BE SEEN WEB DESIGN GLOSSARY

 

Do you ever get confused by all the terms you see on the web? Well here at Be Seen Web Design, we have created a list of the terms we use on a daily basis and then created a glossary of them for you. If you have any terms you are unsure about just send us an e-mail and we'll explain it to you.

 

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

D2D

Distributor to Distributor

Declaration

A declaration is a property and it's value (ex. font-family and Veranda) when discussing CSS

Dedicated Line

A permanent connection to the internet, using an individual separate, phone lines.

Delisting

When pages are removed from a search engines index. This may happen because they have been banned or for other reasons, such as an accidental glitch on the search engine's part.

Description tags

A meta tag that allows the author to control the text of the summary displayed when the page appears in search engine results. Some search engines respond to this information, others ignore it.

DHTML

Dynamic HTML adds more elegance to basic HTML. With DHTML, you can make changes without causing the whole screen to redraw. So, for example, in a DHTML site, users can roll over a menu and see the choices change color, or they see one graphic to turn into another graphic. A good DHTML programmer can write code that will be 'friendly' to all browsers and types of computers

Directory

Is a database of websites usually broken into category. A directory also includes information about the website.

Discussion Board
A discussion board is a general term for any online "bulletin board" where you can leave and expect to see responses to messages you have left. Or you can just read the board.

Discussion Group

An Internet forum is a web application which provides for discussion, often in conjunction with online communities. Older forums date back to around 1996, following the newsgroups and bulletin board systems which were widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. Popular discussion topics include technology, computer games, and politics, but forums are available for any number of different topics. Same meaning as Discussion board.

Domain name

The address of your website. (ex. www.thisisyourdomain.com)

Domain Registrar

A domain registrar is a company or organization involved in registering domain names on the Internet.

Doorway page

Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimised to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

DPI

Stands for Dots per inch. This term is used with printers and other output devices to describe the quality.

DSL
Stands for Digital Subscriber Line. A fast internet connection over a phone line.

Dynamic

Is a type of web page that changes every time you visit it. It lets you enter information that aids it in deciding what to show you next. These page usually end with .php .asp and others.

Dynamic Content

Web page content that changes or is changed automatically based on database content or user information. You can usually spot dynamic sites when the URL ends with .asp, .cfm, .cgi or .shtml, but it's also possible to serve dynamic content with standard static pages (.htm or .html). Many search engines index dynamic content, but some don't if there's a "?" character in the URL.

E-zine

Stands for electronic magazine. It is a type of magazine that is available by e-mail only. For example we have a e-zine.

Face to Face

In the online world, it means meeting someone offline as opposed to online thru social networking sites.

Feed

Means RSS feed. I discussed this in my blog post RSS Feeds. A Feed is an XML based summary of a blogs or websites' news updates. A feed is readable, by feed readers, humans and computers. Feeds are used to get all the information for your favorite blogs to your feed reader without visiting a bunch of different websites.

Fisk

Is to take each point from an article and examine it. This word comes from Robert Fisk a target of such critical articles in the blogesphere.

Flash

Vector graphic animation software made by Macromedia that allows flash graphics to look the same across all browsers, as long as plug-ins are installed.

Forms

A way for website visitors to communicate with the website or other people instead of sending an e-mail. An example of a small form is our newsletter subscription box, where you enter your e-mail address.

Frame

In animation it is a single layer or image of the series.

Frames

A website design method where two or more pages are a viewed as one page divided into sections.

Freeware

Freeware are computer aplications that you ay download off the Internet for free. Freeware products are often demo or striped down versions of more elaborate programs. The whole idea is that you will try it out and like it and then buy the full version. For example for web design, some we use program called Windows Media Encoder for our video tutorials, if is a freeware application provided from Microsoft.

FTP

Stands for File Transfer Protocol. Allows you to send files to one computer from another over the internet. FTP Is a common method of moving files from one or more Internet websites. FTP is basically uploading (sending) and downloading (receiving) from a remote computer. Some people use a FTP client. (FTP Program) to upload or download the programs. Most browsers can accomplish this by just typing in( ex. ftp://web_design_ftp_files). For most FTP sites you need a user name and password to acces the files but others allow you to download and not upload using an Anonymous login ID.

FTP server

A web server you can log onto and upload or download your files.

GB

Stands for Giga Byte.

GIF

Stands for Graphic Interchange Format. A loss less graphics format used on the web. It supports transparency.

Google dance

While the Google update is in progress, search results for each of Google's nine datacenters are different. The positions of a site appears to "dance" as it fluctuates minute to minute. "Google dance" is an unofficial term coined to refer to the period when Google is performing the update to its index. Google may be changing their index calculation method to allow for a continuous update (which will effectively end the roughly monthly dances).