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Glossary of Terms

Blog: A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. [MORE]

CMS (Content Management System): A Web Content Management System (WCM, WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing content such as HTML, but also including XML, SVG and PHP in particular. Weblogs (blogs), such as WordPress, are also CMS, but are often viewed as a medium for blogging. CMS is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions. The software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease. [MORE]

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): In web development, 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 any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. CSS is used to help readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable. [MORE]

Liquid Format: (Also called liquid layouts) adjusts to fit the browser’s width—whatever it may be. Your page gets wider or narrower as your visitor resizes the window. While this kind of design makes the best use of the available browser window real estate, it’s more work (more costly) and on very large monitors, these types of designs can look ridiculously wide. [source: CSS The Missing Manual]

Fixed Format: (Also called fixed layouts) is the preferred choice by designers. Regardless of the browser window’s width, the page content’s width remains the same. In some cases, the design clings to the left edge of the browser window, or, more commonly, it’s centered in the middle. [source: CSS The Missing Manual]

Flash: Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. [MORE]

Framesets: Each frame displays a different HTML document. Headers and sidebar menus do not move when the content frame is scrolled up and down. For developers frames can also be convenient (although today its technology has become nearly obsolete). For example, if an item needs to be added to the sidebar menu, only one file needs to be changed, whereas each individual page on a non-frameset website would have to be edited if the sidebar menu appeared on all of them. [MORE]

HTML: (HyperText Markup Language), is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of tags, surrounded by angle brackets. [MORE]

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. [MORE]