Glossary

Branding

Branding is the most important part of any business today. A brand ensures that clients see you, recognize you, and know your basic goods/services at a glance. Branding includes everything from your business logo, the colors in it, to your business cards, even down to the font you use on your website.

This is not something to be rushed through or skimped on at whatsoever. You know what is said about first impressions, this is especially true for business. Entities that change their brand frequently experience backlash from their patrons as the product they’ve trusted and used is no longer easily recognized.

Call to Action

Generally an info-graphic used to convert website visitors into customers. The most common calls to action are things like “April Special: 40% off all specially marked merchandise” but can have varying messages.

The call to action is designed to be a warm lead generator, and should match your logo/branding.

CMS

CMS stands for content management system. A CMS is used to manage content of a website.  A CMS has and easy to use interface, allowing users to create, edit and publish content. Most CMS are web-based, making updating the CMS software easy.

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. This tells HTML how to look and where to go. Things like font color, size, and position are controlled by CSS.

CSS 3

CSS 3 is the next evolution in styling websites. It supports more modern effects like drop shadow, rounded corners, and animations.

Along with HTML 5, CSS 3 is not fully supported in antiquated browsers like Internet Explorer.

Flash

Once all the rage of the internet, Flash is a now an antiquated way of bringing movement, video, and user interaction to the web. With the popularity of mobile devices, Adobe’s Flash can’t compete with mobile network load times and Adobe’s proprietary usage license. Companies like Apple and Google opted not to lease usage rights for Adobe’s multimedia engine, essentially crippling the demand for Flash’s function.

With modern advents like HTML5, jQuery, and CSS3 Flash has become an unnecessarily large and clunky delivery method for motion graphics and video.

HTML

This stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the basic language for all websites. The codes are wrapped in less than (<) and greater than (>) symbols to distinguish between text printed on the website and code to control images, layout, and function.

HTML 5

HTML 5 is the next step in the HTML language. It supports more modern things like built-in audio and video players that don’t require any extra Javascript or Flash elements.

Unfortunately, versions of Internet Explorer and other, older browsers do not support HTML 5 elements.

JavaScript

JavaScript is an object-oriented scripting language used to enhance user experience on websites.  JavaScript can be used to change and control the function of a website. JavaScript dynamically interacts with users such as mouse clicks, form inputs and page navigation.  JavaScript can be executed in all modern browsers .

jQuery

jQuery is an add-on for Javascript that simplifies modern effects like fading images and drop shadows just to name a couple. This is an incredibly powerful library as it’s capable of doing everything from collecting data to animating multiple layers of text and images. The real benefit of this language is not only its nice effects and presentation, but it’s incredibly lightweight code for browsers to process and doesn’t cause long load times like traditional Javascript.

jQuery is supported in all browsers including mobile devices and tablets. There are some issues with older systems, but jQuery is a widely supported language.

MySQL

MySQL is a popular open-source database management system developed by Oracle Corporation.

A database is used to organize a collection of data into tables. Databases can store mass amounts of information. MySQL and along with PHP is used to manage this infomation. It can be useful when information needs to be categorized.

MySQL is today’s standards for large websites

PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor is not a very good acronym for PHP. What PHP does is get data from a database and formats it to display on a webpage. This is how most all content management systems and websites on the internet work.

PHP is basically a machine reading a spreadsheet, grabbing certain information and displaying it. Notice how every product on eBay has the same sized thumbnail, title and description in the same place, etc. That’s PHP grabbing information from a database and formatting HTML for you to see.

Plugin

Plugins are addons that can be used to extend the functionality of a website. Plugins can be used to customize a website for specific uses and needs. For example, a plugin can be used to add galleries to a website.

Theme

A Theme is used to control the look and layout of your site. It is a collection of template files that work together. Instead of having an html files for each webpage, one theme template file can be used for all of the pages. Themes can be customized to have different layouts,  functions and can be used along side of plugins to really extend a website. WordPress uses themes to display web blogs.

Third Party

Third party (or 3rd party) in web jargon means basically the same thing it does in the real world. It’s an external piece of code or imagery that’s implemented to extend functionality.

There are some amazing 3rd party tools out there, but the detriment is the lack of control over things like styling and function. Also, not all 3rd party features play nicely together, so many times there are issues using multiple 3rd party extensions.

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. It is Open Source and developed by millions of programmers from all across the world.

Although WordPress started as a blogging platform, it’s Open Source policy has allowed for significant growth into something beyond basic blogging software. It is responsible for over 17% of websites in the world and makes client website management extremely simple. Updating your WordPress website is about as simple as updating your status on Facebook.