Five Terms You Will Hear During Your Website Build and What They Mean
Blog Post
Being part of a website build can be exciting but daunting if you’re unfamiliar with the process. If you haven’t been involved in a website development project before, you may worry whether you will be able to communicate your firm’s website requirements and vision effectively.
Web development, like any industry, has its own set of unique terms or jargon, and understanding these terms is crucial to collaborating with your web strategy and development team. Speaking the same language minimizes misunderstandings and ultimately ensures that the final product meets your expectations.
In this blog post, we will define five key terms to get you started, but this is only the tip of the iceberg!
Why should you learn website development terms?
Better Understand the Development of Your Website
By understanding some key website development terminology, you’ll be ready to communicate confidently and contribute to your website project. You will be able to make informed decisions on what your website should and shouldn’t be able to handle and set more realistic project timelines. A stronger grasp of these terms will also help to reduce misunderstandings. You will be more informed, more engaged, and an all-around greater contributor to the project.
Easily Communicate Project Requirements
Understanding website development terminology will help you articulate your vision and requirements with your development team more clearly, which, in turn, makes it that much easier to execute. A shared vocabulary will enable more productive conversations around project scope, timelines for completion, and potential bottlenecks. Moreover, it allows you to ask better questions and improve your decision-making during development, establishing a more collaborative relationship with your development team and ensuring the final website meets your requirements.
Top Five Website Development Terms and Meanings
1. Responsiveness
Responsiveness describes a website’s ability to automatically adjust how it looks and behaves on different devices – whether desktop computers, tablets, or smartphones. A responsive website automatically adjusts the layout, images, and content for an optimum experience regardless of the device a visitor uses. This is very significant in the mobile-first world we find ourselves in today, given that the web traffic is now increasingly coming from handheld devices.
Responsive designs are built using a flexible grid, scalable images, and CSS (website styling language). Responsiveness results in a better user experience, higher Google ranking (since Google prefers mobile-friendly sites), and lower maintenance compared to upkeeping two separate versions of your site—one for desktop computers and another for mobile devices. Other terms for ‘responsiveness’ you might hear when talking to your development team could include “fluid layout,” “mobile-first design,” or even “adaptive design.”
2. Content Management System (CMS)
A Content Management System, or CMS, is software that lets users create, manage, and edit website content without the need for specialized technical knowledge (e.g., code). It’s the interface you use for adding, editing, and organizing website content such as blogs, team directories, service lists, and product catalogues. Some commonly used CMS platforms include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Sitefinity.
The biggest benefit of a CMS is that it separates a website’s content from its code. This allows non-developers to easily update and maintain the website. This separation also helps to maintain consistent styling across the website because the content is inserted into pre-designed templates or pages.
Some factors to consider as you pick a CMS for your project include:
- Is it easy to use for content editors and developers
- Is it scalable as your website grows
- What security features are built-in, and does it require updates
- Are there any built-in SEO capabilities and optimization tools
- How will it affect performance and page load speeds
- Are there built-in E-Commerce capabilities
- What are the website hosting requirements
With the help of your web development team, you can choose the best CMS for your needs, considering various factors and technical requirements.
3. Landing Page
A landing page is a single web page designed to accomplish a specific action, like converting a website visitor into a bona fide lead or customer. Typically, a landing page focuses on a single call-to-action and can be made for marketing campaigns or promotional activities. The idea is to ensure that as few distractions as possible are available to send your visitors on their merry way to perform your desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, or buying something.
A good landing page would include eye-catching headlines, concise and persuasive copy, relevant images or videos, and a very visible CTA. Sometimes, they exclude regular website navigation to focus visitors on a specific action. When talking with your development team about landing pages, you might discuss A/B testing, which is the comparison of multiple versions of the page to see which has a higher conversion rate. Well-designed landing pages can significantly improve the success of your digital marketing efforts by increasing conversion rates and providing valuable data on customer behaviour.
4. Sitemap
A sitemap is a hierarchical list or diagram that outlines the structure and organization of a website’s pages and content. Sitemaps serve two primary purposes: to help users navigate the site more easily and to assist search engines in understanding and indexing the website’s content.
There are two main types of sitemaps:
- HTML Sitemaps: These would be visible to the users and occupy a whole website page, listing all the major pages neatly.
- XML Sitemaps: These are meant for the search engines and include additional metadata about each page, such as when it was last updated and how important it is relative to the other pages of the site.
Creating a sitemap is one of the most important steps in a website development project. It’s at this stage that a website strategist plans the information architecture of the website, ensuring that the content makes logical sense. It helps identify gaps in content, redundancies, and opportunities for internal linking. Your development team may use tools to generate sitemaps automatically or create custom ones based on your specific needs. A well-structured sitemap contributes to a better user experience and can positively impact your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
5. Cookies
Cookies are small text files that websites place on a user’s device while browsing the site. Cookies help enhance user experience through saving preferences, sustaining log-in sessions, and showing personalized content. Cookies come in a wide range of types, such as:
- Session cookies: These cookies are temporary and deleted when a user leaves the website.
- Persistent cookies: These are cookies that remain on the device for some time or until they are deleted manually.
- First-party cookies: These are set by the website the user is on itself.
- Third-party cookies: These are set by visiting external services or advertisers.
Recently, cookies have become a concern in terms of privacy. In some regions, regulations force a website not to install non-essential cookies unless explicitly agreed to by the user. When discussing cookies with your development team, you might want to discuss the implementation of a cookie consent mechanism along with a straightforward cookie policy for your website. Working with cookies is a sensitive process of balancing user experience and functionality with privacy concerns.
Conclusion: Empowering Your Web Development Journey
While these five terms will give you a solid foundation, they're just the tip of the iceberg in the vast sea of web development terminology. As you embark on your website project journey, you'll encounter many more industry-specific terms and concepts. Remember, it's not only okay but encouraged to ask questions and seek clarification. Understanding these terms early in the process can save time, prevent misunderstandings, and lead to a smoother project flow. Don't hesitate to speak up if something isn't clear – it's far better to ask for an explanation at the outset than to realize there's been a misunderstanding after significant development has occurred. In the world of web design and development, curiosity is your friend, and there's no such thing as a silly question. Your project team is there to guide you, so never be afraid to seek the knowledge you need to make informed decisions about your website.
Visit our Website Development service page to discover how Cubicle Fugitive can assist your firm when developing a new website.