Glossary » Website Design

dot-coma

when a website is inaccessible due to too many simultaneous visitors, usually during major events such as a product release or a news item appearing with a link to the site.

drilldown

the act of navigating deeper thru a hierarchy of screens, often when the higher-level screens are intended only as navigation and the important content is only at the lowest level.

e-commerce

electronic commerce; broadly defined, any use of the internet to facilitate buying, selling, or any other kind of commercial transaction. Most often refers to websites that display product information and allow online purchasing and payment.

email

by far the most common groupware application (ignoring of course, the traditional telephone). While the basic technology is designed to pass simple messages between 2 people, even relatively basic email systems of today typically include interesting features for forwarding messages,…

embedded help

text that is integrated into the user interface and provides instructions right next to the part of the interface that it applies to. It is not a separate help system and not even something that needs to be requested by…

embedded links

links within the content of a webpage or hypertext document that are explicitly authored to lead to a relevant area.

entry tunnel

a sequence of screens that a user must proceed through upon entering a website and before being given access to the full range of options on the website. An entry tunnel is usually used to force users to view advertising,…

exit tunnel

a sequence of screens the user views when they leave a website (or any media presentation), parallel to the use of an entry tunnel to enter a website, but much harder to enforce on the web than an entry tunnel.…

external link

a link that goes from a website to another website, at a different address. Such links can be disorienting because the primary navigation structure no longer appears once someone is on a new site. The reliability of the external site…

FAQ

frequently asked questions (pronounced “FAK”); a common form of help for users, especially on the internet. A FAQ list shows the most common questions and provides direct, useful answers. Often, it’s a convenient structure just to minimize dealing with users…

feedback form

a type of questionnaire designed to get a reaction to some recent experience of a person, such as a recent experience with a website or a software package.

frames

(website design) a technique for dividing up a window displaying a web page so that separate areas can scroll independently and load new pages independently.

Frames are useful when something needs to be on-screen all the time, such as navigation…

garden path

a sequence of actions a user takes that each seem to be leading to the desired outcome but don’t produce the desired result in the end, such as navigating thru a series of apparently-relevant website links without finding the desired…

gateway pages

web pages that are intended as entry points to a website from external sites. In addition to the homepage, a site may have additional gateway pages that are intended for specific topics or types of users.

halo effect

(graphics) the glow that appears around an antialiased image when it is placed over a background color that is different from the background used when making it antialiased. This occurs for gif images, which allow transparency, but only for an…

hit logs

statistics on which pages are getting visited on a website, useful for determining which pages are popular, which may be difficult to find, and which paths people are taking through the website.

The logs may contain information on what date…

homepage

the web page that visitors will usually come to first and which provides access to the remaining pages on the website. A home page is frequently accessed through the domain name of the website. Home pages are typically designed to…

HTML

HypertText Markup Language; a simple notation for describing the format and content of text by adding simple annotations or “tags” to the text. HTML is the fundamental format used for presenting documents on the web.

hypertext

a collection of text documents with links from one document to another. A “hypermedia” system is the same sort of collection, but including documents of any type, such as graphics, video, etc. The links may pass between essentially any two…

information architecture

the organization of information; the field which studies how to organize information most effectively to help people find and use the information. For instance, how should websites be organized? What is the best way to design website navigation? How should…

information foraging

a theory of people’s information-consumption behavior, where people are viewed as foraging for information like animals foraging for food. People tend to stay in one place (e.g. on one website) and exhaust the supply of information before moving on. This…

information retrieval

the field of study that examines how people find information and how tools can be constructed (such as search engines and catalogs) to help people find information. Studies examine how the organization of information affects its retrieval, the types of…

information scent

or information residue; cues (“scent”) used in an information display that help people locate and navigate to relevant information.

For instance, the label “bugs” provides a hint that the content it labels contains information about insects or possibly software bugs…

instant messaging

IM; a technique of sending a message: the sender specifies the recipient and typically types a simple text message; the recipient has a window pop up automatically that displays the short message. This differs from email in that the interface…

internet appliance

a device designed to simplify use of the internet and simplify setup compared to a general-purpose computer. Buttons and other controls are minimized and built in to the hardware. The application may permit any kind of web browsing or may…