Read Time: Approx. 12 mins
Introduction:
This post is made to help explain some of the jargon web designers use to a layman audience, largely by making comparisons to real-world businesses that you already understand, to lift the veil on what often seems to be an unnecessarily complicated industry. Some advice is also shared throughout.
Basic Terms:
What is a Domain?
When web developers talk about a domain, we mean a specific part of the link to a website. If we use Google or Amazon to illustrate:
This website’s domain is truenorthwebdesign.co.uk, as in www.truenorthwebdesign.co.uk.
A domain is best understood like a house address. On the internet, it is needed because it marks your plot of land and tells incoming traffic where to go, just like a real-world postcode.
I recommend strongly that you always make sure you buy the domain for your website personally. This ensures that you own the digital land your website is built on, in the same way you would want to own your land before building a house on it. You can trust a web designer to host for you if you don’t want to manage that, but it’s unwise to let them buy your domain too, because then they own it and if you ever want, or need to leave them, it puts you in a very compromised position if they won’t co-operate.
Hosting
Hosting is something that seems confusing to some, because if you have a domain, don’t you ‘have a website’? Well, sort of. But people need to be able to see it somehow and a domain doesn’t do that.
Think of owning a stall at a market – you own a business that sells stuff, but you need some venue to host you in order to sell it to members of the public. Well, just like you pay for the stand at the market, you also pay for hosting online, so that you can be seen by the online public.
In technical terms, hosting means that your website files are stored on a server that people can access with they go to your domain – those files are your website.
You can sort out your own hosting or leave it to your web designer, but there is a degree of technicality involved in this that may put off busy or non-techy clients. There are pros and cons to both approaches (I may write a separate post about hosting later). I offer hosting with all my builds – fast, secure, and reliable – and based in the UK. Some developers charge yearly for hosting, while some charge monthly. I charge monthly and bundle it with other services to make it better value.
CMS (Content Management System)
The CMS is essentially a system, hidden from the visitor but used by the people who run the website, to manage information and content. It is the way we create new pages, new product listings, new blog posts, and more besides. It’s very much the internal organs, if the website is the skin, to draw parallel to the human body.
We also use them to manage and control extensions and other features of a website, such as its structure, settings for things like time zones, and more.
Not every website technically needs a CMS, but they make managing one much easier, particularly for clients that are not familiar with code and cannot do this stuff manually.
All of my websites are built with WordPress, which is one of the most popular and reliable CMS solutions in the world. This makes it easy for you to learn – if you want to – how to do things like adding new blog posts or store listings. Alternatively, I can also do that for you as a paid service.
Plugins
Plugins are extensions that you might think of like apps for your phone. You buy a phone and it works nicely, but you want to use Facebook, so you download an app that lets you do that.
Plugins are the same thing, but for WordPress. I build a nice site but I want to add some fancy features, like a tool to design web pages, so I download Elementor. Or perhaps I want a tool to track my visitors, so I download something for Analytics.
Plugins can be used for anything, from design to adding new features, to strengthening security.
It is never a good idea to use too many plugins though. Just as a device slows down with too many programs running, a website also slows down with too many plugins. It’s clever to be selective and only pick ones that add real value. A slow website loses visitors and struggles to make money. It’s also important to watch out for the safety of plugins. Installing a bad one is like giving a house key to someone you don’t know, and that can be risky.
Frontend:
You’ll often hear frontend used with backend as if to describe two ‘sides’ of a website, but it can be confusing if you have never seen them. It does work quite intuitively though.
A house has an interior and a façade and this is exactly how websites work as well – the only difference being that the public are not allowed to come inside (and if they do, you have a security problem!)
The frontend is the design of the website – how it looks and works to the people that visit it. A frontend web developer, therefore, is one who specialises in the more public and visual elements of web design.
I do a lot of frontend work at True North, which includes everything from fonts, colours, page layouts, templates, and more.
Backend:
The backend is the interior of – or, perhaps better put, the backstage of a website and focuses a lot more on functionality than looks. This is not for the public – it is where information is received, transmitted, and stored. It’s where databases are kept, or integrations are linked into the website to allow greater functionality (such as booking forms or eCommerce stores).
The backend is supported by things that go beyond the website, such as hosting and servers. These allow the backend to run, on top of which is the design of the site. It is a bit like the layers of a sandwich, or insulation in a house – all parts are needed to make the ‘whole’ of a website.
It’s important to note here that WordPress is not just the backend. WordPress – the CMS – is both frontend (what visitors see) and backend (the bit that manages content and logic, etc).
Full Stack:
Looking around for web designers or developers you may have come across the term ‘full stack developer’ a few times. This means the developer works on both the frontend and the backend of websites, so they can do design and functional stuff too. In reality, pretty much all developers do this, as while they are technically two distinct jobs, they are so integrated that it’s almost necessary to learn both in order to be any good as a developer.
