| Term |
Definition |
| Above the fold |
The content that appears on a screen without a user having to scroll. |
| Accessibility |
The degree to which a website is available to users with physical challenges or technical limitations. |
| Alt text |
The ‘alt’ attribute for the IMG HTML tag. It is used in HTML to attribute a text field to an image on a web page, normally with a descriptive function, telling a search engine or user what an image is about and displaying the text in instances where the image is unable to load. Also called Alt Tag. |
| Branding (or visual identity or corporate identity) |
How your logo, colours and styling elements are translated from traditional print-based assets to digital. |
| Breadcrumbs |
Links, usually on the top of the page, that indicate where a page is in the hierarchy of the website. |
| Call to Action |
A phrase written to motivate the reader to take action (sign up for our newsletter, book car hire today etc.). |
| Content Management System (CMS) |
A system that allows an administrator to update the content of a website, so that a developer is not required to do so. |
| Common page elements |
Items that appear on every page of a website. |
| Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) |
A programming language that defines the styles (fonts, colours, etc.) used to display text and content. Web pages are one of the places that this language is used. |
| dpi |
Dots per inch (in an image). On the web, the screen resolution is 72dpi. |
| Flash |
Technology used to show video and animation on a website. It can be bandwidth heavy and unfriendly to search engine spiders. |
| HyperText Markup Language (HTML) |
The code language predominantly used to create and display web pages and information online. |
| HTML5 |
A broad range of technologies that allow for rich media content and interaction on the scale of Adobe Flash, but which, unlike its counterpart, does not require additional third-party plugins. It allows rich multimedia content to be displayed that can easily be viewed by users, computers and devices. HTML5 is the next iteration of the HTML standard. |
| Information architecture |
The way in which data and content are organised, structured and labelled to support usability. |
| Landing page |
The page a user reaches when clicking on a paid or organic search engine listing. The pages that have the most success are those that match up as closely as possible with the user’s search query. |
| Meta data |
Information that can be entered about a web page and the elements on it to provide context and relevant information to search engines. |
| Native mobile application |
A mobile application designed to run as a program on a specific device or mobile operating system. |
| Navigation |
How a web user moves through a website, and the elements that assist the user in doing so. |
| Open source |
Unlike proprietary software, open source software makes the source code available so that other developers can build applications for the software, or even improve on the software. |
| Proprietary software |
Any software that one or more intellectual property holders own and licence to others in exchange for compensation, subject to certain restrictions. Licensees may not be able to change, share, sell or reverse engineer the software. |
| Robots.txt |
A file written and stored in the root directory of a website that restricts search engine spiders from indexing certain pages of the website. |
| Search engine results page (SERP) |
The actual results returned to the user based on their search query. |
| Sitemap |
On a website, a page that links to every other page in the website, and displays these links organised according to the information hierarchy. |
| Universal Resource Locator (URL) |
A web address that is unique to every page on the Internet. |
| Usability |
A measure of how easy a system is to use. Sites with excellent usability fare far better than those that are difficult to use. |
| Web application framework |
Software used to help create dynamic web properties more quickly. This is done through access to libraries of code for a specific language or languages and other automated or simplified processes that do not then need to be coded from scratch. |
| W3C |
World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees the Web Standards project. |
| Web server |
A computer or program that delivers web content to be viewed on the Internet. |
| eXtensible Markup Language (XML) |
A standard used for creating structured documents.
|
