Tring Web Design - Glossary of Terms

Confused by your PHP's and ASP's? Got your WYSIWYG all tied up in knots? Use the glossary of terms below

Accessibility

Refers to how accessible a website is to visitors who may have impairments, such as hearing, eye sight

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

A linked document within a webpage that defines styles: colours, borders, widths, positions of elements on a page such as text, lists or images. CSS allows seperation of content and style information within a webpage making it easier for electronic assessibility devices to scan as well as search engines.

CMS (Content Management System)

A web application, usually insalled onto the web server the domain is hosted on. It allows changes to be made to a website without needing to edit HTML or use FTP. Some allow differetn users to be setup with permissions so they can only edit certain parts of the site.

Domain Name

Your domain name is usually the starting point when setting up a websote. It usually reflects your brand or product.

E-Commerce

When lookng at selling products online you will need an e-commerce packag. These allow you to display your product, have login system for customers to register and connect to payment gateways, such as Worldpay or Paypal. Think along the lines of Amazon

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Protocol for transferring files over the internet. Traditionally you would create your webpage on your desktop or laptop, then transfer them via FTP to the website, along wth any images.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)

Document definition for web pages. HTML markup can include items like tables (the sort you find in Word), numbered or bullet lists, images and links. Marking up a web page has moved onto using CSS to define the styles of page elements.

Images

Images create feel and emotion to a webpage. Common internet image formats include JPEG, GIF, PNG. Lesser used formats include SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics) which allow the creation of dynamic vector art images, e.g. graphs and has a feel similar to Flash

IP Address

The internet is made up of millions of number addresses. an example would be 212.123.45.89. When you type in a web address into your browser, it does a lookup with some central 'root' servers or main address servers. These then tell your browser where the website you have typed in is located on the internet. Domain names resolve to IP Addresses.

ISP (Internet Service Provider)

You need n ISP to connect to the internet. More and more they also offer web hosting space as part of the package.

Javascript

Javascript is known as a client side scripting language and allows some document effects and validation routines to operate on your computer, rather then a server processing the requests.

Open Source

Open source is a movement in software development. Programmers create a piece of software and others in the community contribute to its development and support. Usually available for no charge.

Server

Servers manifest theselves in various forms, print, web, file servers are examples. If creating a website you will need a web server with some features. This will allow you to upload your web pages and image files. You also need to 'point' a domain name at some web server so users can find you on the internet.

Usability

Judges how well a website is usable, in terms of visitors to your site being able to find information quickly and easily.

Web Statistics

Statistics will tell you a lot about the people coming to your website, which pages they looked at and how long they stayed. The most common way to analyse them is to parse web server log files through a program to pull out specific information. Google also have analytics, which allows you to embed a small piece of Javascript into each of your web pages and logs this information for you.