Accessibility
This is one of the primary issues concerning website developers at the moment. This is another part of the move to make websites more standardised. Based on the premise that some users may be operating a website under limitations, environmental or otherwise, there are a certain steps a developer can take to make sure that all parts of the site are still accessible.
At Fuse Internet we take this standardisation seriously. Not only is it further mark of professionalism but it is another feature that can improve the standard of service our clients can pass on to their customers.
Examples of accessibility are resizing fonts so the visually impaired are still able to read the site, all navigation functions can be hot-key activated, and general cross-platform compatibility.
Actionscript
Macromedia's Flash is the industry standard for creating online graphic animations and graphics based interactivity. Actionscript is the programming used by Flash
Back-end
The Back-end of a website is so called because, metaphorically speaking, it sits behind the customer facing, visual part of the site. Most often it is hidden to the public and is the area that houses the control interface of the site, usually a CMS
cgi-bin
cgi or common gateway interface, is a way for you to run executable programs and scripts on your server. The way this affects anyone looking into getting a website is that you need cgi (and a cgi-bin which is the directory where these scripts run) if you want your site to be dynamic. If you only want a static site, a cgi-bin is not necessary, if you will be generating database driven pages etc. you need a cgi-bin to facilitate this.
CMS
CMS is short for Content Management System. This is a program developed to allow users to dynamically control the content (usually text but sometimes also images, sound and video) of their website in real time.
CSS
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a way to add print formatting standards to the design and layout of a website. A language of sorts, CSS makes sure that your site looks the way that you want it to with consistency across a variety of platforms.
Flash
Flash is the industry standard application used to create dynamic, interactive, web-based animations. From internet games through to mini movies, flash is a powerful internet tool.
FTP
FTP is short for file transfer protocol. This function allows you to access files on your server from a remote location whilst maintaining sercurity through file encryption. In other words, this allows you to use the internet to transfer files from one computer to another without allowing other users access to this information during transit.
Hot Keys
This simply referrs to accessing functions, navigational and otherwise, through pressing a combination keys on the keyboard. Usually pressing a lettered or numbered key alongside a combination of control, alt and command keys.
HTML
HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language. This is the original internet language and most people have heard of it even if they don't know what it is. Without getting too complicated, it's the basic language used to layout text and images in a website. It's not really that simple but things rarely are!
LINUX
An open source operating system which will run on most computers including PCs and Macs. LINUX systems have been expanded and honed by some of the technology giants like IBM to produce commercial mainframe server-orientated operating systems. These systems are called UNIX.
Mac OS
Mac OS is Apple Macintosh's standard platform upon which compatible applications run. Apple have named their latest operating system Panther (OS X.3) with Tiger coming soon.
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft produce one of the most popular, standard operating systemes in the world: Windows. Windows provide the basis for most PC applications to run on.
MySQL
MySQL is a database program which sits on a server. Unsurprisingly it is simply a way to store information which can then be retrieved using scripts such as PHP and Perl.