CreatWeb - Web Design Glossary

Glossary - Web Design explained

Accessibility

Accessibility is most often used to describe facilities or amenities to assist people with disabilities, as in "wheelchair accessible". This can extend to Braille signage, wheelchair ramps, audio signals at pedestrian crossings, walkway contours, website design, and so on.

In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 has numerous provisions for accessibility

Web Accessibility

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making pages on the Internet accessible to all users, especially those with disabilities.

For example, graphics-intensive pages may be virtually useless to those without high-speed internet connections. Deaf people, meanwhile, may have difficulty fully understanding pages with audio components, and images without explanatory captions may make web pages difficult for visually impaired users to understand.

When Tim Berners Lee created the groundwork for the World Wide Web, he expected it to become a community with access for all persons from all levels and parts of society. However, disabled web users still face significant challenges in accessing general-audience web sites. In response to this, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has specified three tiers of guidelines for creating accessible sites: Level A (the most basic accessibility), Level AA, and Level AAA.

Content Management System

In computing, a content management system (CMS) is a system used to organise and facilitate the creation of documents and other content. A CMS is frequently a web application used for managing websites and web content. In many cases, content management systems require special client software for editing and constructing articles though.

CSS

In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language.

Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to other applications as well. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Disability Discrimination Act (UK)

The Disability Discrimination Act is a UK parliamentary act of 1995, which makes it unlawful to discriminate against people in respect of their disabilities in relation to employment, the provision of goods and services, education and transport. It is a civil rights law. Other countries use constitutional, social rights or criminal law to make similar provisions.

The British Government set up the Disability Rights Commission to provide support for the Act. Equivalent legislation exists in Northern Ireland, which is enforced by the Northern Ireland Equality Commission.

In addition to imposing obligations on employers, the Act places duties on service providers and requires reasonable adjustments to be made when providing access to goods, facilities, services and premises (Part 3 of the Act).

Domain Name

A domain name is a name of a computer on the Internet that distinguishes it from the other systems on the network. They are sometimes referred to as "web addresses".

Every website, email account, etc, on the Internet is hosted on at least one computer (server). Each server has a unique IP address which is nothing but a set of numbers, such as "203.587.55.11" .

To access a particular internet service, you can either specify its IP address in an appropriate application, such as an FTP client or a browser. However, because it is difficult to remember numbers, an IP address can be associated with a fully qualified host name (a domain name), such as "www.creatweb.co.uk". Domain names also provide a persistent address / name for some service when it is necessary to move to a different server, which would have a different IP address.

Dynamic web pages

Dynamic Web pages can be defined as wWeb pages containing content that can change without the actual HTML code being changed.

A dynamic web page can also produced on-the-fly by server-side programs, frequently based on parameters in the URL or from an HTML form. These web pages are often created with the help of server-side languages such as PHP, Perl, ASP, and Microsoft's .NET languages.

HTML

In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox etc.). HTML is used to structure information -- denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on -- and can be used to define the semantics of a document.

HTML is now an international standard. The HTML specification is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Early versions of HTML were defined with looser syntactical rules which helped its adoption by those unfamiliar with web publishing. Web browsers commonly made assumptions about intent and proceeded with rendering of the page.

Over time, the trend in the official standards has been to create an increasingly strict language syntax; however, browsers still continue to render pages that are far from valid HTML. W3C is moving toward replacing HTML with XHTML, which applies the stricter rules of XML to HTML.

Homepage / Home

The homepage refers to the start page or main page of a website, i.e. the page that is displayed when you enter only a domain name as URL (e.g. http://www.creatweb.co.uk).

Hyperlink / Link

A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference in a hypertext (web) document to another document or other resource. As such it would be similar to a citation in literature. However, combined with a data network and suitable access protocol, it can be used to access the resource referenced. This can then be saved, viewed, or displayed as part of the referencing document.

Hyperlinks are part of the foundation of the World Wide Web.

There are a number of ways to format and present hyperlinks on a web page. The embedded link, a link that occurs within a sentence, is one of the more common formats.

Search Engine

A search engine (such as Google) is a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web, or a personal computer.

A search engine allows to ask for content meeting specific search criteria and retrieving a list of references that match those criteria.

Without further qualification, search engine usually refers to a Web search engine, which searches for information on the public Web. Other kinds of search engine are enterprise search engines, which search on intranets and personal search engines, which search individual personal computers.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimization (SEO) is aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimisation projects on behalf of client sites.

To obtain maximum search engine visibility, a website must tailor itself to be found by its target audience through internet searches. If a site is to be found, a number of activities have to be undertaken in order to achieve the required results. Search engine optimisation is the process of configuring a website to be more visible to its target audience.

Usability

Usability is the measure of the ease with which particular people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles that may predict whether an object is found usable in practice.

In human-computer interaction and computer science, usability usually refers to the usability of the user interface of a computer program or a web site.

Usability includes considerations such as:

Who are the users, what do they know, and what can they learn?
What do users want or need to do?
What is the general background of the users?
What is the context in which the user is working?
What has to be left to the machine? What to the user?
Can users easily accomplish their intended tasks? For example, can users accomplish intended tasks at their intended speed?
How much training do users need?
What documentation or other supporting materials are available to help the user? Can users find the solutions they seek in these materials?
What and how many errors do users make when interacting with the product?
Can the user recover from errors? What do users have to do to recover from errors? Does the product help users recover from errors, for example, does software present informative, non-threatening error messages?
Are there provisions for meeting the special needs of users with disabilities? (accessibility)

Examples of ways to find answers to these and other questions are: user-focused requirements analysis, building user profiles, and usability testing.

Usability is now recognized as an important software quality attribute, earning its place among more traditional attributes such as performance and robustness. Indeed various academic programs focus on usability. Also several usability consultancy companies have emerged, and traditional consultancy and design firms are offering similar services.

Web Browser

A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. Popular browsers available for personal computers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

Web Design

Web design is the design or designing of a Web page, Website or Web application. The term generally refers to the graphical side of Web development using images, CSS and XHTML.

Web Development

Web development is a broad term that incorporates all areas of developing a Web site for the World Wide Web. This includes:

the page's graphical web design
backend programming
web server administration
database interaction
testing
deployment with special attention paid to search engine optimization.

In larger businesses and organisations, web development teams can consist of hundreds of people, while smaller web sites may only include a single person.

Web Hosting / Web Hosts

Web hosting is a service that provides individuals, organisations and users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the Web / internet.

Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity.

Website

A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of web pages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible generally via HTTP on the Internet.

All publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. The pages of a website will be accessed from a common root URL (such as www.creatweb.co.uk), the homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server.

The URLs of the pages organise them into a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the reader perceives the overall structure and how the traffic flows between the different parts of the site.

Website Traffic

Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit.

Websites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country.

There are many ways to monitor this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth – not all web traffic is welcome.

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