The Funny Side of Web

As a website Project Manager, I often find myself in the middle translating "web talk" to "non-web talk". In light of my expertise in turning my "nerd" switch on and off, I thought I would share some of the most common things I hear the web guys say and how I attempt to translate them:

• Web talk: Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) Sucks (click image on the right to see a larger version of the cartoon, which was sent to me from one of our web developers)
• Translation: Internet Explorer 6 is an old website browser that Microsoft no longer supports. Therefore it does not support up-to-date programming languages. This is why your website looks different in IE6 in comparison to newer versions of IE, Firefox or Chrome.

• Web talk: Jquery is awesome
• Translation: Instead of using Flash (a programming language) to create movement on your website, we use Jquery which is a programming language based on Javascript. This will enable the movement on your website to be visible on mobile platforms.

• Web talk: Hard coding is a pain in the butt
• Translation: When a website is not attached to a Content Management System (CMS), a system that enables anybody to make content updates, changes need to be made directly in the website code by a web developer, which can be tedious and time consuming.

Being involved in website projects can be frustrating at times, especially when you don't know the "ins" and "outs" of everything. I do however, learn a lot from our web team. I feel that our clients learn something as well as we go through the development process together.

My key learnings over the years:

• Things will always go wrong with your website. Whether it's the server unexpectedly going down, or a piece of code accidentally being deleted. The key is to not overreact or freak out because, for the most part, these things can be fixed.
• Be patient. You are not always going to understand everything about your website. Learn to be comfortable with the aspects of your website that you do have control over.
• The more effort you put into your website, the more you're going to get out of it. Websites are meant to be dynamic. Learn how to integrate the management of your website into your daily or weekly activities.

So as you venture through your website project and hear words like "PHP", "MySQL" and "DNS", keep in mind that these aren't just words used by web developers to confuse the rest of us, they're actually legit!