Scripting

Including sections of program code in your website, to help make it more dynamic or interactive, is called scripting.

Client-side scripting

•  A section of code is sent to the client computer and executed there, in the browser.
• It is commonly used to add interactive elements to a webpage.
• JavaScript is a language commonly used for client-side scripting.

Server-side scripting

• A section of code is executed by the web server.
• It is commonly used to create dynamic webpages, often connected to a database on the server.
• Popular languages for server-side scripting include PHP, ASP, Perl and ColdFusion.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

SEO is the process of improving the ranking of your webpage in search engine results, in order to increase traffic.

Some SEO techniques include:

• Making sure each page of your site has a unique, concise and descriptive title contained in the <title> tag.
• Using the description <meta> tag to include a summary of each page.
• Using concise URLs.
• Submit an XML sitemap to the companies which run the search engines
• Using brief, descriptive filenames and alt text for images

Search engines and web crawlers

• A web crawler (aka spider) is a piece of software which follows links from web page to web page, analyses the text on each page, and indexes the pages with related keywords.
• Search engines then use this index to find relevant pages when you carry out a search.

Optimisation of code

Load times of webpages affect traffic. By making code more efficient, file sizes, and therefore load times, can be reduced.

Some techniques include:

• Using a single CSS file to hold all the formatting information for the site.
• Putting all JavaScript into a single external file, to reduce fetches from the server.
• Remove/reduce internal commentary and white space.

Thank you to C O’Toole & A Madill from Braidhurst High School for allowing me to edit and publish this here.