Accessibility

The extent to which a website can be accessed by people with disabilities.

Alt Tags

Strings of text that are used to describe images and photos on a website to search engines and screen readers (programs that ‘read’ the contents of a website to somebody with sight difficulties). They also help a website’s search engine position when they contain keywords.

Anchor Text

Text on a web page that contains a hyperlink which directs you to another page.

Blog

An online ‘journal’ used to upload and post news, comments and thoughts. Originates from "web-log".

Breadcrumbs

A ‘trail’ that displays the navigation route you have travelled to get to where you are. They are normally found at the top of a page and make it very easy to jump back to a previous page.

Browser

A browser is a software program used to access and view websites. Examples are Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

An external style sheet used to control the presentation and structure of a web page.

Domain Name

The domain name is the unique name that identifies a website. Domain names always have two or more parts separated by dots.

E-commerce

E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the process of buying, selling and transferring money through websites.

Favicon

A optional small graphic that is displayed next to a domain name in the browser’s address bar. They are created individually for each website.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

FTP is a common way of transferring or uploading the files from a computer to a hosting server via the internet.

Google

The most commonly used search engine, accounting for over 65% of searches.

Google Analytics

This is Google’s own website traffic and marketing effectiveness tool. It provides statistics and summarised data on your visitor numbers, where they are, how they found your page, if they are returning, how long they looked and so on.

Graphic Interchange Format (GIF)

A GIF is a graphics file format which is compressed so that the file can be quickly and easily transmitted over a network. It is the most commonly used graphics format on the internet.

Header Tags

These are used to format text sizing in web pages to enhance readability and relevance for search terms.

Home Page

Also known as the index page, this is the first page of a website from which all other pages should be accessible.

Hosting

This is when storage space for the website files is rented on a dedicated computer server which enables anybody to access the website via the web.

HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML)

Website pages are written in HTML, also known as ‘Hypertext’. The language consists of tags used to define sections of a document. HyperText also allows documents to be connected via links.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HTTP is a protocol by which computers communicate with each other over the internet.

Hyperlink

This a part of a web page that when clicked on, will display a different page specified by its URL.

Internet

The internet is global system of interconnected computers that form a huge network of networks. These computers communicate with each other through a set of common software standards known as protocols to serve billions of users. These protocols allow the sending and receiving of emails; viewing of web pages; the transfer of files between one computer and another; instant messaging, etc. The internet carries a massive range of information resources and services such as the hypertext documents that comprise the World Wide Web.

Internal Links

These are links places on a website that are used to navigate within the website’s different pages.

Internet Protocol Address (IP Address)

Each machine connected to the internet has an address known as an Internet Protocol address (IP address). The IP address takes the form of four numbers separated by dots, for example: 123.45.67.890

JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group

The JPEG or JPG is a compression standard for still images developed by an industry committee. JPEG refers to the graphics file format that uses this compression standard.

Keywords

These are the words and search phrases that people use to search for something on the internet. They are used to optimise a website and help a website’s search engine position over time.

Meta Tags

These refer to HTML coding on a website that is used by search engines to index a website. The most important meta tags are the title, description and keyword tags. Search engines use meta tags in different ways to assess the relevance of a particular website to different search phrases.

Organic Listings

These are the search results that are displayed in the free section of Google; as opposed to the paid-for “sponsored links”.

Page Rank

This is the score that Google gives your web page depending on the quality and quantity of your inward links (ie links from other websites).

PPC - Pay Per Click

This is sponsored listing in Google where advertisers are charged when someone clicks on the listing.

Reciprocal Link

When a web page contains a link to another website on the understanding that your website will receive one in return.

Search Engine

A search engine is a type of software that creates indexes of databases or Internet sites based on the titles of files, keywords, or the full text of files. The search engine has an interface that allows you to type what you're looking for into a blank field. It then gives you a list of the results of the search. When you use a search engine on the Web, the results are presented to you in hypertext, which means you can click on any item in the list to get the actual file.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

The refers to the technique of enhancing a website to achieve good results in search engine listings once a relevant search is undertaken. Various website elements are important when optimising a website, including the website content and structure, the meta tags, links and submission process.

Search Engine Spider

This is a software ‘robot’ that Google sends out into the web to crawl all the websites, going from one website to another using links. It indexes the sites and enables Google to assess the importance and relevance of individual websites.

Sitemap

A website page that lists all the other pages on the website. Sitemaps enable easy navigation and users and search engines alike.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

The URL is the unique address for a website page on the World Wide Web.

Upload

The process by which files are transferred from a local computer to a remote computer.

Validation

The process of ensuring that a website conforms to the appropriate rules and guidelines to ensure accessibility to disabled visitors. HTML and CSS coding for a site can be validated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where the rules and guidelines for website accessibility are agreed.

Webmail

When you can use any computer to access your email by entering an online mail service such as googlemail, yahoo and hotmail.