When you embark on the task of getting your own website set up you are confronted with a lot of technical jargon you might be unfamiliar with. You know how you want your website to look, but how can you explain it to a web designer that expects you to decide on technical aspects you don’t know about?

While meeting with a web designer can be stressing due to all this jargon, they need to meet with you before they move forward. They depend on your decisions in order to know which direction to go to when working on the look and feel of your site. You may wonder, then, if there’s an easier way for them to explain what they want to say without sounding so techy. Here at Clicks & Mortar Websites we’ve come up with a small glossary of 25 Web Design definitions that should make your journey a bit easier.  We hope you find them useful!

1. ACCESIBILITY: in this context, it refers to the ability of a website’s design to respond to the needs of individuals with disabilities that could make it hard for them to move around your site. An accessible website will be compatible with a screen reader or sound players for visually impaired visitors, or it could have a different display option for those with color blindness. Websites with high accessibility will also include transcriptions for any audio files uploaded so hearing impaired visitors don’t miss out on the content.
2. SSL: a Secured Sockets Layer is a protocol created to share private information over the Internet. It encrypts the information being sent over so that it can be shared without compromising its privacy. On a website, SSL is used when you need to collect confidential information, such as credit card numbers.
3. BACK-END/FRONT-END: both of these concepts refer to different areas of a website. Whereas the back-end is hidden from visitors and includes all of the information and elements needed to run the site, the front-end refers to everything the visitor can see: pictures, information, logos, etc.
4. CDN: a Content Delivery Network (commonly referred to as CDN) is a series of interconnected servers that store a copy of a website’s material in several different locations. The larger the CDN, the more servers that it will include. Operating on a large CDN will allow a sizable number of users to access the same content without compromising the performance of a website, since each user will have access to the copy of the content stored in the server closest to their location instead of all users accessing through a single access point.
5. CSS: it stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which are used to define how different elements of your website, built using HTML, are displayed on the computer or phone screen when the page is displayed.

We hope you’ll come back soon for more web design definitions. Stay tuned!