A jargon-busting glossary for common terms and acronyms you’ll come across in web design, development, and WordPress.
Web development and web design can be a minefield of confusing jargon, acronyms, and phrases. This post is a jargon buster glossary for some common terms you’ll come across in web design, web development, and when working with WordPress.
A | B | C | D | F | H | I | J | M | P | S | U | W
A
Refers to the practice of ensuring websites are accessible and usable for all visitors, regardless of any disabilities which may affect how they experience the web. For example, a blind user may use a screen reader device, so a page must make sense to them when read aloud by this tool (with text and images tagged correctly and descriptively). A colourblind user would require that their understanding of any parts of a website aren’t dependent on the use of certain colours only.
Short for Application Programming Interface. An API is a type of software interface that allows two seperate applications to share information between them.
B
The management area of a website. In a CMS like WordPress, this is where you add and manage pages, posts and media.
A backup is a copy of your website’s database. Backups should be taken regularly and stored on a different server to your live website. A backup allows for your website to be saved in the event of it being deleted due to malicious actions or a critical failure.
C
Caching is a core part of the way any website operates, allowing faster loading of files through cached versions of pages stored by the browser of someone who has already visited your site, or on a website’s server. As these elements of the website are pre-stored, they are easier to retrieve.
So when a user browses through other pages on the site that use the same images, CSS, or JavaScript, their browser won’t have to re-download those files. Instead it can simply load them from the cache.
Short for Content Delivery Network. A CDN is a way of distributing content from your website across global servers, so that someone visiting your site in a country outside of where your website is hosted, will be served cached static elements of your website from a server closer to them, whilst more dynamic, real-time content still comes from your central web host. This improves the speed that your website is served to global visitors, and takes some of the workload away from your main hosting server.
Short for Content Management System. A CMS is a web application which allows for more straightforward management, creation, editing, and publishing of content to a website. WordPress is a CMS. It allows multiple users access to edit a website, without the need for coding skills.
Short for Canonical Name. A CNAME record is a DNS record which maps an alias name to a true or canonical domain name. CNAME records are typically used to map a subdomain to the domain hosting that subdomain’s content.
Short for Conversion Rate Optimisation. CRO is a process of analysing, testing and optimising, to improve the conversion rate of your website. Small changes can dramatically improve conversion rates, and in turn, revenue.
Short for Cascading Style Sheet. It is a language used to style HTML. It tells a web browser how HTML elements should be displayed.
Many WordPress sites make use of pre-made themes, which are produced and sold cheaply for mass use. Custom WordPress themes are bespoke built for a particular business, entirely tailored to their needs. They tend to be faster, and more secure too.
D
Short for Domain Name System. It’s like the yellow pages for the web. It translates domain names to IP addresses, which is how web browsers locate and connect to websites.
F
In this context, a web framework or web application framework, is simply a standardised software framework designed to aid in the creation of web resoures, web apps, and even APIs. A full stack framework is one that combines several useful resource libraries into a single stack. Some full stack framework examples you may have heard of are: ASP.NET, Catalyst, Laravel, Ruby on Rails and Symfony.
This is the UI part of a website that displays to users in a web browser.
H
Short for HyperText Markup Language. It is the standard markup coding language that is used to structure web pages and their content.
I
This is an important step when managing website images, so that they don’t slow your site and page load speed down. Images should be sized appropriately and compressed to prevent them causing issues. Image compression tools do this by either reducing the quality of the image, or by finding and combining patterns within its individual pixels that reduce the bits needed to display it.
J
Javascript is one of the most commonly used programming languages in the world. It is used by developers to create dynamic and interactive content for the web. From websites, and apps, to browsers.
M
MySQL is an open source relational database management system, based on structured query language (SQL). It was developed by Oracle, and is widely compatible. Relational databases collect and store data, organising it according to the relational model. An management system like MySQL is a set of tools that are used to manage and query a relational database.
P
This is a tool which can be added to a website, to make building pages a simple and easy process for people with no coding knowledge. WordPress has its own block-based page builder in the form of Gutenberg, which replaced its classic editor a few years ago. There are also numerous third party options designed to simplify page building. Most use drag and drop blocks or elements. Some examples of popular third party page builders are Elementor, Divi and Visual Composer.
Short for Hypertext Preprocessor, is a very widely used open-source scripting language. Conceived in 1994, it’s now the foundation of WordPress, Facebook, Wikipedia, Slack, and Etsy. It’s also used for offline applications and software. It allows for the creation of dynamic and interactive websites. In 2014 a formal PHP specification was created, which is continuously worked on. PHP receives regular updates.
R
Moving from one website platform or CMS to another. For example, our client Morleys, replatformed to WordPress & WooCommerce, from Magento.
S
Short for Service Level Agreement is a document which clearly lays out expectations between a vendor and a customer. It should define what is to be delivered, how success is measured, and what happens if expectations aren’t met.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a standard security technology that protects data transferred between a website server and a browser. The SSL encrypts data passed between the servers and browsers to ensure that the data remains private.
U
Short for User Interface. It is the part of a product, in this case a website, that the user interacts with.
User interface design is ensuring that the parts of your website that users interface with are intuitive, and easy to use regardless of the device they access your website on.
Short for User Experience. UX is a very important concept in design. Using data, tools, testing and self reporting, we seek to understand how a user experiences something. In this case, a website. We can look at a user’s journey through a website and discover any blockers or pain points which can be removed, to improve their experience.
In this context is the process of designing a website with the user experience as the guiding force for decisions. It should follow user research, so the person designing has a full understanding of the specific audience for the website, and what they are trying to achieve, so that they can build smooth user journeys into the website, which help thos users achieve their goals wit ease.
W
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a worldwide organisation which develops and defines web standards, including those for web development. Compliance means that you develop inline with those standards.
Short for Website Application Firewall. A WAF screens traffic trying to reach your website, to filter out potentially malicious traffic before it even reaches your website. It acts as a gatekeeper for your website to protect it from DDoS attacks, malware, intrusions, and brute force attacks.
WebP is a next-gen image format that allows developers to compress images without impacting their image quality. It was first announced by Google in 2010.
WordPress Multisite is a special feature within WordPress that allows you to create a network of linked websites from a single WordPress installation. They can then all be managed from a central dashboard, allowing for simplified control across websites.
Very basically a WordPress theme is a collection of files that work together to create the design of your website, as well as how it behaves.
Short for ‘what you see is what you get’. In this context it is used to describe page and post editors, which let you see what your content will look like on the front-end.
Let us know if there are any other words, phrases or acronyms you’d like us to add to this jargon buster glossary. Just drop us a message here.
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