ram etc - that particular laptop will be configured for you after thepurchase. Configurable products usually don't have quantity since those are either custom made or assembled based on availability of parts.

Overture, which was called GoTo until October 2001, is a paid placement search engine. This means that sites that pay are guaranteed top placement for the terms they are interested in.

Overture could not compete with Google AdWords, which has precise targeting, filters out noise, and keeps ads as relevant as possible. Overture bought out AltaVista and AllTheWeb to try to win some leverage, but ultimately they sold out to Yahoo! on July 14, 2003 for $1.63 billion.

A one-page-checkout (aka at Goldencomm: OPC) is a checkout process where customers enter billing, shipping, credit card, etc., all on one page.  

Shopping Cart -> one-page-checkout -> Confirmation page

Magento and nopCommerce have a pretty good one-page-checkout, with multi-steps.  We have customized our Kentico checkout to mimic these one-page-checkouts.

There is also one-step-checkout, which you see often on Amazon.  Typically, this is with an account already created, click of a button on the product page (usually) completes the order and sends customer to the confirmation page.

Both Fetchback and Criteo were early companies to focus on retargeting to display advertisements to visitor swho had previously visited advertiser's website. Fetchback was acquired by eBay in 2010. 

CRM Retargeting is a relatively new, highly effective marketing technique that allows you to reach your customers in online display advertising by using your offline customer database.

First of all CRM : Customer Relationship Management - this can be anything from Pipedrive or SugarCRM platforms to you’r receptionist notebook with key client birthdays and anniversaries.

This technique brings offline CRM data into online world to allow retargeting customers based on that data. Imagine uploading your offline database of birthdays and have them sent out email on their birthday with card and small gift

"Product Listing Ads"; referred to as Google Shopping now.  Product data can be managed manually in Google Merchant Center OR there can be a data feed from the eCommerce website database to Google.  The bid management for these Google Shopping ads (PLA's) are controlled in the AdWords account.  When the ad (Product name, picture, price) is clicked, user is linked back to the website to purchase.

Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He attended the University of Illinois.

While he attended U of I he worked on his first product -- a browser -- which was invented by a team led by Marc. It was the Mosaic web browser, which later became Netscape Navigator when Marc co-founded his own company in 1994.

An online marketplace (or online e-commerce marketplace) is a type of e-commerce site where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties, whereas transactions are processed by the marketplace operator. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be described as a “simple and convenient portal” to streamline the production process.

Most popular online marketplaces

Amazon
eBay
Rakuten
Overstock
Newegg

Anchor text is the keyword or phrase that you hyperlink to drive users to another page of the current site, or to another site. 

When you utilize Anchor Text, it is very important that you choose strategic words or phrases that you want to gain authority on, for SEO purposes. 

Let's say we're driving traffic to Premier Business Centers from our site, and the sentence we are looking at is: 

"Premier Business Centers is a leading provider of shared office space rentals and conference rooms. They have over 80 locations across the US." 


Most people default to hyperlinking the company name, but we know companies don't generally need help with ranking for branded search. In this case, we would want our anchor text for this one-way link to be "shared office space rentals" as this is a relevant term we want the business to rank for.


According to SEO MOZ, the best SEO friendly Anchor Text is:

• Succinct
• Relevant to the linked-to page
• Low keyword density (not overly keyword-heavy)
• Not generic

Have you implemented an anchor text phrase that ranked well for one of your clients? Share your success story in our Chatter room!
 

The Address Verification System (AVS) is a system used to verify the address of a person claiming to own a credit card.

The system will check the billing address of the credit card provided by the user with the address on file at the credit card company. 

The other security features for the credit card include the CVV2 number.

AVS is widely supported by Visa, MasterCard and American Express in the USA, Canada and United Kingdom. Cardholders with a bank that does not support AVS may receive an error from Internet stores due to the lack of data.

Besides the automated verification, some banks do provide merchants with a manual verification system. Usually this is done for foreign credit card accounts as the AVS only works in the same country. This facility helps the merchants to prevent fraud arising from other countries. The merchant's bank calls the customer banks (or send a fax for banks that request them). Some countries like Denmark however prevent banks from verifying customer data.

A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page, and leaves immediately without any action on the page (an action being clicks to another page, downloads something, fills out a form, clicks to watch a video, etc.) 

• Ex: You accidentally click on an ad you didn't mean to, and when the page loads you automatically close your browser or hit back. You have "bounced" from that page.

A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that bounce, out of your total traffic to that page.

• Ex: 100 people came to a page on your site, and 30 of those people bounced. You have a 30% bounce rate on that page.

In general, a good bounce rate is 60%-ish and below. 40% and below is great. Though keep in mind that there may be some pages with a high bounce rate that are ok to have a high bounce rate.

• Ex: Your Contact Us page on desktop may have a high bounce rate, because people go to that page to write down your address or phone number, then leave. It's important to understand the "why" behind the bounce before we assess a "good" or "bad" bounce rate. Using the percentages as an indicator to double-click on the traffic behavior is your best bet.

Note: A bounce and an exit are not the same thing.

Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.

Here are some examples of doorways:
Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

A more legitimate way to use doorway pages is for campaigns where unique domains is the only solution for tracking reponse.  The pages would need to be marked up so that they are not indexed by search engines.

It is not recommended to use doorway pages as a blackhat method of SEO (to trick the user or search engines).

Cart abandonment is an eCommerce term that describe a visitor who add items to their online shopping cart, but exit without complete a purchase. As a sales recovery tactic, some merchants send abandoned cart reminder emails to customers a few hours or days after abandonment.

Authorize.net, PayPal and Stripe
The gateway connects to the merchant webserver and the payment processor

• In simplest terms, a landing page is a page on a website that someone can arrive at or "land" on. But us GCer's know this as more strategic that just that...a targeted page meant to drive conversions. 
• Targeted promotion or product specific
• Main CTA matches the intent of the ad that your visitors clicked on to reach your page
• Possibly has no global navigation to tie it to your primary website, in order to limit the options available to your visitors, helping to guide them toward your intended conversion goal.

While both have the purpose of being targeted for conversions, a landing page does not necessarily have to be your "hedgehog". A landing page could be a promotion (think "holiday special" or "Product of the month"). A Hedgehog Microsite would be a complete website that follows Jim Collins' "hedgehog concept": 1) Best in the world at, 2) makes you money, 3) passionate about.

A demand by a credit-card provider for a retailer to make good the loss on a fraudulent or disputed transaction.  

Chargebacks are good for consumers who have been scammed because they can get their money back.  They are really bad for ecommerce businesses because they end up eating costs and it may cause rates to increase.

A long tail keyword is a keyword phrase with 3 or more terms.
Ex: orange county magento developers

Long tail keywords can be very fruitful, as they tend to show more intent than a buyer who might just be searching "magento" - and are usually an indication of someone more likely to buy in a faster time frame. The kind of leads we like to find!

The meta description tag in HTML is the 160 character (or less) snippet used to summarize a web page’s content. Search engines sometimes use these snippets in search results to let visitors know what a page is about before they click on it. 

The main reason you'd want to optimize the meta description is so that the user is more likely to click on the link in a search result.  It will not help your rank but will often appear in the search results.

A continuity program is a program based on a subscription model or recurring billing for a specified frequency or cycle. 

A one way link from one site to another.  In October 2005 Google released a series of updates to their algorithm that mostly devalued low quality links, including reciprocal links.  Non-reciprocal links are considered better than reciprocal links.

PageRank is the first algorithm created and used by Google Search that ranks websites. "PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites." The PageRank was a number between 1 - 10, and could be viewed in the Google Toolbar when visiting a webpage. I say "was" because as of March 2016, this feature is no longer supported, but Google started fading out PageRank as early as 2009. PageRank is named after Larry Page, inventor of PageRank and CEO of Google until 2001 (and again from 2011 - 2015). He currently is CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet.

A split shipment is when a single order of several items is broken into several smaller shipments. This can be done to increase the speed with which some items reach the customer, to accommodate using different vessels/carriers for different items, or simply breaking an otherwise costly sized/weight package from being created.

Flash is a multimedia software platform used in web development to create animations, applications, games, and embed video. Adobe will end support for the platform in 2020. Flash is in the search engine portion of the glossary because the platform significantly reduces the amount of content that is visible by search engine indexing bots. Plus in 2010, Apple announced that iOS devices would not support Flash.

Conversion rate optimization. The purpose of CRO is to improve conversion on a website.  The conversion could be filling out a form, purchasing a product or service, viewing an video, or some other goal.  By improving conversion we also decrease (CPO) cost per acquisition.

There are many things that can impact conversion.  CRO is typically started with small changes, testing, and reviewing analytics to see impact.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuck Go, Quora, Dogpile, Wolfram Alpha, Ask.com, Yandex, IxQuick
BONUS: Vimeo, Youtube and TinEye for images

Organic, Paid, Referral

7.

Just kidding.

The real answer is "it depends". A conversion is when the user who's seen your CTA (which might be to buy a product or provide contact information) clicks-through to the next step (buys the product or submits the form). Which means your conversion rate is going to vary widely between industries, leads-vs-sales, and medium (microsite, email, social media, etc.). Each and every has a benchmark that it could/should achieve... but as far as having a "standard" for what defines a "good conversion rate" -- there simply isn't one answer.

What is Quality Score?
 
Quality Score is Google's rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords, your landing page content and your PPC ads. It is used to determine your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process.
 
Who introduced Quality Score?
 
In late 2008, Google revealed that Quality Score was used to determine which ads it would show above organic results, and that a high quality score could actually cause ads to jump over ads with lower quality scores that would otherwise not merit that prominent placement.
 
Why is that important in SEM/PPC?
 
Quality score really does matter to your PPC campaign, as a high score will increase the likelihood of your keyword entering the auction. It will reduce your costs per click and it will increase your ad position on the search engine results page. This means that your PPC campaign really does need to be managed closely, so that you do not waste money on irrelevant clicks and so that you get the most out of the keywords within your campaign
 

Cost Per Thousand. This is a marketing term used to denote the price of one thousand advertisement impressions on ONE webpage. The M represents the roman numeral for one thousand.

At GoldenComm, CPA stands for Cost Per Acquisition. In these terms, acquisition means a new customer and/or sale. This is different than CPC because a click is just a lead. Until it converts -- then it becomes an acquisition. Typically, it takes several/a lot of leads to create a single acquisition... it's that combined cost that creates the CPA. To relate that back to the sales funnel. The CPC is at the top of the funnel -- where CPA is the bottom.

Wordpress alone is not an eCommerce platform. However there is advanced extension called WooCommerce that can add eCommerce functionality to Wordpress.

WooCommerce is the most widely used eCommerce platform in the world. Alone has more installs than Magento + BigCommerce together.

The biggest challenge is security. You might heard that Wordpress is insecure, this is not true. Its security is comparable (if not higher) to other platforms. However its popularity makes it target of choice for malicious activity. So owners of Wordpress sites need to pay attention to security.

I wouldn’t consider WooCommerce for any serious eCommerce work, however it can easily compete for smaller sites with lower budget and where security is not a concern (not processing payments)

It is also very powerful tool for online catalogs. Mostly due to ease of development and support its getting.

Click-through-rate is the rate at which your ad (SEM) is clicked on to the number of times it is displayed.  A higher CTR typically means that the keywords your "bidding" on are relevant to the ad text (aka: As a user, the ads I see displayed mean something to me based on what I am typing into Google or the search bar). 

A Software as a Service eCommerce system is an eComm platform where the user/developers pay a monthly fee to use the service (typically cloud-based). The fee covers the software, hosting, patches/updates, and other costs you'd typically pay a la carte and have to stitch together and maintenance on your own. The best known example of a SaaS eComm system is Shopify. 

Robot.txt file contains instructions for web robots about the website. It may contain rules explicitly excluding one or more robots from accessing the website or specific folder or pages. This file is publicly available and anyone can see what the webserver does not want robots to use. Some robots ignore this text file, especially malware, harvesters, spammers, and security vulnerabilities scan robots.

What is an XML sitemap?
 
XML sitemap is a bit of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a standard machine-readable format consumable by search engines and other data-munching programs like feed readers. XML sitemaps convey information about one thing: the URLs that make up a site. XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site's pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites.
 
XML sitemaps serve a very niche purpose in search engine optimization: facilitating indexation. Posting an XML sitemap is kind of like rolling out the red carpet for search engines and giving them a roadmap of the preferred routes through the site.
 
What is an XML feed?
 
An XML feed is a form of Paid Inclusion or Search Engine Submission in which an XML document is used to provide a search engine with information about multiple web pages. An XML feed is particularly useful for multimedia sites or database sites that draw a variety of relevant search queries.
 

