Do you know your Cookies from your Breadcrumbs? Your CMS from your CSS?CreativeWRX understands that the web can be a daunting place for new business, not least because of all the jargon! We try to avoid techy terms wherever possible but sometimes it just isn't possible. That is why we have developed this glossary resource for anyone that doesn't quite understand a term in our website. We will constantly add to it so if you have a suggestion, please feel free to let us know by contacting us. |
Stands for Uniform Resource Locator. A webpage’s URL is its full address, e.g. http://www.creativewrx.com is our homepage URL
Your server is the computer on which your website is hosted. Servers store data and allow it to be accessed and shared at all times over the internet in a secure environment.
Nearly always just called 'link'. A link is the base rate common denominator between all pages on the web. It's how you naviage from one site to the next.
An acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is the language used to write most webpages. There are other languages available to web designers but HTML is the most common.
The software used to view webpages on the internet. There are infact a plethora of browsers you can use today but the most popular are Internet Explorer 6,7,8 and Mozilla Firefox. Mobile Phone handset browsers such as Opera are becoming increasingly more important.
Why this is important to designers? Well unfortunately each browser interprets the code we write to display your webpage differently. This means your webpage can look wildly different in different browsers. The skill from a web designers perspective is coding a site that looks the same in all.
These are little text files that are stored on your computer whenever you visit a webpage. Some are nice, others are bad but they are ubiquitous!
Whenever you visit a site and it seems to remember your password and login details, this is in actuality the site reading a cookie file stored on your computer and filling in the fields with the information it reads there. There are other uses for cookies and many of the more advanced functions on a webpage rely on this technology in order to work.
An acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. This is the practice of improving the value of your website to achieve higher organic search positions. This is done through tweaking and adding new content, and most importantly through targetted link building.
PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is a type of online advertising that makes use of search engines such as Google. A PPC project will involve paying search engines to show a link to your site when users search for a product or service that you provide.
When a user clicks that link, you will pay the search engine a small commission based on the perceived value of the keyword used to display the results. The perceived value is determined by the PPC marketplace where advertisers bid on how much they are willing to pay a search engine to display thier link associated with each keyword.
Organic search results are the results you see that a webpage has earned on merit only. They are quite separate from the 'sponsored pages' or paid results. Organic results are on the whole more trusted than paid results at delivering relevant content.
A metatag is a piece of code that allows search engines to accurately determine the content of a webpage. Metatags aren’t actually visible on a webpage, but do appear in the search engine results as a description of what the page is about. For this reason, metatags are more important from a conversion standpoint than an optimisation perspective.
Can be misleading as more often than not keywords can be grouped together to form key phrases. These sets of words are what are targetted by your website to draw traffic into them from the search engines. e.g if someone was to type 'Blue Widgets' into Google, you would want to make sure that your website about Blue Widgets was found by them. By optimising your pages content and linking to other sites using this phrase we can make sure you are!
Web Design companies will talk about accessibility alot in their designs. It simply means the ease of which users with impaired hearing/sight or motor skills can navigate your site.
The functionality of a website is the number of technical functions it can perform e.g. having the ability to take online payments, or to perform a “search” on stored data or content. Not to be confused with usability (see below)
A website’s usability is a measure of how easy it is for visitors to understand a website, find their way around it and successfully achieve their goals. Not to be confused with accessibility or functionality.
An amalgamation of the term 'favourite icon' is a small thumbnail image appearing at the beginning of the URL in your browser, at the top of tabs and on your favourites list.
Abbreviation of Cascading Style Sheets. CSS allows web designers to work on the presentation of your sites content exclusively away from its functionality.
All main heading styles, for example will be dictated by the <*H1><*/H1> tags (without stars) in a CSS file on your site. Working in this way allows designers to more easily organise and administrate areas of your site.
Abbreviation of Content Management System. A CMS system allows non-tech savvy people to edit and amend webpages without ever having to look at a snippet of code.
They are useful for organising large site content and making changes to your site away from the office as they allow you to edit content in your web browser. Most of CreativeWRX's sites are designed with a content managed backend allowing you to become the web designer!
Ecommerce is a term used to described the selling of products and services online though your website. It involves a suite of other services designed to pass credit card details securely from one computer to another.
Short for 'web log'. Blogs have become the defacto method of choice of communicating personal opinion on the web. For this reason, 'corporate blogs' have become popular in the business world as a means of communicating a more personal voice to potential customers.
Breadcrumbs are navigation features of a website that improves its usability. CreativeWRX's site uses theses and you can see them clearly at the page top of this article.
If you get lost in a site they provide a quick means of navigating back to a more familiar page. Breadcrumbs are also very usefull for SEO purposes, providing your site with a clear internal linking structure.
