General jargon
Terms you may encounter.
A domain name is the name of your site - your-business-site.com for instance. This usually costs just a few pounds a year.
Hosting is just some space you rent on a web server (see server below. Typically hosting starts at around £50 per year and rises depending on features you require.
Search engine ranking is a measure of how high your site appears when searched for in Google, Yahoo or other search engine.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a technique that attempts to move your site towards the top of a search engine's results page. Not all SEO companies can actually deliver the goods - be wary.
A Server or Web server is just a computer set up to host web sites - see hosting above.
A URL or Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address of any web document - www.your-business-site.com/about-us.html for instance
WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get). An editor, for instance Word, that enables you to design a page without seeing or writing any underlying code.
Programming jargon
Terms us techies tend to use.
HTML is a language used to present a web page to your browser. View the source of this page to see some HTML.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and tells the browser how to format the appearance of HTML. It contains, for instance, colour and font size information amongst other things.
Javascript is a programming language that interacts with HTML to create, for instance, simple animation in a web browser.
PHP is also a programming language. It is used on the web server rather than in the browser though. One of the main benefits is enabling sites to use content from a database.
A database is a collection of information, stored in a standardised format, that can be retrieved or searched through.
MySQL is database system that is widely available on many web server hosting packages.
Open source code as it relates to this site is PHP and Javascript code that has has been written and released for free, for the good of the community. It's well written and works superbly.
Tools, techniques & methods.
At mediagraphic Andy uses HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript & MySQL to produce a site. Using these elements correctly means that a website will display properly in all modern browsers. In addition screen readers will interpret it correctly so that visually impaired or blind users will have access to it.
On the server PHP and MySQL work together to get the actual page content from the database. PHP then assembles the content into HTML and sends it to your browser. The browser then uses any CSS and Javascript that has been written to format the page correctly.
Apart from using a few pre-written, open source chunks of PHP and Javascript Andy writes everything by hand, this means that a site has exactly the amount of code it needs to do the job. No surplus or redundant junk in the pages that some WYSIWYG editors leave in to clutter the page up. Lean sites that load as fast possible is the result.