I don’t use the term because I don’t want to intimidate or confuse people who are not familiar with tech jargon, but I am a full stack developer as I work on both the frontend and backend of the websites I build, too.
Responsive:
When we talk of a website being responsive, we mean that it adapts to different screens nicely, without breaking the layout – or even worse, the actual functionality of the page.
This includes making sure text scales down in size, so you don’t just see one huge word and nothing else. It means making sure images are not pushed off the side of the display, that you can still click on buttons and type in forms, and so on.
Responsiveness is vital in the modern day, where most websites get a significant majority of their visitors on mobiles and not computers. Responsiveness is why a lot of websites today are built in blocks, which you may even be able to tell if you look at them closely. It helps when shrinking down to a phone screen, because two boxes that sat beside each other on a computer can be stacked on top of each other on a phone and look – generally – fine.
Responsiveness is a huge factor in SEO nowadays too, which leads on nicely to…
SEO:
SEO sometimes feels like the buzzword of the age in web design, and that’s partly because it is. It means “Search Engine Optimisation” and involves quite a bit of work to make a website appear in Google search results. It is, basically, the process of optimising a website to be better than others, so it appears higher in that list. SEO can broadly be split into two types:
On-Page SEO
This is the SEO that is done on the pages of your website. It should be done by all good developers while your site is being built, and includes things like correctly using heading hierarchies, adding alt text to images so Google can understand what they are (and screen readers), responsive design, targeting keywords in the writing of text on a page, etc.
In analogy with a house, on-page SEO is exactly like setting good foundations so the building doesn’t fall over when you start adding walls and a roof.
Targeting Keywords?
The internet is understood by search engines largely in terms of keywords. You essentially see this play out on social media, when someone writes a post and puts a hashtag in it, because they want to target the audience looking for that keyword. #funny finds people looking for a laugh, so you can share your joke with them.
Well, web pages also target keywords. Although it is a bit more complicated it works in a similar way. If you are a hairdresser in London, you will sprinkle references to that into your page. “Welcome to the best hairdresser in London” in the heading, for example, with “I’m a 32-year-old hairdresser based in London – open every day!” in the body text, and so on.
You have to make sure to keep it natural though. There is a lot of writing out there these days that is written not to entertain or inform, but to game the SEO system, and it’s almost nonsense stuffed with keywords to try and appear higher in Google search. It’s important not to forget to write for your audience first and foremost, otherwise you won’t have one for very long.
Off-Page SEO:
This is SEO that happens beyond the context of a single page, and includes broader tasks like speed optimisation across the website, for example. A slow website frustrates visitors and they leave, and Google knows about this, and will lower the ranking of that site as a result.
It also includes things that happen outside of your site completely that help it grow. Such things include marketing, and what’s known as backlinking.
Backlinking?
Backlinking is the art of getting other sites with a good, trustworthy reputation, to link to yours. It signals to Google that you, too, are trustworthy. It’s like the internet version of networking – it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
It is often very hard to get backlinks organically from other website owners (such as bloggers) so people usually try to post helpful answers to questions on Reddit or Quora or similar, and link back to their own site, or they write guest posts on other people’s sites in return for a link, etc.
There are some cheap, too-good-to-be-true services out there that promise glowing results in no time when it comes to this sort of work but I’d caution you to research carefully. SEO is an elusive topic to most people and opportunists look to cash in on that. A bad job of this, particularly someone who is using shady sources to get you backlinks, is going to hurt your website in the long run. It’s like if your friend who is a schoolteacher gives you a reference, vs. an angry neighbour you don’t get on with, when applying for a new job. The number of references is not important, the quality is.
Further to this, it’s also important to note that SEO is ongoing, like maintenance, and a) never gets ‘completed’ and B) is very difficult to guarantee results for, because everyone else is trying to out-compete you just like you are trying to out-compete them. Anyone guaranteeing SEO results is either a genius, or a bit optimistic – and most people are not geniuses.
A Note on my SEO Services:
Currently, I only offer on-page SEO. SEO is one of the ways in which a website is almost ‘alive’ and requires constant upkeep. (Other ways are security, updates, optimisation, etc). SEO is quite time-consuming and to do it really well requires quite expensive tools.
Being a website builder/designer foremost, while I do work on the backend – and I do maintenance work, I am not an SEO specialist, and so at the moment I don’t offer ongoing SEO. I may look to change this in the future, but I prefer the designing – that is what I’m best at. You might think of this much like a racer enjoys racing, but isn’t necessarily a good mechanic, and while they can do basic maintenance on a vehicle, the serious stuff is probably done by another qualified expert.
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