Friday, October 3, 2008

Internet Glossary (part 1 of 4)

From time to time we stop and listen to ourselves talk about creating websites in the office and just laugh! CSS, broswers, platforms, png, jpg, gif, flash, swf, sitemaps etc. Our language can sound pretty crazy to a non-web person. So we thought it would be nice to share what some of these things are and help you understand our language more. This in turn will help you manage your online presence with more confidence and be able to tell the difference between buzzwords and web design terms! (a GIANT thank you to Wikipedia for help making the definitions even easier)

BROWSER: This is your window to the internet. These applications let you see the images, text and layout of web pages. Popular browsers include: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. We test your website on the popular versions of browsers to make sure your site looks good from the users end.

CSS (Casecading Style Sheets): Used to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of website pages. CSS improves content accessibility, provides more flexibility and control in the presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition. We highly recommend if your site is not using CSS to convert over. Many new browsers rely on this code to show your website in the best possible way to your visitors.

FLASH: Flash technology (sometimes called Adobe Flash) is a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. Flash can be very entertaining, but keep in mind Search Engines are as thrilled with all Flash websites. Ask us how to keep things moving AND keep you listed.

More terms coming next week! Stay tuned!