Magento Open Source is a free, open-source eCommerce platform that anyone can download and use to build an online store. It is perfect for small businesses that want to experiment and learn how to build an eCommerce site.
 
Magento Commerce is the premium paid version of Magento. It is designed for those that believe the Community edition is not enough. It is mostly used by bigger online stores that need advanced features and more customizable options.
 

Using two versions of the same page and serving them to different visitors at random. Then comparing the results

Cyber Monday is the Monday that follows Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Much like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a day focused on big-time sales on consumer brands/products. 

The major difference is that Black Friday emphasizes the physical in-store sale, while Cyber Monday is for online shopping. Many retailers have sales for both days. 

Just that. The log of past orders. This can come into play on a new website (migration), marketing (Bronto), or a myriad of other reasons. You can also create metrics based off of order history (LTV, first order, etc.).

A point of sale (POS) is the place where sales are made. On a macro level, a POS may be a mall, a market or a city. On a micro level, retailers consider a POS to be the area where a customer completes a transaction, such as a checkout counter. It is also known as a point of purchase.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. GA is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. As our standard practice, we install and monitor GA data and build marketing strategies for our clients.

A 3PL (third-party logistics) is a provider of outsourced logistics services. Logistic services encompass anything that involves management of the way resources are moved to the areas where they are required. As an example: You place on order on an eCommerce site, the information is sent to the 3PL service, which then dictates the fulfillment process.

A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept payments in multiple ways, typically debit or credit cards. A merchant account is established under an agreement between an acceptor and a merchant acquiring bank for the settlement of payment card transactions.

While there are many answers that we could use, this is decidedly not a "great" WOTD. 

Why? Because the best answer from GoldenComm's standpoint is "it depends on the platform being utilized and the client data". Parent and child data/products can be organized differently - and mean different things - in Magento, versus Kentico, versus Nop, etc.

In high-level terms, a child product falls under the umbrella of the parent product.

An example of one parent to child relationship: 

• Parent Product - Pillow
  • Child Product - King, Queen, Twin

Two Factor Authentication is a method of confirming a user's claimed identity by utilizing a combination of two different components. 

For example, if I try to log into my banking account from an unknown device using my username and password, I will have a validation code texted (or emailed) to me. This validation code has a short lifespan, to which I use to complete the login to my bank account.  This is a form of 2FA.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a method used to add security and privacy to private and public network, such as Wifi Hotspots and the Internet. VPNs use advanced encryption protocols and secure tunneling techniques to encapsulate all online data transfers. VPN entegrity checks sensure that no data is lost and the the connection has not been hijacked or intercepted. At Goldencomm, we require that you establish a VPN connection before connecting to our servers at RS so that data traveling across the network is protected.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to ensure that ALL companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) was launched on September 7, 2006 to manage the ongoing evolution of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards with a focus on improving payment account security throughout the transaction process. The PCI DSS is administered and managed by the PCI SSC (www.pcisecuritystandards.org), an independent body that was created by the major payment card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB.). It is important to note that the payment brands and acquirers are responsible for enforcing compliance, not the PCI council.

How it affects Goldencomm and our clients: Every website that is processing payments (credit cards) is subject to PCI compliance. All of our commerce websites need to comply with this standard.

Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People

SSL is encryption mechanism that protects data as its being transported between server and User.

SSL is transactional - which means connection / encryption is initiated separately for each page. Which technically allows you to pick which pages you want to encrypt. Some time ago common practice was to use SSL only on forms where customer sends data to the server (login, checkout, contact etc)

AOSSL - Always on SSL means that site does not accept non encrypted connections anymore. If you request page typing in http:// it will automatically switch to https:// which means every page view regardless if its a form or not will be encrypted.

What that means ? Different things for different departments (IT, Marketing etc) but for us most important things are:

• Sites with SSL enabled across their entire domain are getting an SEO rank boost from Google; and this boost is likely to increase in the near future. Keep your business a cut above the competition with site-wide SSL.

• Online consumers know SSL means security. When a user sees an SSL Certificate on your site, they know you are a legitimate company and your identity has been verified. They also know their information is safe in your hands.

Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing qualified customers to products and services, rather than pushing products and services on the masses. It provides information, an improved customer experience and builds trust by offering potential customers information they value via permission-based marketing. Think of inbound as earned.

The term "inbound marketing" was coined by HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan and is synonymous with the concept of Permission Marketing, a 1999 book by Seth Godin.

The chart below does a good job of showing some of the differences between inbound and outbound (interruption).


 

Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication process that allows a user to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials. SSO is a common procedure in enterprises, where a client accesses multiple resources connected to a local area network (LAN).

I’m sure all of you at least once used Facebook connect to log in to different service. Or google account.

Facebook connect is good example of customer grade SSO.

Microsites, simply, are specialized websites which focus on what your company does best. In "Good to Great," Jim Collins relays a quote attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Your business may be good at many things, but we want to focus on the one thing you do BEST. We translate this idea into a website thats sole purpose is to get you leads. You'll know this strategy is working when your phone is RINGING OFF THE HOOK. 

An iFrame is an inline frame used inside a webpage to load another HTML document inside it. This HTML document may also contain JavaScript and/or CSS which is loaded at the time when iframe tag is parsed by the user’s browser. In the past commonly used to extend websites functionality by 3rd party code. 

Recently iframe popularity went down. While its very easy to use (you can virtually enable any page into another one) its also very limited:
1. You can't access, modify content within iframe.
2. Main website and iframe are completly separate websites, even that they appear in 1 browser window on user computer. This is important to realise since any form filled in within iframe can only post information within that iframe.

Most common use nowdays is to embed forms as iframes (Salesforce, Hubspot etc etc.)  Those pages have no styling or branding so its easy to create and embed contact form on your website. However data posted thru such form will only be transfered to 3rd party service - as is. GC never recommends iframe solutions since website has no trace of any form data being submited, we can't also add any additional data that is important for tracking (IP, Referral url or history)

A trojan horse site is a microsite that creates opportunity to sell other goods or services.  For example, a trojan horse site that GoldenComm built is Forklift Frank.  The parent company, Raymond Handling Solutions offers many material handling solutions.  Even though forklifts do not drive their economic engine it creates the opportunity to get in the door and sell other services.

With one-way link building,  your site gets inbound links from other sites without your having to link back to them.  Search engines value this type of linking because inbound links signify a vote of confidence on the part of other sites in favor of yours.  It's even more are beneficial if the sites that link to yours have a greater domain authority than yours.

A Denial of Service (or Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a cyber attack that attempts to make a resource unavailable to its users. This is usually done by flooding the resource with superfluous requests (... in other words, a bunch of fake "people" requesting the same web service to overload the site and take it down or make it unavailable). 

A persona is a classification of traits and behaviors of a buyer, often related to their job title, and includes information about the buyer that is both personal and professional. Many times these personas are given names, so an organization can quickly identifywhat persona they are referring to.

Rough example:

"Phil the CEO (age: 60) likes to receive information in bullet points and is most concerned with cost. He golfs and likes dogs. Nina the Marketing Director (age: 35) likes to receive information with great detail so she can weigh all of her options. She does yoga and likes to read."

If this company was putting together a 30 page case study, they could quickly identify in a meeting that this case study is not something "Phil" would read, but "Nina" would. Now they won't waste marketing dollars trying to get the Phils of the world to download this case study, and will instead target the Ninas of the world.

Use it in a sentence: Personas are the first step for planning, before you can begin marketing automation. If you don't know who your buyers are, how can you market to them properly?

Call To Action. In design, we always want to lead the eye of our audience. We do this, usually, with angles, colors or focus/out-of-focus with photography. For web design, we lead the eye with a call to action, the main thing we want the user to do. Most likely a brightly colored button.

A squeeze page is a page who's sole purpose is to convince the user to opt-in and provide their email address. This is usually accompanied by an offer (free e-book, whitepaper, templates, etc.). Our Golden Rules are a good example of squeeze pages.

Sendgrid, MailChip, Constant Contact, Silverpop, Exact Target, Hubspot, Pardot, Elioqua, Act-On, Bronto, Listrack, Marketo. Some, not all are marketing automation enabled.

BYOD is short for bring your own device. Employees who bring their own computing devices, such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets to the workplace need to check with the company's governance policy to help IT better manage these devices and ensure network security.

A firewall is a network security device that monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic and decides whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a defined set of security rules.

Firewalls have been a first line of defense in network security for over 25 years. They establish a barrier between secured and controlled internal networks that can be trusted and untrusted outside networks, such as the Internet. 

A firewall can be hardware, software, or both.

Three companies that make a firewall are: Cisco, Juniper and Barracuda

Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. The word is a neologism created as a homophone of fishing due to the similarity of using a bait in an attempt to catch a victim. According to the 3rd Microsoft Computing Safer Index Report released in February 2014, the annual worldwide impact of phishing could be as high as $5 billion

But what that looks like in real life?

Imagine you are logging to your PayPal account, the site looks exactly as it should and nothing caught your attention. You are in hurry and provide your username and password, site says your password is incorrect. So naturally you think that you’ve forgot the password but again you are in hurry so you will just recover it so you enter your email address.

In all this you haven’t seen that you’ve been on payplay.securenet.com or something similar looking legit. At this point you’ve given out your username / password / email to malicious site.

Second example is more sophisticated. You have malware on your computer that listens to your web browser activity. Once you go to paypal.com it will inject iframe into the site covering the real content (similar how you can do it with any web code inspector), at this point you are on the PayPal site (url looks ok) but the form where you log in is actually coming thru different site, it will look identical but will send your data somewhere else.

Malware is an piece of software that was written with the intent of doing harm to data, devices, or to people. Common categories of malware are virus, trojans, spyware, worms, ransomeware, adware, and botnets. Symptoms of malware may include pop-up advertisements, settings have changed and can't change back, web browser contains additional components that you didn't download, computer seems sluggish. To stay protected, make sure to have an antivirus running on your machine.

SIEM (pronounced "sim" with a silent e) stands for "Security information and event management". A SIEM system key focus is to monitor and help manage user and service privileges, directory services and other system-configuration changes; as well as providing log auditing and review and incident response. Some equipment and devices that might be a part of a SIEM system are firewalls, antivirus, intrusion prevention, etc.

DMZ is acronym for demilitarized zone that has military background.

In computer security, a DMZ or demilitarized zone (sometimes referred to as a perimeter network) is a physical or logical subnetwork that contains and exposes an organization’s external-facing services to an untrusted network, usually a larger network such as the Internet.

In short: DMZ is part or the network that is exposed to public. Quick example would be that company has 2 servers, one containing invoicing information will be completely separated from internet (LAN network), while second server will host company website and will be available on internet. Second server will be considered as part of DMZ zone

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application) that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A proxy server acts as "middle man", facilitating access to content on the World Wide Web, providing anonymity and may be used to bypass IP address blocking.

• Many schools block access to popular websites such as Facebook. Students can use proxy servers (as a middle man) to circumvent this security.
• One of our clients BrukerAFMProbes.com has some IP logic that displays country currency based on country IP of user visiting the site.  In order to test this, we have often used a proxy server to bypass the IP logic and act as though we were from an IP other than the U.S.

A stored procedure is a set of SQL statements, saved within the database, that are used to perform a special task.

The advantages of using a stored procedure:

• Stored procedure allows modular programming
  • You can create the procedure once, store it in the database and call it any number of times in your program.
• A stored procedure allows faster execution.
  • If the operation requires a large amount of SQL code that is performed repetitively, stored produces can be faster. They are parsed and optimized when they are first executed, and a compiled version of the stored procedure remains in a memory cache for later use. This means the stored procedure does not need to be reparsed and reoptimized with each use, resulting in much faster execution times.
• A stored procedure can reduce network traffic.
  • An operation requiring hundreds of lines of code can be performed through a single statement that executes the code in a procedure, rather than by sending hundreds of lines of code over the network.

This is a malicious attack using SQL statements that can control a website database server, possibly altering the database schema. The only way to really prevent this is to make sure the the database server is secure, using stored procedures, etc.

Our standards at GoldenComm help protect our clients from SQL injection attacks. We are filtering all data that is user generated (forms, page load,s etc.) before it is sent to the database.  This allows detection and prevention of malicious activity. Another item that we see in all our website builds that provides security against such attacks is form validation. By making sure we are allowing only data that we are expecting to receive from customers (ie: no special characters in name field), we are preventing malicious code to be passed to the server.

This is a type of cyber security threat where a secret attacker relays or alters communication between two parties that think they are talking directly to one another.

Active Directory (AD) is a directory service that Microsoft developed for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services.

AD can be thought of as an SSO. A single user account that has access to many systems. When we hear the term, we should automatically think: 

1. Microsoft
2. Security
3. Scalability
4. As a company, we are capable of working with it

Customer segmentation refers to the division of the customer base into specific types according to purchasing behavior patterns.
 
