Ozean Interactive Media | Web Development Definitions & Hints

If you're hiring a web design agency, the part of the design process that you probably know the least about is coding. Fortunately, we've got you covered. Yep, that is right, right here in little ol' Gainesville Florida.

The languages and techniques listed below are ones we commonly work with. Feel free to browse the list to get a sense of what we can do. You might even learn a little bit about programming.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a series of techniques used to make a website more visible to search engines like Yahoo! and Google. These techniques include writing HTML that can easily be parsed by web spiders, writing a robots.txt file to aid in accurately indexing a site, and registering a website on the major web directories.

Search Engine Optimization can significantly increase traffic on a site, and can thereby be a major asset to companies for whom web traffic is important.

Flash

Flash is the technology used to add richly animated and interactive content to web pages. Most commonly you'll see Flash used to make banners at the top of a page, but Flash video (on YouTube, for example) and even Flash games are also quite common as well. Flash can even be used to construct entire websites when unique interactivity is needed that cannot be attained strictly using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

HTML

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML can be considered the "skeleton" of a website, in that it imparts both structure and content upon a page. Well-written HTML is characterized by being lean, semantically rich, and easily accessible to handicapped browsers. In order to write such HTML, one must separate the data that contains a page's meaning from the data that encodes its appearance. This is accomplished through the use of Cascading Style Sheets.

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Style sheets are used to control the appearance of a page in a way that is independent from its structure and meaning. Thus, using CSS, it is possible to create many different appearances for a site without changing any of the site's underlying HTML, as was famously illustrated by the CSS Zen Garden.

By far the most difficult part of coding in CSS is coping with the varying support browsers have for CSS. Internet Explorer, for example, is notorious for ignoring or incorrectly applying CSS rules. Thus, when using style sheets, cross-browser cross-platform testing becomes an unavoidable necessity.

Yet despite the trouble it entails, the use of CSS is a must for writing lean, semantically-meaningful markup.

Javascript

If HTML contains the meaning of a page, and CSS governs its appearance, Javascript can be understood to control a page's behavior. Javascript is commonly used to script the underlying mechanics of a website like form-handling, username/password validation, and table sorting. It's also frequently used to control various animations on a page, like drop-down menus or mouse rollovers. It can also be used to create Dynamic HTML (DHTML) through techniques like DOM scripting and AJAX.

PHP

PHP, strangely, stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, making it a recursive acronymn. PHP is a powerful open-source software that can be used for many things, including communication with databases. PHP is a server-side language, meaning that it runs on a computer that is being used to serve a web page, rather than a computer that is being used to view a web page.

PHP is one of the most rapidly up-and-coming languages in use on the web today.

SQL or MySQL

SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It is a fourth-generation programming language (meaning that it is very human-readable) that is ubiquitously employed to interact with databases. SQL is commonly used with other languages like PHP to develop online database-driven applications.

Third-party Functionality

There are many pre-existing applications that can be added onto a website with very little difficulty, such as Google Search and Google Maps for example. If you are interested in having any of these added to your site, please contact us to discuss the details.

We also take this little opprotunity to remind you, do not let our location in Gainesville, FL fool you. We digitally travel across the globe! In fact, we have done work all over Florida in cities such as Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, & Miami. In addition, Ozean Interactive Media has performed work for clients all over the southeast United States espcially in Georgia & Alabama.

Contact us today!(352) 376-0505 Finally,GO GATORS! (you just knew we had to slide that in, especially with our advertising agency being located in Gainesville,FL!)

Please enjoy our web site! After all, it was designed & developed for the web especially with you in mind!