UsefulDesign.org

Background
The background is like a canvas on top of which characters and graphics are placed. Some monitors allow you to control the color or shading of the background. Also referred to as a Background Tile.

Browser
Short for Web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages. The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. In the 90's Navigator ruled, but Microsoft IE has taken over most of the market share. Both of these are graphical browsers, which means that they can display graphics as well as text.

More on browsers

Domain (top-level domain or Domain name)
On the Internet, domains are attached to an IP address. All devices sharing a common part of the IP address are said to be in the same domain. A domain name is SOMETHING.COM or NAME.SOMETHING

DPI
Dots Per Inch - a measurement for graphics and image files.

Flash
A bandwidth friendly and browser independent vector-graphic animation technology made by Macromedia. As long as different browsers are equipped with the necessary plug-ins, Flash animations will look the same. Flash allows for all kinds of interactive animation no possible with plain HTML or DHTML

Font (aka Type-Face)
A design for a set of characters. A font is the combination of typeface and other qualities, such as size, pitch, and spacing.

Frames
A feature supported by most modern Web browsers than enables the Web author to divide the browser display area into two or more sections (frames). The contents of each frame are taken from a different Web page. Frames provide great flexibility in designing Web pages, but many designers avoid them because they are hard to index in search engines correctly.

More on Frames

GIF-
Pronounced jiff or giff (hard g) stands for graphics interchange format, a bit-mapped graphics file format used by the World Wide Web. GIF supports color and various resolutions. It also includes data compression, making it especially effective for scanned photos.

Hexadecimal Colors
Code used in HTML documents to specify the color of text and backgrounds displayed in web environments such as Netscape. Example #FFFFFF is white in html> each 2 digit section is a rgb value. The first two are the red value, the second are the green, and the third set are blue. This allows thousands of colors to be created with the six digit hex value.

More on choosing Colors

HomePage (Home, Index)
The main page or Index page of a Web site. Typically, the home page serves as an index or table of contents to other documents stored at the site.

Hosting (Web hosting)
A website must be on a computer that is connected to the internet, you pay a monthly fee to keep your web site up on a host. See Hosting 2020

HTML (HTM)
Short for HyperText Markup Language, the authoring language used to create documents on the World Wide Web. HTML defines the structure and layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags and attributes.

ISP
Short for Internet Service Provider, a company that provides access to the Internet. For a monthly fee, the service provider gives you a software package, username, password and access phone number.

JPEG (JPG)
("Jay - peg") Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and pronounced jay-peg. JPEG is a lossy compression technique for color images. Although it can reduce files sizes to about 5% of their normal size, some detail is lost in the compression.

Link (aka HREF aka Anchor)
In hypertext systems, such as the World Wide Web, a link is a reference to another document. Such links are sometimes called hot links because they take you to other document when you click on them. A link ususally leads to another URL or URI (see below)

Menu (Navigation)
You can enter another area on a site by simply pointing and clicking on a menu item. This is a list of links on a website.

MouseOver
A JavaScript element that triggers a change on an item (usually a graphic) in a Web page when the mouse passes over it. The change usually signifies that the item is a link to related or additional information. Mouseovers are widely used in Navigation Bars, pop-up boxes, and/or form submissions.

Resolution
Refers to the sharpness and clarity of an image or to the settings of a monitor. Most monitors run at 800x600 or 1024x768 DPI Resolution

Scrolling
To view consecutive lines of data on the display screen. The term scroll means that once the screen is full, each new line appears at the edge of the screen and all other lines move over one position. For example, when you scroll down, each new line appears at the bottom of the screen and all the other lines move up one row, so that the top line disappears.

The term vertical scrolling refers to the ability to scroll up or down. Horizontal scrolling means that the data moves sideways.

In theory, the display should move smoothly, as if it were a piece of paper being moved up, down, or sideways. In practice, however, scrolling is not always so smooth.

The scrolling method of viewing documents does not recognize page boundaries. One advantage to scrolling, therefore, is that you can look at the end of one page and the beginning of the next page at the same time.

Splash Page
A page in a Web site that the user sees first before being given the option to continue to the main content of the site. Splash pages are used to promote a company, service or product or are used to inform the user of what kind of software or browser is necessary in order to view the rest of the site's pages. Often a splash page will consist of animated graphics and sounds that entice the user into exploring the rest of the Web site. Some splash pages will bring the user to the main Web site automatically, and some require the user to click on a link that will load the main page.

SubPage
Any of the inside pages of a website. The home page menu contains links into the sites subpages.

Table
Refers to data arranged in rows and columns. A spreadsheet, for example, is a table.

URL (URI)
Abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.

Window
(1) An enclosed, rectangular area on a display screen. Most modern operating systems and applications have graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that let you divide your display into several windows. Within each window, you can run a different program or display different data.