Difference between Segment & Persona?
 
Marketers use customer segmentation to classify various types of customers into specific groupings, ultimately making it easier to target products or communications tailored to the group’s preferences or needs.
 
Marketers use personas to help them better understand their prospects and customers on a more personal level (Through research and interviews with real people). Personas can be grouped into segments and can be in more than one segment, but personas are unique and independent of one another.
 
Why is it important?
Segments and personas are both important and helpful marketing tools but they’re used for different reasons at different stages of a marketing process. Based on qualitative data, personas are used early in the process to give prospects and customers personalities and preferences while segments, built from quantitative data, help marketers more effectively reach their target audiences.
 

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You would use a SWOT to analyze the competitive landscape of your company against others, and in the market.   

Baidu is a web services company based in China. Baidu is often compared to Google because they have a very similar product offering, including search engine, mapping, images, AI, music, and self driving cars. 


Why are they important?  Baidu is one of the largest internet companies in the world with a market cap of $79 billion.
 

Content Networks -- also known as Content Ads or Contextual Networks -- are ads served alongside related content. They're basically relevant display ads to the page content (chosen by keyword) and billed for the same (by impressions, not clicks).  

By definition, an editorial is an article written by or on behalf of an editor that gives an opinion on a topic.  More so in the past, this would be in newspapers, etc.  Today, we can relate this to blogging and social media, where anyone can "play" in the space.  Recently, we have seen many political figures, CEO's, etc. taking a stance on world wide topics, or maybe industry topics.  It's much easier to have a "voice" today than 10 years ago, when getting published in a newspaper took a bit more effort. 

Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to attract attention and generate leads, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility & engage an online community of users.
 
Top 5 types of Content Marketing: Blog/Guest posts, Images, Infographics, Videos and Case Studies.
 
Examples: The email service provider GetResponse does a lot of the basics right like marketing blog with a new post every day, well-promoted free trial for new signups and a variety of lead magnet email courses. Mint.com was the first company to create infographics to attract customers on a mass scale – that resulted in 2 million customers within 3 years.
 

This "buzz-word" has been around but who can answer the question, "What is Marketing Automation"? Marketing automation refers to software/tools that exists with the goal of automating repetitive marketing actions, such as emails, social media, and other website actions. The technology of marketing automation is about developing and nuturing leads at different stages of the sales funnel and buyers journey.  While it is true it makes these repetitive TASKS easier, the time involved in setting up personas, segmentations, workflows, content creation, etc. is a different story and missunderstood by many marketers.

Common Patforms:
Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, ActOn, Bronto, Kentico EMS

Kentico EMS, Act-On, Bronto, Hub Spot, Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, etc.

EdgeRank is the name commonly given to the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what articles should be displayed in a user's News Feed. As of 2011, Facebook has stopped using the EdgeRank system and uses a machine learning algorithm that, as of 2013, takes more than 100,000 factors into account.

PageRank is the first algorithm created and used by Google Search that ranks websites. "PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites."

The PageRank was a number between 1 - 10, and could be viewed in the Google Toolbar when visiting a webpage. I say "was" because as of March 2016, this feature is no longer supported, but Google started fading out PageRank as early as 2009.  

PageRank is named after Larry Page, inventor of PageRank and CEO of Google until 2001 (and again from 2011 - 2015).  He currently is CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet.

Golden Circle






What - Every organization on the planet knows WHAT they do. These are the products they sell or the services they offer.

How - Some organizations know HOW they do it.  They are the things that make them special or set them apart from their competition.

Why - Very few organization know WHY they do what they do.  WHY is not about making money. That's a result.  It's a purpose, cause or belief.  It's the very reason your organization exists.

Simon Sinek’s book ‘Start with Why’ gets you thinking about the importance of addressing WHY you do what you do.

When an organisation articulates their WHY and we believe it, then we go above and beyond to include their offerings in our lives. We embrace their beliefs, not because they’re necessarily better, but because they represent values that are important to us. They make us feel like we belong and these organisations are the ones that create loyal fan bases, and brand ambassadors.

In Simon's book, it looks at how the Golden Circle corresponds with the three major levels of the human brain.

Neocortex: This is our newest area of the brain, our homo sapien brain, and this corresponds with the WHAT level of the Golden Circle.  This is responsible for all our rational and analytical thought and language. This allows us to look through vast amounts of facts and figures, but it doesn’t drive behavior. This is why it’s so confusing when we go shopping for a specific type of product that’s offering a range of similar features and benefits.

Limbic Brain: The Limbic brain comprises of the middle two sections and is responsible for all our feelings, such as trust and loyalty. This area of the brain is responsible for all human behavior and all our decision making. It is where our emotional connection takes place, and it has no capacity for language.

Your "gut decisions" come from your Limbic brain.  People don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing. 

Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember unique information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) or to record the user's browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited in the past). They can also be used to remember arbitrary pieces of information that the user previously entered into form fields such as names, addresses, passwords, etc. They are also the unique identifier that remarketing banners rely on.

Google Panda and Google Penguin are code names for changing search result ranking algorithm. Google Panda, released in February 2011, penalizes websites of low quality and those with low quality content. Google Penguin, released in April 2012, helps bringing down websites that violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines and use black-hat SEO techniques. What is is Hummingbird?

Keyword stuffing is a spam technique to try and gain favor from search engines by loading page content and metas with keywords. If discovered, the site will be penalized with low rankings. It's a "black hat" tactic and not something any reputable company or agency should do. 

Client-side means it's happening on your local machine. Server-side means it's happening at the server level. Client-side is obviously a lot faster and more efficient since the communication/process is done on your local machine (and thus dependent on your hardware/software). Server-side means the message/communication has to be sent to the server, processed, and passed back (so now in addition to your machine, the speed of which is dependent on the server itself, as well as, the connection). 

WLAN stands for Wireless Local Area Network
WWAN stands for Wireless Wide Area Network

• The main difference is the coverage.  
• WLAN typically covers a room or office or home (your home wifi or our wifi here in this office), and can be faster than WWAN.  
• WWAN uses telecom networks and therefore covers much larger areas (your mobile 4G network), and is somewhat more secure than WLAN.

Bandwidth is how many 'lanes' the internet connections 'roads' have. The  more 'lanes' (i.e. bandwidth), the more 'traffic'

CRSF is short for cross-site request forgery, also known as one-click attack or session riding. It's a type of malicious exploit of a website where unauthorized commands are transmitted from a user that the web application trusts. 

Satefty CSRF tips for users and developers:

• Logoff immediately after using a web application
• Do not allow your browser to save username/passwords, and do not allow sites to "remember" your login
• Do not use the same browser to access sensitive applications
• Check standard headers to very the request is same origin
• Check CSRF token

What is TCP/IP mean?
 
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet. TCP/IP can also be used as a communications protocol in a private network (an intranet or an extranet).
 
Why is it important?
 
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) are the two most important lower-level protocols enabling Internet connectivity.
 
As with any form of communication, two things are needed: a message to transmit and the means to reliably transmit the message. IP is responsible for moving packets of data from one connection point to the next while TCP verifies the integrity of data traveling between two endpoints.
 

POP3 and IMAP are protocols for retrieving emails to a local PC or device. POP3 creates local copies of emails and deletes the originals from email servers. Emails that are downloaded are not accessible from a different device. IMAP allows user to retriece emails from different devices and email clients. It keeps emails on email servers until user deletes them. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the process of storing and forwarding emails across the network at TCP/IP protocol layer. For example, when a visitor submits a contact form, the system sends an outvound email to admin and a copt to the visitor submits  a contact form, the system sends an outbound email to admin and a copy to the visitor via SMTP.

Domain Name Servers (DNS) maintain a directory of domain names and translate them to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Since computers identify each other by IP addresses, the job of DNS is to turn a user-friendly domain name like "GoldenComm.com" into an IP address like "72.32.231.128". 
"When we launch the website and update DNS to point to our servers, we should let the client know it could take up to 48 hours to propagate across the web"

A domain registrar is an entity that manages the registration of domain names.
A few to name are: Godaddy, NetworkSolutions, 1and1, DreamHost; Hover, BlueHost, NameCheap, HostGator, Name.com, Register.com, iPage...
Karthick mentioned: Bigrock.in, planethoster.net, hostway, domains.com

What is CDN? Name the largest CDN in the world.


A Content Delivery Network is a system of distributed servers that deliver pages and other Web content to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server. The goal of a CDN is to increase performance, reduce latency, accelerate site load times, reduce bandwidth consumption secure applications and even block data scrappers and other forms of spammers hitting your server.

How does it work?
Servers nearest to the website visitor respond to the request. The CDN copies the pages of a website to a network of servers that are dispersed at geographically different locations, caching the contents of the page. When a user requests a webpage that is part of a content delivery network, the CDN will redirect the request from the originating site's server to a server in the CDN that is closest to the user and deliver the cached content. CDNs will also communicate with the originating server to deliver any content that has not been previously cached.

For GoldenComm, a website with heavy imagery being delivered to a global audience (think big eCommerce clients, educational/Lead gen sites with images/video being downloaded, etc.), would be a good candidate for a CDN.

Akamai is one of the oldest and largest CDNs
 

Sun Microsystems invented JAVA. Oracle Corporation currently owns it. It doesn't cost anything to use JAVA on your website.

What is ICANN?
 
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit organization responsible for co-ordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases.
 
What is an IP Address?
 
An Internet Protocol address (IP Address) is a numerical label assigned to each device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses are usually written and displayed in human-readable notations such as 172.16.254.1 in IPv4 and2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:8:1 in IPv6.
 
Use ICANN and IP Address in a sentence
 
The IP address space is managed globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) ICANN maintains registries of IP Address identifiers.
 

Specifies the number of minutes that a session can remain idle before the server terminates it automatically. The default is 10 minutes. Session. Timeout has no hard-coded limit. Most Web administrators set this property to 8 minutes.
 
Session expiration time is context dependent, and more security related than user experience related. In Sweden at least, there is a silent agreement among financial institutions to have a ten minute session expiration time. But if your app or web app don't handle money or other sensitive information, you can use weeks instead of minutes on session expiration time.
 
Idle session timeout is ineffective at maintaining security because many applications make periodic background requests to the server; a session is never considered idle until the user shuts down or disconnects the computer. On the other hand, absolute session timeout requires the user to log in again even if the user has been active the whole time. This is a recommended security feature.

Short Version:
Changing save location of an uploaded file from the public root of the site so it is not accessible/executable by the user.

Longer Version:
Sometimes, we include a file upload field in contact forms. This is commonly used for career pages. Allowing a user to save files to our server is, well, dangerous! Most people that would use our sites probably would not intend to hurt us, but that doesn't mean that they can't.

Let's take a WordPress site as an example: we use the Contact Form 7 plugin to create forms. This plugin allows us to save files, but by default, it will save them to the uploads folder. That means if we upload a file (hackme.php) into a form... it would be accessible through this URL: site.com/wp-content/uploads/{year}/{month}/hackme.php This is common knowledge (among developers) and dangerous. So we typically save them outside the root, under a random name.

This is much safer and will prevent users from accessing the file that is uploaded.

An application programming interface (API) is a particular set of rules ('code') and specifications that software programs can follow to communicate with each other. It serves as an interface between different software programs and facilitates their interaction, similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.

You might sometimes hear someone say : "Developer needs to integrate into Twitter API so we can pull recent tweets". This means that Twitter software has API (application interface) that we can "Talk to" using programing language for example to retrieve recent tweets and show them on our website.

"C Sharp"
C# is a programming language that is designed for building a variety of applications that run on the .NET Framework. (Developed by Microsoft)

Why do Java Programmers wear glasses?
- Because they don't C#

Business-to-business (B2B) refers to a situation where one business makes a commercial transaction with another. This typically occurs when:

• A business is sourcing materials for their production process (e.g. a food manufacturer purchasing salt).
• A business needs the services of another for operational reasons (e.g. a food manufacturer employing an accountancy firm to audit their finances).
• A business re-sells goods and services produced by others (e.g. a retailer buying the end product from the food manufacturer).

In most cases, the overall volume of B2B (business-to-business) transactions is much higher than the volume of B2C transactions. The primary reason for this is that in a typical supply chain there will be many B2B transactions involving subcomponents or raw materials, and only one B2C transaction, specifically sale of the finished product to the end customer. For example, an automobile manufacturer makes several B2B transactions such as buying tires, glass for windscreens, and rubber hoses for its vehicles. The final transaction, a finished vehicle sold to the consumer, is a single (B2C) transaction.

For example you can say: Snugtop is B2B company. They are oriented on creating supply chain for their products (working with installation partners). Their products need to be installed so they partner with other businesses to provide installation service.

