Definitions
In this section of the website you will find definitions of key words and phrases used by PillarProjects staff members.
Definitions
Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality.
AJAX is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With AJAX, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of AJAX techniques has led to an increase in interactive or dynamic interfaces on web pages and better quality of web services due to the asynchronous mode.
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. There are two categories of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.
Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis irrespective of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.
Historically, web analytics has referred to on-site visitor measurement. However in recent years this has blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories.
Cloud computing is the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet on a utility basis. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.
The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it conceals.
A technical definition is "a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." This definition states that clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.
A content management system (CMS) is a web application for creating and managing HTML content. A CMS is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images), and facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential web maintenance functions. The software provides tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content on a website with relative ease. Users generally access their CMS via their web browser.
The concept of guerrilla marketing was invented as an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. Typically, guerrilla marketing campaigns are unexpected and unconventional; potentially interactive ; and consumers are targeted in unexpected places. The objective of guerrilla marketing is to create a unique, engaging and thought-provoking concept to generate buzz, and consequently turn viral.
Guerrilla marketing involves unusual approaches such as intercept encounters in public places, street giveaways of products, PR stunts, any unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results from minimal resources. More innovative approaches to Guerrilla marketing now utilise cutting edge mobile and digital technologies to engage consumers and create a memorable brand experience.
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists et cetera; as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms (for example, a 'Contact Us' form that users can fill in and submit). It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content. It can include or can load scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behaviour of HTML processors like web browsers (like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox et al); and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material.
Joomla! is an award-winning content management system, which enables users to build websites and powerful online applications. Its ease of use and extensibility, have made Joomla! popular: Joomla! is also an 'open source' solution that is freely available to everyone. Joomla! is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database system to store information.
Joomla! templates are pre-designed website templates, which are a combination of graphics, CSS, and HTML. The template gives your website it's individual look and all that is missing is functionalities, which are created through the use of plug-ins. Joomla! templates can be sourced for free, or paid for.
MySQL is a relational database management system. MySQL stands for "My Structured Query Language". The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.
Open source software is computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the 'Open Source Definition' or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user-generated content. The term open source software originated as part of a marketing campaign for free software. Open source software models reportedly result in savings of about $60 billion USD per year to consumers.
PHP (or PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language. PHP can be embedded into HTML and generally runs on a web server, which needs to be configured to process PHP code and create web page content from it. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge.
Rapid Application Development (RAD) refers to a type of software development methodology which uses minimal planning in favour of rapid prototyping. The "planning" of software developed using RAD is infused with writing the software itself. The lack of extensive pre-planning generally allows software to be written much faster, makes it easier to change requirements, and lowers the cost of a project.
Return on investment (ROI) is a performance measure which compares the return on an investment (results) with the cost of that investment (time, money, resources, efforts et cetera).
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of paid placement, sponsored searches, and SEO.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Applying technology to meet business needs. Giving to a business a technology solution that solves business problems.
Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales, or increased donations) through self-replicating viral processes. The goal being that users will pass on compelling and/or entertaining content to other users. Various social networks on the Internet can facilitate this spread, including social network websites (such as MySpace, facebook and bebo), video websites (such as YouTube and Vimeo), and email (Gmail and Hotmail).