Web Site Glossary

Web Site Terminology and Jargon Explained

DotCom Business Solutions serves many clients who are new to Web Site Design and often puzzled over some of the terms frequently associated with the Web Design process. For this reason we have provided a Glossary of Web Site Terminology enabling our clients to have a better understanding of Web Design and Web Site Elements in general.

Accessibility
In the context of a Web site, accessibility refers to the degree that a Web site can be accessed by people with disabilities.

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is a measure of how fast data that can be transferred between two computers. Popular units include Kilobits per second (Kbps) or Megabits per second (Mbps).

Browser
A browser is a software program that allows you to view and interact with various kinds of Internet resources available on the World Wide Web. A browser is commonly called a web browser.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
A technology used to control the presentation (and often the layout) of a Web page. CSS controls colours, font faces, text sizes, etc.

Clickable Image
A clickable image is any image that has instructions embedded in it so that clicking on it initiates some kind of action or result. On a web page, a clickable image is any image that has a URL or more than one URL embedded in it (i.e. hidden behind it). This can be accomplished simply by including an <A HREF> anchor tag in an HTML <IMG> (image) tag. Embedding more than one URL in an image requires constructing an image map.

Code-editor
A type of authoring tool that allows you to directly edit the HTML source of a Web page.

Content Management System (CMS)
In the context of a Web site a CMS is a collection of tools designed to allow the creation, modification organisation and removal of information from a Web site. It is common for a CMS to require users to have no knowledge of HTML in order to create new Web pages.

Document Type Declaration (DTD)
In the case of a Web page, the DTD is referred to in the first line of the Web page and specifies the language (HTML, XHTML, etc.) used in the Web page.

Domain Name
The domain name is the unique name that identifies an Internet site. The Internet is made up of hundreds of thousands of computers and networks, all with their own domain name or unique address. Domain names always have two or more parts separated by dots. A given server may have more than one domain name, but a given domain name points to only one server.

Download
The transfer of files from a remote machine (for example, a Web server operated by an ISP) to a user's machine.

E-commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the process of buying, selling and transferring money through the internet.

File Size
The amount of space that a file takes up when stored on disk. File size is usually measured in bytes, kilobytes (K), megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB).

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
FTP is the most common way of transferring the files from one computer to another across a network (including the Internet). Despite its popularity FTP is insecure and usernames and passwords can be intercepted by third parties.

Flash
Flash is a vector-based, multimedia technology developed by Macromedia that can be embedded in HTML pages. Flash files can take the form of animations, games and even whole 'Web' sites.

Graphic Interchange Format (GIF)
Acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, GIF is a graphics file format that uses a compression scheme originally developed by CompuServe. Because GIF files are compressed, the file can be quickly and easily transmitted over a network. That's why it is the most commonly used graphics format on the World Wide Web.

Hits
This term refers to the number of files that are downloaded from a web server. Keeping track of hits is a way of measuring traffic to a website that can be misleading. The number of hits a site receives is usually much greater than the number of actual visitors. That's because a web page can contain more than one file. For example, each graphic element is a separate file, so a page with nine graphics would count as ten hits, one for each graphic and one for the HTML file. In this scenario, a page may have 10,000 hits, but only 1,000 visits.

Home Page
Also referred to as a web page, the home page is the starting point of a Web presentation often called an "index" page. It is a sort of table of contents for what is at the website, offering direct links to the different parts of the site.

HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML)
The language of the Web. Web pages are written in HTML. The language consists of simple tags used to define sections of a document (e.g. <p>This is a paragraph.</p>). HyperText also allows documents to be connected via links.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
The Internet is made up of computers communicating with each other through standard protocols. HyperText is one such protocol and is the one used to transfer Web pages.

Internet
The Internet is worldwide collection of computers all connected together to form a huge network. These computers communicate with each other through a set of common software standards known as protocols. These protocols allow the sending and receiving of emails; viewing of Web pages; the transfer of files between one computer and another; instant messaging, etc.

