Your Image is Everything
If knowledge is power then the following design tips should give you a boost:

Looking for some handy graphic tips or wanting to get a handle on your upcoming web design need? Look no more as the following information we have prepared is designed to take you from dummy to brainiac in a matter of minutes. From finding your Corporate Identity to everything you need to know about websites but didn't know to ask, we've got it covered. So pop the kettle on, sit back, and turn your brain to 'sponge' mode.

Website Buzz Words

Continuing the series on website basics, we are happy to provide a glossary of internet and web based buzz words...

Website buzz words to know if you're venturing onto the web:

Web Hosting: Loosely refers to the place your website files are located. The term actually refers to the service that is being provided by a Web Hosting Provider or Internet Services Provider (ISP). In essence, an ISP has a stack of computers in an air-conditioned room. The computers are connected to the computers of other ISP's around the world and together form the Internet. Anyone who wants to 'log on' to the Internet needs to go through an ISP. The ISP charges you to store your files on their computers, data usage and for direct access to the Internet.

E-commerce: Short for Electronic Commerce and referring to online transactions or transactions conducted over the Internet.

Shopping cart: A shopping cart is the term to describe a set of website functions or dedicated software that facilitates online transactions. The online version of a supermarket shopping cart.

Database driven website: Websites with pages that need to change often or be updated regularly are most likely to require a database to be able to store and manipulate information. These types of websites are termed Database Driven and include websites from realestate.com.au and eBay to small business web design.

Website accessibility: Ensuring a website is accessible to everyone including people who need to use software that reads the screen for them. Accessibility standards have been introduced by a web standards organisation called W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). In Web marketing circles the term may also refer loosely to search engine optimisation or SEO.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): W3C standard to define the visual presentation aspects of web pages such as margins, background, borders, effects, and text formatting.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): A multi-faceted process for improving different elements of a website to gain maximum natural rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Includes ensuring the web pages are free from programming errors, are correctly structured and compliant to standards to name but a few.

CMS (Content Management System): When you want to update your website regularly without having to hire a web designer every time, you need a content management system. The best CMS's allow you to simply log on to your website and update it instantly (such as ours) while others require extra software and training at extra cost.

XHTML: Stands for extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language and is the code of choice for professional web designers and developers. XHTML is like an empty bookshelf which acts as a framework to hold your books in place, or in this case, your website content.PHP: Stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor and is a scripting language that allows web developers to provide extra functionality to websites and web applications.XML: Refers to extensible Mark-up Language which allows information to be stored, structured, transformed, and sent. Very handy indeed.

MySQL: My Structured Query Language is a database management system and in fact is the most widely used of all open sources relational database systems.

Introduction to Web Standards:

Web standards exist to allow everybody including the disabled and sight impaired to access web pages on the internet. The two main web technologies involved are XHTML and CSS. You can check the definitions above to gain a basic understanding of XHTML and CSS.

Previously web designers used HTML whereas XHTML provides greater interconnection with more devices and is now the standard. The introduction of CSS meant web designers could separate out the code that controls the layout and styling from the main HTML or XHTML code. The result of which meant faster and greater control over the look and function of a website.

W3C are the organisation who decide the standards and assist in helping designers create websites that are accessible to as many people as possible, whether disabled or not. A website that is written with the latest standards in mind will benefit from greater traffic overall and become a more successful website - so it's win, win for everyone involved.