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The Terminology of the Web Design Industry Anchor Anchors are links that jump to another part of the same page. In fact, anchors are used on this very page. Click on the terms to the left to see what I mean. ASP This is a programming language but its not a very good one : Content Content is a word we often use to describe the information that you display on your site. Content is usually text but can also be images, videos, Flash, or music.Cookie A cookie is a small text file that a website sometimes saves to a person's computer. The real purpose of cookies is to make the life of the website viewer easier. When you visit a website and you go to the login screen to find that your username/email is already filled out, that is an example of what cookies can be used for. If you say yes to this option, one way for the website to save your username is to place a cookie on your computer containing the username. Then when you re-visit the site, the website looks for that cookie.Crawlers Sometimes referred to as a spider or a robot, it is a computer program which searches the internet for websites and reads their contents. Search engines use them to review millions of websites in a very short period of time. Usually the search engine wants to read the content on the site to see what its about. Then when people do searches on the search engine later, the search engine knows what sites to display because it already crawled them all. CSS This acronym stands for Cascading Style Sheets. What this means is that the settings for how your site looks is centralized to one file. That might not mean much to you now but if you want to change a font or a color on your site, its nice to just change one file instead of every single individual page on your site. Data-Driven Web Design See Dynamic Web Design Domain Name A domain name, often referred to as a URL or a website's address, is the unique name that is assigned to your website such as http://www.yoursite.com where the "yoursite.com" part is the domain name, and technically the whole thing all together is the URL. It is important to note that the .com part is called the extension and that different extensions mean different domain names. So yoursite.com is not the same as yoursite.net. Dynamic Web Design Dynamic websites are ones which get a significant amount of their content from a database. At AZPixels we usually use a type of database called MySQL. Dynamic sites offer many advantages over the alternative - static sites. Some things that are possible with dynamic sites that are not with static ones include: custom search results, login systems, calendars, shopping carts, and statistics tracking. Flash Flash is a product made by Adobe and previously by Macromedia. Flash is basically the easiest way to accomplish animation on sites today. An example of this animation can easily be found at the top of this page. The header of this website is entirely made in Flash. Some other examples of our flash includes...Full Flash Website Online Commercial Host (Or Website Host) A hosting company is commonly used to host your website and make it available for others to see. technically you could host your own site but if anything happened to your computer (including turning it off), then your website would stop working. Not to mention if you had lots of traffic to your site, your home computer would not be able to handle the amount of people visiting your site. So most people use hosting companies which have 24-7 on hand staff that support the computers, make sure they are being overworked, and more importantly they usually provide email solutions in addition to hosting your site. HTML This acronym stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. All you need to know about HTML is that it is the fundamental building blocks of all websites. If you right-click on this screen RIGHT HERE, you should see a menu with an option to view the "Source" of this page. The gibberish text that comes up is HTML. Also, HTML is not a programming language for all you freelance website designers out there who list it on your resume as one JavaScript This is a programming language which is used for many things to enhance your websites. One common example is when users are filling out a form to submit, and when they click the submit button they might get an immediate error suggesting that the form was not filled out correctly. Its JavaScript that makes this possible. Keyword or Key Phrase This is a subject of within Search Engine Optimization. A keyword is a word or collection of words that you anticipate people will search for in search engines in order to find a site like yours. For instance, keywords for this website which does website design are... Phoenix Website Designers Custom Website Design Flash Websites When people type in these phrases, AZPixels is a candidate for coming up in the search results. To learn more about which websites come up first in search results. See Search Engine Optimization. Linux Linux is a software which runs and controls a server, See Server. Meta-Tags This is a subject of within Search Engine Optimization. A meta-tag is a hidden piece of information within a website. Originally meta-tags were used to tell search engine crawlers how to categorize your website. So if you said the word "Website Design" in your meta-tags, that means that when people type that keyword, your site will appear. But remember, this is the way it used to be. For many years now, search engines have ignored meta-tags because of website designers abusing meta-tags for dishonest purposes. MySQL This is a type of database which has grown in popularity in the last several years. Many of our clients who are unfamiliar with databases and MySQL wonder how much information can be stored in these systems. The answer is usually 100 times more that what they need. If you are using a MySQL Database or any other database for your website then you have a Dynamic Website and not a Static one. Organic Search Listings This is a subject of within Search Engine Optimization. Organic search listings means when someone types in a keyword into a search engine, your website comes up. You can read our detailed description of this concept on our page: About Search Engine Optimization. Page Hit If you have a stats program for your website, you can probably see how many page hits you are getting. While the definition of a "hit" can vary, usually people are referring to how many pages got viewed on their website. So if 100 people saw your site yesterday and each person looked at 3 pages, you would have 300 page hits. See also Unique Visitors vs. Unique Visits Pay-Per-Click This is a subject of within Search Engine Optimization. When it comes to getting listed on search engines, there are two ways to do it. Pay-Per-Click is an arrangement where you pay for every click that someone does on a search engine to get to your site. Typically you can bid on how much you want to pay. But in the bidding aspect of PPC, the high bidders usually get better position on the page. PHP This is a programming language which makes it possible to make dynamic websites. Server-Side Programming Languages like PHP are responsible for how huge the web has become today. With PHP, a website can do database searches, uploads, security, logins, signups, emails, statistics, reports, and much more. Search Engine A search engine is not the same thing as a search directory. A search engine is a huge database of websites which have been visited by crawlers which read the site to determine its contents. When you type keywords into the search box of Google, the servers at Google will display websites that most closely match your search based on what the crawlers found on your site. Search Engine Optimization This is the scientific process of designing your site so that search engine crawlers will list you more closely to the top of the results. Read more about this process on our page: About Search Engine Optimization. Search Directory A search directory is not the same thing as a search engine. Directories are similar to phonebooks. There are main categories like Business and Arts. When you click on Business you might get a sub-category like Investments. There can be many sub-categories of sub-categories but eventually you will see a list of sites that match the category you are in. Server A server is a computer which hosts websites. In other words, your "website host company" is one that has many powerful servers which holds sometimes hundreds of websites per server. When someone types your domain name into their browser to look at your site, their computer will connect to the server which will send the file Static Web Design Static website is what most small websites are. Static just means that the information doesn't change easily like it does for dynamic websites. Static sites are usually much cheaper and faster to make that dynamic sites. Unique Visitors vs. Unique Visits Both of these website statistics are useful and its also useful to know the difference. A unique visitor is one person visiting your site for a variable amount of times. So if two people visit your site over and over again, you will only have two unique visitors (the number doesn't go up with the amount of times they visit: See Page Hits). Unique visits shows how many times your site has been visited regardless of how many pages were viewed. So if one person goes to your site five different times and a second person visits one time, that would count as six unique visits but would be two unique visitors URL Website Address