.net

Java ( JavaServer Pages )

Web Server and Database Server

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is business process management software that has a broad set of activities that help an organization manage its business. An important goal of ERP software is to integrate back office business processes and facilitate the flow of information within an organization so business decisions can be data-driven.
 
Even though, ERP can provide many benefits, it also can lead to tragedy in implementation because of complexity to implement, time consuming, requiring a lot resource such as money, human resource, hardware, and software.
 
A few ERP systems include SAP, Net Suite, PeopleSoft, Workday and MS Dynamics.
 

Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, FreeBSD

Electronic Data Interchange is the transfer of data from one computer system to another by standardized message formatting, without the need for human intervention. EDI permits multiple companies -- possibly in different countries -- to exchange documents electronically.

"Stands for ""Content Management System."" A CMS is a software tool that allows you to create, edit, and publish content on the web.  The following are some of the most popular ones:
* Kentico
* WordPress
* Joomla
* Drupal
* EPiServer
* SilverStripe"

These numbers are all modem speeds. 2400 and 9600 are measured in bit/s while 9.6 and up are in kbit/s

File Transfer Protocol

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client using the client–server model on a computer network.


Some FTP clients you might be familiar with are FileZilla or DreamWeaver.

View source is to view the webpage code that the web brower received from the web server.  This is important for SEO purposes since Google and other search engines read this code to determine your ranking for a given search query

In CRM (customer relationship management), a CRM system is software that covers a broad set of applications designed to help businesses manage many of the following business processes: customer data, customer interaction, access business information, automate sales, track leads to conversions, track sales pipeline, etc.

The most popular CRM in the world is Salesforce. Other popular CRMs are Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar, Zoho, Netsuite, Infusionsoft, etc.

All except HTML are email protocols.

POP3
Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is a standard mail protocol used to receive emails from a remote server to a local email client. POP3 allows you to download email messages on your local computer and read them even when you are offline. Note, that when you use POP3 to connect to your email account, messages are downloaded locally and removed from the email server. This means that if you access your account from multiple locations, that may not be the best option for you. On the other hand, if you use POP3, your messages are stored on your local computer, which reduces the space your email account uses on your web server.

IMAP
The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is a mail protocol used for accessing email on a remote web server from a local client. IMAP and POP3 are the two most commonly used Internet mail protocols for retrieving emails. Both protocols are supported by all modern email clients and web servers.

While the POP3 protocol assumes that your email is being accessed only from one application, IMAP allows simultaneous access by multiple clients. This is why IMAP is more suitable for you if you're going to access your email from different locations or if your messages are managed by multiple users.

SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the standard protocol for sending emails across the Internet.

This stands for Internet Protocol version 4 and version 6. Internet Protocol is the standards-based way the Internet communicates, and every device on the Internet is assigned a unique IP address for identification and location. IPv4, has started to run out of IP addresses (Similar to what happens with area codes) In 2012, v6 was launched to solve this problem. While it is intended to replace v4, currently most computers still run on v4. To relate this back to another WOTD, this is all part of IoT!
v4
32-bit address length
numbers only
Example IP address: 192.0.2.235

v6
128-bit address length
numbers and letters
Example IP address: 2001:0db8:0000:0042:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

What is “THING”:

A thing, in the Internet of Things, can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low – or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network.

An Internet Service Provider provides a service that allows you to access the internet.  Typically this would be a cable or phone provider but some are privately owned.

Netscape, a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc., sued Microsoft in 2002 for a series of anti-competitive actions aimed at promoting Microsoft's Internet Explore browser at the expense of Netscape Navigator. Netscape lawsuit alleges that Microsoft's conduct violated the law and harmed competition and consumers. Netscape's lawsuit seeks not only an award of damages, but for the Court to provide injunctive relief that will help restore competition on the computer desktop.

Sales funnel refers to the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products or services.  The final step of the sales funnel is when goods or services are purchased.

A sales funnel illustrates the movement of prospects through the sales process.  There are dropouts at each stage. Here is an example:

|||||||||||||||||||     20- Prospects know about a product
        ||||||||||||            12- Shows interest a product
            ||||||||                   8 - Meet and compare the product to others
               |||||                      5 - Want a proposal for the product
                 |||                        3 - Purchases the product
 

A high-level general-purpose programming language used especially for developing Web applications

The 80-20 rule, formally known as the Pareto Principle, is the concept that 80% of the effects are generated by 20% of the causes. When we apply this to business specifically, we can generate statements like:

- 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers
- 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your products or services

When we see that 80% of a company's revenue comes from 20% of their products or services, what might GoldenComm suggest looking into? That's right - a hedgehog microsite! 

We know that 1 out of 3 required characteristics of a hedgehog is that it makes you money (drives your economic engine), and if 20% of your products or services are generating 80% of your revenue - a hedgehog very well may be hiding in that 20%.
 

IBM introduced the AS/400 in 1988 as a combination of hardware and an operating system.  Both have continued to change through the years but the system is still backwards compatible, so you can run a program created in 1988 on a current server today.  Wait, what?  They are still running today?  Yes! There are over 100,000 companies still using AS/400 technology (renamed IBM i) - mostly for heavy computing applications like ERP and banking.   

SOAP (originally Simple Object Access Protocol) is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services in computer networks. Its purpose is to induce extensibility, neutrality and independence. It uses XML Information Set for its message format, and relies on application layer protocols, most often Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), for message negotiation and transmission.

SOAP allows processes running on disparate operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) to communicate using Extensible Markup Language (XML). Since Web protocols like HTTP are installed and running on all operating systems, SOAP allows clients to invoke web services and receive responses independent of language and platforms.

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style, an approach to implementing web services. It's a lighter weight communications and efficiently use internet bandwidth compare to SOAP (Simple Object Access). Additional benefits are easier to scale, smaller learning curve, and designed for web applications. One of a few downsides is REST does not have direct support for generating client from a server metadata, such as WSDL in SOAP.

Stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.  It is a WWW "language" that both servers and your browser understand. In simple terms, HTTP tells your browser to go out into the WWW, using a specific default port, to find the specified IP address, and render that data back to your browser.


Based on the protocol, a different Port might be used to transfer the information.  


Different protocols use different default ports (highways):

• HTTP communicates by default through port 80
• HTTPS communicates by default through port 443
• FTP communicates by default through port 21
• Email (SMTP) communicates by default through port 25 
• SQL and other secure ports such as SSH, etc. use different default ports, as well.

When thinking of "HTTP" what comes to mind? Do you think of SSL, or maybe lack there of? Who knows about the new Chrome standards coming out in October for non secure pages with forms? Chatter it up in WOTD Chatter and or discuss with your teams!


 

(1) 301 Moved Permanently - This and all future requests should be directed to the given URI (301 redirects) (2) 400 Bad Request - The server cannot or will not process the request due to an apparent client error (3) 403 Forbidden - The request was a valid request, but the server is refusing to respond to it. The user may be logged in but does not have the necessary permissions for the resource (4) 404 Not Found - The requested resource could not be found but may be available in the future. Subsequent requests by the client are permissible (5) 500 Internal Server Error - A generic error message, given when an unexpected condition was encountered and no more specific message is suitable.

Load balancing refers to efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers, also known as a server farm or server pool. 

Load balancing allows website to handle more customers than single computer could process. Load balancing is primarly used for 2 reasons: high capacity or high availability. First allows to serve higher volume of users, second one allows part of the infrastructure (web server) to fail and load balancer will user other available servers to serve network traffic.

Rather than full back-up, an incremental back-up looks for only those files that have changed since the last back-up and updates the back-up of those files. 

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is just that. A service (like Salesforce or Jira Cloud) for disaster recovery. This includes back-ups and restoration -- but also a failure-state and failback. The former being a temporary solution until your systems come back up; and the latter being what happens once your primary systems are back up. The economies of scale that come with cloud computing have turned disaster recovery from an enterprise only offering into something that pretty much every business should at least consider. 

Imagine comparison between FOX and HEDGEHOG.

For business the Hedgehog Concept is the intersection of three circles.
1. What you are passionate about
2. What you can be the best in the world at
3. What drives your economic engine

More than a strategy it’s really an understanding. It’s interesting to note the difference that Jim Collins identifies in Good to Great.

An MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) is someone who has passed exams about the Microsoft Windows NT operating system, related desktop systems, networking, and Microsoft's back office server products. MCSE is an expert level credential from Microsoft. It is part of the MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) certification programs.
 
To acquire an MCSE, one must be an MCSA first. MCSA or Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate is the entry level Microsoft certification. Once you earn your MCSE credential, you'll need to pass a recertification exam every three years to maintain it.
 
Some of the Microsoft online certifications are:
 

• MCSE - Business Applications
• MCSE - Cloud Platform & Infrastructure
• MCSE - Data Management & Analytics
• MCSE – Mobility
• MCSE – Productivity

How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in the 1930s. Emphasizing the use of others egotistical tendencies to one's advantage, Carnegie maintained that success could be found by charm, appreciation, and personality (talk about them!).

Hybrid mobile apps are built with a combination of web technolgies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScripts that is hosted inside a native application.  This enables them to access device capabilities such as accelerometer, camera, contacts, etc.

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a metric that indicates how fast the server was able to process your request. When typing in a URL, a few things are happening: DNS Lookup, SSL Negotiation, User requests of content from the server, server-side processing of requests...and once all this happens, we get our Time to First Byte. This is the point where the browser actually starts downloading HTML of the page that the server generates.

In Google Page Insights this is measured as "Server response time", and is something Google looks at carefully.

This all plays into the larger topic of PAGE SPEED. Our very own Mic, created a fantastic wiki article, Page Speed Explained! with a great PDF (attached).

The thing to keep in mind here is that page speed is more than just html content, but also more than the "size" or performance of the serve

A vector image uses geometrical formulas to represent images. The other way of representing graphical images is through bit-maps in which the image is made up of a pattern of dots (note that bit-maps are often referred to as raster graphics). Programs that allow you to create and manipulate vector graphics are called draw programs and programs that manipulate bit-map images are called paint programs. Vector graphics are more flexible than bit-maps because they can be easily re-sized. In addition, images stored as vectors look better when displayed on high resolution printers and monitors. Bit-map images look the same, regardless of the resolution of the display. Another advantage of a vector graphic is that they often require less memory than bit-maps do. Note that most output devices including dot matrix printers, laser printers and display monitors are raster devices (wide format printers being the exception). This means that all objects, even vector graphics, must be translated into bit-maps (or rasterised) before being output. Vector graphics do not need to be translated in to bit-maps until the last possible minute, after all sizes and resolutions have been specified.

Oliver Napoleon Hill was an American author. He is known best for his book 'Think and Grow Rich' which is among the 10 best-selling self-help books of all time. He was inspired by a suggestion from business magnate and later-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Most of his books were promoted as expounding principles to achieve "success".

He has written the book during the decade 1930's and promoted it as a personal development and self-improvement book.

13 principles in the form of 'Philosophy of Achievements' can be found in this book.

72 DPI - Dots Per Inch Actually monitors are measured in PPI - Pixels Per Inch, and not Dots Per Inch (DPI).

Any decent screen today is much more than 72 PPI. For example a very popular displays like 24” 1920x1080 are 92PPI. I’m often using a 13” MacBook screen which is more than 220 PPI.

Many users now use mobile devices to browse the web, so there are screens 5” with 1920x1080 today which have 440 PPI or a flag example - iPhone (6/6S/7) which has 325 PPI.

So I would argue that 72 PPI is good enough today for the web.

Claremont University is in Claremont, California. The school is home to Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management (often cited as the Drucker School of Management). Drucker taught at Claremont for 30 years. He's the originator of management by objectives. 

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990); MIT Sloan School of Management

1. JPEG

JPEG is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and is the most popular among the image formats used on the web. JPEG files are very ‘lossy’, meaning so much information is lost from the original image when you save it in a JPEG file.

Pros of JPEG:
24-bit color, with up to 16 million colors
Rich colors, great for photographs that need fine attention to color detail
Most used and most widely accepted image format

Cons of JPEG:
They tend to discard a lot of data
After compression, JPEG tends to create artifacts
Cannot be animated
Does not support transparency

2. GIF

GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format, is limited to the 8 bit palette with only 256 colors. GIF is still a popular image format on the internet because image size is relatively small compared to other image compression types.

Pros of GIF:
Can support transparency
Can do small animation effects
‘Lossless’ quality–they contain the same amount of quality as the original, except of course it now only has 256 colors
Great for images with limited colors, or with flat regions of color

Cons of GIF:
Only supports 256 colors
It’s the oldest format in the web, having existed since 1989. It hasn’t been updated since, and sometimes, the file size is larger than PNG

3. PNG

PNG, short for Portable Network Graphics, has been approved as a standard since 1996. It is an image format specifically designed for the web. PNG is, in all aspects, the superior version of the GIF.

