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At Good Egg, we love talking like humans to other humans, because *spoiler alert* we’re humans too (we’ve proved it many times by selecting photos of bicycles and traffic lights).
But if you’re building a website or working with a website developer, it can feel like all the information you’re being given or asked for has been written by robots. Robots whose preferred language is abbreviations and acronyms.
So if website jargon has got you tied up in knots, we’ve put together a handy web design glossary to help you feel empowered when you’re working on your website or outsourcing to a website designer. This absolutely isn’t an exhaustive list, but it should cover most key terms you might find in a DIY article or on a call with a developer.
Want to work with a web designer who promises a jargon-free zone? We’ve got just the Egg for the job (our Holly)! Find out more about our web design services here.
As we’ve mentioned, working with tech folks can feel like you’re speaking a different language. And sometimes that’s because you literally are. Websites can utilise dozens of different languages to talk to each other and appear correctly on our screens. You don’t need to learn them to have a website – most modern website builders take care of it for you — but here are a few key ones to be aware of.
CSS controls your website’s appearance. It tells your website browser how a webpage should look (its style). Without CSS, webpages would look like an old Word document written in Times New Roman: just headings, text, and images. Very boring.
HTML is the barebones content of your website — the skeleton that other languages, like CSS, can then build on. If you ever customised your own MySpace page, you’ll have used HTML – it’s the code that sits within angle brackets (”<” and ”>”).
JavaScript allows your website browser to produce visual changes on a site (like a form submission or an animation) without having to reload the page.
PHP acts like the brain of a website, running complex behind-the-scenes tasks. PHP processes data and generates dynamic web content.
Designing your website inclusively to ensure that there are no barriers preventing people from using your site. Accessible practices include using alt text to describe images for screen readers; making sure there’s high contrast between your text colour and background colour, and having captions on videos. WAVE Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool is a really helpful tool for checking your site’s accessibility.
Data about who is visiting your website. This can be very basic — like how many pageviews you got or which country visitors were from — or more complex — like tracking a purchasing journey. Google Analytics is the big daddy of analytics, but can be a bit overwhelming to setup and use. Most website builders will also give you some basic analytics.
Tools or systems that do things automatically for you, giving you more time and headspace to focus on other bits of your business. This could be as simple as an email autoresponder or a more complicated workflow using software like Zapier.
The admin area of your website, where you publish new pages or posts. This is where your website data is stored and managed. You’d have to be logged in to see this — it’s not accessible to the average website visitor.
The programme/app that lets you browse the internet. Popular browsers include Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Edge. Browsers might display your website slightly differently, especially between desktop and mobile.
When you visit a website, your browser might temporarily store information from that website on your computer, so that it can load the page more quickly when you visit again. This is the cache. If you’re making changes in your website’s back-end and they’re not showing, caching could be one reason why the changes aren’t pulling through to the live site. You can clear the cache in your browser by doing a hard refresh. Fabric Digital has a great summary of how to hard refresh your browser.
Geography affects page load speed. If a website’s server is based in London, a visitor in Paris will have faster load times than a visitor in Hong Kong. CDNs get around this by creating a network of servers around the world that store a version of your website. So rather than waiting for the information to travel from London, a visitor in Hong Kong might access a server in Singapore instead. Much closer, and therefore much quicker.
Software used to create, manage, and modify digital content on a website without needing loads of specialised technical knowledge. WordPress, Wix, Webflox and Squarespace are some of the big names in the CMS space. They’re also sometimes called website builders.
Little bits of data that store information about your activity on websites. They can be used to help a website remember things for you, like the contents of a shopping basket or your login details, or track what you’re up to across the web, like when you search for Italian holidays and then start getting adverts about Rome on your Instagram.
The piece of tech that you’re viewing a website on. In the early days of the internet, this would have just been a desktop computer, but now someone could be viewing your site on a mobile phone, a tablet, a laptop or the touchscreen that controls their smart home.
Buying and selling things online. This could be via a marketplace like Etsy or via eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, or WooCommerce.
The main view of your website, which a visitor would see and interact with. You’re looking at the front-end view of the Good Egg website right now.
A page on your website that tells a visitor how you use their information. If you’re in the UK and your business processes any personal data – like names or email addresses – you need a privacy policy on your site. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a useful article about who needs a privacy notice and how to write one.
Tweaks you can make to your website to make it more visible on search engines. Lots of factors affect your website’s SEO, including the keywords you’ve used on your site; if it’s being linked to by other websites (known as ‘backlinking’ and your site’s speed, mobile friendliness and accessibility.
The page of search results that you see when you type a query into Google or other search engines.
A digital certificate that authenticates a website’s identity and enables an encrypted connection, which keeps your data safe. You’ll know if a website has one because you’ll see a little lock next to the URL. Not having an SSL certificate is bad for your website’s SEO and will decrease user trust in your site. Lots of website hosting includes SSL certification as part of the service.
