Have you ever felt like a nodding dashboard dog? Pretending that a load of technical mumbo jumbo is sinking in, when in reality you are absolutely bewildered and not only do you not understand what is being said, but you have convinced the culprit of your baffled state into believing you know what they are talking about too!? Oh dear, what a sticky predicament to find yourself in! Without meaning to though your head continues to nod which keeps the jargon flowing and sends you deeper into a hole of utter cluelessness!
Meta tags, hyperlinks (external & internal), resolutions, navigation bars, frames, image maps not to mention the abbreviations like URL, CSS, HTML. Unintelligible gibberish to some but perfect sense to those in the world of web design.
At Lingo, we want to share knowledge with you to help you understand, and where industry specific language is used, we make sure it’s easy to take on board, and will make sure you are not left reeling from jargon overload. If you are really green, here’s a few starters to show you how we break down the lingo and make it easy for you to take in.
Starting with the basics, and a fundamental term upon which web design is based, is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). This is the name of the language system for building components on web pages such as body text, font and colour, as well as graphics and hyperlinks. Think that the internet speaks in a foreign language? This language is HTML. The appearance and layout of a web page can be made by applying a ‘CSS’ (Cascading Style Sheet) which is basically a HTML template that can be applied to a web site to make it look a certain way. If a website is made up of HTML, a language, then CSS is the dialect, or accent that it speaks in! (It determines the style of the page).
Just to re-track ‘hyperlink’ is a way of moving from one place to another either within the same web site or to a separate web site altogether. Handy when viewing a web site and useful for directing web users to the best place to get information. A hyperlink within the same web site is known as an internal link whereas a link to a different site is called external.
Meta tags are a special HTML ‘tag’ that provides information about a web page. They are descriptive key words about the information on the page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. But they are vital in boosting the number of hits on your website. Hits by the way just means how many views your website has had by internet users. Web site owners can view how many hits they’ve had, which is great to see if improvements to the site have increased audience figures or not.
The internet is something you use everyday, so you shouldn’t be worried by the baffling words about it. It’s not a profane language but a specialized lingo that can be learnt and understood. It is best to start off with just a few terms, and as you would learn a new language, gradually build up your vocabulary. Check out this space soon for another friendly push towards being in the know and down with the lingo!