As reported by MUO, internet culture often has unfamiliar terminology that’s difficult for outsiders to understand.
If you’re involved in creating a website, you’re going to want to arm yourself with as much website terminology as possible. Without this information, you may feel left behind during critical conversations and feel uncomfortable with the next steps in the process.
This article is all about the latest terms you’ll need to understand to prevent this anxiety. Wherever you are reading these words, settle in and prepare yourself to learn the buzz words that will impress your team!
Accessibility
Are you familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act? This landmark legislation changed the landscape in literal and metaphorical ways for millions of Americans.
Accessibility for those with color blindness, deafness, and other disabilities has become a hot topic in recent years. However, creating designs that everyone can utilize is far from an old topic. In Australia, the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992 made it mandatory for each website to provide ways for anyone to access its information.
Content Management System (CMS)
The everyday tool that you’ll use the most for your website is often referred to as a CMS. This application helps you create and manage the content on your website without any coding knowledge required.
Many cool website designs that you’ve enjoyed in the past got built using WordPress. This content management system is the most popular by far, but there are plenty of other platforms to consider.
Duplicate Content
When Google or other search engines go through your website, one of the first things to get flagged as duplicate pages.
One of the most common reasons for poor traffic is having too much of the same content on your site. Google may not know what you’ve designated as your main page and will continue searching for relevant keywords regardless. As a result, potential users may land in the wrong place, if they make it at all.
The importance of taking a dive into more terms that will teach you about this type of website design terminology may prove crucial to success.
Hero Image
When you’re creating a website, you’re also crafting a narrative. And as of 2021, one of the most inviting ways to get people to buy into your story is a hero image!
You may have run across these large images on a homepage in the past. If the developers invested time into the design, this should have motivated you to explore even more of the website.
Landing Page
Website design services can toss this term around without enough explanation, so now is the perfect time to understand what it means.
When you’re coming up with website design ideas for landing pages, you’re hoping that visitors go to a page that encourages them to interact further. As you convert more people with these pages, you should see an uptick in customers and traffic. In many cases, you’ll pay for ads on Google or other sites with a landing page link targeted toward the desired market.
Meta Tags
When search engines crawl through your website, they’re looking for meta tags to understand and categorize the content. Among all the technical terms for SEO, this is arguably the most important to understand and execute.
Meta tags come from the HTML on your site, and they’re often manipulated while working in your CMS. If you’re interested in learning even more about how to design a website, start with this term and branch out.
Migration
When you’re moving the content on your website from one host to another, that’s called a migration. In some cases, you may hear people refer to a move from one content management system to another with the same term.
There are times when you realize that your hosting provider doesn’t meet your needs. When that happens, you may want professional help moving everything safely to another home.
Mobile-Friendly
Some circles may call this “mobile responsiveness,” but the end goal is always the same: make phone users happy! If you’re not planning to make your site a pleasure to use on an iPhone or Samsung device, you’re already behind.
A Cisco Annual Internet Report estimates that over 70 percent of the world will have access to mobile internet by 2023. Considering the ease and low cost of cell phones, it’s easy to assume that you will need to keep your design with these users in mind.
Sitemap
When you design a website, you create an outline that’s often referred to as a sitemap. Similar to creating a structure for a school paper, this process means building the vision for how your site operates.
This effort often gets split into two different types of sitemaps. You’ll want to create one for HTML for design purposes, and an XML version to format for your SEO goals.
User Experience (UX)
User experience, or UX, focuses on designing how you want users to interact with your website.
The more diverse of a population you can have contributing toward this effort the better. The methods you will rely on include usability testing, surveys, and interviews. In some cases, you may even use card sorting to develop the architecture based on user feedback.
Need More Website Terminology?
Having this website terminology in your back pocket is an excellent step toward building a presence that’s relevant to 2021. However, there’s also an entire world beyond these elements to examine. If you’re going to become a web guru, you’re going to need to arm yourself with more knowledge.
Do you want to start estimating the website design cost for your project? Do you need more ideas? Then check out more of our professional advice about web technology on our blog today!