Glossary: Web

Accessibility

Web accessibility is about enabling equal access to online content and services for all people, including those with visual and mobility impairment.

It is now a legal requirement under the Disability Discrimination Act that organisations should take reasonable steps to make their sites accessible.

Anti-Aliasing

Smoothing or blending the transition of pixels in an image. Anti-aliasing the edges on a graphic image makes the edges appear smooth, not jagged.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of information your connection to the Internet can carry.

Bug

Software code can be very complex, and complexity leads to unexpected outcomes.

A bug is an issue with programmed code that causes unexpected or unwanted behaviour. Programmers will normally fix any bugs in a system free of charge within a defined period after launch, usually 3 months.

There’s a difference between a Bug and a Change request. Change requests happen when there is a change in feature or scope, whereas a bug is an unintended aspect of the agreed feature set.

Browser

The software used to view, manage, and access web pages by interpreting hypertext and hyperlinks. The two most common browsers are Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Web pages often appear differently depending on the brand and version of the browser intended to view them in.

Client extranet

Playne Creative will set up a project site for all projects, which enables everything regarding the project to be kept in one place and serves as the definitive source for all project documents.

CMS

CMS - Content Management System, is what allows websites to be updated without needing technical know how. A CMS system will allow a user to update the content of their website, including adding news articles, editing existing text, and maintaining a product database. This is all managed via a user friendly admin panel.

CSS

CSS is an abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a way of defining the formatting and “look and feel” of a web page. This is important as one can separate the data from the way that data looks making the website easier to maintain and also making the website easier to interpret by web browsers using XML technology. The style sheets are called cascading as they are separated into sections that can cascade or lay on top of each other. As a leading interactive agency Playne Creative uses industry best practice XHTML & CSS when developing its websites.

Domain Name

A unique name that identifies one or more IP addresses. For example, the domain name abacus.ca represents one IP address. Domain names are used in URLs to identify particular Web pages. Every web site that you visit is stored under domain name.

Meta-tag

Meta-tags are HTML tags that can be used to identify the creator of a web page, what HTML specifications a web page follows, the keywords and description of the page, etc. The most common use of a meta-tag in online marketing is the keyword and description tags, which tell the search engines that index meta-tags what description to use in their search query results.

Quality Assurance

This is the process of checking that programming and other deliverables are ‘fit for purpose’ and as agreed in the early stages of a project, prior to releasing it to clients.

Site map

This is an overview document, which shows all the component parts of a site, as well as the ways in which site visitors are channelled to the information they need.

Template

A template is a prototypical web page out of which a number of other web pages may be built. A website of hundreds of pages may be built out of just a few templates.

Typical templates include the home page, lower level index pages, search and standard pages.

URL

It stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is a string that supplies the Internet address of a resource on the World Wide Web, along with the protocol by which the resource is accessed. The most common URL type is "http," which gives the Internet address of a World Wide Web page. Some other URL types are gopher and ftp.

Wireframe

Wireframes give an overview of how a website is going to work. Similar to architects plans in that they show how everything interlinks and enables everybody to be working from the same blueprints. Similarly it wouldn’t be sensible practise to build a house without plans! Wireframes are the foundation that everything else is developed from.

W3C

W3C is short for the World Wide Web Consortium, an international consortium of internet related companies who are responsible for developing and setting open standards. The ultimate goal is to enable the Web to evolve in a focused direction.