Web Design Dictionary
Affiliate - A marketing program which enables webmaster to place banner ads on the website and received a referal fee or commisson when customers click on the link to visit the merchants website.
AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript And XML is an approach to using a combination of technologies (such as Javascript, DOM, XML, XMLHttpRequest) to allow changes to a webpage to be made without reloading the whole page.
Anchor Text - The clickable text part of a hyperlink. It usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.
Apache - The most popular web server software in the world since 1996. As of October 2005 almost 70% of the worlds web servers run on Apache.
API - Application Programming Interface is a set of definitions of ways computer software can communicate with each other.
ASP - Active Server Pages is a Microsoft technology for generating dynamic webpages. Most ASP pages are written in VBScript but many other scripting languages can be used such as JScript.
Bandwidth - Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted in a given period of time. Web hosting companies often limit website bandwidth, for example a 10Gb/month limit which would mean you cannot transfer more than the set 10gb in 1 month.
Bot - See Spider
CGI - Common Gateway Interface is a web technology that enables clients to request data from a program executed on a web server. When a request is made to a cgi script the server will call the program to be executed and its output is sent to the user to be displayed in their web browser.
CMS - A Content Management System allows someone to easily add or edit the contents of a webpage often without them needing any technical knowledge.
Cookies - A small text file stored on a visitors computer usually used to identify that user to a particular website.
CSS - Cascading Style Sheets is a feature which gives web designers more control over the design of a webpage. It allows content and design to be kept seperate allowing small changes to the design to be made without having to make large changes to every page.
DBS - DataBase System of storing data in a structured format which can accept feeds from website forms and applications to store clients records securely.
DHTML - Dynamic HyperText Markup Language is a combination of technologies used to produce more interactive webpages. It makes use of DOM.
DOM - Document Object Model is the specification for how objects are represented in a web page. The DOM defines attributes that belong to an object and how they can be manipulated.
Domain - The address of an internet site. For example the domain of this site is white-hat-web-design.co.uk.
Flash - A technology developed by Macromedia which allows web pages to have moving animations and video.
FTP - File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for transfering files over the web. FTP is mostly used for downloading files and uploading sites to a web server.
GIF - Graphics Interchange Format is an image format which uses upto 256 colours. GIF is great for animations, buttons and diagrams that have a limited number of colours while JPEG is used for photographs.
Hosting - The files for a website have to be stored on a web server, this is refered to as hosting. Your host is the server on which the website is stored.
HTML - HyperText Markup Language is the language used to create webpages. HTML is used to structure information inside tags for exampe <h1>Heading</h1> denoted the text inside the h1 is a heading.
HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol is the protocol used to connect to a web server and transfer files across the inertnet.
IIS - Internet Information Services is a web server created by Microsoft which runs on Windows. Roughly 20% of the worlds web servers run on IIS, second only to Apache.
Java - A high level object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems. Small applications written in Java, called applets can be embeded into web pages. Note: Not to be confused with Javascript.
Javascript - A client-side scripting language developed by Netscape to help developers create interactive sites. Some of its features are similar to Java but they were developed independently.
JPG / JPEG - The most popular image compression format on the web. The name itself stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG is at its best on photographic images while line drawings and iconic graphics are best saved as GIFs.
Meta Tags - A HTML tag that provides information about the web page. Meta tags may contain information about what the page is about (keywords and description), who wrote the page, when they wrote it and much more. Many search engines use this information when indexing pages.
MySQL - MySQL is the most popular open source database in the world and is most commonly used for web applications. It has become so popular due to its speed, reliability and ease of use.
Page Rank - One of Google's methods to measure the importance of a web page according to its popularity and links to other websites.
Perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language is a programming language first developed for processing text but now often used in web development.
PHP - PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side scripting language allowing websites to contain dynamic content. Over 20 million domains use PHP making it one of the most popular scripting languages on the web.
PNG - A lossless image format originally designed to improve upon and replace the gif format. PNG is the 3rd most common image format on the web, beaten only by JPEG and GIF.
PPC - Pay Per Click is a marketing program where you can list a series of search phrases and determine your bid price for each phrase in competition with other web sites. The more you bid the higher your placement on the search engine results for that phrase in the list of sponsored listings either at the top or to the right or under the free listings.
Reciprocal Link - An agreement between two websites to provide links to each others sites. It can provide visitors with links to other sites of a similar topic. Search engines take the amount of incoming links into consideration when ranking your site.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimising a site to improve the chances of it being ranked higher by a search engine, therefore increasing the amount of visitors to your site.
SERP - A Search Engine Results Page is the page returned by a search engine containing the results of your search.
Spider - A program which fetches webpages to allow them to be indexed by search engines. They crawl through the inernet by following links on a webpage.
SSI - Server Side Includes is a simple server side scripting language, its primary purpose is simply include the content of other files within a webpage. For example creating a file for the website header and then including it with every page, if the header needs changing only that one header file would need editing and not all the pages on the site.
SSL - Secure Socket Layer is a protocol for transmitting private information across the internet by encrypting the data sent. URL's which use SSL usually start in https://
URL - Uniform Resource Locator is the complete address of a resource or files on the world wide web. It includes the protocol, the domain and the name of the file.
W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium is an organisation whose purpose is to develop standards for the web. The W3C's mission is "To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web".
XHTML - eXtensible HyperText Markup Language is a markup language which builds upon HTML but is a lot stricter and requires code to be syntactically correct. XHTML can be thought of as a mixture of HTML and XML.
XML - eXtensible Markup Language provides a text-based means to describe and apply a tree-based structure to information, allowing data to be easily shared across networks and the internet.
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