The Terminology of the Web Design
Industry
Anchor
Anchors are links that jump to
another part of the same page. In fact,
anchors are used on this very page.
Click on the terms to the left to see
what I mean.
ASP
This is a programming language but
its not a very good one : ) - Please see
PHP
Content
Content is a word we
often use to describe the information
that you display on your site. Content
is usually text but can also be images,
videos, Flash, or
music.
Cookie
A cookie is a small
text file that a website sometimes saves
to a person's computer. The real purpose
of cookies is to make the life of the
website viewer easier. When you visit a
website and you go to the login screen
to find that your username/email is
already filled out, that is an example
of what cookies can be used for. If you say yes to this option,
one way for the website to save your
username is to place a cookie on your
computer containing the username. Then
when you re-visit the site, the website
looks for that cookie.
Crawlers
Sometimes referred to
as a spider or a robot, it is a computer
program which searches the internet for
websites and reads their contents.
Search engines use them to review
millions of websites in a very short
period of time. Usually the search
engine wants to read the
content on the
site to see what its about. Then when
people do searches on the search engine
later, the search engine
knows what sites to display because it
already crawled them all.
CSS
This acronym stands
for Cascading Style Sheets. What this
means is that the settings for how your
site looks is centralized to one file.
That might not mean much to you now but
if you want to change a font or a color
on your site, its nice to just change
one file instead of every single
individual page on your site.
Data-Driven Web
Design
See Dynamic Web
Design
Domain Name
A domain name, often
referred to as a URL or a website's
address, is the unique name that is
assigned to your website such as
http://www.yoursite.com where the "yoursite.com"
part is the domain name, and technically
the whole thing all together is the URL.
It is important to note that the .com
part is called the extension and that
different extensions mean different
domain names. So yoursite.com is not the
same as yoursite.net.
Dynamic Web Design
Dynamic websites are
ones which get a significant amount of
their content
from a database. At AZPixels we usually
use a type of database called
MySQL. Dynamic
sites offer many advantages over the
alternative -
static
sites. Some things that are possible
with dynamic sites that are not with
static ones include: custom search
results, login systems, calendars,
shopping carts, and statistics tracking.
Flash
Flash is a product
made by Adobe and previously by
Macromedia. Flash is basically the
easiest way to accomplish animation on
sites today. An example of this
animation can easily be found at the top
of this page. The header of this website is
entirely made in Flash. Some other
examples of our flash includes...
www.blairbunting.com - Full Flash
Website
www.geckoms.com/commercial.php -
Online Commercial
Host (Or
Website Host)
A hosting company is
commonly used to host your website and
make it available for others to see.
technically you could host your own site
but if anything happened to your
computer (including turning it off),
then your website would stop working.
Not to mention if you had lots of
traffic to your site, your home computer
would not be able to handle the amount
of people visiting your site. So most
people use hosting companies which have
24-7 on hand staff that support the
computers, make sure they are being
overworked, and more importantly they
usually provide email solutions in
addition to hosting your site.
HTML
This acronym stands
for Hyper Text Markup Language. All you
need to know about HTML is that it is
the fundamental building blocks of all
websites. If you right-click on this
screen RIGHT HERE, you should see a menu with an
option to view the "Source" of this
page. The gibberish text that comes up
is HTML. Also, HTML is not a programming
language for all you freelance website
designers out there who list it on your
resume as one : )
JavaScript
This is a programming
language which is used for many things
to enhance your websites. One common example is
when users are filling out a form to
submit, and when they click the submit
button they might get an immediate error
suggesting that the form was not filled
out correctly. Its JavaScript that makes
this possible.
Keyword or Key Phrase
This is a subject of
within
Search Engine Optimization. A
keyword is a word or collection of words
that you anticipate people will search
for in search engines in order to find a
site like yours. For instance, keywords
for this website which does website
design are...
When people type in these
phrases, AZPixels is a candidate for coming
up in the search results. To learn more
about which websites come up first in search
results. See
Search
Engine Optimization.
