Stands for Cascading Style Sheets. When designing a site, the creation of style sheets enables any changes to the design of the site to be made via amending a single style sheet, rather than going into each individual page and making amends.
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Web Design
Custom Error Page
A user-friendly page which displays an error message which is more readily understandable than the default messages which are provided by web servers.
See Also: Error Page
Dynamic Contact
Where a dynamic language such as PHP is utilised to provide content for a web page on demand. In the past search engines struggled to index dynamic content – and although this has improved many webmasters still elect to create some static pages for search engines to index.
Error Page
A page which is displayed when a given web page cannot be accessed.
See Also: Custom Error Page
Information Architecture
The way in which a site and the information within it is organised and structured.
JavaScript
JavaScript is a scripting language that runs locally on a users’ browser and is generally used for web development. Its primary use is through functions that can either be included from or embedded in HTML pages. Although syntactically similar to the programming language Java; JavaScript and Java are actually unrelated.
See Also: Java
Mouseover
A mouseover is a GUI event that occurs when a user hovers their mouse over a particular area of the GUI. Mouseover events are commonly used in web browsers where the URL or hyperlink can be viewed in the status bar when users’ hover over the link on a webpage. Web designers can also create their own mouseover events using JavaScript and/or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – An example of a common application of the mouseover event is a tooltip.
Navigation Bar
This is the top level navigation in any given website. Ordinarily this will either sit at the top of the page, or down the left hand side.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a representation of the structure of a website and should include all of the pages on a given domain. It’s typically used at the planning stage to assist in the design process, and when included on a live site acts as an alternative way to navigate for both search engine spiders and human users.
Sky Scraper
An industry standard sized banner with the following dimensions: 120 pixels (wide) x 600 pixel (high). The following other ad types also come under the Skyscraper banner – Wide Skyscraper 160 x 600 & Half Page 300 x 600.
Sniffer Script
A program which identifies which browser a visitor is using and serves them an appropriate version of the website. These scripts are also used to ascertain whether or not a user has flash, and therefore serve them an appropriate version of the site.
Standards Compliant
A term which refers to a website’s design being compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) standards. See also Web Standards.
Static
Static means unchanging; the opposite of dynamic. For example a Static URL will always lead to the same web page; whereas in sites where URLs are generated dynamically a given URL will not always lead to the same page; and may instead cause an error message to appear as the web page cannot be found.
Usability
How user-friendly (or otherwise) a particular site or particular pages of a site are.
Web Standards
Web Standards most commonly refers to the guidelines issued by the W3C regarding the accessibility and usability of web sites. For further details see http://www.w3.org/
See Also: Web Standards