What is e-commerce?
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction’s lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.
A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web.
Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as Business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market).
Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.
Web hosting, How to obtain it?
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation.
Web hosting is often provided as part of a general Internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these services.
A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The webhosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. A customer may also choose Windows for its hosting platform. The customer still can choose from PHP, Perl, and Python but may also use ASP .Net or Classic ASP.
Web hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System, so the end-user doesn’t have to worry about the more technical aspects. These Web Content Management systems are great for the average user, but for those who want more control over their website design, this feature can sometimes be a nuisance rather than a feature.
Macintosh has supported Apache since the “Tiger” system was introduced, and the Darwin (operating system) provides a Unix-like interface via Terminal.app. Such systems have complete Web hosting capabilities, including support for PHP, and Perl and Shell scripts. Personal Web Sharing can be activated in the Sharing panel of System Preferences…[1].
One may also search the Internet to find active webhosting message boards and forums that may provide feedback on what type of webhosting company may suit his/her needs.
What is a Content Management System, or CMS?
At the risk of stating the obvious, it could be said that a content management system is quite simply - a system that manages content.
However, it is precisely the obviousness of what a CMS is and does, that has created a degree of confusion amongst ‘would be’ purchases of such a system. Wrapped up in a seemingly harmless statement is enough ambiguity to enable all kinds of products to masquerade as content management solutions.
To fully understand what it is a CMS does, we have to first define a) what it is we are referring to when we talk about content b) what it is we understand under its management and c) what do we mean by a system. At the risk of sounding ‘obvious’, only when you know what content it is you want to manage can you ‘filter’ (and I mean filter) through the myriad of options that are available - and not be ‘bamboozled’ by sales speak into taking the wrong product.
What is Content?
Content is in essence, any type or ‘unit’ of digital information. It can be text, images, graphics, video, sound, documents, records etc - or in other words - anything that is likely to be managed in an electronic format.
What is Content Management?
Content Management is effectively the management of the content described above, by combining rules, process and/or workflows in such a way that its electronic storage is deemed to be ‘managed’ rather than ‘un-managed’.
What is the CM System?
The system itself is definable as a tool or combination or tools that facilitate the efficient and effective production of the desired ‘output’ using the managed content.
To combine all three, we can say;
“A CMS is a tool that enables a variety of (centralised) technical and (de-centralised) non technical staff to create, edit, manage and finally publish (in a number of formats) a variety of content (such as text, graphics, video, documents etc), whilst being constrained by a centralised set of rules, process and workflows that ensure coherent, validated electronic content.”
Why are there so many types of Content Management System?
If every piece of information that is stored digitally within an organisation can be described as content - then a piece of software such as e.g an ‘asset management tool’ can be said to be a content management system in the same way that a ‘document management system’ that manages documents can be said to be a content management system or a web content management system that manages web pages can also be a CMS. Alas every vendor sees the management of content from their product perspective. Combine this with the reality that at the so-called ‘Enterprise Content Management’ level, solutions have not just one form of content management but many - so they may be looking after content in the form of digital assets, documents, web content management, records and much much more.
If you then add into this equation those vendors that have found ways of stretching the type of digital information that their product manages to include other content types - however badly they a ctually do it (muddying the water even further) - then you would be forgiven if you found yourself in a state of ‘content management confusion’.
Ref: http://www.contentmanager.eu.com
Why should I Blog?
Blogging has a lot of function, it can cover a lot of subjects. Its entirely depends on you how you define your audience. It can serve as your online diary, connect to your family and friends, express your thoughts and opinions, to market or promote something.
Content of your blog can be in any types, of course text, images, videos. For beginners make your blog simple, there are a lot of blogging tools out there like wordpress. Fast and easy configuration if you follow instructions, once already set up all you have to do is just to post. Just have fun with it, for a meantime just enjoy the process of writing.
Understanding how search engine works.
Here’s an insight how search engine works.
A search engine operates, in the following order
Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google’s handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned webpage. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.
When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document’s title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords.
The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of webpages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.
Reference: Wikipedia.org
