The “What Is…” page is a collection of terms which may commonly be misunderstood or unknown by anyone. You can think of this as a glossary of terms, or a website jargon list. There may be references throughout to external web pages to give some more information.

So, What Is…

Accessibility - When referring to a website, accessibility is used to describe the level of which the site can be accessed by people with disabilities.

Bandwidth - This is a measure of how fast data can be transferred between two computers. You may have seen the common units such as kBps (Kilobyte per second) and MBps (Megabyte per second). Since this term is used a lot in computing, when we talk about Bandwidth in web design it means how fast the web server can talk to the visitors computer. Every time someone visits a page of your website they download the text and images to their computer. When this event occurs bandwidth is used up. These visits are often referred to as “hits”.

Browser - What are you reading this with? A browser! A browser is a piece of software which is installed on your computer to allow you to interact with internet resources. There is various different browsers which are available to you, the big ones you may have heard of are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. It may also be referred to as a Web Browser.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – CSS is a technology used to control the presentation of a web page. For example, the colours, text and even layout can be controlled through CSS. Using CSS speeds up the time it takes to download pages and allows vast changes to be made to a collection of web pages at once.

Clickable Image – This is an image which has code “behind” it, often forming a type of link to direct you somewhere else when you click it with your mouse. This is achieved by using anchor tags.

Content Management System (CMS) – A Web Content Management System (WCMS), is a method in which it allows the user to edit their websites once the web designer has completed the work. The CMS solution that I often use is called WordPress (although other alternatives are available). WordPress provides you with a platform in which you can edit pages, text, add news, links, anything you want. This can all be done via a user friendly menu and tools which will be familiar if you have used any text editing program such as Microsoft Word – so you don’t need to know any code!

Domain Name - This is a unique name which identifies any internet site, basically the www. part.

Download - When downloading, you are transferring files from a remote machine, to your computer.

E-Commerce – This is the process of buying and selling products or services online. Think of a website like Amazon. They list products on their site and you have the ability to add them to a virtual shopping cart and pay for them.

File Size - Another term which is commonly used in computing and does not need to refer to a website. File Size is the amount of space which a file takes up on a disk. For example, an image on your hard drive might take up 10 megabytes of space.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) – FTP is a method of transferring files from one computer to another across a network. This network may well be the internet! Although it’s a very popular method of transferring files it can be insecure since usernames and passwords can be intercepted by baddies. You may have heard of the FTP client, FileZilla.

Flash - Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video and interactivity to web sites. This can take the form of banners, images or even whole websites.

Forums - Forums, or Discussion Boards, is an online discussion platform. There is many different providers for forums, but I prefer to work with PhpBB.

Google Maps – Google Maps is a map service provided by the company Google. It is very intelligently named. These maps can be embedded into web pages to provide an all singing, all dancing interactive map point to where you want it. Google Maps has a Street View option, allowing people to navigate through streets as if they were actually there.

Hits - Hits refers to the number of files that are downloaded from the web server. You are able to measure how much traffic your site gets by recording this hits. Although this can be very misleading as the amount of hits you get will be greater than the number of visitors. This is because the web page will very often contain more than one file.

Home Page – The home page is the entrance point of your website. It will be the starting place for all your visitors so it should include navigation to the other parts of your website. It can also be called an index page.

Hosting - Websites need to be hosted or stored on another computer. You can think of a host as a hard drive for your web sites pages to sit on.

Hyperlink - This is a hyperlink! These are used to link different web pages together, or move the visitors to a point which you can define. Hyperlinks don’t need to be text, they can be images or other elements of a page.

HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) - HTML is code which most web pages are written in. This code is then translated by your web browser to display the page you see now. XHTML is Extensible HyperText Markup Language and is a development of HTML.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – This is the process of transferring the content of a web page to your computer from a web server.

Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) – Every computer, server, even fridge that connects to the internet has an address know as an IP address. An IP address is a series of numbers separated by dots, which looks like this: 66.102.9.104

JavaScript - JavaScript as a language or code which can be used within web sites. It provides more functionality that standard XHTML. More commonly it is used in conjunction with XHTML to add dynamic features. JavaScript should not be confused with Java which is a full featured programming language.

Mark Up - This is the process of converting documents into Web pages by inserting HTML tags.

Meta Tags - Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. This is used by search engines to index a website. Meta tags are often included in the header code of a web page.

Multimedia - Multimedia is media and content that can present itself in different forms. Using multimedia within your website will bring you functionality such as moving images, sound, etc.

MySQL - This is a popular relational database management system (RDBMS) which is used to create web pages dynamically. Every time a web page is viewed, the database will be checked and will update the content of the page accordingly.

Navigation Tools – These tools allow visitors to move around a web page. These can take the form of hyperlinks. Normally the navigation tools can be seen at the top, bottom or sides of the screen allowing visitors to move to other parts of the website.

PHP - Hypertext Preprocessor (a recursive acronym!) is widely used across the web. It is a general purpose scripting language to produce dynamic web pages. It provides additional functionality over XHTML. Commonly used alongside a MySQL database.

Robot - A robot is a mechanism that can move automatically, but in website terms, it is a program which automatically moves around web pages for a specific purpose. Robots which record all the contents of websites to create a searchable database can be called Spiders or Worms.

Search Engine – Google is a search engine. Search engines are pieces of software which creates indexes of databases or internet sites. This is based on keywords, titles and even the full text of a file. When you go to a search engine such as Google you will be presented with a box to type in what you are looking for. The engine then matches your text against its database and returns results which match.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – A common example of a search engine is Google and a common example of websites with good SEO are those you see at the top of your searches. It’s the process of getting your audience to your website! It’s no good getting hundreds of people to visit your website if they leave in a few seconds because it’s not really what they are looking for – the goal is to get qualified traffic. In other words, attracting potential customers to your website.

Tags - Used in HTML documents, tags are descriptive codes that tell a web browser how to display text and graphics. For example, to underline text, the tags are used.

Universal Resource Locator (URL) - In the address bar of your web browser you enter the URL of a website. A URL is the address of a website on the web. The URL is a convention used to locate files and other services.

Upload - Upload is the opposite of download. Instead of transfering the files from a remote location to your computer, you transfer files from your computer to the remote location. An example of this would be uploading a picture from your computer to a photography website such as Flickr.

Usability - Usability in terms of web design is a way to measure how easy it is for a visitor to perform a given task, such as finding the information they need.

Webmaster - A Webmaster is not always a wizard like creature that looks at websites all day, but is someone who is responsible for them. This can be designing, developing, maintaining and marketing the site.

Web Server - A term used to describe the location of your websites files. More specifically it describes the software running on the remote computer which allows the web pages to be requested and sent to the browser on the visitors computer.

Wiki - A wiki is a collection of pages which allow people to add and edit content via a simple text editor. A well known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, “The free encyclopedia”.


Something missing? Let me know!