It may feel like you’re starting to learn a foreign language, but we’ve got you covered, here are few web design terms that you may here that will be useful to understand.
Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system, or CMS, is a system that allows you to add, modify or remove content on your website. It sits behind the publically visible portion of your site and is accessible only by logging in to a secure area of your site.
Domain Name
Simply put, this is the address people type into a browser (e.g. Chrome or Internet Explorer) to get to your website. Domain names can play a significant part in driving traffic to your website so you should choose carefully. If you’d like to know more about how to choose the perfect domain name, check out our post on the subject here.
Domain Registrar
A Domain Registrar is just the company that secures the reservation of your Internet domain name. It’s usually the company you chose to claim your given domain name initially. However, you can change registrars anytime you like. We recommend a reputable domain registrar such as fasthosts.co.uk
HTML
In proper terms, HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It’s often mistakenly referred to as ‘code’ by the uninitiated but is, in fact, a series of tags (labels) used to define the structure of a webpage, and the types of content within.
Hyperlink
A hyperlink is a single HTML element, which when clicked takes you from one part of a website/page to another.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design is a principle founded on the idea that websites will appear differently on different devices and browsers. Responsive Websites adapt and scale to the device they are being viewed from, making the site easier to navigate for the user. All modern websites should be responsive, as nowadays users use a variety of devices to surf the web.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This is a collection of strategies and processes for improving the position your website appears in search engine (like Google and Bing) results. A website with a clear SEO strategy will be more likely to be found by your customers. In web design, SEO impacts content creation, page titles, load time, image labelling to coding types of files used.
Sitemap
A sitemap outlines the structure and hierarchy of your websites pages and the relationship between pages. Sitemaps are an essential part of good SEO, as they describe the layout of your site to search engines like Google or Bing.
Staging Environment / Staging Site
These are basically a clone of your new website at another address that is used for testing purposes. It allows you to experiment with changes before making them live on your main website, helping you catch errors before they reach your customers.
Sub-page
A sub-page is any page that is not the homepage or lies beneath another page in the sitemap. An example of this could be individual product sub-pages beneath a product category page.
URL
Stands for Uniform Resource Locator, also known as a website address. It is a complete web address used to find a particular web page. This is similar to a Domain Name, but unlike a domain name, provides more information. This could be the connection protocol (secure or insecure), a file path, or even an IP address.
User Experience (UX)
A term most commonly used to define how intuitive and easy to use a website is. However, UX goes beyond this and also tries to measure a person’s emotional response and engagement with a particular web page.
User Interface (UI)
The User Interface is the collection of elements which allow people to interact with a website. The goal of a good user interface design is to make interactions intuitive and as straightforward as possible, allowing the visitor can interact with your website easily.
Web Host / Web Server
This is where your website files are stored online. The web host processes data from your visitors and your website itself. Content management systems often require a web host to operate. When content is added to a website via the CMS, it directly interacts with the web host to update databases and files, displaying this back to your visitors on the site.
Wireframe
Wireframes are a critical piece of the website strategy process that are typically completed at the very outset of a web design project. They show the planned layout of elements on a web page template before building. This allows you to ensure all the required features are included, and the page meets your UX objectives.
Web Design Terms Summary
We hope you enjoyed this summary of web design terms. We’ll continue to add to the list as time goes on. Please feel free to suggest some other terms you’d like to know the meaning of.
