Visual Terms
Knowing what a site is and how they work (even if just vaguely) will give you a leg up on someone who's trying to wing it. Here we give you some definitions about the visual concepts of web design.
What's a browser?
A web browser is the application you're using to surf the internet. This could be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Navigator, Safari, Opera, or Konqueror. There are literally hundreds of browsers available, each with their own quirks and rendering engines that display pages slightly different. The web standards movement has pushed many browser manufacturers to follow the W3C specs as close as possible so that pages display in each browser almost identically. There's still a way to go, but it's not nearly as bad as several years ago (even Microsoft is on board).
WYSIWYG? — HUH?
WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. This often refers to visual editors that allow you to drag and drop items onto your page as you create the site. Most editors today are either strictly WYSIWYG or a hybrid of visual editing and code editing. Of course, there are still some that allow you to create the entire site by editing HTML code.
What is CSS?
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) are the preferred method of changing the look for your site. They allow you to quickly change the colors, positions, and sizes of various elements throughout your site. Also, since they can be created in an external file it makes it easy to change one item and have that propagated throughout the rest of your site.