Web design terminology explained

Getting a website designed and built for the first time can be a daunting task. The hardest thing of all can be getting to grips with the technology and terminology that can be complicated. The web is continually evolving with fast moving changes in the way technology and humans communicate with each other. Below you will find a list of website terms you may have come across already and tries to explain these in non techy english. It is hoped that you will find these useful in choosing your interactive agency.

Search Engine Optimisation SEO

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a service that focuses on improving a website's visibility on search engines under specific keyword searches. This is done through trying to anticipate how search engines work and building a site with this in mind to obtain the highest ranking possible under specific keywords. For example lets say you are a shop selling toys for pets online. You are a new online venture and no one knows you exist. How are you going to generate visitors to your site and hopefully turn them into sales?

One option is to think about people using search engines who are looking for the services you are offering. They need your products but you need to think about what keywords they are using to try and find somebody selling toys for pets. The interactive agency you choose would build your website in a way from content, coding and site structure that would give those keywords the highest visibility possible for in web search engines.

The techniques employed to try and give these search terms the highest visibility possible have given the Search Engine Optimisation industry a bit of a bad name as there are companies out there willing to employ techniques that try and unfairly manipulate search engines to get them to rank their sites highly. These sites when discovered can be banned. Google the most dominant search engine in terms of market share have written an excellent article on the subject.

Another important consideration when optimising your website is having other sites on the web linking to yours. This is important as this is like having another external website referring or voting for your site by linking to you. This in tern gives your website more importance. This importance can be seen as a page rank. By downloading the google toolbar to your browser you can find out google's page rank of a particular website. It is understood that having a website with a page rank that is high is a good way for your site to improve its page rank and thus be found over other websites competing for similar keywords.

Search Engine Optimisation can be performed by Search Engine Optimisation companies or interactive agencies that specialise is Seach Engine Optimisation like Creative Theorem. If you would like to talk to us about how we can optimise your site click here.

XML

XML stands for extensible markup language and is a web technology that helps describe data. Computers interact by sending messages between each other. XML can be thought of as a universal web language describing that data. Before XML computer applications had to be integrated to enable different systems to communicate. By using XML as a global internet standard computer systems now have a way of transferring data and interpreting that data easily. The systems can be running completely different technology as long as the two agree on the XML tags used for communication this data can be easily manipulated by the two systems.

XML sounds great by how does this effect my website. Well XML is used in numerous types of systems as well as web pages. XHTML is used to describe to content of a webpage with CSS describing the formatting of that page. XHTML enables web browsers to be written using this standard which means your website can be viewed on all kinds of devices from mobile phones, laptops and PDA's and new emerging devices too. That is of course if you choose an interactive agency that uses latest XHTML technology to develop your site.

CSS

CSS is an abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a way of defining the formating and "look and feel" of a web page. This is important as one can separate the data from the way that data looks making the website easier to maintain and also making the website easier to interpret by web browsers using XML technology. The style sheets are called cascading as they are separated into sections that can cascade or lay on top of each other. As a leading interactive agency Creative Theorem uses industry best practice XHTML & CSS when developing its websites.

Web Services

Web services are web applications that can communicate with other web applications and computer systems over a network such as the world wide web. Web services use XML as a communications protocol and is a from of distributed computing.

With web services application functions can be written and published to allow systems to communicate with other systems openly. This enables different computer systems to communicated in ways that before was impossible.

An example of a web service could be an application that allows your website to send an order to a third party system that processes payment, sends a message to a separate system to process a fax invoice to the customer and then send a confirmation to your site and customer that the order has been processed or not.

Web services allow this kind of communication possible allowing system components to be distributed across the web and reused. Your web based software system can ask a question to another remote system like "can you process this order" or "can you calculate this for me please" and receive an answer. The rules for locating, integrating and communicating with web services applications in defined in SOAP an XML-based technology defined by the W3C. The UDDI is a no cost registry where one can publish and query different web services.

Creative Theorem is an interactive agency that specialises in web services integration and software development. Contact us if you would like some examples of what we have done in this area for clients.

PHP

PHP is short for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a scripting language that has become very popular in developing dynamic & database driven websites. This popularity is down to the fact that the language was designed for use on the web, its relative simplicity and open source nature which means that one can add functionality to PHP ones self offering complete control.

MYSQL

MYSQL is a relational database management system (RDMS) recently acquired by Sun Microsystems. The purpose of this RDBMS is to provide a secure mechanism for the storage and retrieval of data. MYSQL has become one of the most popular RDBMS in use on the web in part due to the way it complements PHP. Some high profile websites that use the MYSQL database include You Tube, Flickr and Wikipedia.

Wireframe

A wireframe is a front end prototype of a website or web based software system. It is usually developed from a functional specification that defines the system and user functions. The wire frame usually is a bare bones online prototype with no graphics or backend functionality. It serves to display and finalise the user functions of the software system and to analyse any changes to the functional specification. Not every interactive agency will use this approach to developing a system but we think that on many projects it is an excellent way to define system functionality, get that functionality signed off and hence increase the projects time to market.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an online marketing practice that aims to generate traffic to a specific website by having many websites linking to that website promoting specific products our services on it.

This enables the merchant website to have an extended network of sites on the net generating leads that can be turned into sales. For the affiliate this allows them to gain extra revenue by promoting products and services on their site. Our Interactive Agency is an expert in online marketing and have good working relationships with some of the mayor affiliate networks and direct affiliate programs. We would be happy to advise you on that best way to profit form this innovate form of internet marketing.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click advertising is a system whereby one bids for people visiting your website based on specific keywords. Each visit is a "click" and for each click one specifies the amount one is prepared to pay. This form of advertising aims to compliment natural search rankings by enabling the a website to get exposure for search terms that it would unwise not be ranked highly for.

Google's Pay Per Click programe is called google adwords. Microsoft has one called adcentre and yahoo has Yahoo Search Marketing. Each of these allows you to bid for search position on each of the search engines.

Web Analytics

It is crucial for any web master to be able to track and monitor web traffic. There are a number of software tools that enable you to do this some of them may be included in your hosting package or others are third party software that you can use.

Good web analytic software can help you track the users of your website overtime. It can tell you the number of unique visitors, their locations, the keywords they are searching under and the areas of the site they are visiting as well as how long they are spending on different areas of the site.

A good interactive agency will monitor this data for its clients and suggest ways that the website can be modified to improve not just the number of users coming to the site but be able to convert those users into customers.