Glossary of Common Web Design Terms
Omega2webdesign keep the web terminology simple and talk to you in plain English. However, we understand that not everyone does, so have produced simple explanations of common web terms to help you cut through the jargon and better understand it.
The glossary of web terms is listed alphabetically:
Alt-tags:
Some web browsers do not display the images on a web page. If this happens the image should have a caption, or alt-tag, saying what would normally appear. These also help search engines locate and index a page.
Anchor Text:
Links on sites need a description to tell the search engines what the link is pointing towards. This is a combination of anchor text and the name of the link. Keeping the links mixed from the keywords so they are different on each page can help visibility in the search engines.
Analytics:
A product offered by Google which provides information on the usage of a web page, from the number of visits to the location of the browser and the search terms used to find the page.
Banner Ad:
An online advertisement with a link to the advertiser's website, banner ads can utilise several graphic formats, animation and sound.
Blog:
A contraction of the term web log, this is a site providing a regular commentary on a particular subject, event, or theme.
Browsers:
A piece of software allowing pages to be viewed on the internet. The most common are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS):
A modern way of designing websites separating design from content. This makes the page load faster, allows a consistent appearance across the site and easier for search engines to read what’s on a page.
Description
Each page should have a few lines of text summarising the content. Though not visible to visitors the description text is picked up by search engines.
Domain Name (URL):
The web address of a website.
Flash™:
This is a file type to allow animation or movement to be included on graphics or imagery.
H1 Tags:
Page headings and other prominent text are often used by search engines to rank a page. These headings are given a separate attribute, or tag, to the main body of text on a page.
Hyperlink:
An electronic link joining one area of a page to another specific location on the same page, another page or another site on the internet. This is the basis of navigation around websites and the internet in general.
Indexing A Site:
A search engines will rank a website by its content. With so many websites on the internet a page’s rank in relation to others becomes vitally important. This is indexing and is constantly changing.
Inline Styles:
An outdated design concept where a page's appearance (e.g. fonts, font size) is detailed by elements within the page itself rather than in a separate cascading style sheet. The use of inline styles may make the page larger in size and so take longer to load.
Keywords:
Each page has a number of words or phrases attached to it. These may or may not be visible when viewing a site but are vital in allowing search engines to assess the content of a site and rank it accordingly.
Link Farms:
A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites and generally the referring pages have a Google PageRank of zero thereby damaging the sites own PageRank.
Meta-tags:
Meta-tags are used to specify a page’s title, description and keywords. These are essential in helping search engines locate the page.
Page Rank:
An assessment by a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo, of a site or page's design, content and links to other sites. A page rank can therefore be used to gauge a site's relevance to its subject and possibly it's popularity.
Robots:
Also known as a spider this program reads a web page and indexes those pages referenced from it. A robot can also assess the validity of a page with reference to current web standards.
Search Engine:
A system that regularly looks around the internet and collects a list of sites. Users can then search for relevant sites by entering chosen words and phrases.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
This is a process to improve a website to promote key messages and making it more relevant to people surfing the internet. A well presented site without good search engine optimisation may not be found by search engines.
Sitemap:
A sitemap is a document detailing the various pages on a website and how they link to each other. This helps both visitors find pages and search engines to index a site.
Social Networking:
The practice by which internet users build relationships and bookmark important sites with like minded people.
Spry Assets:
A set of programming rules allowing sites to have dynamic content and animated sections.
W3C:
The international standards organisation for the world wide web. Many sites promote themselves as W3C compliant indicating that they confirm to the latest web standards.
Web design content:
A webpage consists of the design elements and actual text on the page. It is the text that constitutes the we design content as browsers can not see the artistic elements.
Web hosting:
The files concerned with displaying a website on the internet need to be stored on a web server. The service of providing this storage is called web hosting.
Webmail:
A facility allowing users to send and receive e-mails via their website. This facility can be of particular use for users operating remotely rather than from a central location.
Websafe:
A term given to fonts and/or colours which are compatible across browsers. Not all fonts are readily available on the internet.
Xhtml:
A language used to construct websites which allows a consistent appearance across a range of browsers.
