ABC’s of web design
Accessibility – refers to how user-friendly or ‘accessible’ your website is, particularly for less able users such as the visually impaired.
breadcrumb trail – often also known as a path, the breadcrumb is a (usually) horizontal list of links showing the path to the current page from the home page, for example the breadcrumb to this article might be:
Home > Internet and Online Business > Web Design > ABC’s of Web Design
CSS – Cascading Style Sheets, commonly referred to as CSS, is a markup language used to tell web browsers how a web page should look like, for example, what colors, font styles, sizes, and positions a page should use . CSS files have the file extension .css
domain names – A domain name is the names used to find a website in a web browser, for example, EzineArticles.com. Domain names can also have subdomains like blog.ezinearticles.com
embed – A term generally used to describe elements such as video or flash that can be ’embedded’ into a page. An embedded element is typically something that doesn’t run natively in a web browser and requires additional plugins to be installed, such as a flash player.
favicon- Short for ‘favorite icon’, the favicon is the small image that is displayed next to the URL in most web browsers. It gets its name from a time before search engines were commonly used to find websites and favorites lists were important features. The favicon would be placed next to the bookmarked sites.
MISTLETOE – The graphical user interface or GUI refers to the operating system that allows a visitor to obtain information from a computer in a visual way without entering code. On any website it’s a GUI, although in web design this terminology usually refers to more advanced web-based applications and games.
HTML – Hypertext Markup Language or HTML is the primary language of the web and what most web pages use to structure their content. not strictly a programming language HTML is a very basic set of commands that a web browser can interpret to help design a web page.
image map – An essentially old-fashioned style of web design in which a single image has clickable sections that link to different web pages. Imagemaps are rarely used in modern web design as they are considered somewhat inaccessible.
jpeg – JPEG or JPG are the most common file type used to display images on the Internet. GIF and PNG images are also popular.
Keywords – Keywords are used by search engine optimizers (SEOs) to help search engines understand what a page is about and return that page to relevant search results. SEO is used to placing keywords within keyword meta tags, although this practice is now outdated and keywords are now more effective if used in the page title, headers and within copy of web pages .
Link – Links or hyperlinks are Internet navigation systems that allow visitors to move between pages and websites. The links are encoded in HTML using the a href tags, but you can also create a link using javascript and flash.
metadata – Metadata in web pages refers to additional information about the page contained in the HTML area that is not displayed to visitors, but is used by machine readers, such as search engine crawlers.
Navigation – Any system that allows visitors to ‘navigate a website’ can be called a navigation system. the most common navigation on websites are menus, search functions, breadcrumbs, and sitemaps
open source – Refers to software where the source code can be accessed and edited to make it behave in a different way. The most popular open source software in web design today is the WordPress blogging platform that anyone can download, install and edit. Open source generally makes web design faster, as it’s often easier to start with someone else’s code than to write your own from scratch.
permalink – Permanent links or permalinks are generally used in blogging terminology to describe the absolute link to a post or page that does not change over time. As blogs are time based and new content is added regularly, a post’s permalink is where the post will still be found after newer posts remove it from the home page.
RSS – Really Simple Syndication or RSS is a type of XML file that simplifies the content of a website into a ‘feed’ of content that can be easily published on other sites or accessed by applications such as RSS readers. Using RSS, the contents of a site can be read without having to visit the website itself.
subdomain – A subdomain is located below a domain name in the hierarchy of the web. The subdomain is the part of a web address that precedes the domain name. for example, in blog.ezinearticles.com, the ‘blog’ part of the address would be the subdomain, while EzineArticles would be the domain. Subdomains are useful for hosting different types of content under the same domain name.
location code – Code added to web pages to allow visitors to be monitored by web analytics tools such as Google Analytics is called tracking code. Typically, the tracking code is a small piece of javascript code that is not visible on a web page to normal visitors, but does report information about the visitor to the web analytics server.
url – The universal resource locator or URL is the address of a web page on the Internet that is displayed in the address bar of a web browser.
validXHTML – refers to the code of a web page that ‘validates’ against the standards established by the W3C (see below). This is an industry standard among web designers.
w3c – World Wide Web Consortium or W3C is a group that defines “standards” for web design technology.
XML – Extensible Markup Language or XML is a type of markup language used to create a simple structure for online documents such as RSS feeds.