Web terms explained - understanding 'Geekspeak'
website design ~ content management systems ~ search engine optimisation ~ web analytics
According to research from Nielson/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don't understand the terms that describe what their device actually does. A BBC report shows that britons are increasingly tech-savvy but are still bamboozled by tech jargon. Its time to put an end to Geekspeak and put you back in control!
| Accessibility | Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality. |
| Animation | Is moving or changeable image or text. There are a number of technologies that web designers use to create animation, including: Animated GIFs, Dynamic HTML, Java, Shockwave and mainly Flash. |
| Backend | The server process that happens behind the scenes of a website. The backend is the process that serves the information to the end user and interacts with a shopping cart, for example. |
| Breadcrumb | Breadcrumb navigation (also referred to as a 'breadcrumb trail'), locates the current webpage in the context of a navigation path. |
| Broken link | These occurs when the target page that the link is referring to has been moved or renamed. Also called a dead link. Search engines don't like to see broken links and it ends up reflecting poorly on the quality of information offered by the site, and therefore lowers your relevance in the search engine results. |
| Browser | A web browser is a software application which enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web |
| Cache | A cache is a temporary storage area on the browser where frequently accessed data can be stored for rapid access. Once the data is stored in the cache, future use can be made by accessing the cached copy rather than re-fetching or recomputing the original data, so that the average access time is shorter. |
| Content Management Systems | A content management system (CMS) is computer software or online interface used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion without any knowledge of html. |
| CTA | Or 'Call to Action' also known as a goal, is where you want your site to ultimately guide the user to. Ie. (contacting the business, making a purchase, downloading a white paper, etc.). |
| Database | A database is an accessible warehouse of information, much like the records of an excel file. There are columns and records within those columns. This makes it so an infinite amount of data can be stored in an organized way and retrieved via humans or computer applications. |
| Dynamic | A dynamic web page provides an interactive experience that is termed "dynamic". Content (text, images, form fields, etc.) on a web page can change, in response to different contexts or conditions. |
| E-commerce | The buying and selling of goods on the Internet. Certainly the most cost-effective way of doing business because it represents the lowest overhead possible: no building to rent, no products to stockpile and the lowest cost form of advertising in the world (other than word of mouth, of course). This cheapest form of Internet advertising (free!) includes optimizing your site for organic search results in google and link trading with popular sites. |
| End User | Referring to the group of persons who will ultimately operate a piece of software (i.e. the expected user or target-user). |
| Flash | A popular authoring software made by Macromedia (recently bought out by Adobe Systems) that enables website developers to create animations (rich applications with motion that are all vector-based). The opposite of Flash is static sites that are created with html. The major drawback with sites that are built entirely in Flash is that they cannot be optimized for search engines such as Google and Yahoo since they cannot actually read the text that is involved in Flash applications. |
| Front end | The part of a website that the end user interacts with. You are interacting with the frontend of 1team website right now. A site's backend is the part behind the scenes that takes care of interactions with a database or shopping cart. |
| HTML | Stands for "HyperText Markup Language." This is the universal base language for most of the websites on the World Wide Web. HTML is what search engines read through to gather information for your search results. Web pages that are designed with HTML are referred to as "static pages" as opposed to "dynamic pages" that are authored by Flash. |
| Home Page | The homepage (often written as home page) or main page is the URL or local file that automatically loads when a web browser starts and when the browser's "home" button is pressed. The term is also used to refer to the front page, webserver directory index, or main web page of a website of a group, company, organization, or individual. |
| Keyword | In website design, this refers to a word that is vital to describing your specific industry. For example, Adrial Designs could not be described without using words such as "graphic designer, website design, print design, logo design" and so on. The more keywords used on a site that is properly optimized, the more opportunity users will be able to find your site on the web by use of search engines. |
| Landing page | Is the web page reached via a link or as a result from a web search |
| Links | Or a hyperlink is a reference or navigation element to another section of the same web site or to another web page that may be part of a (different) domain e.g. a link to a BBC news article on the BBC web site |
| Meta tags | Information placed on webpages not intended for human users to see. It is data that is meant for search engines and other internet applications to interpret and use. |
| Navigation | Just like properly navigating a boat from one shore, across the ocean and then getting safely to the other shore, a well-planned out and executed navigation scheme to a website guides its user through the site to usher them to the goal (contacting the business, making a purchase, downloading a white paper, etc.). Navigation is probably one of the most important pieces to web design. It includes menu structure, where elements are placed on a page, what size every element is in relation to every other element, and on and on. After all, how can someone get to where they (or you) want to go without some proper (and hopefully easy and intuitive) guidance? |
| RGB | Stands for "Red, Green, Blue." These three colors of light all combine in varying degrees to create all the colors of the rainbow. RGB is the color language used by computer monitors and digital cameras. See also CMYK for the main colors used in inks. |
| Search Engine | Is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. |
| SEO | The methodical and purposeful building of a website to enhance your chances of being listed higher in search engine results for the top
keywords in your industry. For example, if you own a pizza shop in Chapel Hill, NC, your website should be designed in such a way to get you listed high for keywords such as "pizza, food, fast food, Chapel Hill, NC." Depending upon your industry and how your competitors position themselves, your keyword set focus can change. |
| Shopping Cart | A special form of software online that keeps track of the items customers would like to buy until they proceed to the checkout to make their final bulk purchase of all the items at once. |
| Sitemap | A sitemap is a page that tells visitors and spiders all the links to every page on a website. It is helpful for both humans and robot spiders to have an overview of the site and how all the different sections fit together as one entity. |
| Static | A static Web page is a Web page that always comprises the same information. Contrast with Dynamic web page. Advantages Include: Quick and easy to put together. Ideal for demonstrating how a site will look. Cache friendly, one copy can be shown to many people. Disadvantages include: Difficult to maintain when a site gets large. Difficult to keep consistent and up to date. |
| Sub page | A subpage usually refers to a lower level web page in a website or wiki with the same main name as the starting level page plus a slash and text identifying the location of the subpage. More precisely, it refers to a part of the path in the hierarchical part of the Uniform Resource Identifier (also known as URI or URL). For example, if the name of the main page were :first, a typical subpage would be called :first/second. In most implementations this system is recursive, so that subpages can have their own subpages (e.g. :first/second/third). |
| Template | A powerful tool in website design that allows you to use the same look for all your pages while switching out content for the main portions of the page. Most websites need to maintain the consistency of having the same information at the top and mostly on the sidebar, so templates are very important since they allow web designers to create an entire website containing however many pages and can update the entire website's template just by changing one file. A website template is much like a library item, but is for the entire page layout instead of just applying to an individual item on a page. |
| URL | Uniform Resource Locator is a compact string of characters used to represent a resource available on the Internet e.g. http://1team.co.uk/ |
| Web page | A Web page is a resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser. This information is usually in HTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via links. |
| Website | A location on the World Wide Web that contains web pages and begins with a homepage or landing page, other pages that relate to the homepage, and text and images that support the central focus and purpose of the website's existence on the Internet. Every website should have a central theme, focus and graphical look. |
| Wiki | A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. |
| World Wide Web | (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. |
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