the sephone blog

Whenever you talk about technology, you’re likely to get an earful of abbreviations and acronyms. We know it’s confusing - we deal with it every day! Here’s a little “geek glossary” to help you navigate some of the more common things you might hear us mention.

• dA / dA lite: dA and dA lite refer to Sephone’s content management systems, datAvenger and datAvenger lite. The content management system is the administrative area where you can edit your site.
• HTML: HTML is really the language of the Web. Just like Word documents are used for word processing and PowerPoint is used for presentations, HTML is used to display Web pages within a browser. When the browser reads the HTML, it adds the right colors, links, text sizes, and more to create a readable Web page (like this one!). (It stands for “hypertext markup language”, which is a really complicated way of saying that HTML pages can use text formatting and can link to other pages.)
• PHP: Most of the sites we create use another programming language known as PHP. PHP allows us to build sites that change based on what the site owner tells the site to do: display an image gallery, post press releases, or allow you to check out on an e-commerce site. All of these happen before the page even reaches your Web browser.
• SEO: Short for “search engine optimization”, SEO is an ever-changing study of how to make your sites look their best in search engines like Google and Yahoo. This is done through a combination of stuff that we control (easy-to-read page addresses, clean programming, and more) and a bunch of things that are up to the site owner to control (page titles, meta data, and most importantly, the actual content of the site).
• WYSIWYG: Many of our products use a tool known as a WYSIWYG, or “what you see is what you get” editor. A WYSIWYG editor looks like a stripped-down version of a word processing program like Word; it will give you the ability to boldface, italicize, or resize text, as well as a number of other functions. Some WYSIWYGs even let you insert links or images into your text. The WYSIWYG in datAvenger, for example, has over 25 different actions built right in.

Is there anything else that you think should be a part of this list? Leave a comment and let us know.

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