Image Map
An image map is a graphic divided into regions or "hotspots.", that when clicked, accesses a web page that is linked to a particular region. A typical example of an image map is a website that offers national information organized by state. Clicking on a state on a map of the United States calls up the appropriate page.

Internet Protocol Address (IP Address)
Each machine connected to the Internet has an address known as an Internet Protocol address (IP address). The IP address takes the form of four numbers separated by dots, for example: 123.45.67.890

JavaScript
JavaScript is a client-side scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. JavaScript should not be confused with Java, the full featured programming language.

Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG or JPEG)
An acronym for Joint Photographic Experts Group, an industry committee that developed a compression standard for still images, JPEG refers to the graphics file format that uses this compression standard. You will find JPEG files on the World Wide Web with the file extension .JPG.

Mark Up
The process by which documents are converted into Web pages by the insertion of HTML tags.

Meta Tags
An element of HTML coding on a website that is used by search engines to index a website. Most meta-tags are included within the 'header' code of a website and the most important tags are the title, description and keyword tags. Rules used by different search engines govern how such tags are used, how many characters they should contain, and how they should be formatted.

Multimedia
Multimedia refers to the simultaneous use of more than one type of media such as text with sound, moving or still images with music, and so on.

Navigation Tools
Navigation tools allow users to find their way around a website or multimedia presentation. They can be hypertext links; clickable images or icons; or image maps. Navigation tools are usually present either at the bottom or top (or both) of each page or screen, and typically allow users to return to the previous page, move forward to the next page, jump to the top of the current page, and return to the home page.

Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard graphics creation and manipulation package.

Robot
A robot is a program that is designed to automatically go out and explore the Internet for a specific purpose. Robots that record and index all of the contents of the network to create searchable databases are sometimes called spiders or Worms. WebCrawler and Lycos are popular examples of robots.

Search Engine
A search engine is a type of software that creates indexes of databases or Internet sites based on the titles of files, keywords, or the full text of files. The search engine has an interface that allows you to type what you're looking for into a blank field. It then gives you a list of the results of the search. When you use a search engine on the Web, the results are presented to you in hypertext, which means you can click on any item in the list to get the actual file.

Search Engine Optimisation
The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a web site to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimizing a web site, including the content and structure of the web site's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.

Server
A computer located on a network that provides information that other computers can use. For example, a server may allow access to Web pages, email, streaming video, etc.

Tags
Tags are descriptive formatting codes used in HTML documents that instruct a web browser how to display text and graphics on a web page. For example, to make text bold, the tag <B> is used at the beginning and end of the text.

Universal Resource Locator (URL)
An acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is the address for a resource or site (usually a directory or file) on the World Wide Web and the convention that web browsers use for locating files and other remote services

Upload
The process by which files are transferred from a local computer to a remote computer. For example, a person working an offline copy of a Web site would then upload files to a server operated by their ISP.

Usability
A measure of how easy it is for a user to complete a task. In the context of Web pages this concerns how easy it is for a user to find the information they require from a given Web site.

Web Designer
A person who designs Web pages. Usually a designer will produce a mock-up of a page in a graphics application (for example, Adobe Photoshop or The GIMP). Once a design has been approved by a client the designer will produce an HTML template, CSS files and all of the images needed to produce the Web site. These files will then be passed to a Web developer or directly to the client.

Web Page
A web page is a document created with HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) that is part of a group of hypertext documents or resources available on the World Wide Web. Collectively, these documents and resources form what is known as a website.

You can read HTML documents that reside somewhere on the Internet or on your local hard drive with a software program called a web browser. Web browsers read HTML documents and display them as formatted presentations, with any associated graphics, sound, and video, on a computer screen.

Web pages can contain hypertext links to other places within the same document, to other documents at the same website, or to documents at other websites. They can also contain fill-in forms, photos, large clickable images , sounds, and videos for downloading.

Web Server
A term often used to describe a computer that hosts a Web site. In actual fact the term refers to software running on that computer allowing Web pages to be requested and then sent to a user's Web browser.

Web Statistics
Statistics produced by analysing the access logs for a Web server. For a variety of reasons (covered in the text) Web statistics should be treated with caution as they are not reliable.