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.

Posted by admin on Monday, February 28th, 2011