Pros of PNG:
Lossless, so it does not lose quality and detail after image compression
In a lot ways better then GIF.  PNG often creates smaller file sizes than GIF
Supports transparency better than GIF

Cons of PNG:
Not good for large images because they tend to generate a very large file, sometimes creating larger files than JPEG
Unlike GIF however, it cannot be animated
Not all web browsers can support PNG, especially older browsers

User interface (UI) is a series of screens, pages, and visual elements that you interact with a device. User experience (UX) is the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect of the company products and services. When building a website, it's important to discuss and consider both aspects in order to create a beautiful, cohesive and intuitive experience.

The 12 column grid creates consistency between layouts and provides the breakpoints for responsive designs.  For optimal user experience, ideally interfaces should adapt layouts for the following breakpoint widths: 480, 600, 840, 960, 1280, 1440, and 1600px.

A "bad break" would be considered one where the layout might look strange in a specific width, and most likely is not developed with the standard breakpoint considered.

Stephen Covey was an educator, author, businessman and keynote speaker. He wrote several books, including:

1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
2. First Things First
3. Principle-Centered Leadership
4. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families
5. The 8th Habit
6. The Leader In Me

In 1985 Stephen Covey established "Stephen R. Covey and Associates" which in 1987 became The "Covey Leadership Center" which, in 1997, merged with "Franklin Quest" to form what is today "FranklinCovey".

CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key/black)

256 different colors

Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb's Foundation

Frameworks have been used for years. CSS is hard, it's been hard for a while (it was released in 1996). The introduction of frameworks like the original 960 Grid System which was created to help design oriented developers make uniform websites based off a 12, 16 or 24 column grid system just like we used to for print layouts. The grid system was great and minimal, then other frameworks were introduced that made commonly used items (like a thumbnail or a menu system) easy to attain. Of course the introduction of the iPad in 2010 with its responsive 9.7 inch 1024x768 pixel display made it so that developers and designers looked for solutions to include one stylesheet per site to help it fit these new devices. Right after the iPad was introduced, Bootstrap and Foundation were as well.

Although Twitter's Bootstrap is the most popular framework, GoldenComm doesn't use it. We have a few sites that are built with it, but those are sites we inherit. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with bootstrap. It has a huge community behind it and there have been tons of questions and answers on stackoverflow. It's easy to get started and great for beginners. 

We're not beginners. 

The biggest argument against Bootstrap is that sites look like cookie cutter images. Because it has many pre-built components that are included out of the box, this is often true. For us, this usually means that we're restricted to what we design and that's not something we'd ever like to say to a client (plus Johnnie might get really sad). Foundation is flexible and was built on Sass first, Bootstrap followed that lead later. When we were looking for a GC Base replacement, this was a huge deal for us as we could use as little or as much of the core code as we needed. Foundation won.

All in all, Foundation and Bootstrap deliver the same result: an easy to use set of components and "rules" for both our developers and designers to communicate with each other. They're not necessary to create a responsive site, but definitely useful

A way of bringing products or services to market so that they can be purchased by consumers. A sales channel can be direct if it involves a business selling directly to its customers, or it can be indirect if an intermediary such as a retailer or dealer is involved in selling the product to customers.

Some examples of sales channels: 
1. Online Marketplaces
2. Distributors
3. Foreign Distributors
4. Affiliate Sales
5. Outsourced Sales
6. Value-Added Resellers (VARs)
7. Catalog

"H" in H1, et al stands for "header". Regardless of what the page looks like -- to a bot (think SEO) -- the text/image inside an H1 tag is the most important thing on the page. H2, the second most and on down the list. Because of that, the content of a an H1 is very important -- and only one H1 should be used per page.

Typically, a distributor sells to Value Added Reseller (VAR), who in turn sells to the customer. Sysco (distrubtor) sells to the restaurant (VAR) where patrons go. We service clients that are distributors and VARs. Particularly with the evolution of ecommerce, there's more channel conflict happening. Manufacturers can now sell direct to customers online. As can distributors. 

Most graphic editing programs allow layers, including Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator.   Even Axure, one of our wireframe tools uses layers.

Photoshop layers are like sheets of stacked acetate. You can see through transparent areas of a layer to the layers below. You move a layer to position the content on the layer, like sliding a sheet of acetate in a stack. You can also change the opacity of a layer to make content partially transparent. 

A company that provides disaster recovery services, which ensure that critical business information can be recovered quickly, minimize downtime and keep business running.

A team at Adobe created PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format. They released version 1.0 of Adobe Acrobat that is capable of reading PDF format on June 15, 1993. PDF allows user to view a file precisely - down to the pixel of what the author had intended on any operating system.

Speech is silver, but silence is golden proverbial saying, mid 19th century; meaning that discretion can be more valuable than the most eloquent words.  The poet Thomas Carlyle translated the phrase from German in Sartor Resartus, 1831.

The pixel (a word invented from “picture element”) is the basic unit of programmable color on a computer display or in a computer image. Think of it as a logical - rather than a physical - unit. The physical size of a pixel depends on how you’ve set the resolution for the display screen. If you’ve set the display to its maximum resolution, the physical size of a pixel will equal the physical size of the dot pitch (let’s just call it the dot size) of the display. If, however, you’ve set the resolution to something less than the maximum resolution, a pixel will be larger than the physical size of the screen’s dot (that is, a pixel will use more than one dot).

Pixel is also defined as smallest element in the picture that is defined by solid color.

Pixel-perfect means you have considered every detail, down to individual pixels.

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. This allows to share author work under common usage agreements without need of defining their own. Another example especially for IT would be MIT licensing model.

Its important to know that CC have multiple levels, the fact that work is distributed under CC license means it can be freely used. Different levels are illustrated on attached image

A sales lead is a prospective consumer of a product or service, created when an individual or business shows interest and provides contact information. Businesses gain access to sales leads through advertising, trade shows, direct mailings and other marketing efforts. These are the people in the top of the funnel.

A famous movie that talks about leads is Glengarry Glen Ross, from 1992. Alec Baldwin "Blake" is well known for this movie. A famous quote that might ring a bell for you - "Put that coffee down! Coffee is for closers."

Royalty free generally means that you pay a one-time fee in exchange for the right to use copyright material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales.

Copyright free is work that is not protected by copyright.  While you might have to pay a fee to obtain a copy of the work, your use will not be restricted unless you’ve agreed that it will be in an enforceable contract.

Nondestructive editing allows you to make changes to an image without overwriting the original image data, which remains available in case you want to revert to it. Because nondestructive editing doesn’t remove data from an image, the image quality doesn’t degrade when you make edits. You can perform nondestructive editing in Photoshop in several ways. Check it out here if you are interested in the photo editing details. 

It's important for us to understand this concept for a few reasons, but the most important is to practice what we preach. Image sizes should be optimized down to the smallest they can be, without destructing or degrading the image quality. 

The “Flyweel Concept” was popularised by Jim Collins in “Good to Great” book.

The good-to-great companies understood a simple truth: tremendous power exists in the fact of continued improvement and the delivery of results. Point to tangible accomplishments—however incremental at first—and show how these steps fit into the context of an overall concept that will work. When you do this in such a way that people see and feel the buildup of momentum, they will line up with enthusiasm.

We came to call this the flywheel effect, and it applies not only to outside investors but also to internal constituent groups.

CSS stands for cascading style sheets, a style language used to add fonts, spacing, color and other stylistic elements to documents on the Internet. CSS is used to style documents written in markup languages such as HTML, XHTML and XML.

30 second do-it-yourself research: What is SCSS and how its different from CSS

Photoshop CS6 Extended, Illustrator CS6, InDesign® CS6, Acrobat® X Pro, Flash® Professional CS6, Dreamweaver® CS6, Fireworks® CS6, Adobe Premiere® Pro CS6, After Effects® CS6, Adobe Audition® CS6, SpeedGrade™ CS6, Prelude™ CS6, Encore® CS6, Bridge CS6, Media Encoder CS6, Flash Builder® 4.6 Premium Edition

A WYSIWYG (pronounced "wiz-ee-wig") editor or program is one that allows you to see what the end result will look like on a web page, while the interface or document is being created in html automatically. WYSIWYG is an acronym for "What You See is What You Get".

An HTML WYSIWYG editor, like the "visual" tab in WordPress, conceals the markup and allows the user to think entirely in terms of how the content should appear. One of the trade-offs, however, is that an HTML WYSIWYG editor sometimes inserts the markup code it thinks is needed all on its own - making things a little messy.

Ex: You use the visual tab to write a blog post in WordPress and use the bullet point option like you would in a word doc to write out:

• Dog
• Cat

When you click the "text" tab you will see that WordPress has inserted the html for you:
<ul>
     <li>Dog</li>
     <li>Cat</li>
</ul>

Zipping is a form of compression. You're combining the files into a single folder and reducing it's file size to make it more transportable

Full bleed is printing from one edge of the paper to the other without the standard borders by which most personal printers are limited. This is useful for printing brochures, posters, and other marketing materials. Often the paper is trimmed after printing to ensure the ink runs fully to the edge and does not stop short of it - usually indicated by crop marks on the paper.

A technology accelerator, you guessed it, is a form of technology that can be used to accelerate the rate at which you can do business and/or perform services. In a nutshell, anything you can utilize so you don't have to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch.

Some technology accelerators we use are:

• Kentico
• Leadlander
• Magento
• Mongoose
• Yext
• Yotpo

Camera-ready is a common term used in the commercial printing industry meaning that a document is, from a technical standpoint, ready to "go to press", or be printed.

Both are punctuation.  There are 3 lengths of what are more or less dashes — Hyphen (-), en dash (—) which is the width of an N, and em dash (—) which is the width of an M.


A hyphen connects two things that are function as a single concept like, “toll-free”.

An en dash relates things that are related to each other by distance, like January—December.

An em dash is the most versatile of the three.  Depending on the context, the em dash can be used in place of commas,  parentheses, or colons

CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. It is also the name of Corel's Graphics Suite, which bundles CorelDraw with bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs. The latest version is designated X8 (equivalent to version 18), and was released in March 2016. CorelDraw is designed to edit two-dimensional images such as logos and posters.

Photoshop is a raster image editor and CorelDraw is a vector image editor. Both are made by different companies, Adobe makes Photoshop, Corel makes CorelDraw. Adobe's equivalent to CorelDraw is called Adobe Illustrator, which is also a vector image editor.

The difference between vector and raster graphics is that raster graphics are composed of pixels, while vector graphics are composed of paths. A raster graphic, such as a gif or jpeg, is an array of pixels of various colors, which together form an image

Unlike web safe fonts, web fonts are NOT pre-installed on the user's system (think Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Courier, Verdana, Georgia, Garamond, etc.). Web fonts are downloaded by the user's browser while rendering the webpage, and then applied to your text. This is done through CSS. The main drawbacks of using web fonts is it can/will slow your site's load time.

Best practices for use of Web Fonts:

1. Do not use in EMAIL text - fonts are completely dependent on the user's machine and email client they are using. Web fonts will default to some other font that already is downloaded and that the email client recognizes. Images can be used with fonts in them to get a more "designed" email.
2. Keep your custom fonts (Web Fonts) to a minimum in website builds.  Because this sits in the CSS file, it has to load on every pages, which can slow the site down. 
3. Clean up your fonts in your CSS.  If a web font is not being used, get rid of it in the CSS as to not slow down the site.

Fortune 500 is an annual list of 500 of the most profitable U.S. industrial corporations. In total, this list represents 2/3 of the total dollar value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. (GDP). 

Let's name some!
Walmart
Apple
CVS Health
AT&T
Ford Motors
INGRAM MICRO

Getty Images, Inc. is an American stock photo agency, with headquarters in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage. It targets three markets—creative professionals (advertising and graphic design), the media (print and online publishing) and corporate (in-house design, marketing and communication departments).
 
The main difference between Getty and Shutterstock is the price. Getty is a mid to high end stock image company while Shutterstock is a micro stock. The other difference is that Getty offers both a rights managed and royalty free licenses. Shutterstock only offers royalty free.
 

Mergers & Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is the area of corporate finances, management and strategy dealing with purchasing and/or joining with other companies. In a merger, two organizations join forces to become a new business, usually with a new name. Because the companies involved are typically of similar size and stature, the term "merger of equals" is sometimes used.

In an acquisition, on the other hand, one business buys a second and generally smaller company which may be absorbed into the parent organization or run as a subsidiary. A company under consideration by another organization for a merger or acquisition is sometimes referred to as the target.

Above the fold originates from the days of the newspaper. It was the content you could see on the front of the newspaper without unfolding it to see the rest.

