>GLOSSARY

Brand

An identifying symbol, words, or mark that distinguishes a product or company from its competitors. For many products and companies, branding is an essential part of marketing.

Branding

Entire process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product (good or service) in the consumers' mind, through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

Browsers

A program used to surf the world wide web, popular browsers include Firefox, Safari, Opera & Internet Explorer. Not all web browsers display webpages the same. Internet Explorer for example often displays things differently that are shown exactly the same in the other browsers. For this reason, web developers usually have to add extra code specifically for Internet Explorer. If you are not using it already, we would recommend downloading firefox to ensure you get the full web experience

CSS

A language used to program the style, look & layout of websites. CSS files are usually known as stylesheets. They are the modern way to style websites. CSS can be applied without stylesheets but the modern way to do it is via an external stylesheet.

Domain Name

This is the name that identifies an Web site. For example, "microsoft.com" is the domain name of Microsoft's Web site. Domain names are limited to what is available, you may wish to buy trade-supplies.co.uk for your business but if someone else has already registered this then you wont be able to buy it. Variations on registered domain names are a way round this, for example uk-tradingsupplies.co.uk. If a .co.uk domain name has been taken, then are usually alternatives so you may find tradingsupplies.com or tradingsupplies.net may be available instead.

Flash

Flash is a popular software program used by web developers. Flash enables developers to combine animation with interactive code, as such a lot of games on the internet are produced with flash. The carousel on the homepage is a flash program. Some developers code whole websites in flash without using any traditional HTML or CSS on the site. The advantage of this is that there is a lot more scope for what can be done however a significant disadvantage is search engines have difficulties indexing websites coded in flash since search engines are programs to index HTML pages. This means a website coded in flash may not ever appear in a search engine's results.

Hosting Server

A hosting server is a computer that is connected to the internet and holds files that make up a website. For a website to be online and viewable by the world, it's files must be stored in a server connected to the internet.

Indexing by Search Engines

Search engine indexing refers to the process where search engines such as google store information about your site to enable it to be searchable when a user types keywords into a search request. If your website is not indexed by all the major search engines then it will not come up in a search request.

Platforms

Platforms in a IT context refers to the many different devices that can be used to access the internet. For instance: screen readers, mobile phones, iPods, netbooks, PCs

Search Engine

An online program used to search the world wide web, for example google, yahoo, ask.

Screen readers

Devices used by partially sighted or blind people to access webpages on the internet. As they cannot see, they screen reader reads out the text on the webpage. Websites have to be coded corrected for screen readers to be able to do their job correctly otherwise they simply wont work. This is why all Absolute Websites' webpages are developed to be fully compliant with screen readers in accordance with W3C Standards.

Sitemap

A document listing all the pages within a website that it submitted to google for them to index and store in their database

Splash Screen

An introduction screen to a website or program, usually a short animation

W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is: To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

XHTML

A language used to code websites that enaable them to be W3C standards compliant meaning they will work on a varierty of different platforms