Responsive design is a method of applying different sets of display rules  to elements of a website based on the size of the viewport availale.

These rules are applied via Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) and can affect the appearance, position, size or visibility of specific elements such as navigation, sidebars, pictures and the main content.

A single code base is created for the website rather than building a different website to be viewed on mobile phones, tablets and desktop computers.

Responsive design isn’t just a technical issue. A good responsive design requires design decisions to be taken to determine which elements to change as the viewport changes.

To see an example of responsive design in action, visit www.smashingmagazine.com with your web browser maximized. Now slowly resize the window until it is as small as it can go. The layout changes as you do this and as the viewport reduces in size, different parts of the style sheet are triggered and applied to the layout.

Reset style sheets are used to create a baseline that web designers can work from no matter which browser people are using to view the web site.

On the web, a style sheet is a file or section of code contains information about how to display elements on a web page. A style sheet tells the browser where to place certain elements, how big they should be and what colour they should be. Styles sheets are written in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Whether or not the designer adds a style sheet to a web site, the web browser will still use its own default style sheet to decide how big different types of text elements should be and what sort of margins they should have etc. Each browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera etc)  uses different default settings.

So many web designers choose to use a reset style sheet to clear out all of the default setting before applying their own styles.

The Real Time Web is a phrase used by some people to distinguish sites which publish content on a frequent basis from those web sites that publish less frequently. News web sites and active blogs are usually classed as part of the real time web where as a regular company web site is not.

What separates and helps define the real time web from the ordinary web is the speed at which their content is indexed by search engines such as Google.

Sites which are classed as part of the real time web are indexed very frequently (e.g. hourly) where as other sites may only be indexed every two weeks.

All types of traffic to a web site are identified by where the visitor was before they arrived at your web site. When a person clicks on a link on a web site and arrives at another web site this is called a referral.

The site that the person clicks through from is called the referring site. Web analytics packages used to help you understand who is visiting your web site can tell you the addresses of the pages on other web sites that have referred visitors to your web site.

This can be useful for tracking the success of promotions and advertising.