A Basic glossary of website terms for people who are relatively new to the website design and development and online marketing. This list should prove helpful for marketing and advertising practitioners in understanding what someone in the industry is saying regarding your potential website solution.
Us designers and developers often use confusing terminology especially in long sentences when we explain your important options and solutions. You deserve to have technical terminology explained in “plain English”. Understanding how online marketing and building a website works, will help you to decide which web site designer your business website needs. To get a profitable website you must understand how it works, what is happening and what your web designer is working on. Hopefully this can help some of my website design clients on the Sunshine Coast aswell!
Accessibility.
This relates to the design and coding of the website. There are standards for website design and these standards refer to how easy it is for everyone to use your website, including people who handicapped or limited by older computers.
Adobe Business Catalyst. A Content Management System that enables a business owner to easily edit, update and manage there website. BC is one of the best CMS out there as it if very easy for clients to use and understand.
Backlink.
Links from another website to yours. This is used to increase a websites ranking in search engines and to get more people to your website. Generally the more the better – however they need to be from reputable websites.
Bandwidth.
How many people visit your website determine the bandwidth usage. The more people coming to your website the higher the bandwidth.
Blog.
A website consisting of a seriers of articles or diary entries. This is often used a marketing tool to increase search engine rankings.
Browser.
This is the software you use to visit a website. There are lots of different internet browsers available and generally every website looks a little different in each one. The most popular are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari for Apple Macs.
CMS – Content Management System.
A dynamic website that is database driven and enables the you to manage the content and make changes to your website without needing to know any coding at all.
Code.
Basically what lies behind the pretty design of the website is the code. Everything is coded, piece by piece to create custom websites. There are many different types of code the most basic are, HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Conversion.
A marketing term that refers to how many website visitors convert to buyers. This is what website marketing is all about, it is pointless getting thousands of visitors if no one is buying your product or your services.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management. This is a strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and retain those the company already has and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.
Database driven.
On a database driven website, the information is not stored on the page, but in a database. Every time someone visits a particular page, the information is drawn from the database in order to display it on the page. This means information can be taken from the database and displayed on different location of the website to create a dynamic website experience.
Search Engine Directory or Online Business Directory.
Just like the yellow pages except online.
Domain Name.
This is the name of the website. Depending on availability names can be easily registered online just like registering an ABN number. Domain names incur a yearly registration fee.
FTP. File Transfer Protocol.
This is how us web designers get your website files from our computers to the internet.
Hosting.
For you to have a website or email address, a computer somewhere has to provide a physical space to store the information, files and handle the bandwidth. This is known as hosting and it incurs a monthly and yearly fee and is more expensive than a domain name.
HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language.
The bare bones language that is used for creating websites.
IE – Internet Explorer.
The most commonly used internet browser in use. Also one of the poorest internet browsers with a lack of security and standards. I always recommend if you still want to use, a update is essential is a newer version of ie.
ISP – Internet Service Provider.
The company that provides you with internet access.
Javascript.
A code language used to achieve effects and functions on websites that normal html and its variants cannot achieve.
jQuery. Almost the same as javascript except easier to use. jQuery is starting to replace flash animations because of its flexibility and ability to create appealing animations.
Keyword or Key Phrase.
A keyword is a single word that when used throughout your website correctly makes your website appear in search engines when someone searches the same word. A Key Phrase works exactly the same except it is more than one word.
Link.
An area on a web page or piece of text that can be clicked on. Once clicked on, the person will be taken to the to a new web page or website. This is how internet users interact with the internet and get to places and download files.
Optimise.
How a website is structured with regard to search engines. A well optimised website is search engine friendly.
PPC – Pay Per Click.
A common term in internet advertising where you purchase advertising space on someone’s website, but instead of paying a flat monthly rate, you pay a small amount each time someone clicks on your advert – which is a link that takes them to your website.
Search Engine Ranking.
When someone searches for something using a search engine, they will receive pages and pages of results. Where a specific site appears in those results is its ranking. Closer to the top means it has a higher ranking. A critical consideration in having your website found on the internet.
Reciprocal Links.
When 2 websites link to eachother. This is a generally a tactic used for gaining more links in the hope that Google will increase the website’s ranking as a result.
Search Engine Friendly.
A search engine friendly website is one that search engines can easily read and find all the links on and properly optimised and not breaking any of their rules.
SEO. Search Engine Optimisation.
Simply refers to the practice of developing the website code and content to achieve the highest possible search engine ranking.
Sitemap.
This is an index to all the content on a website. It is normally accessible from at least the front page of the site and is used for two purposes: to help people find what they are looking for on the site and to help search engines find all your links.
Spam.
This is junkmail, normally sent out in bulk and normally with no regard as to whether you want to receive it or not.
Subdomain. A domain that is behind another, but totally seperate. Using sub-domains you can effectively have multiple “domains” on a single registered domain name and hosting account. Eg: blog.your-domain-name.com
Traffic.
Refers to all the people and computers that are visiting your website. Traffic directly affects bandwidth.
WordPress.
Is a Content Management System used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites, WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today.
This was very helpful. Thanks!
Glad it was useful!
Hi Alicia thanks for your reply!
Yes it does get a bit of traffic, I got most of the traffic from CSS galleries. Now I am trying to target website design sunshine coast and brisbane so it is geographic!
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