Glossary of website design process

Most Common and Important Terms to know after you hire a web design company:

Click here to know the website body parts on image demonstration:

URL/WEB ADDRESS/LINK/DOMAIN:
All of these terms are technically different from each other, however when any of our representative will refer to any of these terms, he is talking about the address of your website example: www.medialinkers.com is URL of our service.

Static Website/Static Feature: As the name suggests, a website that can't be changed or does 't interact with customer is a static website. These are basically informational websites. The opposite of this is: Dynamic/Interactive Website: A website that can do something in response to visitor's action. Example: You enter your Email address and it sends you a news letter. This is an interactive feature. Our Bronze and Silver Packages are Static website packages basically. However the contact us forms available with these packages are technically only dynamic page that sends an email to you when visitor of your website hits "Send" button.

Back end Control Panel for website: If you are getting an interactive/Dynamic website done, we will develop a control panel from where you can manage these features. Example: A customer signs up but forgets his password, you can go to your control panel and see the records of all customers. You can the search this particular case and change his password etc. A back end control panel is basically an interface programmed by our developers to make things user friendly for you.

Form Submission: When you fill a form and click on submit, this feature is generally referred to as form submission on website. All packages of MediaLinkers include at least one form submission. We can use form submissions for many different options like to receive free quotes, online order bookings etc.

Merchant/Vendor/Online payment processors: Ecommerce websites need an online payment processor to accept credit cards online. If you choose a gateway, you can accept credit cards on your own website and store for future records. Hiring a merchant will require you to have bank account in USA and some more documentation ready. Example of famous gateway providers are: Verisign.com, Authorize.net and worldpay.com Mostly small businesses use the concept of Vendor or payment processor. Using this, a third party service becomes your reseller. A customer adds a product from your website shopping cart, then clicks on CHECK OUT. This takes him to the page of your payment processor where he enters his credit card information. If payment is successful, you receive the order confirmation. If it fails, you can show your own apologize page and phone number to call. The Reseller will transfer the $ in to your account using wire transfer or send you a check based on amount you have decided with them or on a particular time. Commonly known vendors or resellers are: www.2checkout.com, www.paypal.com

Hosting Service: Once your website has been completed, it needs to be placed on Hosting Servers, from where people can visit it around the world. With MediaLinkers website design service, if you would like to manage the hosting yourself, we will deliver the pages through CD or Email. If you would like us to post them on a third party hosting servers, we will be glad to do this for you. However MediaLinkers offers hosting service on their servers that are based in AZ, FL and CA. 95% of new websites we design are hosted with us, while 30% of re-designs decide to switch their websites to our servers. Our Hosting website is at: www.hosting.medialinkers.com

Content: When your project coordinator uses the word "Content" he is most probably talking about material that is supposed to be provided by you. This can be the text to be put on any of the pages, the phone number and address for the contact us page etc. Some people may confuse content with more information like e.g. suitable images. We mostly use stock images from our own inventory. However if client believes he can supply better images, he may include these in to the content. Sometimes you may find text that may have no understandable meanings. This is called "Lorem Ipsum" and is used in web design industry to denote that this text shall be replaced with the text that you will provide for website.

Others:

Spam: is unsolicited e-mail or Emails sent to you for marketing purpose while you have not subscribed to receive them. If your website has auto form submission, ask your coordinator to guard your website by putting "image security" and "Hidden Emails"

SSL: The method of passing sensitive information through encryption method. A person trying to sniff the data being passed from your website to another will not be able to understand the data.

Web Language: An Interactive or Dynamic website is not in simple html. It needs a web language in which we program the behavior and interactive features. Some commonly used web languages are: PHP (open source language by Linux) , ASP.NET, C# (by Microsoft Inc). If you have already purchased hosting service before getting a dynamic website built through MediaLinkers, please make sure that your host supports that language. If you don't update your Project coordinator to use a particular web language, he will decide this keeping in view the requirements, security, availability of programmers and budget of client.

FTP (File transfer protocol): FTP is generally required to upload and download the files of your website from a hosting server. If our rep. is asking you to provide him FTP, he is looking to have a user name and password, using which he will be able to see your pages and download them before making any changes. Clients hosting their website with MediaLinkers don't need to keep records of their FTP as their project coordinators always have access to their website.

Cookies: Cookies is a small file that can be stored on the computer of your website visitor for future references. Example: If you want your website to remember a visitor for next 30 days, you can ask us to program a cookie that will be placed in his computer and will be tracked on next visit. A cookie can be manually washed by visitor or may get killed when visitor clears history of his browser or formats his Hard Drive.

Tips and Tricks:

How to refresh your web page entirely?: Most Internet Services store your website pages on their cache computers and when you visit them again, it fetches from cache server instead of bringing the latest refreshed page. This helps them in increasing internet speed. In order to see the latest pages of your website you can hit CTRL + F5 on your keyboard while you are on that page. This command is used to request your ISP to show the latest pages.