A Record
Short for Address Record. An entry in your DNS table (zone file) that maps each domain name (e.g. you.com) or subdomain (e.g. abc.you.com) to an IP Address. In other words, the A record specifies the IP address to which the user would be sent for each domain name. For example, you can have abc.you.com point to one IP address, and xyz.you.com point to a different IP address.
Abandonment
When a user leaves a shopping cart with something in it prior to completing the transaction.
Accessibility
Basically, this is the ability of a website to be used by people with disabilities, including visually impaired visitors using screen readers, hearing impaired visitors using no sound, color blind people, or those with other disabilities. A website with low accessibility is basically going to be impossible for those with disabilities to use. Accessibility is particularly important for sites providing information to those with disabilities (healthcare sites, government sites, etc.), though it is an important aspect to consider when designing any site.
Acrobat
Acrobat is part of a set of applications developed by Adobe to create and view PDF files. Acrobat is used to create the PDF files, and the freeware Acrobat Reader is used to read the PDF files.
ActionScript
ActionScript is Adobe Flash's own embedded scripting language. It has a JavaScript like structure and has developed into a flexible and powerful platform for Flash games and interactive multimedia.
Ad Blocker
Aoftware on a user‘s browser which prevents advertisements from being displayed.
Ad Network
An aggregator or broker of advertising inventory for many sites. Ad networks are the sales representatives for the Web sites within the network.
Affiliate Marketing
An agreement between two sites in which one site (the affiliate) agrees to feature content or an ad designed to drive traffic to another site. In return, the affiliate receives a percentage of sales or some other form of compensation generated by that traffic.
AJAX
Stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX is typically used for creating dynamic web applications and allows for asynchronous data retrieval without having to reload the page a visitor is on. The JavaScript on a given page handles most of the basic functions of the application, making it perform more like a desktop program instead of a web-based one.
Alt Tag
Part of the image source tag in HTML. A good web designer will always include text in all of your image sources for two reasons: (1) if any of your visitors choose not to view graphic images on your web pages, the alternative text will be shown; and (2) if your visitors use Internet Explorer as their browser and they leave the mouse over any graphic image, they will view the text in your ALT-attribute. Screen readers used by the vision impaired also use Alt Tags to determine the type of content on a web page.
Anchor Text
The text a link uses to refer to your site. This can make a big difference in your site’s search engine results.
Android
Android is a software platform and operating system for mobile devices, based on the Linux kernel, developed by Google and later the Open Handset Alliance.
Animated GIF
A GIF graphic file, which consists of two or more images shown in a timed sequence to give the effect of motion.
Animation
Animation is the creation of a timed sequence or series of graphic images or frames together to give the appearance of continuous movement.
Applet
An applet is a small program designed to run within another application. Java is one of the major languages used for creating Web-based applets.
Artifacting
Distortion that is introduced into audio or video by the compression algorithm (codec). Compressed images may have stray pixels that were not present in the original image.
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is the basic clear-text Latin characters. There are 128 standard ASCII codes, each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.
ASP
Stands for Active Server Pages. ASP is a Microsoft technology similar to CGI that is used to create dynamic content for a web page. Pages using ASP are created with programming scripts (eg; JavaScript) and integrated with the HTML of a page. It is a server?side scripting language and is mostly used on Windows platforms.
Avatar
A graphical representation of an individual in a game or other virtual world or environment