In terms of websites, when content is "above the fold" it is visible to the visitor without having to scroll. Content that is on the site and only visible once you scroll down is considered "below the fold". In traditional UI/UX, you would make sure your most important content and CTA's were above the fold.

Arguably, this term is fading out. There are so many varying screen sizes that depending on the screen you are viewing the site on, the fold can "move" and is no longer a universal point of reference.

Venture capital is usually funding that is given to a start-up company, with the expectation of a large return on their investment. You might commonly hear start ups talking about "VC funding" or "first round funding". This is all in reference to Venture Capital.

Private Equity (PE) firms usually do a full buy out of existing companies, with an acquisition, gaining complete control over the company. However, a PE firm can still invest venture capital into a company, rather than buying out ownership of the entire company.

Known as the "Great Recession" -- 2008 and 2009 was most dangerous crisis economic time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

The issue actually began much sooner and started to come to light in 2007 with inflated home prices in the US. In a nutshell, underwriting and financial practices upholding the home mortgage industry fell out, which led to a lot of people having a home mortgage balance significantly more than what they could now sell their home for. This snowballed into a full on economic melt-down that impacted most of the globe.

Brick-and-mortar refers to businesses that have physical presences, as oppose to online store only.

The executive level of a corporation with a "C" in the title - ie: CEO, COO, CMO, CTO, CIO, etc. Also known as the "C-Suite".

Chief Information Security Officer or just Chief Security Officer is a C-Level executive in an organization ultimately responsible for protecting all information assets and technologies of the company.

Uncover better ways of developing software by valuing:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The process of "repeating" in small segments, with improvements/changes each time.

Answer: Predictive

Two popular project management solutions are adaptive and predictive. "Agile" (or Scrum) would be adaptive, whereas "waterfall" is a predictive style.

(1) What did you do yesterday?
(2) What are you doing today?
(3) Do you have any blockers?

Duration. Sprints define a fixed duration (i.e. two weeks).

The freezer

As a(an) [actor] I want [narrative] so that [goal].

User stories are incredibly important at GoldenComm. They help to set expectations for both the client, and internal teams that are responsible for developing the user story into real-life website interaction. "Success criteria" follows every user story. Our developers use the success criteria to confirm they have successfully completed the task at hand. 

User Stories are part of every website build we do, and help to outline test-cases for websites when we are ready to launch. What does success look like? Awesome user stories.

A use case is most often outline using UML (Unified Modeling Language). Use cases are best used to define a user's path/flow through a website (similar to a workflow).

A gap analysis compares actual results to desired results, and looks at the difference between the two.

Root cause is the underlying issue that has caused the difference and/or the undesirable results. Often times people confuse the root cause with effects (or symptoms). A great way to get to the root is to keep asking "why" until you can't anymore.

The gap between desired results and actual results are often due to a root cause. When you fix the root cause, your actual results should become your desired results.

Let's give an example:

Gap Analysis of Your Current State of Health

• Desired Result - To be healthy
• Actual Result - You're sick

Root Cause - Why are you sick?

• I don't feel good - Why?
• Because I have a sore throat and a stuffy nose - Why?
• Because my immune system is down - Why?
• Because I have a virus - Why?

...Can't go any further? Bingo. Your root cause is the virus. Fix the virus, and you will no longer be sick. Not feeling good, a sore throat and a stuffy nose, and a low immune system would all be symptoms (effects) of the virus (cause).

Get rid of the virus, become healthy - you have now made your actual result your desired result. Great success!

Proof of concept is also known as proof of principle. POC is a prototype that is designed to determine feasibility, but does not represent deliverables.

Here at GC the project manager's best practice is to start a POC during planning when  we determine that it is necessary to integrate with a third-party API.  The reason?  So that we fully understand what challenges we may face and can plan accordingly.

Hunters are out looking for new sales (think Jason) and are good at convincing people to be our customers.  Whale Hunters are sales people that look for BIG deals.

Farmers are those that take existing customers and turn them into loyal customers and continue to buy services from them.

Thom Hartmann proposed the Farm/Hunter metaphor to explain the origins of ADHD.

1. The buying experience should be your top priority

In most B2B markets, multiple companies sell similar products or services at once. To outperform the competition, your company needs to differentiate itself from the others. But how? A better buying experience will give you a huge advantage over your competition.

2. “Challenger” reps are the best at selling

According to the authors, sales reps can be categorized into 1 of 5 rep profiles: the hard worker, the challenger, the relationship builder, the lone wolf, and the problem solver. Sales reps who are “challengers,” meaning they push and debate with potential buyers, consistently outperform their peers in a complex sales environment.

3. Innovation is a sales manager’s biggest asset

The CEB found that these 4 attributes account for sales manager effectiveness, in order:

Sales innovation – Create new ways to solve deal-level problems and invent new ways to position offers based on customers’ unique needs and priorities. Deeply understand what’s preventing a deal from closing, figure out why and where there is a holdup, and innovate ways to move it forward.

Coaching – Guide reps to adapt their message to each opportunity and show reps how and when to control the sale. Drive high quality rep performance.

Selling – Tailor offers to each unique buyer. Help your reps close the largest, most complex deals.

Resource allocation – Emphasize adherence to the sales process and fix issues as needed.

An open-ended question is a question that encourages a full, meaningful answer rather than just a "yes" or "no".

"Churn" is Customer Attrition.

Churn rate is a term that is used in many contexts, but is most widely applied in business with respect to a contractual customer base. It is the rate at which customers leave in a given time period.  At GoldenComm, with a goal of 100% client retention, zero client's lost would be a churn rate of 0% in a given month.

Lifetime Value is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.  Let's determine which type of customer has the highest LTV and create a marketing strategy around bringing more of those customers in.

A "pipeline" is a visualization of where prospective projects/customers are in the sales process. For GoldenComm, our process looks a little like:

• Lead - we might get a call from our AdWords campaign or an interested party from one of Jason's seminars. That's it, they're a lead.
• Prospect - if they continue down the pipeline to signing an MSA, then we'd consider this lead now a prospect.
• Opportunity - once an SOW is written up and sent to the client, we think they've now arrived at the opportunity stage of our pipeline.
  Won/Lost - and the end of our pipeline is when we win or lose the SOW.

Closing a deal as it relates to the bottom of the sales funnel. When you get that signature on your sales opportunity, you have closed the business.

A limited amount of things. A number to meet. In sales, this pertains to the sales target assigned to either a salesperson, dealer, distributor, region, or territory as a required minimum for a specified period (month, quarter or year). These can either be in dollar amount or number of goods or services sold.

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider (either internal or external) and the end user that defines the level of service expected from the service provider. SLAs are output-based in that their purpose is specifically to define what the customer will receive.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a disinformation strategy used in sales, marketing, public relations, talk radio, politics, religious organizations, and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and manifestation of the appeal to fear.

Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay. And the same thing very well could have a different value to different people.

A cold call is an unsolicited call in attempt to sell goods or services. Ofter contrasted with "warm call" where contact with the potential buyer has already been made or they've inquired with the company for more information. 

A loss leader is doing or selling something at a loss. This is usually done to attract new customers (but can also be done to do things like move inventory). Companies might sell a tool or machine (like a printer) for a low (or even free) -- hoping to gain a new customer on refills, bits, blades, cartridges, etc. for the previously sold item.   

This can be a slippery slope however for a service company -- since margins naturally erode over time. 

The gross profit on a sale or product. 

Check out this nifty video for a more detailed explanation.

The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer's overall satisfaction with a company's product or service and thecustomer's loyalty to the brand.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
For Example - During 2016, Apple has a Net Promoter Score of 72, Amazon has a Net Promoter Score of 69 & Netflix has a Net Promoter Score of 68. The biggest benefit of high NPS for these brands is customer retention.
 
While CSAT measures a users' satisfaction with a product or service, NPS measures customer loyalty.
 

A pain point is a problem, real or perceived. At the root, a pain point is something that a customer is aware of (if you’re lucky) and which bothers them. It’s a problem waiting for a solution - “I can’t do X” or “X is stopping me from doing Y”.
 
Few Steps for Identifying Customer Pain Points

• Ask your ideal client to speak about their organization and really listen & hear
• Find out what type of pain customer is experiencing and why?
• Ask what motivates them?
• Let your client know that you had experienced a similar kind of situation
• What is the value in having their business pain removed?
• Start with the pain point that is the most disruptive & devastating

 
Examples: “It takes too long to order a pizza” is a simple problem (pain point) everyone has and “I can’t accurately predict machinery failures in airplane engines “ is a complex problem (pain point) only a few people have
 

Upselling is a sales technique where a seller influences the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale.

When done correctly, upselling addresses an additional need and is not forced. It presents the buyer with an option to receive more value, which usually comes with a bump in price tag.

Is a favored saying of oilman and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. “One of Jones’ pet phrases is: ‘Never let your money get mad.’

Translated, it means all decisions should be made in a dispassionate, businesslike manner” was cited in print in 1997. The expression was dubbed “an old oil-field axiom” that Jerry Jones lives by in a 1993 newspaper story.

“Don’t ever let your money get mad” appears to have first been cited in print in the 1950s.

Think of a sound bite as a little information nugget - a short executive summary of a selling point of a product, service, or company. They help people quickly understand concepts and tend to be memorable. Some people call these their "elevator pitch".

As an example, the sound bite for GoldenComm happens to be our mission statement - "We make websites work harder."

An effort in identifying a sales opportunity and facilitating the communication between a customer with the right person to complete a sales transaction.

In the sales process, the gatekeeper is typically a receptionist, an executive assistant, or a designated person who is trained and responsible for keeping a prospect from being bothered by irrelevant callers.

Just as we train salespeople to get past the gatekeeper, gatekeepers are trained to deflect calls that are unimportant. The gatekeeper screens calls and visitors, typically deflecting the ones he/she believes are not a good use of time.

Gatekeepers have two main concerns:
1. Keeping the wrong person away from "the boss"
2. Allowing the right person to see "the boss"

Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People

Click-through-rate is the rate at which your ad (SEM) is clicked on to the number of times it is displayed. A higher CTR typically means that the keywords your "bidding" on are relevant to the ad text (aka: As a user, the ads I see displayed mean something to me based on what I am typing into Google or the search bar).

Sales funnel refers to the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products or services. Awareness - prospects become aware of the existence of a solution. Interest - prospects demonstrate interest in a product by conducting product research. Evaluation - prospects or prospect companies examine competitors’ solutions as they inch toward a final buying decision. Decision - a final decision is reached and negotiation begins. Purchase - goods or services are purchased.

CRSF is short for Cross-site request forgery, also known as one-click attack or session riding. It's a type of malicious exploit of a website where unauthorized commands are transmitted from a user that the web application trusts. Satefty CSRF tips for users and developers: * Logoff immediately after using a web application * Do not allow your browser to save username/passwords, and do not allow sites to "remember" your login * Do not use the same browser to access sensitive applications * Check standard headers to very the request is same origin * Check CSRF token

The 80-20 rule, formally known as the Pareto Principle, is the concept that 80% of the effects are generated by 20% of the causes. When we apply this to business specifically, we can generate statements like: - 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers - 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your products or services When we see that 80% of a company's revenue comes from 20% of their products or services, what might GoldenComm suggest looking into? That's right - a hedgehog microsite. We know that 1 out of 3 characteristics is that your hedgehog makes you money (drives your economic engine), and if 20% of your products or services are generating 80% of your revenue - your hedgehog very well may be hiding in that 20%. Do you have any clients that you can point out their 80-20? Let us know in the WOTD chatter.

Typically, a distributor sells to Value Added Reseller (VAR), who in turn sells to the customer. Sysco (distrubtor) sells to the restaurant (VAR) where patrons go. We service clients that are distributors and VARs. Particularly with the evolution of ecommerce, there's more channel conflict happening. Manufacturers can now sell direct to customers online. As can distributors.

Getty Images, Inc. is an American stock photo agency, with headquarters in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage. It targets three markets—creative professionals (advertising and graphic design), the media (print and online publishing) and corporate (in-house design, marketing and communication departments). The main difference between Getty and Shutterstock is the price. Getty is a mid to high end stock image company while Shutterstock is a micro stock. The other difference is that Getty offers both a rights managed and royalty free licenses. Shutterstock only offers royalty free.

A stored procedure is a prepared SQL code that you can save, so the code can be reused over and over again.

So if you have an SQL query that you write over and over again, save it as a stored procedure, and then just call it to execute it.

You can also pass parameters to a stored procedure, so that the stored procedure can act based on the parameter value(s) that is passed.

JavaScript Object Notation - a lightweight format for storing and transporting data in a "self-describing" key-value pair format.

