Website Design Abbreviations

Here at Force 4 - we promise never to bamboozle you with any website design "lingo", but have you ever wondered what any of it stands for?  Here are a handful and their brief explanations:

.png =                   Stands for: "Portable Network Graphics". This file type uses lossless compression and is similar to a GIF. It’s meant for use on the web and can’t be used in a CMYK (print) colour space. Unlike GIF files PNG does not support animation.

Hero =                  A common term used to refer to the main image on a homepage or landing page.

HTML =                 Stands for: "HyperText Markup Language".  Consists of different tags combined to create the structure of any website. The tags are put together in pairs with the content of your website filling in the spaces in between.

CMS =                   Stands for: "Content Management System".  A CMS allows its users to edit, delete and manage the content of a website from a visual interface.  

FTP =                     Stands for: "File Transfer Protocol".  FTP is used to transfer all kinds of files around the Internet, including HTML files.

Alt =                        Stands for: "Alternate text".  Used to describe an image. Used by search engines and screen readers in place of an image.

SEO =                      Stands for: "Search Engine Optimisation".  Planning out and writing a website’s content to improve the likelihood of it showing up for relevant search terms in search engines such as: Google, Yahoo etc.

DNS =                      Stands for: "Domain Name Server".  DNS translates easy to remember website addresses like "www.force4computing.co.uk" into numerical IP addresses that computers can process.

URL =                       Stands for: "Uniform Resource Locator".  URLs can be website addresses or an address for any other file or resource on the Internet. URLs tell computers where to go to access Internet content.

PHP =                      Hypertext Preprocessor (also defined as "Personal Home Page"). PHP is a scripting language, often used with MySQL databases to connect websites to databases.

HTTPS =                  Stands for: "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure".  This abbreviation is used to tell web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox that the user wants to load a website.  This is a secure version of HTTP that can be used to transmit secure and sensitive information.  

DHTML =                 This is a combination of the Document Object Model (DOM), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript that allows HTML to interact more directly with the readers.   

CSS =                       Stands for: “Cascading Style Sheets”. These documents contain the colours, fonts, layout and overall appearance of a website. They are separated from the HTML structure to reduce repeating the styling of similar elements on multiple pages. A style sheet may only need to be altered once to have an effect on multiple pages of a website, hence having a cascading effect. 

We hope you have learnt something !!  Thanks for reading.