Web Design SEO Glossary B

BCC – Blind Carbon Copy
Terminology partially borrowed from the days when type written letters used carbon paper to make a copy of a letter for business purposes. Applied to emails, a blind carbon copy is a copy of an email that is sent at the same time as the “original”, but the bcc recipients’ names and email addresses are not seen by any of the message’s recipients.

Backup
A backup is a copy of electronic files kept for security and/or historical documentation reasons. IMCD keeps multiple backup copies of the professional websites it hosts as redundant security benefit of its web design services.

Backward Compatible
Software designs that are engineered to work with earlier versions or the output files of earlier versions of the software application, a user agent, language, program, etc. XML code is currently backwards compatible with the earlier HTML code.

Bandwidth
Bandwidth describes the amount of data that can be transferred over the network in a fixed amount of time, usually measured in bits per second. The bandwidth of a website is set by the hosting service. A website with large amounts of images or video files needs greater bandwidth than a website that is mostly text.

Banner
A banner is a static or animated graphic that is placed on web sites as an advertisement. Banner ads are used as the more common way of advertising on the Internet.

Block Level Element
In HTML and XML code, a block-level element usually contains inline elements and other block-level elements. Block level elements such as paragraphs, headings, divs, and blockquotes usually begin a new line.

Blog
Blog is a shortened version of web log. A website or portion of a website where entries are made in a journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order. Entries are generally text, however images can be added to each entry. Further organization of blog entries is done by creating categories for the different subject areas. Blogs are used by many high ranking real estate web sites, finance blogs and professional business websites to easily add timely and informative content to the site. With the intuitive, web-based interface blogs use, non-technical people can add content to their blog. Most blogs have the capacity to have online visitors comment on the blog entries.

Bookmark
In Internet usage: A hyperlink to a particular web site or web page, stored (bookmarked) in a web browser to make it faster and easier to visit the site in the future. Internet Explorer terms bookmarks “favorites” in Microsoft’s habitual effort to appear as if they are not once again imitating somebody.

Breadcrumbs
Harkening back to the story of Hansel and Gretel, breadcrumbs are a navigation tool that denotes the current web page’s location by a horizontal list of pages that track back to the home page. Breadcrumbs allow visitors to backtrack to pages that usually have more general information than the one they are currently viewing.

Broadband
A high-speed internet connection that is “always on” that permits the fast transmission of large file sizes. Broadband technologies include cable, T1 lines, DSL and wireless.

Browser
Also known as a web or Internet browser, it is the software that interprets all the underlying code to render websites as they are seen by visitors. Browsers renders items visually and audibly so visitors can read the text, listen to streaming audio or streaming video as well as any voice assistance or page readers. Three popular browsers for PCs are Chrome (by Google), Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox and for Macs is Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

Browser Style Sheet
The default style sheet a browser uses. When web designers do not call out a style rules in the HTML or CSS, the browser applies their default values. Although their is no official standard and style sheets vary between browsers, some common browser styles are black text and blue hyperlinks.