Linux
Linux is a software which
runs and controls a
server, See Server.
Meta-Tags
This is a subject of
within
Search Engine Optimization. A meta-tag
is a hidden piece of information within a
website. Originally meta-tags were used to
tell search engine
crawlers how to categorize your website.
So if you said the word "Website Design" in
your meta-tags, that means that when people
type that keyword,
your site will appear. But remember, this is
the way it used to be. For many years
now, search engines have ignored meta-tags
because of website designers abusing
meta-tags for dishonest purposes.
MySQL
This is a type of
database which has grown in popularity in
the last several years. Many of our clients
who are unfamiliar with databases and MySQL
wonder how much information can be stored in
these systems. The answer is usually 100
times more that what they need. If you are
using a MySQL Database or any other database
for your website then you have a
Dynamic
Website and not a
Static one.
Organic Search Listings
This is a subject of
within
Search Engine Optimization. Organic
search listings means when someone types in
a keyword into a
search engine,
your website comes up. You can read our
detailed description of this concept on our
page:
About Search Engine Optimization.
Page Hit
If you have a stats
program for your website, you can
probably see how many page hits you are
getting. While the definition of a "hit"
can vary, usually people are referring
to how many pages got viewed on their
website. So if 100 people saw your site
yesterday and each person looked at 3
pages, you would have 300 page hits.
See also
Unique
Visitors vs. Unique Visits
Pay-Per-Click
This is a subject of
within
Search Engine Optimization. When it
comes to getting listed on
search engines,
there are two ways to do it. Pay-Per-Click
is an arrangement where you pay for every
click that someone does on a search engine
to get to your site. Typically you can bid
on how much you want to pay. But in the
bidding aspect of PPC, the high bidders
usually get better position on the page.
PHP
This is a programming
language which makes it possible to make
dynamic
websites. Server-Side Programming
Languages like PHP are responsible for how
huge the web has become today. With PHP, a
website can do
database searches, uploads, security, logins,
signups, emails, statistics, reports, and
much more.
Search Engine
A search engine is not
the same thing as a
search directory.
A search engine is a huge database of
websites which have been visited by
crawlers which read
the site to determine its contents. When you
type keywords into
the search box of Google, the
servers at Google will
display websites that most closely match
your search based on what the crawlers found
on your site.
Search Engine
Optimization
This is the scientific
process of designing your site so that
search engine crawlers
will list you more closely to the top of the
results. Read more about this process on our
page:
About Search Engine Optimization.
Search Directory
A search directory is not
the same thing as a
search engine. Directories are similar
to phonebooks. There are main categories
like Business and Arts. When you click on
Business you might get a sub-category like
Investments. There can be many
sub-categories of sub-categories but
eventually you will see a list of sites that
match the category you are in.
Server
A server is a computer
which hosts websites. In other words, your
"website host company"
is one that has many powerful servers which
holds sometimes hundreds of websites per
server. When someone types your
domain name into
their browser to look at your site, their
computer will connect to the server which
will send the files to the users computer.
Essentially, a server will "serve" files to
your computer.
Spiders
See
Crawlers
Sponsored Search Results
See
Pay-Per-Click
Static Web Design
Static website is what
most small websites are. Static just means
that the information doesn't change easily
like it does for
dynamic
websites. Static sites are usually much
cheaper and faster to make that dynamic
sites.
Unique Visitors vs. Unique Visits
Both of these website
statistics are useful and its also
useful to know the difference. A unique
visitor is one person visiting your site
for a variable amount of times. So if
two people visit your site over and over
again, you will only have two unique
visitors (the number doesn't go up with
the amount of times they visit: See
Page Hits).
Unique visits shows how many times your
site has been visited regardless of how
many pages were viewed. So if one person
goes to your site five different times
and a second person visits one time,
that would count as six unique visits
but would be two unique visitors
URL
See Domain Name
Website Address
See Domain Name
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