Glossary of Web Design Terms (S-Z)

Search Engine

A search engine is a program which conducts searches on the World Wide Web for websites and documents which contain specified keywords or phrases. The search engine then provides the user with a list of documents containing the specified keywords or phrases. Some of the more commonly used search engines include Google, MSN, and Yahoo to name but a few.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to the practice of boosting a website’s popularity with search engines by including suitable keywords and phrases to increase its ranking in search engine results. Basically in order for a website to be easily located by a user, you need your website to rank high in search engine results. Thus Search Engine Optimisation provides users with a greater opportunity to locate your website on the vast World Wide Web.

Shockwave

Shockwave is a plug-in which enables you browser to display applications created by Macromedia.

Shopping Cart

Shopping cart is an online application which permits users of a website to browse an online catalogue and add items which they wish to purchase to their shopping cart. Following the completion of adding items to their shopping cart, users may then proceed to ‘check out’, which is where purchases are totalled and payment is made.

Spam

Spam refers to the act of sending unsolicited advertisements and commercial documents to users of email and newsgroups.

Spider

A spider is automated software which crawls through hyperlinks and pages on the World Wide Web to collate data to enable search engine to build a summary of the content of a given website.

Splash Page

A splash page refers to an introduction display of a website which is displayed prior to the website’s homepage. A splash page is generally animated and introduces users to the products or services on offer.

Spyware

Spyware is a hidden software parasite which when installed in your computer can collect information and unknown to you convey details to its author.

Status Bar

The panel at the base of your computer browser window is known as the status bar. When a user moves its cursor of a hyperlink, this will results in either information about the destination of the hyperlink to its web address to be displayed in the status bar. JavaScript can be used to control the content displayed in the status bar.

Streaming

Streaming refers to content, generally of multimedia format, which plays as it is downloaded. Real Audio and QuickTime ate examples of streaming media.

Tag

A Tag or HTML tag refers to a formatting command written into a document thus specifying how it should be formatted.

Templates

Templates are used on websites to give a sense of continuance and consistency across its web pages. Thus templates create web pages which look and navigate in the same manner but may contain diverse content.

Thumbnail

A thumbnail is a smaller version of a larger image or pictures on a webpage. A thumbnail image usually contains a hyperlink for users to access the full size image.

Traffic

Traffic in web terms refers to the number of users which have visited a given website.