Web glossary

Copy is simply another word for the textual content of your website. While no one will know your business as well as you, if you're really not confident in writing your own copy, you can employ a copywriter to write the text for you. Your website designer will also likely want to change your copy somewhat for search engine optimisation purposes.

Cascading Style Sheets are used to strictly control - sometimes down to the pixel - how and where the content of a webpage will appear to visitors. A particularly useful aspect of cascading style sheets is that the styling instructions provided in them can easily be shared by all the pages of a website, creating a professional, uniform appearance.

A domain name is the common 'address' of your website on the internet and it is by typing your website's domain name into a internet browser's address bar that many people will find your site.

Here are a couple of examples: www.Web-Presence.co.uk and www.Google.co.uk

An 'email client' is a computer program that is used to send and receive emails over the internet. Some popular examples of email clients are Microsoft's Outlook and Windows' Live Mail. These days, many people also access their emails via webmail - which involves visiting a website (such as Google's Gmail) and logging in to send and receive emails.

Websites are primarily coded using Hypertext Markup Language. HTML provides the framework for a website, allowing the text and graphics on webpages to be styled to the author's taste - some examples include font type and style, page background colour and hyperlinks. While HTML provides the foundations for a website, other coding languages, such as CSS, PHP, MySQL and Javascript are needed to further enhance a website visitor's experience.

An internet browser is a computer program that allows people to view webpages on the internet. While Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox remain the most popular 'web browsers', an increasing number of people are turning to alternatives such as Google's 'Chrome' browser and Apple's 'Safari' browser.

Another coding language that is used commonly on the web is Javascript. Javascript is used to code many of the 'special effects' you see on websites like extended menus that appear when you hover the cursor over them and some banners and adverts that periodically switch between images.

The pages of your website are stored online by a website hosting provider. This storage space is provided by the hosting provider on one of their web servers. It is then possible for people to find and view your website pages by accessing the files stored on the web server. Generally, people will do this using an internet browser via an easy-to-remember domain name (see above).