Website Design Glossary

In the world of the Internet and web design you will encounter some jargon. Don’t worry I’ve created a Glossary that will explain all these terms.

Bandwidth: The amount of data that can be transferred through a network connection. Web hosting can levels of bandwidth these range in price. A basic five page website that gets a small number of visitors will not need a great deal of bandwidth. If you have a successful website with 10,000 visitors a day and video content, then you are going to need lots of bandwidth.

Blog: Short for “weblog”. A blog is like an online journal, where content is updated on a regular basis. There are blogs related to any subject that you can think of. Businesses use blogs to create a personal relationship with their clients and to expand their brand.

Browser: The software program that you view your websites. Most popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Firefox. These web browsers are free.

Content: Information that is on your website. This can be articles, text, images, music, video, animation, comments or anything that is created by a person. Search engines are on the hunt for new, fresh content. To have a successful website it is ideal to update your site frequently.

Domain: The domain is your address to your website. A domain is also known as a URL (universal resource locator).

Flash: A software program made by Macromedia, but now acquired by Adobe. Flash is an interactive platform of web authoring, where you can create animations, interactive presentations, games and websites.

FTP: File transfer protocol. This is a method of transferring files from your computer to the Internet.

Hosting: Also known as web hosting. When you’ve created a website, your files need to be transferred to a server, this is a computer that is purely connected to the Internet. You will “host” the files on this computer server.

HTML: Hypertext markup language. This is the most basic code that websites are written in. The general layout of any website is created in HTML.

IE: Internet Explorer

Javascript: A programming language that is used to make web pages more interactive.

Keyword: A word or phrase related to your website. For this website one of my key phrases is “web design Lincolnshire“. When a web user types that key phrase into Google it will appear in the search engines.

Navigation: The menu system that a website has to navigate from page to page. A good menu system is required for a website.

Search engine: Think of a search as a giant telephone directory with all the content you could ever want to find. However, a search engine ranks good relevance content first. Therefore, you will always get the best content first.