Use Case: Ajax calls, returning data from an API. This is a newer way of displaying data, instead of using XML.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They are a set of accessibility guidelines to help keep websites usable for people that are hearing or visually impaired and viewing the website with a screen reader or some other device.

One thing to note, this topic is a big gray area, and currently many lawyers are looking for quick settlement money by taking legal action against companies that are not compliant. Typically as long as effort is made to keep sites accessible then there shouldn't be any issue.

Disavowal is a tool that allows publishers to tell Google they don't want certain links from external sites to be considered as part of Google's system of counting links to rank websites. If there are spammy links coming into one of our sites, from a non trusted third party site, then we would want to disavow. When disavowing you should be certain that the update should be made, because it is hard to undo. Disavowing can be done through Google Search Console

Schema is an advanced SEO technique. It is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs (search engine results pages). Typically schema mark up should be added with JSON-LD.

Check out https://schema.org/ to see different schema mark up that can be utilized!

A Javascript Framework in it's most basic form is a collection of JavaScript code libraries that provide the developer with pre-written code and or structure to code with (emphisis on structure).

An analogy: when building a house you could create all of your own building materials (bricks, wood ect) but it probably makes more sense to use premade materials since creating materials can be very time consuming, and then you can build your house to whatever specifications you want using those premade materials.

Some examples of JS Frameworks are: Vue, React, Angular

An abstract concept of an environment where the JavaScript code is evaluated and executed. Code inside a function executes in the function's execution context. Global code executes in the global execution context. See https://blog.bitsrc.io/understanding-asynchronous-javascript-the-event-loop-74cd408419ff

JavaScript is a single-threaded programming language meaning only one thing can happen at a time. Asynchronous programming methods (callbacks, promises, async/await) allow the script to perform functions without blocking the main thread. See https://blog.bitsrc.io/understanding-asynchronous-javascript-the-event-loop-74cd408419ff

Tree Shaking is a technique implemented by Webpack, and other bundlers, to only pull in the required functions, methods, variables, that are used in your code instead of pulling in the entire library of code.

Disclaimer: This one is a little more technical.

In Javascript, code is typically read and executed left to right up to down. Because of this variables and functions need to be declared before you can use them, one cannot use a variable/function that does not exist yet.

Hoisting is a feature that allows you to make forward referencing functions and variables. A variable or function can be hoisted so that it can be used before it is written in the code, in essence a hoisted variable/function is placed at the top of the scope in the code so it can be used later in that scope even though it is written not at the top.

Formerly known as Accelerated Mobile Pages. created by Google. The AMP method is now used for ads, stories, desktop, and emails. AMP has a very strict set of requirements on scripts and styles that can be used to speed up the loading time of your page. Typically a whole site would not be built on AMP, only specific pages due to the limitations of the resources that can be loaded.

Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium", is a pricing strategy by which a product or service is provided free of charge, but money is charged for additional features, services, or virtual or physical goods.

Return On Advertising Spend, (ROAS), is a marketing metric that measures the efficacy of a digital advertising campaign. ROAS helps online businesses evaluate which methods are working and how they can improve future advertising efforts.

A hard drive that PhotoShop ends up using to process changes - the more disc space on the hard drive the better performance you get in PhotoShop

Put simply this is only downloading images when they're needed. This is a good method that we use to optimize page speed and load time. This functionality is built into our Wordpress baseline. Web browsers are getting smarter with how they handle images. Chrome has added a new attribute: loading=lazy. Loads an image, content, or resource when it's in the viewport. The end user would not notice this happening unless the developer adds loading animations.

Discussion: What is an example of a good time to use lazy loading?

Emulation of a computer system. At GoldenComm we use Browserstack for testing websites across various platforms and operating systems. Other examples of when to use virtual machiines is for running mobile aps, or if you are using a PC and you need to emulate iOS.

Virtual machines emulate hardware operating systems and software. Where as Docker only emulates software. The benfit of this is that Docker is faster and lightweight compared to virtual machines.

A Work Breakdown Structure is a higher level project artifact that supports the creation of schedules and budgets. The WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables.

What does TCP/IP mean?
 
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet. TCP/IP can also be used as a communications protocol in a private network (an intranet or an extranet).
 
Why is it important?
 
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) are the two most important lower-level protocols enabling Internet connectivity.
 
As with any form of communication, two things are needed: a message to transmit and the means to reliably transmit the message. IP is responsible for moving packets of data from one connection point to the next, while TCP verifies the integrity of data traveling between two endpoints.
 

A Content Delivery Network is a system of distributed servers that deliver pages and other web content to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server. The goal of a CDN is to increase performance, reduce latency, accelerate site load times, reduce bandwidth consumption, secure applications, and even block data scrappers and other forms of spammers hitting your server.

How does it work?
Servers nearest to the website visitor respond to the request. The CDN copies the pages of a website to a network of servers that are dispersed at geographically different locations, caching the contents of the page. When a user requests a webpage that is part of a content delivery network, the CDN will redirect the request from the originating site's server to a server in the CDN that is closest to the user, and deliver the cached content. CDNs will also communicate with the originating server to deliver any content that has not been previously cached.

For GoldenComm, a website with heavy imagery being delivered to a global audience (think big eCommerce clients, educational/lead-gen sites with images/video being downloaded, etc.), would be a good candidate for a CDN.

Akamai is one of the oldest and largest CDNs
 

An ALT tag is what shows in place of an asset (image) when it's not rendered by the browser or can't be seen by the user (and is instead read by a screen reader). They're important for SEO -- since combined with the ALT description, that tells the search engine what the image is (i.e. people in line).

Royalty free generally means that you pay a one-time fee in exchange for the right to use copyright material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy, or volume sold -- or some time period of use or sales.

Copyright free is work that is not protected by copyright.  While you might have to pay a fee to obtain a copy of the work, your use will not be restricted unless you’ve agreed that it will be in an enforceable contract.

Magento Community edition is a free, open-source eCommerce platform that anyone can download and use to build an online store. It is perfect for small businesses that want to experiment and learn how to build an eCommerce site.
 
Magento Enterprise edition is the premium paid version of Magento. It is designed for those that believe the Community edition is not enough. It is mostly used by bigger online stores that need advanced features and more customizable options.
 
Security – Magento CE doesn’t have credit card tokenization or highly secured payment bridges. The biggest problem with the free version is that it is “Not PCI compliant”. Magento EE deals with that by providing you with more powerful security features (PA-DSS).
 

RealSimple is a women's interest media brand. While Inc, FastCompany, Entrepreneur, and Wired are business media brands.

An interaction design technique often used in human–computer interaction to help maintain the focus of a user's attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. This improves usability by presenting only the minimum data required for the task at hand.

Black hat marketing is the use of unethical (and sometimes, but not always, illegal) strategies to promote online business. In contrast to ethical “white hat” strategies, black hat strategies use deception and manipulation to accomplish their objectives.

Communications Decency Act Section 230 - Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider". In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.

Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something. When you use websites and apps, you don’t read every word on every page - you skim read and make assumptions. If a company wants to trick you into doing something, they can take advantage of this by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another.

The aesthetic-usability effect refers to users' tendency to perceive attractive products as more usable. People tend to believe that things that look better will work better — even if they aren't actually more effective or efficient.

Specific. Measurable. Attainable. Relevant. Time Bound.

The Block, Element, Modifier methodology (commonly referred to as BEM) is a popular naming convention for classes in HTML and CSS. Developed by the team at Yandex, its goal is to help developers better understand the relationship between the HTML and CSS in a given project.

Atomic classes are simple, single-purpose units of styling. Much like inline styles, Atomic styles only apply a single style declaration. Unlike inline styles, Atomic styles have a lower specificity, making them easier to override, and can be modified through the use of pseudo-classes, media queries, and more.

The equilibrium price is the market price where the quantity of goods supplied is equal to the quantity of goods demanded. This is the point at which the demand and supply curves in the market intersect. To determine the equilibrium price, you have to figure out at what price the demand and supply curves intersect. Generally, an over-supply of goods or services causes prices to go down, which results in higher demand.

Despite most photos eventually appearing as JPEGs, shooting in the format means you lose most of the photos digital information. RAW contains the uncompressed, largely unedited image data that comes directly from your camera’s sensors. By shooting in RAW you don’t limit your options when it comes to image editing.

Similar to the Compiling process that takes source code (like a C# class) and turns it into an unrecognizable output (executable byte code), the Transpiling process takes source code and turns it into a similar, usually readable, output.

At GoldenComm our Front End team uses tools like Gulp and WebPack to transpile our SCSS files into a CSS file. We write our styles in SCSS so that we can leverage variables, loops, and more. However, browsers can't read or interpret the SCSS language. So that code gets transpiled into a browser-readable format (CSS).

Similarly, we use frameworks and custom code that are written in ES6 JavaScript and TypeScript. Some older browsers don't support all ES6 JavaScript syntax and no browsers can interpret TypeScript. So our team uses the transpiling process to transform those advanced code bases into a JavaScript file that can be executed by all modern browsers.

TypeScript is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript which adds optional static typing to the language. It is developed and maintained by Microsoft and it's completely open-source. Javascript is a dynamically typed language, so the main benefit of Typescript is that it offers the possibility to add static types to your Javascript code and make it easier to maintain large projects...

Z-Wave is a communication protocol designed for home automation and remote control applications. Z-Wave is a wireless protocol harnessing low-energy radio waves to help smart devices or appliances communicate successfully with one another. Zensys from Denmark developed Z-Wave in 2001. The stated goal was to create a cost-effective Zigbee alternative enabling devices from different brands to communicate in harmony.

Click-through Rate = how many times your ad is displayed divided by the number of times how many people click on your ad. This is a performance indicator. If you have a very low CTR it might mean you need to re-evaluate your ad cpopy, landing page, keywords or add negative keywords. For Google Ad grant accounts there is a required 5% minimum CTR

The quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used. For example, a handle on a door affords pulling it open, while a metal plate or a push bar on the door affords pushing it open. In UX, this can be applied by creating affordances so the user knows how to - or how not to - interact with the interface. https://uxdesign.cc/what-is-an-affordance-6b60f2de79f2

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) is a set of attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications (especially those developed with JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/semantics-aria

The Yelp Effect refers to a customer's inclination to leave a bad review relating to a bad experience more often than leaving a good review relating to an exceptional experience. It also refers to the over/under inflation of an establishment's true worth by such reviews. It can also change how a company or service provider operates. For example, Doctors feel pressured by what patients may say about them afterward - so the fear of bad patient-satisfaction scores, or negative reviews on online sites, is creating a “Yelp effect” that drives doctors to provide care that patients don’t actually need.

The current standard in font formats. It contains both the screen and printer versions in a single file, and its compatible for both Windows and Mac. The file extension is .otf.

Acronym for Integrated Development Environment and it’s commonly used as a term to describe programming software like Visual Studio and PHP storm. The software provides tools for programming, compiling and outputting the project code.

A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. These applications are fast, as most resources (HTML+CSS+Scripts) are only loaded once throughout the lifespan of the application. Only data is transmitted back and forth.

Knolling is the act of arranging different objects so that they are at 90-degree angles from each other, then photographing them from above. This technique creates a very symmetrical look that feels pleasing to the eye. Images that feature knolling tend to be set against a contrasting solid background. – Example 1 – Example 2

Any element of your website that is confusing, distracting, or causes stress for visitors, causing them to leave your page. Examples of friction-causing elements include dissonant colors, too much text, distracting website navigation menus, or landing page forms with too many fields.

Cross-site scripting is a type of web application security vulnerability typically found in web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users.

The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases.

Skeuomorphism is when a digital element is designed to look like a replica of the physical work. For example, think iPhone’s calculator or Apple’s newsstand where the bookshelf and magazines look and feel like they do in real life. – Example 1 – Example 2

In computer programming, string interpolation (or variable interpolation, variable substitution, or variable expansion) is the process of evaluating a string literal containing one or more placeholders, yielding a result in which the placeholders are replaced with their corresponding values.

String concatenation - "hello " + myVariable + "!" String interpolation - `hello ${myVariable}!`

Maximize conversions automatically sets bids to help get the most conversions for your campaign while spending your budget. It uses advanced machine learning to automatically optimize bids and offers auction-time bidding capabilities that tailor bids for each and every auction.

A tendency to favor filling blank spaces with objects and elements over leaving spaces blank or empty. Research into horror vacui suggests a general inverse relationship between horror vacui and value perception - as horror vacui increases, perceived value decreases. For example, a storefront window with tons of items displayed is perceived as a low cost/value store, while a store with very few products displayed will be perceived as a high cost/value store.

The top image or main banner image on a website.

A bidding method that lets you set your own maximum cost-per-click (CPC) for your ads. This differs from automated bid strategies, which set bid amounts for you. Manual CPC bidding gives you control to set the maximum amount that you could pay for each click on your ads.

