Find out more about some of the more technical terms used on this website

A Blog is a website or part of a website dedicated to articles, news or information about a particular subject or simply a personal diary. They are effectively a very basic Content Management System and have an administration area which you log into and post your articles. The blogging system automatically places your post into the webpage and archives your previous posts allowing you to focus on the subject matter without having to worry about how to construct a webpage or navigational menu.

The system I currently use is called Wordpress, an open source and widely used system which due to the large community of users and developers is highly customisable and extensible with a variety of plugins and modules.

Further reading - Wikipedia's Blog entry

A Content Management System is a system which allows users with no knowledge of HTML or CSS to edit the content of an existing web page and even add new pages and sections based on pre-existing templates. Similar to how the blogging tool works, there is an adminstration area where users can login and simply edit the text as they would in a text editor and the CMS takes care of the rest.

The system I currently use is called Concrete 5, an open source and widely used system. It has a variety of plugins such as news modules, e-commerce, slideshows etc and is easily customisable to suit any layout or branding style.

Further reading - Wikipedia's CMS entry

Cascading Style Sheets are files which allow web designers and developers to dictate how a webpage will look by specifying layout parameters, background colours and images etc. It is important to use CSS for presentational information so that the mark up of the HTML files remain structurally and semantically clean. Along with many other aspects this aids visually impaired users and search engines to use the site more efficiently and also makes it easier to make global site wide changes to the visual appearance of the website.

Further reading - Wikipedia's CSS entry

Hyper Text Markup Language - is a language for webpages. It is used to mark up the structure of a page using tags. These various tags allow web designers and developers to divide a webpage into logical sections and tell the web browser which text is to be treated as a heading, which is a paragraph, which is a list etc. etc. These tags also provide a reference to use in the CSS files to add stylistic and presentational information.

Further reading - Wikipedia's HTML entry

Jquery is a javascript library which allows for the quick and east deployment of javascript functions into a web page. When used wisely javascript is a fantastic way to add a bit of dynamic interaction to a website and enhance the user experience.

Examples of where JQuery can be used are - sliding additional content at the click of a button, smooth animated transitions to button rollovers or photo galleries. Visit the quote form on this website and select different enquiry types to see one simple JQuery effect in action.

Further reading - Wikipedia's JQuery entry

Further reading - Wikipedia's javascript entry

A PhotoShop Document is just that - a layered composition created in the program Adobe Photoshop. Many web designers use Photoshop to create mock ups of different webpage templates before coding/marking up their websites, as it is often faster to move page elements around and to create artwork and imagery to go with the design in a visual enviroment.

Some designers create these page layouts in Photoshop but either do not know how or do not have the time, to turn them into fully functioning websites. That is when you can contact someone like me to finish off the job.

Further reading - Wikipedia's Photoshop entry

Search Engine Optimaisation is the process of taking a website's content and ensuring that you get the highest possible position in search engine results for specific targeted search terms. Amongst other things this involves using contextually keyword rich content in important places such as headings and link text, and building up good quality and relevant links with other websites

It is important that this is done as naturally as possible so that any SEO does not interfere with the user experience on the site. Some poor SEO tactics can also cause you to actually lose places in search engine results.

Further reading - Wikipedia's SEO entry, Read my SEO blog article.