Glossary » Website Design

interstitial advertising

(web) advertising that interrupts the flow of interaction on a website; in particular, advertising that appears at the destination of a link that must be viewed before some desired content is available.

ISP

internet service provider; a service that provides access to the internet for users, usually through a telephone dialup.

Java

a cross-platform object-oriented general-purpose programming language. Java can be embedded within a web page to provide a very flexible user interface. Java is not to be confused with JavaScript, an essentially unrelated scripting language that can be used within a…

landmark

a screen that is sufficiently distinct from others that users can easily remember it and, upon recognizing it, use it to establish their context and location.

latency

same as delay — a measure of the time it takes for a message to be transmitted across a network. The variance of the latency is also an important measure.

link

or hyperlink; a button within a document (hilited text or images) that allows people to move to another document, and thus to navigate through a set of documents, such as clicking through various sites on the web.

link rot

because websites are frequently appearing and disappearing (and moving to new addresses), some fraction of links to outside websites will become invalid links over time. The slow degeneration of a web page with many links, due to the occasional link…

load testing

testing a software system to verify that it can handle high-volume use; for instance, checking that a website can handle a large number of simultaneous users, checking that a game can handle a large number of players, or confirming that…

marquee

1. (computer graphics) the dotted-line that appears around drawings when they are selected in drawing programs. When animated, a marquee is often referred to as the “marching ants”.

2. (graphic design) a hilited area, usually the focal point of a…

mental map

(website navigation) a representation in a person’s mind of the structure of a website, which is likely to be incomplete and simplified. A mental map helps people simplify the job of remembering what they’ve seen to the problem of remembering…

Metcalfe’s Law

the impact of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes, which is roughly the number of possible connections (n(n-1)/2). Proposed by Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet.

MUD

multi-user dimension (or dungeon), a virtual reality, usually text-based, populated by many people, often used for chatting or playing games with other users.

Variations include a MOO (object-oriented MUD), MUCK (multi-user chat kingdom), and MUSH (multi-user shared hallucination). While some…

navbar

navigation bar; a group of buttons or hyperlinks that are used to navigate through a website or through a set of screens. Each button is typically labeled with the title of the page it goes to and/or an appropriate icon.…

navigation

finding things in large or complex information spaces, such as on websites. Some ways to help people navigate include:

…

netiquette

polite ways of behaving on the internet, such as:

…

newsgroups and mailing lists

similar in spirit to email systems except that they are intended for messages among large groups of people instead of 1-to-1 communication. In practice the main difference between newsgroups and mailing lists is that newsgroups only show messages to a…

open card sort

a type of card sort that asks users to suggest categories that topics group into. Users are provided with a list of topics (e.g. content pieces to go on a website) and are asked to group them and to label…

orphan page

strictly speaking, a web page with no outgoing links. From a practical point of view, an orphan page is any page where it is not obvious to users where to go next, so they abandon the website. Pages are ideally…

page schematic

or static wireframe; a drawing showing the basic navigation and content elements of a web page, without detailed content or concrete visual layout. The idea is to reveal which navigation elements appear on a page, e.g. top-level, second-level, breadcrumbs. This…

path

a custom sequence of documents that are navigated through a hypertext or hypermedia system, intended to provide a “guided tour” or a “lesson plan” with interesting and useful stopping points.

payoff page

(web) the target page that a user arrives at after clicking on a banner ad or candy box. The payoff page should satisfy the user’s purpose in following the link while additionally informing the user, persuading the user of a…

portal

(web) a website that serves as a central information source, especially by providing substantial numbers of links to other related websites. Portals are distinguished by their topic, method of link selection, and added value, such as reviews, rankings, and site…

robot

a piece of software that actively browses the web, retrieving and analyzing documents, usually used to collect and index documents for search engines.

rollovers

actions that occur as a user moves a pointer over objects, such as the hiliting of buttons as a user moves over them, in order to indicate that they are clickable, and also sometimes used to provide additional information (such…

router page

a web page whose primary role is to route the user to another appropriate page. Examples include homepages, sitemaps, and portal sites. Often homepages and main section pages should not solely serve a routing function but should include useful information…