UI is how something looks and functions. Good UI feels familiar and intuitive. Bad UI is cluttered, inconsistent, and difficult to use.
UX is designing the layout, functionality, and flow of information, where things are, and how you navigate to them. Good UX operates seamlessly and is satisfying to use. Bad UX doesn’t work properly or isn’t accessible.
API keys are a string of letters and numbers which allow different bits of software to talk to one another. For example, an API key connects our website to our mailing list provider. You’ll find them in your integration settings, and each one is unique.
The address where users can access your website, such as goodegg.digital. You buy a domain name from a domain registrar (like GoDaddy), then connect (also known as ‘pointing’) it to your website, via a process called updating the nameservers. This can take 24-48 hours to take effect.
Your website host stores all the files for your website. Some website builders, like Squarespace and Wix, host your website for you. Others, like WordPress, are self-hosted, so you arrange the hosting yourself. Web hosting uses a lot of energy, so we think it’s important to use a sustainable host, like Siteground or Krystal.
Integration is when your website sends or receives information to another website or app. Showing your Instagram feed on your homepage is an integration.
The version of your website that is live on the internet right now. Changes you make to a live site will take effect straight away.
Getting around a website.
A piece of software that adds specific features to a website. You might use a plugin to add a design feature to your site or to add some cool functionality.
If the URL of a page has changed or you’ve deleted a page from your site, redirects tell users and search engines where to go instead to find the page. Say we were changing our ‘Blog’ page to a ‘News’ page, and changing the URL from goodegg.digital/blog to goodegg.digital/news. A redirect would mean that anyone typing in the old URL (/blog) would automatically get redirected to the new URL (/news). Without a redirect, you’d get a 404 ‘Page doesn’t exist’ error message, and it would be bad for your SEO.
A list of the pages on your website. When you’re building a website, this is how you plan the site structure and content. Once the website is built, search engines use sitemaps to understand your site and what information is there. An SEO plugin like Yoast will help you submit a sitemap.
A staging site (or staging environment) is a copy of your website where you can make changes without affecting your live site. This could be a simple thing like testing a plugin, or a full redesign.
The bit of a webpage that appears first; what a visitor to your site would see without scrolling. This is generally someone’s first impression of your website, so it needs some pizazz.
The main meat of your website: everything underneath your top menu and above your footer.
A CTA gives us an instruction to get us to do something on a website, and is generally in the form of a button. CTAs could be things like ‘Get in touch’, ‘Buy now’ or ‘Read more’.
The little icon associated with your website, which you’ll see next to the site’s name. Gmail’s is a colourful envelope, ours is a smiley face.
The bottom section of a webpage, where you’ll usually find contact details, privacy policy, and links to other important pages.
If you’re reading this on mobile (or make your desktop window a bit smaller), you won’t see our menu at the top of the screen; you’ll see three horizontal lines in the top corner (known as a hamburger button). When you tap that button, our previously hidden menu (the hamburger menu) will appear.
The top section of a webpage, where you’ll find the site’s logo and navigation links/menu. You might also have a login area here, a cart button or links to social media.
A standalone web page created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. Everything on this page is focused on getting the visitor to take a specific action, like signing up for a course, enquiring about a service or buying a ticket. This is a landing page that we created for our eBook: The Good Egg Guide to Building A Feel-Good Business.
A prototype of a website to show how it would look when it’s built. It doesn’t have any functionality but shows the design and appearance. We use Figma to build mockups.
Building and designing a website so that it looks good on all different sizes of screens and devices – from widescreen desktops to portrait mobile phones.
How a visitor moves around your site, from the moment they arrive on the page to when they achieve their end goal (like buying your product, learning about your services or getting in touch). Good web design guides the user around the site using information, reinforcement, incentives and calls to action. If there’s not a clear user journey, your visitor will probably give up and leave your site.
A simple outline of the website that shows the basic structure of what will be on the page. You can draw a wireframe on a piece of paper.
A description of an image that gets added to a site’s HTML code. Alt text is used by screen readers to describe images for blind and vision-impaired people, so it’s best practice to write alt text for all the images on your site. A browser will also show this image description if it can’t load the image.
The different formats an image file can be in. The main ones are:
Data about a file that’s written into the file itself. Like how Google Photos can tell you what camera a photo was taken on. If you ever, hypothetically, downloaded songs from Limewire, you’ll remember the pain of the metadata being wrong and having to manually add the name of the band and the song title.
Optimising images reduces their file size without noticeably reducing their quality and helps keep your website running quickly. It’s good practice to optimise your images before uploading them to your site. Some things you can do to optimise your images:
If you’re tired of working with website designers who use this jargon like a second language, let’s chat! Clarity is our love language, and our website services are designed to be as easy, accessible, and stress-free as possible.
Pop us a message to find out more about our services or request a bespoke quote.
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