TGM Designs

TGM Designs created this glossary of web design and related terminology to help our clients to know and understand what services we provide. The terms cited are used regularly throughout Web development and design documentation. If you are starting a new website project then you will find these terms very helpful. This glossary's intention is to be relevant and beneficial to your understanding rather than be comprehensive.

Univeral Access

The idea that all things on the Internet should be accessible by the largest audience possible, regardless of disability, location, device, or speed of connection to the Internet. The ability of everyone, regardless of age, nationality, disability, or any other factor, to access and take advantage of a website.

Universal Selector

In CSS, a universial selector is depicted by an asterisk. It is a kind of a wild card. It acts like a type element, except it matches any and every element it can. Therefore, * {color: red;} would turn every element in an entire document red.

Unix

A 32-bit, fully multitasking, multithreading operating system developed by Bell Laboratories in the 1960s. A powerful highly scalable operating system, UNIX and variants of it (GNU, Solaris, Linux, AIX, FreeBSD) is used to operate servers and web servers, supercomputers, mainframes, mini computers and powerful PCs and workstation.

UNIX is one of the most flexible and powerful operating systems available. UNIX is not a single operating system like Windows, but a class of similar operating systems.

Upload

To transfer a file from a local computer to a remote computer. In web terms: to transfer a file from a web client to a web server. (see also Download).

URI

Acronym for Uniform Resource Identifier. It is a term used to identify resources on the internet. A URL is one type of an URI.

URL

Acronym for Uniform Resource Locator and is an address referring to a document on the Internet. In other words, it is the address of an individual web page element or web document on the Internet. The syntax of a URL consists of three elements:

	The protocol, or the communication language, that the URL uses.
	The domain name, or the exclusive name that identifies a web site.
	The path name of the file to be retrieved, usually an HTML document.

Many people mistakenly believe a URL is the same as a domain name or home page. Every web document and web graphic image on a web site has a URL.

Usability

A measure for how simple or difficult users find the website to be when they wish to perform their desired action. It is affected by the website’s structure, layout, text formatting and hyperlinks, among others. A website that scores high on usability means higher conversion rates.

USENET

A large collection of newsgroups and discussion groups on the Internet.

User Agent

Software to access web content, including desktop graphical browsers, text browsers, voice browsers, mobile phones, multimedia players, plug-ins, and some software assistive technologies used in conjunction with browsers such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, and voice recognition software. Browsers are a subset of user agents. All browsers are user agents, but not all user agents are browsers.

User Session

Each time a site visitor with a unique IP address enters a Web site during a specified period of time; usually 20-30 minutes, is counted as one user session. If the visitor exits the site and reenters within the specified period of time, it does not count as another user session.