Jargon buster
A field in the domain records. An A record points your domain name to the IP address of a computer or server connected to the internet. So, it needs to point to whoever is hosting your website for it to accessible to the rest of the world-wide-web and internet. The A in A record stands for Address.
Accessibility is about making sure that a website or any other digital product is accessible to all users. For instance by adding closed captions to any videos. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines set the standards for digital accessibility.
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
A set of guidelines to make website authoring tools (like CMS) accessible, both to use and in terms of the content they produce.
Content design, also know as UX writing, is all about making sure your content is planned, written, and delivered in the most user-focused way. That way you can deliver helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not search engines.
Content Management System
Computer software used to manage the creation and management of digital content. Usually a CMS provides a user-friendly editor that creates web pages for you with little or no coding.
Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of increasing the percentage of users or website visitors who complete a specific call to action. For instance, clicking on a link in an email or making a purchase on a webpage.
Call to Action,
A marketing device that encourages or instructs a customer to provoke a response. For instance a “buy it now” button, or a “sign up now” link.
Click Through Rate.
A measurement of how many people click on a link to view a page, email or advert.
A unique name which is used as the address where internet users can access your website. E.g cherwelldigital.co.uk. The .co.uk part is actually called a top level domain.
Always make sure you own your domains, and they are registered to you, not a supplier. It’s always good practice to host your domains separately from your web hosting. If you control your domain you can point it to wherever you like, so it’s a good way to make sure you have control of your digital presence.
Domain Name System
Like the address book of the internet. Humans navigate the web using domain names. Computers use IP addresses. The Domain Name System is a decentralised system that translates domain names to IP addressees.
An online platform often used for designing digital products. Typically wireframes but can also be used for more finished designs.
A website has to live somewhere on the web. Hosting just means some space on a computer (server) somewhere that is connected to the web, where people can find your website. We don’t host websites as we think our customers should own their own hosting (in the same way you should own your own domains) although we can help you find the best hosting for your and your website, set it up and manage for you.
Pay-per-click advertising. Every time a users on a link in your advert you pay a fee.
Search Engine Marketing
The process of making sure a website is high in the Search Engine Results Pages usually by using paid advertising, such as Pay Per Click (PPC) platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads, Differs from SEO which is usually a way of improving unpaid (or organic) search results.
Search Engine Optimisation – the process of making sure a website is set up to optimise its discoverability by search engines. SEO is usually a way of generating unpaid (or organic) search results, as opposed to SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or PPC (Pay Per Click) which are ways to improve paid search retails.
Search Engine Results Pages. The list of results that comes up when you enter a search term into Google or Bing etc. Coming high in the SERPS is a goal of SEO, SEM, and PPC.
Secure Socket Layer – the system of electronic authentication that gives a website a layer of security and confers a padlock in the domain name in the browser. Sites without a SSL certificate will not have the padlock and have some form of security warning in the browser. Although SSL has actually been superseded by TSL (Transport Socket Layer) the term “SSL” is still in common usage.
Essentially a very secure password, that lets browsers know that the domain of your website is authenticate.
Transport Socket Layer – which is the standard that replaced SSL for security certificates. Everyone stills call them SSL certificates though
The way content is categorized and organised on a website. One example might be the main navigation menu, but it also includes other things like also content tags, categories and subcategories, and content hierarchies.
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines
A set of guidelines for user agents (such as web browsers and media players) aimed at making the user agent accessible to users with disabilities.
User Experience. This is all about how easy or hard a user will find using your site is. The focus is on functionality and flow. Is it hard to find the product you’re looking for, or check out? Compare this to UI, which is more focused on how a site looks.
User Interface. How a site looks. in terms of branding, logo, colours, fonts etc. As opposed to UX which is how a site functions and how easy it is to use.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet. The current recommended standard is WCAG 2.2
A Content Management system, that enables users to build websites. It is estimated that around 60% of all websites using CMS are using WordPress, and around 28% of the top 10 million websites use WordPress.
The full open source version of WP CMS. It’s free to download and use any way you want. You will need somewhere to host it though.
WordPress.com is a proprietary version of WordPress, owned by the company Automattic, which offers a hosted version of WordPress. Not a bad place to start to learn WP, but not all functionality and customisation may be available in this more curated environment.