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.
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