You start by setting a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid for your entire ad group (called your default bid), but you can also set separate bids for individual keywords or placements. For example, if you've found that certain keywords are more profitable, you can use manual bidding to allocate more of your advertising budget to those keywords. If you're not sure which keywords or placements are most profitable, or if you don't have time to devote to managing manual bids, consider a Maximize Clicks bid strategy instead.

Maximize Clicks is an automated bid strategy that automatically sets your bids to help get as many clicks as possible within your budget.

Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions. You can see your Quality Score by adding the Quality Score column to a report. The Quality Score is reported on a 1-10 scale and includes expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you'll see higher Quality Scores.

The tracking ID is a string like UA-000000-2. It must be included in your tracking code to tell Analytics which account and property to send data to.

The tracking ID is automatically included in the JavaScript snippet for websites, but also needs to be included in other tracking technologies like the SDKs and the Measurement Protocol for Analytics to work.

Blackhat SEO strategy where you spam a website with unnatural links for short term ranking

Cost Per Aquisition - a metric you should measure whenever sending traffic to a site. Average cost per action (CPA) is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the total number of conversions. For example, if your ad receives 2 conversions, one costing $2.00 and one costing $4.00, your average CPA for those conversions is $3.00.

Sitelink extensions are additional links that can be added to Google ads that link to specific pages of the website. For example, a specific product or service. Sitelink extensions are good because they make your ad bigger and more prominent, and also give the user more options which can help increase CTR.

PLA stands for product listing ads, these are also sometimes referred to as shopping ads. The content for these ads comes from your data feed, which can be created in an XML format. These ads can appear in various Google properties.

Responsive search ads let you create an ad that will adapt to show more relevant messages to the audience. You enter multiple headlines and descriptions, then Google will test different variations based on the search term. By doing this Google will learn which combinations perform best.

When you see Product A compared to Product B, you'll assume they have the same value

Enhanced CPC is a bidding strategy that combindes manual bidding with smart bidding technology. It is a variation of Manual CPC (the default bidding strategy). It will automatically adjust your manual bids for clicks that seem more likely to lead to a sale or conversion. Enhanced CPC will also try to keep your average CPC below the max CPC you set.

Building a start-up company with very little money, often relying on personal savings and pushing for the lowest possible operating costs, while implementing cost-saving systems such as fast inventory turnaround.

Tofu refers to the little squares that are displayed when a typeface is not loaded on to a computer or when a font doesn’t have a specific glyph.

Spyfu is a an SEO and PPC tool that can be used during competitor research. Information such as: what keywords a competitor bought in Google Ads, how they ranked and organic rank for search terms, are just a couple examples of data that Spyfu can help you attain.

Hot Module Replacement - HMR exchanges, adds, or removes modules while an application is running without a full reload. This can significantly speed up development by retaining application state (which would be lost during a full reload), save time by only updating what's changed, and instantly updating the browser when modifications are made to CSS/JS in the source code.

CPM stands for Cost per thousand. This is a way of bidding in Google Ads where you pay per one thousand impressions weather viewable or not. Viewable CPM (vCPM) bidding ensures that you only pay when your ads can be seen. Existing CPM bids will be converted to vCPM automatically, but it's best to update your bids since viewable impressions are potentially more valuable.

Request For Comments - An RFC is a formal document that describes the specifications for a particular technology.

Release Candidate - A beta version with potential to be a stable product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge.

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the: 1) MAJOR version when you make a incompatible API changes, 2) MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards compatible manner, and 3) PATCH version when you make backwards compatible bug fixes. https://semver.org/

A superfamily is a set of typefaces—sans and serif designs for example, or regular, slab, and rounded variations—that are crafted to work together in close harmony. In contrast to pairing typefaces from different font families, superfamilies are often used when more visual cohesion is needed. UX designers might deploy a superfamily to delineate UI text (menus, tooltips) from editorial content (headlines, body copy), and to create a consistent tone with clear hierarchy, across an app or website.

Also referred to as overlines, these are those short phrases only a few words usually, that can appear above your titles. Ideally the only time you want to use all caps in titles

POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) is a way of approaching web accessibility by breaking it down into four main aspects: information should be Perceivable, interfaces should be Operable, content should be Understandable, and the meaning of the content should be Robust to changes in the way it is accessed.

Emphasizing the goal to produce a design that aligns to the wants and needs of the user. The User-centered design (UCD) process outlines the phases throughout a design and development life-cycle all while focusing on gaining a deep understanding of who will be using the product.

Somatic markers (brain shortcuts) are feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust. According to the hypothesis, somatic markers strongly influence subsequent decision-making. Example: Why do you buy Coca Cola when Santa is on the can? It reminds me you of Christmas and comfort. It’s why you might be inclined to buy Charmin toilet paper - what’s softer than a big cuddly bear?

https://mindmeld.substack.com/p/no-2-somatic-markers-tiktok-and-beef

Somatic markers (brain shortcuts) are feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust. According to the hypothesis, somatic markers strongly influence subsequent decision-making. Example: Why do you buy Coca Cola when Santa is on the can? It reminds me you of Christmas and comfort. It’s why you might be inclined to buy Charmin toilet paper - what’s softer than a big cuddly bear?

https://mindmeld.substack.com/p/no-2-somatic-markers-tiktok-and-beef

“a11y” stands for “accessibility.” It is a numeronym, with 11 representing the count of letters between the letter a and the letter y. The word accessibility has different meanings in different contexts. On the internet, the use of the term a11y helps to identify content related specifically to digital accessibility. For example, it is often used as a Twitter hashtag by digital accessibility practitioners.

Link juice is the term used in the SEO world to refer to the value or equity passed from one page or site to another. This value is passed through hyperlinks. Search engines see links as votes by other websites that your page is valuable and worth promoting.

Step 1: Find link-worthy content

Step 2: Make something even better

Step 3: Reach out to the right people

Promotional content that appears when a user first goes to a website and is blocked from the main content. A pop up is an example

Most wapuus are little creatures that are slightly modified to make it easier for them to hold or interact with elements. They are cartoon characters, more so than a logo or icon, so they need to be fluid. There are no rules for how to make your wapuu design, but there are guidelines for what constitutes a wapuu on the Wapu.us Field Guide & Trading Post. There are no limitations on colors, species, props, or size. In theory, a wapuu can be 3 inches or 10,000 pounds! It’s really the eyes, nose, and mouth that are distinctive areas in wapuus. https://wapu.us/wapuu-history-origin/

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary field of study focusing on the design of computer technology and, in particular, the interaction between humans (the users) and computers. While initially concerned with computers, HCI has since expanded to cover almost all forms of information technology design. As a field of research, human-computer interaction is situated at the intersection of computer science, behavioural sciences, design, media studies, and several other fields of study.

A sandbox is a development enviroment where devs can "play" with tools, platforms and data. Sandboxes are more than just an early development testing tool. They serve as versatile tools that any company can benefit from when deployed in all stages of development, project-level testing, quality assurance, and ongoing operations and support.

Neumorphism combines developments of flat design and skeuomorphism. Neumorphism, or soft UI, is a visual style that combines background colors, shapes, gradients, highlights, and shadows to ensure graphic intense buttons and switches. All that allows achieving a soft, extruded plastic look, and almost 3D styling.

Website accessibility overlays and plugins aren’t the answer to accessibility and compliance, despite being touted as an easy, automated solution for web designers and developers and their clients. They present a plethora of problems. An accessibility overlay is installed by simply adding one or a few lines of code—javascript—to the site. It modifies the site usually only at the browser level, not touching the site’s code.

Page Authority (PA) is a score that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that gives a measure of how successful a site is when it comes to search engine results. It gives an overview of likely search engine performance with a score ranked between 1 and 100, with the higher end of the scale representing a better outcome.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is increasing the percentage of users who conversions on a website. Conversions can include purchasing a product, clicking 'add to cart', signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link. - Tools to evaluate: Google Optimize (AB testing), GA, VWO, Call Tracking

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, or ATAG, are a set of criteria that work in addition to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The main difference is that WCAG deals with accessing content, while ATAG deals with creating content. Both documents are created and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium.

ATAG consists of two parts: Part A focuses on making tools accessible to authors with disabilities, and Part B focuses on supporting authors to create accessible content.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is increasing the percentage of users who conversions on a website. Conversions can include purchasing a product, clicking 'add to cart', signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link. - Tools to evaluate: Google Optimize (AB testing), GA, VWO, Call Tracking

A Boolean variable has only two possible values: true or false. ... In this example, when the boolean value "x" is true, vertical black lines are drawn and when the boolean value "x" is false, horizontal gray lines are drawn.

Act of guilting the user into opting into something. The option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance - most commonly to get a user to sign up for a mailing list and is often found in exit intent modals and other popups.

No team, not "variable"

A value-added reseller (VAR) is a company that adds features or services to an existing product, then resells it (usually to end-users) as an integrated product or complete "turn-key" solution. ... By doing this, the company has added value above the cost of the individual computer components.

A continuity program is a company's sales offer where a buyer/consumer is agreeing to receive merchandise or services automatically at regular intervals (often monthly), without advance notice, until they cancel.

The theory that users will abandon a website if they are unable to complete their task within 3 mouse clicks.

This is a design rule that helps ensure color balance in a design. The rule says that 60% of a design should be the primary color. 30% is the secondary color and 10% is the accent color.

Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

Google has provided a number of tools over the years to measure and report on performance. Some developers are experts at using these tools, while others have found the abundance of both tools and metrics challenging to keep up with.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

Popular work week in China tech industry term - 9am to 9pm 6 days a week.

A bundling tool similar to Webpack for bundling/compiling front end code.

An acronym that describes a pattern used to make web pages load faster and interact faster. It works by re-loading the most important resources first and caches everything else remaining.

• Preload the late-discovered resources.
• Render the initial route as soon as possible.
• Pre-cache remaining assets.
• Lazy load other routes and non-critical assets.

Source: https://web.dev/articles/apply-instant-loading-with-prpl

GraphQL is a query language (that's what the QL stands for) used for APIs. It's used to load data from a server to a client. It can handle many resources in one request which makes it fast to retrieve data. Other methods of retrieving data from an API uses the REST model which is slower and can't handle multiple requests.

Eyebrow text is a descriptive keyword or phrase placed above the main headline and blurb. It appears in a smaller font and sums up the content in just a few words. When users scan the headline, they’ll also scan the eyebrow. As a result, they’ll better understand the context, which increases the chance of them reading the blurb and clicking through.

Proximity is simply the process of ensuring related design elements are placed together, signalling a relationship between one another, which in turn helps speed up the user’s cognition when scanning through your Site or App.

The Gestalt principle refers to a set of psychological laws that explain how our brains naturally perceive and organize visual information by grouping similar elements, recognizing patterns, and simplifying complex images, essentially stating that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" - meaning we tend to perceive things as unified wholes rather than individual components; key principles include proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and figure-ground separation.

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on drawing high-fit customers in as opposed to blasting your message to anyone and everyone.

Through tactics like blogging, social media and SEO, inbound marketing attracts customers to your company using helpful, relevant content.

Churn rate is a measurement used to calculate customer retention and is significant for recurring revenue companies. It helps companies identify how many customers they lose in a given time period.

To calculate churn rate, you divide the number of customers lost during a time period by the number of customers you had at the beginning of the time period.

A facade is a static element which looks similar to the actual embedded third-party, but is not functional and therefore much less taxing on the page load. An example would be an image of a Google map location.

Source: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/third-party-facades

The Streisand effect is a social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information, often via the Internet. The Streisand effect is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, they are significantly more motivated to access and spread that information.

A collection of images that are added together so you can manipulate with CSS. An image sprite is a collection of images put into a single image. A web page with many images can take a long time to load and generates multiple server requests. Using image sprites will reduce the number of server requests and save bandwidth.

A page you can only access through the url (example: our media pages). Orphan pages are website pages that are not linked to from any other page or section of your site. This means a user cannot access the page without knowing the direct URL. Additionally, these pages can't be followed from another page by search engine crawlers, which means they are rarely indexed by search engines.

In computing, language primitives are the simplest elements available in a programming language. A primitive is the smallest 'unit of processing' available to a programmer of a given machine, or can be an atomic element of an expression in a language. In computer science, a primitive is a fundamental data type that cannot be broken down into a more simple data type.

Net promoter score (NPS) is a widely used market research metric that typically takes the form of a single survey question asking respondents to rate the likelihood that they would recommend a company, product, or a service to a friend or colleague.

A data lake is a centralized repository designed to store, process, and secure large amounts of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. It can store data in its native format and process any variety of it, ignoring size limits.