|
If you feel like your website design company is speaking
Greek, you’re not alone. We web designers use
web design technologies day after day and we’ve
developed our own little language that often leaves
the real world completely clueless. After working with
many customers that seem oblivious to what I’m
talking about, I determined to write an article explaining
web design technology in plain English so the general
public can better understand when discussing things
with a website development company.
A term you may hear your website development company
use that sounds confusing is CSS. This abbreviation
stands for cascading style sheets. Basically, CSS enables
a designer or programmer to control the way documents
are visually presented. For instance, a default font
may be set using CSS, then the style sheet can be used
on various pages in the website ensuring that they are
all consistent in looking. Because the style sheet is
used throughout the site, it only downloads once, so
the site will load faster and give quicker access to
its visitors. CSS can also be used to modify the look
of forms, text color, and more.
Another abbreviation you may run across in communications
with a website design company is HTML. HTML stands for
hyper text markup language. HTML is what makes
up most of the websites you see from day to day.
Take a look at the address bar. Notice how the
website address ends with .html? This means that
it's a "static html" page or in other words;
there's no programs or databases being used. "Static"
is a term that basically means unchanged. In most
cases the page was manually made. An example of
a "dynamic" page would be a results page of
search engine. Let's say you search for "Website
Development Company". The search engine then
retrieves all of the matching information from a database
and puts it onto the page you're viewing. If search
engines had to use "static html" pages for
every single search result they simply couldn't exist.
For the millions of searches made every day and the
constant updating search engines requires to do it would
be impossible to create enough pages to accommodate
what search engines need to keep up with.
So now you may find yourself asking, what is a dynamic
page? A dynamic page is usually made up of two
things. First you have the template, which is
the part of the page that won't need to change.
This is most commonly the top menu or "header"
and/or the bottom menu or "footer".
In most sites they will use the same header and footer
throughout the website. The second part is the
dynamic part of the page. Let’s say the
website was designed for real estate. If the website
design company enabled it with a search character, you
could search for a home with your desired specifications.
So if you searched for a 2 bedroom home in your town,
the program then runs through the database pulling all
the listings that match your query (search). You
are then presented with a page that shows you all the
matching listings. That is the dynamic part of
the page. As you may now see, using dynamic pages
can greatly decrease the workload and increase website
functionality.
Keep an eye on our site for the next version of this
article with more website development terms and technologies
explained.
|
Web Promotion FAQs
