Website glossary
Glossary of terms used in web design
We hope this glossary provides some insight into the terms and jargon used in web design and hosting.
- Accessibility
- Ensuring that a website is useable by people with disabilities.
- Blog
- A web log allowing a site owner to write a journal.
- Brochure style
- A website that acts as a brochure for the owner with content that changes occasionally. May also be called a static site.
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Commonly used to seperate design from content in a web page. It is used to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.
- CMS (Content Management System)
- Software system that allows a 'user' to add, amend or delete content from their website.
- Content
- The elements that makes up a web page such as text and images.
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Software system that allows a 'user' to add, amend or delete content from their website.
- Copyright
- If a web page is produced which contains unique content that page is copyright and cannot legally be copied.
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- Commonly used to seperate design from content in a web page. It is used to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.
- Database Driven website
- Also known as a dynamic. A web page that contains programming that takes information from a database and inserts that information into the web page each time it is viewed.
- Description (meta-tag)
- A brief and concise summary of your page's content. Used in result lists from search engines. See also "On page optimisation".
- Domain Name
- The human readable address of a website e.g. www.imaker.co.uk
- Dynamic web page
- Also known as a database driven. A web page that contains programming that takes information from a database and inserts that information into the web page each time it is viewed.
- e-commerce
- Selling products and collecting payment online.
- Flash
- An Adobe product that provides movie like qualityanimations. It can also produce web pages however we do not recommend whole pages should be created using flash.
- Forms
- A method of collecting data from a user which is then processed in some way. The output of the form can be stored in a database or can be emailed.
- Host
- A computer that provides web-documents to clients or users of the world wide web. (see also Server).
- HTML
- Hypertext markup language. All web pages are displayed using html. It is the code that the pages are written in and browsers interpret to display the page. (see also XHTML).
- Images
- Pictures, photos, animations, charts etc.
- IP Address
- A unique set of numbers that every machine connected to the internet has.
- Java
- An object orientated programming language that runs on a server and allows interaction with the user in a web page. (NB not to be confused with JavaScript).
- JavaScript
- A simple programming language that allows interactivity in Web pages. It shares some characteristics with Java but is not so powerful. Itcan be included in the HTML source, enabling dynamic content and motion.
- Meta-tag
- Form the 'heading' section of a web page. The most useful is the description meta-tag. See also "On page optimisation".
- Menu
- Often refers to the navigation method.
- Navigation
- The links that allow a user to move from one page to another.
- On page Optimisation
- What you can do to a web page to make it more attractive to search engines. See also our On page Optimisation article (opens a new window).
- Payment Gateway
- A service provider that will collect payment for products sold online usually paid for with a credit card.
- Pay per click
- A service offered by search engines to provide traffic to your website.
- Search engine optimisation
- Making your web site attractive to search engines and gaining a higher ranking in the search listings.
- Seo
- See Search engine optimisation above.
- Server
- A computer, connected to the internet, to provide web pages to the world wide web. (see also Host).
- Spider
- Usually a web robot sent out by search engines to search for and through pages of websites and keep the search engines databases up to date.
- Static website.
- A website that changes infrequently. eg a brochure style site.
- Title element
- This is probably the most important element of a web page. It is a short piece of text that describes the page and is used in window title bars, bookmark lists and result lists from search engines. See also "On page optimisation".
- Top level domain (TLD)
- The last part of an Internet domain name; that is, the letters which follow the final dot of any domain name. For example, in the domain name www.imaker.co.uk, the top-level domain is uk
- W3C (WWW Consortium)
- The governing (advisory) body of the www.
- WWW (world wide web)
- All of the documents that can be accessed via the internet.
- XHTML
- A variant of HTML. Stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is a hybrid of HTML.