Glossary
Our clients often have questions for us about Web development, and considering all the terms involved in creating even a simple Web site (.php, .css, .html, javascript, jquery, etc.), it’s no wonder! We always encourage you to contact us if you have any questions, but these terms may help out as well, especially if you’re interested in learning how to develop sites yourself.
- Browser
- CSS (cascading style sheets)
- CMS (content management system)
- LAMP stack
- PHP (hypertext preprocessor)
- Vector
- WordPress
Browser
A program or interface which displays information from Web sites. Browsers retrieve information from a server. Some examples of commonly-used browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome, and Mozilla’s Firefox. When we create Web sites, we test them in all browsers going back to Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3.0, and the most recent 4 versions of Google Chrome (new versions of Chrome are released monthly, and the vast majority of Chrome users update regularly).
Stylesheets take the content of your web site and change it’s appearance, from setting the color of the text to setting the sizes and appearance of various parts of the layout. This is all possible in HTML, of course, but the advantage is that for multiple pages, you only have to write the CSS file once. Change an attribute, and you could be changing the appearance of a particular element on 100 different HTML pages. This is a difficult concept for some beginners to grasp, so feel free to check out W3Schools or CSS3.info for more. We generally are using CSS3 in our sites, always making allowances for browsers that don’t support it just yet.
CMS (content management system)
A content management system is, for our purposes, software installed on a server which makes it easy for a web site to be updated and/or edited without technical knowledge. We use WordPress for all of the websites we develop from scratch.
LAMP is an acronym for a solution stack of free, open source software, originally coined from the first letters of Linux (operating system), Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (database software) and Perl/PHP/Python, principal components to build a viable general purpose web server.
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP, unlike HTML, runs on the server side, meaning that the web server translates it into HTML before sending it to your browser. That means that if you view the source code of a page, you won’t see any PHP code. Instead, you’ll likely see HTML code that’s been automatically generated by the PHP code a developer has written. PHP also is the “P” in the LAMP stack, the set of technology behind most websites.
Vector-based graphics (including .ai files created in Adobe Illustrator, among other programs), can be scaled to any size. They do not contain pixel-by-pixel data. Instead, they are mathematical representations of images, which is why they do not degrade in quality, no matter how large they become.
WordPress is the content management system which we use most often. It is the most widely-used CMS in the world, and it’s user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone to update. Originally a blogging platform, WordPress has become the industry standard for web sites; its core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and it is free, with updates coming out every couple of months.
